Kim Bach . OrgAssorted bookmarks from my web-travels
Send your name to the asteroid belt on the Dawn spacecraft. Your name will be recorded onto a microchip that will be placed aboard the spacecraft accompanying it on its mission to the asteroid belt. After entering your name below, you will have the opportunity to print a document that verifies your journey aboard the spacecraft.
My name is travelling on the Dawn mission, a fitting birthday gift. Thank you to NASA.
The 28th of October 2006 was the day of the Linuxforum 2006 Birds of a Feather sessions, and as it might have been noticed by regular readers, yours truly hosted the session on “open standards”, inspired by the recent legislation that asks the government to start using, and implementing, open standards in their IT solutions.
The forum was held at Symbion, which is a “research incubator”, I arrived late, and I followed the signs…Hmm that door leads to a stairwell, I entered, and immediately the door shut, I knew I was in trouble – I’ve experienced the same situation before – Shudder! There was NO way to exit the stairwell without a valid keycard, which I naturally didn’t hold. OK, in the words of Douglas Adams, Don’t Panic…There actually was a door to the outside, but it had a clear sign that said…Don’t open, it will trigger the alarm…
Hmm…I was as usually packing, using my cell phone to access the yellow pages actually yielded a number, I called it and the man on the line was quite surprised, first and foremost he was a bit annoyed about the fact that the building was open to host the Linuxforum, secondly he wondered how I got hold of his number, well it was listed with information! Well he gave me the main number to Symbion, he suggested that they had a number to call in case of an emergency…No way, I got a machine and a friendly goodbye! Damn…Well there were two numbers to some security services posted in the stairwell, I called both but they were also closed for the weekend. Now I started pounding on the door, but no one could hear me…Finally I heard a door slam…Hey! Wait a second…Phew someone was working that afternoon…With one swipe I was let out of my temporary prison, but I could have stayed there for a long, long time.
It’s a stupid set-up, and dangerous, I’ve experienced worse once, where I got trapped in another stairwell, and in that particular stairwell I didn’t find any doors to the outside, luckily I had my cellphone and the number of one of the employees.
The label on the button that opened the door read “Udtryk” this is funny, “udtryk” is Danish the litteral translation is “outpush”, and the meaning is that you press the button to get out, but “udtryk” also means “expression”, I’ll spare you the highly irregular and colourful expressions that I wanted to spill while trapped in the stairwell.
Oh well, now on topic!
My call for BoF was:
The spread of open standards
With Kim Bach, kim.bach(at)gmail.comI’m interested in how we can help implement the legislation B103: On the use of open standards in the public central administration.
Steps like the implementation of Open Document Format is a small step in the right direction, but don’t we need to establish a central CIO (Chief Information Officer) function in the public, inspired after Massachusetts. The “Bedst og Billigst” (best and cheapest) software policy of the government isn’t too clear, and it often results in “non-movement”, since that always will be cheapest.
How can we spread the knowledge of open and free alternatives to commercial products within, for instance, content management.
I’ve never done anything like this before, so I didn’t really understand the BoF format, but it’s really workshops, and quite informal, or at least that was the way my session ended, and I was very happy to see that some 20 people had joined the session, and more arrived later and they actually stayed!
Most of the sessions yesterday were hardcore technical sessions, and most of them were really packed.
I had prepared a few slides (follow link) and I’ve blogged on the subject several times, and I’m maintaining a page on my wiki.
I started out by presenting my slides, but really I only had 2-3, and immediately we had a real discussion going on, but it wasn’t till the end that we begun getting suggestions that we could write down. I’ll put it down to my lack of experience, and that I should have done more to keep focus, but it was really more of a brainstorm, and it was very rewarding indeed, at least to me, with most of the audience getting involved in the discussion.
We had a long and very fruitful discussion, mostly focused on the window of opportunity that we have right now, with Linux and open source software reaching such a high degree of maturity, and the major commercial player being almost tied down by huge technical challenges creating the next generation of their bread-and-butter software.
When it came to open standards, we spend a lot of time talking about Open Document Format, and ODF is very important indeed, because it can be considered a “Trojan”, simply start sending documents to the public authorities and tell them that they simple need to get hold of an open and free implementation of an Open Document Format viewer, for instance OpenOffice. With B103 in our hands, we can just say that what we sent was a document in the ONLY format that is an official ISO standard, and that the authority should start complying with B103.
Another important point that was made was that the volume agreements that the Danish public sector has with Microsoft, called eAftale is about to expire, so now’s the time to start pushing the alternatives to the politicians.
I’m quite happy with my own performance, and I’ll try to use this experience to build a shorter presentation, and I think that I got good response.
After “my” session, there was a session on the next steps for the open source movement in Denmark.
A number of suggestions on next steps were listed. We need to do A LOT more lobbying, and we need some reference cases, e.g. this school switched to Linux…
We’ll set-up a press centre…using the SSLUG wiki as a starting point, it seems that the Open Source movement in Denmark is in need of new blood, and I’m voluentering my services, I really need to join these SIGs.
The day ended with quality beer and more geekery, I’m REALLY REALLY impressed by Ubuntu 6.10 and I have the perfect machine to test it on, an iBook G3 500MHz that I just acquired.
I’m right@home@Linuxfourm. IT’S MY CULTURE! AND LET’S GO WITH THE LOBBYISM.
JPL.NASA.GOV: Feature Stories: The Spark of a New Era
The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is celebrating it’s 70th birthday.
In this feature the early history of JPL is described.
I consider the JPL to be the most succesful NASA subdivision, as the true pioneeers of planetary exploration.
70 years ago my own mother was born and my father was 7. Back then, the things we do today would have been considered so far into the future, that you might have been committed to a closed ward, if you had suggested that humanity could, for instance, visit all the planets in the solar system within a lifetime. Just try to imagine where we can be in another 70 years, what put’s it into perspective is that it might be so amazing, that we can’t even begin to imagine it.
Congratulations to the JPL.
NASA – ‘McMurdo’ Panorama from Spirit’s ‘Winter Haven’
To celebrate the 1,000th sol of the Spirit rover Mars mission, NASA has released a panorama.
Congratulations to NASA with this amazing success, makes you wonder what the next generation of rovers will achieve.
Oct. 26, 2006, marks Spirit’s 1,000th sol of what was planned as a 90-sol mission. (A sol is a Martian day, which lasts 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds). The rover has lived through the most challenging part of its second Martian winter. Its solar power levels are rising again. Spring in the southern hemisphere of Mars will begin in early 2007. Before that, the rover team hopes to start driving Spirit again toward scientifically interesting places in the “Inner Basin” and “Columbia Hills” inside Gusev crater. The McMurdo panorama is providing team members with key pieces of scientific and topographic information for choosing where to continue Spirit’s exploration adventure.
With Firefox 2, Mozilla touts security and speed | CNET News.com
FirefoXXXy 2.0 has been released, and so far it’s gr8! All my feeds and quick links (e.g. the WordPress bookmarklets that I couldn’t live without) still works. The UI is a little sleeker, and it seems more responsive. I’ve also installed my first plug-ins – the new spelling dictionaries – and yes, there’s one in Danish, can’t wait to let it loose on my Wiki projects, if it works, this is really, really good news.
Nothing runs like a Fox (hey wasn’t that the motto of a Microsoft product sometime?)
On a curious note, the Firefox team received a cake from the Microsoft IE team congratulating them on shipping. I REALLY REALLY like the Microsoft IE team!
“The key focus in Firefox 2 is making sure that what we are focusing on is tightness and efficiency–with the ability of turning that browser into exactly what one needs, focusing on security, stability and speed,” said Mike Beltzner, who Mozilla describes as its “phenomenologist.”
The Leopard Early Start Kit provides developers with advance access to an exclusive collection of digital resources and information — everything you need to deliver innovative applications to your customers when Leopard ships in 2007. So begin innovating now with the Leopard Early Start Kit.
MIAOOOUUUWW! Leopards are KEWL…Go get’em “Tiger”!
Inspireret af Line Pedersens weblog…
Sprogkirkegård… hm, hvad skal man mene om det?
Sprogkirkegården er oprettet fordi vi ikke kan vente på at sprognævnet får etableret deres egen portal. Hvor svært kan det være…
Den første fugl var en and (Originally uploaded by K.Job).
Hmm…Illuderet (ahem Illustreret) Videnskab skulle nok overveje at læse det de selv skriver…
For the people with limited grasp of the Danish language…
“And” means “duck” AND “hoax” in Danish…So the first oiseaux (bird, fugl) was a duck (and=hoax)
LOL
BLOGBOGSTAVER: Gæt en and: Hvem er Gundel Gaukeley?
Jeg har ALTID elsket Miss Tick! C’est une “traduction” (ou versione, c’est mieux ça) formidable!
J’aime aussi Mystique de “Les Gens X”, elle est, comme Miss Tick, KAMP-lækker!
Twi – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Twi (pronounced ‘chwee’ [tÉ•Ê·i]) is a language spoken in Ghana by about 7 million people. It is one of the three dialects of the Akan language, the others being Akuapem Twi and Fante, which in turn belongs to the Kwa language family. Within Ghana, Twi is spoken in the Ashanti Region and in parts of the Eastern, Western, Central, Volta and Brong Ahafo Regions.
Twi is an absoulutely beautiful language I was SO fortunate to attend a mass in, just by chance, in Steffanskirken this sunday, I had no idea that the Danish State Church was THAT spacious.
I haven’t cried since. Alice Taylor R.I.P. (now a tear is making a feeble attempt at working it’s way to the tear canal, but the force is with me, I’m strong! You be strong too, follow the white light).
