What better way to justify the proprietary bits of Ubuntu than a practically useless stooge distro to point at whenever we’re questioned
The best ELER evar.

So, last week I recorded an episode of LUGradio with Jono, Aq and Chris from Canonical. It’s pretty good – I’m right at the beginning of the episode, talking about the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project.

So, my friend John is now self-employed, and has started his own business.
ifup are IT consultants specialising in Free Software and GNU/Linux
Please give him all your work 🙂

More of my book

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Got this today.

Are you and $colleague willing to step down yet? This is just becoming upsetting, we don’t want to have to get $leader involved. It’s upsetting that this has happened and we don’t want to have to get you in trouble.

I think it’s particularly funny, especially when you consider this is because of a locked topic and a few trolls being banned from a channel for a while.

(Via Vikki)

Speak up for freedom! – This is my first article for BadVista.

myExperiment is a Virtual Research Environment which makes it easy for people to share experiments and discuss them. Scientists should be able to swap workflows and publications as easily as citizens can share documents, photos and videos on the Web. myExperiment owes far more to social networking websites such as MySpace and YouTube than to the traditional portals of Grid computing, and is immediately familiar to the new generation of scientists. The myExperiment provides a personalised environment which enables users to share, re-use and repurpose experiments – reducing time-to-experiment.

This is what I’m working on now 🙂

BBC News today…

Britain’s national film and television archive is to be opened up in order for it to be accessed by the public

Looks good, but then..

Eventually these images will all be available in a digital format.

Uh-oh. Let’s see, which Digital Restrictions Management system will they implement for this? Time to lobby the BFI, then.

The government has rejected a call to ban the digital locks that limit what people can do with the software, music and movies they own.
Of course, nobody expected the Labour government to actually change this, did they? The Green Party on the other hand, said this about the recent Vista launch.

“So-called ‘digital rights management’ technology in Vista gives Microsoft the ability to lock you out of your computer. Technology should increase our opportunities to consume media, create our own and share it with others.”
“But Vista helps the corporate media take away our consumer rights. Silence in government betrays a shocking complacency in the face of this latest attack on our rights.”

Join the Green Party today if you feel that the present government have failed to represent you on this. You might also be keen to note that this is the same government who want to take away your civil liberties under the guise of combating terrorism. Also consider reading Sian Berry‘s blog on newstatesman.com, including Microsoft – bad for consumers and the environment?.