FOSS

Google have released their own browser, Chrome (currently available at www.google.com/chrome for Windows - Linux and Mac OS X builds coming soon).

What's cool about this? A lighter, faster, stronger, more resilient browser to begin with.

Firefox and IE chew up a lot of memory. I frequently have the browser lag, jam, or just plain crash on me, especially with a lot of tabs open and accessing sites that make heavy use of java script.

The new Google browser has a process per tab, so one page jamming won't affect the others. It also has its own Javascript VM, V8, with aggressive garbage collection, so it's more memory efficient.

Google are expert at usability and interface design. Like Apple they excel in delighting users - adding all the kind of cool things that you would have added if you'd designed it yourself, rather than had it foisted on you by some mega-corporation.

Around the corner, however, come even richer, more powerful internet applications, making the underlying OS even more irrelevant. Say good bye to your desktop monopoly Microsoft.

I stole my headline from techcrunch. I need a tech section on the blog, I think.

Word up the Internet massive! Fedora Core 6 has been delayed, but fear not, because we've an extended mix of Fedora Reloaded for you this time.

After listening to all those experimental jam electro-noise free jazz rock albums on Jamendo we've put together a stream of Fedora consciousness podcast recorded live in wmealing's garage (well, more accurately his lounge).

We weren't able to connect Chris Blizzard this time round to talk about the One Laptop project, so that will be in the next edition.

Enjoy!

Download:
Fedora Reloaded 6 (ogg version)
Fedora Reloaded 6 (evil mp3 version)

Here are some links from the podcast:

Jamendo : www.jamendo.com
Libmtp project: http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/
Django: http://www.djangoproject.com/
DJ Vraj: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/dj.vraj/

Head down tail up at the moment. We're racing to get changes in for a milestone in the development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. I'm working on the installation documentation for x86, IBM POWER, and IBM S/390.

At the moment I'm using two laptops and an LCD flatscreen to give myself a three monitor desktop using Synergy.

Synergy is a program that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, that allows you to use one keyboard and mouse across two machines, as well as providing a shared clip board. By mounting my home directory on my second laptop using NFS I can work on the same files in multiple windows.

Two of the screens are running on one CPU, the other laptop screen is running on it's own CPU, but the mouse goes between all three, and the keyboard goes to whichever one has the mouse focus. I can cut and paste between all three.

It was simple to download ("yum install synergy" for Fedora users), and set up.

Here's my synergy.conf file. The IP addresses for ibook.G4 and thinkpad.T43 are in my /etc/hosts file.

  GNU nano 1.3.12                       File: /home/jwulf/synergy.conf                                                     

 section: screens
       ibook.G4:
       thinkpad.T43:
    end
    section: links
       ibook.G4:
           right = thinkpad.T43
       thinkpad.T43:
           left = ibook.G4
    end

Aside from that, this morning I went to Kate Pell's lead practice at West End Yoga. Good to be back, and there was a lot of Simon Borg-Olivier influence in the practice today. More about that when I have some time to write about it.

It's also Kartik month, which means Damodara dipa-dana, or offering lamps to Damodara each morning and evening, and Kartik-vrata or special austerities. It's a nectar time. Prahlad and I are having a great time. Prahlad blows the conch each morning while the members of our household are offering the lamps and we sing the Damodarastaka. I guess it must be for him like Christmas season was for me when I was a child, except that it lasts one month.

My friend Visnu-maya has been searching for a good portable digital music player. The latest model to come under her consideration is the Sandisk e260. It's Sandisk's take on an iPod Nano-killer.

I recently came across this player in a BBC article that explains that Sandisk are fighting a lawsuit with the patent holders of mp3 over this player. Apparently Sandisk are refusing to pay licensing fees for their implementation of mp3 codec on it, claiming that they have implemented it in a way that does not infringe on any existing patent. They had their entire stock impounded by the German police at an electronics tradeshow

From this review of the e260 it looks like a good player, but it doesn't support ogg, which would be a significant negative for me.

Ogg Vorbis is technically superior to mp3 (better sound quality at lower file sizes), and is also unencumbered by patents.

At the recent Open Source Symposium in Melbourne, where I was speaking about Fedora, Harish Pillay mentioned that there may not be significant momentum around switching from mp3 to ogg as the patent is due to expire in 2010. Since I've started using ogg as a matter of principle, however, I've definitely appreciated it's superior quality, as well as the feeling of freedom that using it brings. ;-)

It's a similar situation to the Graphics Interchange Format (gif), which was owned by Compuserve until the patent expired. Gif is now freely usable. However, while it was patented the Portable Network Graphics format (png) was developed as a patent-free format, and it is technically superior to gif.

MP3 is now being touted as a "legacy standard" by the main industrial players because( a) the patent expires in 2010, only three years away, and (b) it doesn't support DRM (Digital Restrictions Management).

Apple, Microsoft, and other industry heavyweights are pushing DRM-wrapped mp4, atrac3, wma and other formats that support restrictions. As mentioned in the e260 review, the end user is the loser, with digitally restricted file transfers taking exponentially longer with this device.

Check out this article about Microsoft's Zune player - they are going to DRM everything that you put through their player's wireless transfer capability, even if you own the copyright and don't want any DRM. That's exactly why I moved away from Sony's minidisc format - you couldn't even digitally copy a kirtan or lecture that you had recorded live with a mic.

Now with the Zune it's the same deal. Beam kirtans, lectures, a live or home studio recording of your music, or your podcast to a friend's Zune and Microsoft's player will refuse to play those files after three days or three playbacks, whichever comes first. How cool is that - not! :-)

Let's hope they see sense, and that end-users help them to do that by waking up enough to their collective self-interest to vote with their feet and their wallets.

In order to have free content we need to have free formats. Rewarding companies that have a commitment to consumer freedom by buying their digitally unrestricted players that use free formats is doing the grassroots work.

Those who give up their liberty for temporary convenience will find themselves ultimately with neither.

I wrote previously about getting the Democracy Player working on my Fedora Core 6 rawhide system.

I use it to watch the "Yoga Today" show, which broadcasts a one hour class every day via the Internet (it's a 300MB+ download each day, so be careful with your bandwidth!).

Well, the player stopped working after I tried to work around a recent bug in yelp. Democracy Player relies on the Mozilla browser, which has been removed from Fedora Core in favor of the more recent Seamonkey, as Mozilla is no longer being maintained. That removal caused some problems in yelp, which I then tried to fix, and b0rked the bailing twine and duct tape that was holding my Democracy Player together.

Anyway, to get Democracy Player to work again, I downloaded a Fedora Core 5 mozilla package and installed it, and Democracy Player worked again.

So follow the instructions on my earlier post, plus installing this mozilla package to get it working now.

I wrote to my friend Sukanthi the other day to ask her how it's going with the Fedora operating system on her laptop (We loaded it on a few weeks before she left Australia), and to point her to the BBC documentary on Free Open Source Software, The Codebreakers [1] [2]. She had wanted to know more about the philosophical reasons for using FOSS. She is currently in Hungary and wrote me today:

There is a new Hare Krishna centre in London called Matchless gifts, they have free internet access for the under priviledged and they use Fedora. They also do yoga classes and kirtana nights and classes with prasad.

I took my mum there, it was cool, she was playing the drum and chanting Hare Krishna.

Someone blogged about it here

Update: I gave Matchless Gifts a call, and it turns out that they're using Ubuntu (which is what I thought they would / should be using). "Fedora" obviously represents GNU/Linux in my friend's mind.

Here is a two part documentary by the BBC on Free Open Source Software, available on Google Video:

The Codebreakers - Part One
The Codebreakers - Part Two

I got into a discussion with a colleague at work the other day about Bikram and open source. Venkatesh Hariharan (Venky) was quoted in an article indicating that Bikram had attempted to patent yogic postures, which is not strictly correct.

Here is an email that I wrote to him about it:

Bikram enjoys a controversial profile in the yoga world.

One writer said: "Many people don’t know this, but Bikram yoga is actually the black sheep of yoga practices. Whenever I find myself sipping chai and chatting with a group of yogis, as soon as I confess my love for Bikram, the conversation pauses, as if I’ve just told a group of Christians that, funnily enough, satanism has me feeling better than I’ve felt in years."

Some people love to hate him, for a variety of reasons which includes his taking legal action against ex-students who teach his yoga system using his name without his permission.

My understanding of Bikram's attempt to "patent yogic postures", as it was described in the article, is that he has a copyright on his 26 posture sequence performed at 37 degree heat using the name "Bikram Yoga". He settled out of court with the "Open Source Yoga Unity" (a group of ex-students and practitioners of his yoga who did not wish to license his system) in such a way that they can do what they want, but cannot call it "Bikram Yoga".

Basically he's trying to protect and control his brand, which uses his name. It's analogous to us protecting the Red Hat brand. Linux (the code, not the name) is completely free for you to do what you wish with - "Red Hat" (the brand) is not. Similarly Yoga is an ancient science with no earthly owner, but "Bikram Yoga" is not free for all comers to plaster on their studio without submitting to Bikram's conditions (which include paying him a fee). He wants to ensure that whatever goes under the name "Bikram Yoga" conforms to his standards for his system. Which seems fair enough to me.

There has been a lot of FUD about the whole thing, and it's an easy target, but the way I understand it, it's not quite as "evil" as it's made out to be. In fact, it's quite like Red Hat's position.

(in the interests of full disclosure I'm a student of Bikram)

Basically the argument is like this:

"Our client has assembled freely available components into a particular system which they have tested and certified. You are free to use, modify, and redistribute this system or components of this system - however you may not do so using the name ["Red Hat" | "Bikram"]"

ergo: Red Hat is the Bikram of Open Source.

Sometimes when I'm sitting with Free Software activists and I tell them that I work for Red Hat the conversation pauses, as if I've just.... you get the idea.

I agree with Venky that BKS Iyengar's approach is a little more detached and free of the proprietary mentality, but I can't help but see the parallels between Bikram and Red Hat, and I think it's an ironic critique to make.

I can understand how people feel about Bikram; he has a swaggering style that just rubs some people people the wrong way.

If Red Hat is the Bikram Yoga of Open Source, then perhaps Bikram is the Marc Fleury of Yoga.

(I admit that I'm giving Bikram the benefit of the doubt here - I'm reasonably convinced that the present state of affairs is the result of not being able to win the full amount of control that he would like to in court)

A great article about the recent Knowledge Symposium held in India:

“There’s also anger over some recent developments. Red Hat India’s Venkatesh Hariharan pointed to attempts to patent yogic postures, under the name of Bikram Yoga, in the United States recently. “When asked, why he was doing it, the expatriate Indian’s answer was, ‘This is the American way of life’,” Hariharan said.

“These are models that we need to look at. Is that kind of model applicable to India?” Hariharan said. “If we [in India] had patented the zero, what would have happened to the world of IT? Would one of the most famous person in the world of IT have had so many ‘zeroes’ behind his net worth?”

Red Hat, Bikram Yoga, and "intellectual property" issues - this is too good to pass up. Check it out: India At The Forefront Of Knowledge Commons Debate

Tonight I spent some time on the phone with Citraka das, from Italy, helping him debug his planet aggregator installation.

Citraka was in Italy, I'm in Australia, Caitanya Candra from Hungary was also on it, and we're working on a Linux server somewhere in Atlanta, USA.

That's why they call it the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

Since ISKCON News has been down for a week and a half people have been missing their fix of Hare Krishna news.

ISKCON News is an hourly snapshot of the reports and thoughts of members of ISKCON around the world, documenting their personal and collective efforts to fulfill the mission of the organization.

It will be back up later this week, running the latest version of Planet.