“Now one of Clinton’s laws of politics is this: If one candidate’s trying to scare you and the other one’s trying to get you to think, if one candidate’s appealing to your fears and the other one’s appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.” — Bill Clinton, supporting John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign
“We are moving to a point in the world where more and more law will be expressed in its effective way, not in terms of statutes solidly enacted by the parliament … but in the technology itself: code.” — Australian High Court Judge, Justice Kirby, Tech makes lawmakers impotent, says Judge
“I will also continue to drive on the left-hand side of the road. Will it be dangerous? Yes. Is it illegal? Highly. But that’s just how committed I am [to my Irish roots].” — Will Ferrell receives the James Joyce award while goofing around in Ireland.
“Starting today, customers in Germany, United Kingdom, France and now Spain can purchase Ubuntu 7.10 with built-in DVD playback on the XPS 1330n” — Good move by Dell, shipping Ubuntu on highly desirable hardware… Not yet in Australia though.
“Meet apt-clone(8). The tool which integrates with the Nexenta system, keeps track of upgrade checkpoints and allows to create/destroy/edit checkpoints by request.” — Where Solaris could be today, if Indiana had built upon existing FLOSS infrastructure.
“You can […] log in to ICQ with the username icqnumber@aol.com on server xmpp.oscar.aol.com on port 5222. TLS is required.” — Works for me. XMPP and OpenID are truly on the march. Outstanding!
“Looking to manage your WordPress install via your phone? Then the award winning WPhone plugin is exactly what you need.” — Extraordinarly tasty (and tasteful!) WordPress admin interface plugin for mobile bloggers. Very sweet.
“In a legal effort to help US senator [Larry Craig], the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is arguing that people who have sex in public toilets have an expectation of privacy.” — I am sure Senator Craig has always been a huge fan of the ACLU. Ha ha!
“‘Bollocks’ is a word of Anglo Saxon origin, meaning ‘testicles’. The word is often used figuratively.” — I linked this (without checking if it existed) as a joke today. Turned out to be incredibly comprehensive, including bonus James Joyce references.
“Incidentally, the Australian Electoral Commission also [does] contract work. They mostly run ballots for unions and the like. They’d probably be available to run the Presidential election in November for a very reasonable rate.” — Hilarity on Slashdot!
“Tis the season and all, and since it feels good to give I just couldn’t resist. We’ve increased the RAM on all plans by 20%, for new and existing customers!” — My 450MBRAM becomes 540MB, even as Linode improve service and infrastructure. They rock!
James Maguire at Datamation published an article late last year about the favourite projects of FLOSS industry and community leaders. Uh huh, I’m still catching up with 2007!
With my GNOME Foundation hat on I thought that, rather than taking the easy way out by plugging a bunch of our rocking applications, it might be cool to show off some of the projects that make GNOME rock:
Blogs and planet sites have had a huge impact on communication in the FLOSS world. GNOME and WordPress share many of the same philosophies about usability and development, so it’s not surprising that heaps of GNOME contributors use WordPress — and we’ve recently deployed WordPress MU on blogs.gnome.org. WordPress rocks.
Perpetually overlooked as one of the most important FLOSS apps, even though it is absolutely crucial to the development of so many: Mozilla, GNOME, Apache, Eclipse, OpenOffice.org… the list goes on — even NASA uses it! Bugzilla makes GNOME rock harder.
Using GNOME technologies throughout, the OLPC project has created an amazing user interface for kids, and contributed some great technologies to the FLOSS world along the way — coming soon to GNOME! The best bit is that OLPC will take Software Freedom to millions, if not billions of kids around the world.
One of the classic ‘behind the scenes’ projects that has contributed to so many advances throughout the FLOSS world. It lies deep in the core of GNOME’s rendering technologies, not only delivering beautiful graphics, but a totally delicious API for software developers as well.
Okay, okay, I have to plug at least one GNOME application! Evo might not be the newest or sexiest GNOME app, but it is indispensible as one of our core communications tools, and its features help many users shift to FLOSS platforms - particularly in corporate environments. The next release will even have Google Calendar and Exchange MAPI support — sweet!
Check out the article for plenty of rocking Open Source projects suggested by other FLOSS industry and community folks.
“After almost 9 years, today was my last day at Red Hat. I’ll miss it, and all the great people there.” — Holy jamoly. It will be very interesting to see where Havoc lands. Here’s hoping he stays within the orbit of GNOME.
