Christian eBuddy Blog

© *amelia*

The wife and I haven’t had a vacation in a while. We will be spending next week in Jamaica, where we did our honeymoon.

A whole week away from the Internet, cell phones, and laptops…sounds like heaven.

I am looking forward to the airplane ride. Wonder if there will be any hints of Linux usage on the entertainment system (hopefully not because it crashed and had to be rebooted). We shall see.

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Article submitted by Olivier Schwander. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!

There are lots of different tools for managing your time: Mozilla has a standalone solution: Sunbird and another one based on Thunderbird: Lighting, KDE has Korganizer, and Gnome has the young gnome-agenda and the very popular Evolution, and we must not forget the most famous web based tool: Google Calendar.

All these applications are based on a graphical user interface, and use either iCalendar or the older vCalendar as the data formats.

What about people who prefer console based interfaces and want to edit the data with their favourite text editors? The best solution is remind: it uses an easy but powerful language for describing events. A simple example, this event happens every Tuesday at 13:00 and lasts one hour:

REM Tue AT 13:00 DURATION 1:00 MSG Group meeting

You always forget your appointments? Remind can help you:

REM Tue +1 AT 13:00 +120 *5 DURATION 1:00 MSG Group meeting

It will begin to bother you one day before the date, and will display warnings two hours before, every five minutes. The language is really powerful, and is able to express arbitrary complex date calculations (first Monday of a month, excluding holidays, moon phases). To look at the events of the day, simply run:

$ remind
Reminders for Thursday, 10th July, 2008 (today):

Write Debaday post today at 3:00pm

Remind can import and export iCalendar files, and generate HTML and Postscript from your calendar. You can choose to have reminders sent by email, or showed by a pop-up window but you’ll need to start remind with some special arguments for that, see the Remind FAQ at the 43folders wiki which has a lot of useful tips for remind.

You can also use it through user-friendly interfaces: tkremind, a Tk based front-end, but it hides some of the power from remind; and wyrd, a curses based interface which eases the editing of events and lets you use all of the power of remind.

Availability

Remind has been available in Debian since Sarge (perhaps even longer), and in Ubuntu since Dapper.

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Bought a new motherboard, everything works out of the box so far except for sound.

For sound I had to:


echo "options snd-hda-intel model=auto probe_mask=1" >> /etc/modprobe.d/options
modprobe snd-hda-intel


Then everything was good. Taken from this thread.

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Well after the election, the Web continues to be a force to rally activists, including a new effort to fight bans on gay marriage.

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Citrix Systems bought Vapps, which makes high-definition conference-call equipment, for $26.6 million in cash.

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While the appetite for video games remains strong, consumers appear to be exhibiting some price awareness.

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Warner Brothers will now release movies in Korea over the Internet before the DVD comes out.

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Google changed nothing about how it handles the data it collects when it introduced its new flu-tracking service.

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There are no definite “dos” and “don’ts” for the rules of digital decorum and dating, and texting and instant messaging are especially tempting to use on impulse.

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dmidecode: Finding Out Hardware Details Without Opening The Computer Case

dmidecode is a tool for dumping a computer’s DMI (some say SMBIOS)
table contents in a human-readable format. This table contains a
description of the system’s hardware components, as well as other
useful pieces of information such as serial numbers and BIOS revision.
Thanks to this table, you can retrieve this information without having
to probe for the actual hardware.

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Canonical has just announced that they’ll be bringing the ARM arch to Ubuntu. This is quite exciting — ARM devices have been getting more and more features, and as LinuxDevices reports, there’s been unofficial builds by Nokia for a while. Centralizing the builds should help reduce the effort needed to set up Ubuntu on such platforms. For example, currently builds happen after release and are announced when they’re complete; we can now expect regular builds throughout development and a release date people can plan around.

There’s some interesting hardware coming my way that I’d like to try this on, but I won’t share just what it is until I actually have one in my hands, since they’ve sold out their first small batch and having problems in manufacturing.

In the meantime, I’ll be hanging out in #ubuntu-arm observing.

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Background:

I am not one to use Slashdot as a measure of the importance of an issue. I’m sure there is something I could link to right now showing the complete inanity of some stories, but I won’t.

HOWEVER, this just hit the Slashdot homepage: “Non-Profit Org Claims Rights In Library Catalog Data”

This is slightly old news and I thought about blogging it before. I tend to try and keep my posts on this blog mostly tech related with an obvious leaning towards Open Source (Ubuntu specifically) since I am on planet.ubuntu. However, I now feel ok to post this now since it is on Slashdot .

What’s the Deal?

So, in essence: The OCLC is changing their policies to restrict what their members can do with the bibliographic data which is provided. Bibliographic data is simply a collection of facts (Author, Title, publication date, etc) and is thus not able to be copyrighted. However, there is nothing stopping anyone from restricting what you can do with ANY data via a contract (think: EULA). This is what they are doing, they are stopping their members from sharing this collection of facts with other people who might be able to use those facts. Yes, some people might make a commercial use of those facts, but there are also others who, as nonprofits, are simply trying to make a wonderful product for all of humanity to use.

Ok, that last sentence was slightly over dramatic, but I want to get this point across: the limiting of this knowledge (facts are knowledge) only hurts us as a whole and only helps the OCLC; no one else.

The Code4Lib group, a collection of techies in the Library community, have a nice wiki page with more information on this change of policies, including a diff between the two versions. The page also includes others’ opinions (blog posts) on the matter.

Now, as happens regularly with me on issues related to library policy, others may disagree with me. These others may even be my co-workers and/or bosses. As such, the usual disclaimer of this is only my opinion and no one else’s etc etc applies here.

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