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  Protect your freedom!

  
  
  
  

• Small print in big fat letters

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

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Sometimes it’s good to give your friends some time to work on their ideas. mc44 totally appreciates wobblywu’s hard work. This is how communities work at best.

Today, the Finnish Linux User Group[1] announced their yearly Linux Contributor Award. The Winner: Ubuntu Suomi! Translating from the press release (Finnish PDF).

The volunteer community has taken care of translations, arranged events around the country, promoted Linux and Free Software to legislators and, above all, provided user support through its web forum.

Mirv accepting the prize.
(Photo from the ubuntu-fi blog)

Congratulations to our most excellent LoCo Team!

Two honorable mentions were awarded as well. One was given to the Linux.fi wiki. The choice further emphasizes the great importance that peer-provided support and documentation has for the success of Free Software. The other one went to Monty Widenius, the founder of MySQL. Yes, in case you didn’t know, he is yet another Finn helping build the tools for our road to software freedom. :) Altough MySQL is not directly related to LInux, as one of the pillars of the near-ubiqutuous LAMP stack, its success is very much tied to that of Linux.

Cheers to these Honored Ones too!

[1] Yes, there is only one. It is a small country :)

This morning, I found an email from Karol in my inbox, telling me about a promotional Ubuntu website he designed. It is slick!

The site is a place for Ubuntu users to share their story. Why do you use Ubuntu? Tell your story about security, stability, desktop sexiness and all the other reasons to choose our favorite Linux distribution for your daily business and pleasure use!

We all know why GNOME is the most popular desktop in the enterprise. It does so much for users — they don’t have to do a thing while the GNOME daemons get things done. topyli and mc44 were trying to convince aubade of the benefits today.

I think it was a pretty noble effort anyway.

OpenOffice.org has released version 2.4 with many improvements. Congratulations to both developers and users of OO.o! I personally am in no capacity to evaluate it. I’m pretty sure it has about as many buttons and check boxes and sliders as the previous one. I still like Abiword.

The new OpenOffice.org website looks awesome though, double cheers for the clean and usable design!

Inspired by this, and also probably about my previous post, my friends nickspoon and mc44 on #ubuntu-offtopic defined a topyli-friendly design for OpenOffice.org 3.0. There’s still time to make a difference before they feature freeze!

But as mc44 says, don’t get your hopes too high :(

It is nice to see that Ubuntu Linux was found to be the most difficult system to crack in the pwn2own “hack contest”, when Vista gave in on the third day when 3rd party apps were game. OSX fell first, on the second day due to a Safari bug.

Not so nice to see breaking systems called “hacking”. Again, hackers build stuff, they don’t brake it. It makes me extra sad to see so many Ubuntu and Linux-loving bloggers happy about the failure of other systems. Calling your system good is good marketing. When you laugh at failures in other systems it is laughing at their users, which does not make them interested in you or your offering.

My experiment with replacing irssi with Jabber clients is over for now. There are a few reasons for this of course.

• Mobile Jabber clients simply are not there yet. There is no way they can compete with a screened irssi over PuTTY. Notifications are nice, but the cost in RAM usage (for Java apps) and usability (for native clients) is too high.
• 24/7 connectivity is too hard to achieve with Jabber clients.
• I like being available on IRC at all times without people having to find out my Jabber ID or email address. This is for making myself more available, not to keep my contact information  more private (that’s not my cup of tea anyway.)

Bottom line: old school server/client solutions still rule in chat, just as I’ve found with email (IMAP) and PIM data (SyncML servers).

I still love Jabber though, and my Bitlbee session is open. Running Jabber over my irssi session may make my Jabber presence less exciting and featureful, but it also makes it client-independent and more reliable.

Currently, the CCSM (Compiz Config Settings Manager, a horrible name to begin with) looks like this:

My humble proposal for the next-generation version that would fit well into GNOME:

Thanks for your attention :)

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