Friday, February 29, 2008

Black History Month Ends on a GREAT note!

I was listening to Beneath the Surface on KPFK today & host Jerry Quickley was getting all emotional as he played large excerpts of Malcolm X speeches. Also listened earlier & heard Cynthia McKinney! Talk about some great, inspirational people who aren´t afraid of telling the truth!

Heck, this whole year started off great on KPFK! This comes as no surprise if you´ve ever listened but if you haven´t switch your dial off of all the commercial nonsense & listen to an independent voice. Talk about RED_PILLS!! OMG, KPFK doles out nothing but...

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Microsoft Heroes Happen Here

LA kickoff event just happened but I´m going to go see what all the fuss is about in April in Anaheim.

I know I talk a lot of smack about M$, their monopolistic practices, vendor lock-in strategies they employ & how they generally just ¨scare¨ you into buying their bloated, buggy products but having the whole story isn´t a bad thing. I just want to be fully-informed.

EU Fines Microsoft 1.3 BILLION!!!

So it finally happened! They´ve been getting sued by the whole EU for years & finally got fined.

I blogged about it almost a year ago (well, made a small comment on it) but went a bit more in-depth on the historical tip. I talk about it as I run into SO many people that had no idea this was going on. Sure, all the slashdotters knew the 411, but this is something you didn´t even hear an iota of on the mainstream media (they prefer to talk about less-relevant stuff like ´roided up baseball players).

Just remember, the U.S. isn´t holding M$ accountable here in the states for the EXACT same practices they were accused of overseas. It´s not gonna happen, too much of the government´s infrastructure is built on Microsoft products. $250 toilet seat covers are actually sounding like a good investment now...

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

IBM Linux Kid Commercial

So this is the new Linux commercial. The last one I mentioned was a spoof on the Mac commercials making fun of Windows. This new one is a bit more serious but still pretty accurate. ;)

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

I might not have time to help out on WINE

With all the goings-ons & the two projects I´ve just realized I need to jump on, I might not have time to help out on the Wine project. Well, I´ll be throwing bug reports at it but I was hoping to get more involved.

I heard about WINE a couple years back when I used to (have time to) play WoW & heard someone had found a way to play it on a Linux box (WoW was only released with Windows & Mac OS X install clients). I tested it out & sure enough, it was definitely playable. Ever since then, I´d occasionally throw something new at it & see if I could finally get fully off the evil empire (tm).

I then met Dan Kegel at a Linux Installfest event. Months later, he gave a talk to SGV LUG on Wine & Zumastor (another pretty sweet project). That´s when I found out he was heavily involved in those projects (as well as leading the Picasa for Linux project). We talked at length at SCALE 6 & I was really excited....then BAM!

Once free time arises, I´ll definitely be helping out more on this wonderful project! :)

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

It´s about to get real busy

Well after the wonderful SCALE 6X conference, there were a few things born out of that. My conversation w/Zak started as a question re: whether he´d seen something on the internet that I´d thought about for like 3 years (but I hadn´t seen anything after repeated google searches). Even though I´ve never done anything like this"before, Zak encouraged me to basically just start it. He´s totally right, so my 1st project is starting a tech-based non-profit. It´ll be a web-based tool & since I´m going to have to teach myself a few things to create the cool features I want to provide the community, it´s going to take a while...stay tuned.

The 2nd thing I´m now working on is the IndaMixx project. I also met Ron @ SCALE & we had some real good conversations.

I´m really looking forward to the creation of a service for the community-based, grass roots organizations through technology as well as being a part of a revolutionary musical endeavor.
200GR8!!!

Monday, February 11, 2008

SCALE 6X- Rockin' OSS Conference

Wow! What a great event! I can´t believe it took me this long to finally attend one. Boy have I missed out. The speakers were great, the topics terrific & there were lots of friendly people around.

Friday
I spent the majority of my time hopping back & forth between the Open Source Software in Education (OSSIE) & the Women in Open Source (WIOS) tracks. Both had interesting presentations & informative dialogue between presenters & audience. My favorite was Angela Byron´s talk on Drupal. I heard about Drupal a year ago but have just recently been evaluating CMS solutions & Drupal was my clear winner so it was a nice coincidence to hear Angela´s talk. I also attended some really cool Birds of a Feather (BoF), especially the WINE one as I´m looking forward to contributing a bit more than just using the product. ;)

Saturday
The OSSIE & WIOS tracks were no more but there was still lots of great presentations being given. My favorite was the talk by Zak Greant. I was so blown away by how progressive-minded his talk was that I approached him & we talked at length about how open source can be used as a tool to effect positive societal change. More on what that spawned later. The Haiku presentation by Bruno was also great. Another great project I´d love to contribute to (if time permits). The reception was nice & many folks won really nice gifts. Grats. :)

Sunday
The final day started with a great keynote by Stormy Peters. I´d seen her presentation on Friday so I knew it would be well worth it. The first 2 presentations I visited were about legalities in open source. Karen Sandler and Robert Scott did a really nice job explaining what are, usually, very convoluted issues. I really wanted to visit the Creative Commons presentation but I´ve known about CC for a long time & am currently charting the ways that I´m going to release my music projects using this tool (again, a topic for another day). I chose the sysadmin presentation over my friend´s Distributed MySQL presentation (I know he forgives me, hehe).

A wonderful conference that was worth every penny. I´m booking early again next year! :)

Thursday, February 07, 2008

On the eve of SCALE 6X

So it's the eve of this year's Southern California Linux Expo aka SCALE & I can't wait. The schedule is jam-packed with topics I'm interested in. Heck, even the Birds of a Feather (anyone being able to create a mini-conference of like-minded folks is such a cool idea!) events seem super interesting. The Friday ("pre-SCALE") lineup has tracks that are right up my alley- open source solutions in healthcare IT, open source in education & women in open source. All are things I've either worked on directly or evangelized about.

All that plus seeing several current & (I'm sure) long-lost friends should be really cool. The only 2 other conferences I'm equally excited about are UbuntuLive & ComiCon. ;)