Ciarán's free software notes

Yesterday was the last day of FISL. After blogging in the morning, I participated in a panel discussion about adoption of GPLv3. I think this went better than my software patents presentation on Thursday - I'm happier and more suited to Q&A or small room discussions than giving non-interactive presentations. The GPLv3 panel discussions actually attracted a good crowd. Not as big as for Richard Stallman's talk where people had to sit on the floor after the seats filled, but larger than for Richard Fontana's presentation of GPLv3 from a legal perspective. Maybe this indicates that free software users and developers are more interested in the goals and motivations of the GPL than then legal implementation.

Two tech things for users of GNU/Linux or similar operating systems:

1. If you ever need to download a torrent, install bittornado and the command line is: btdownloadcurses http://example.com/path/whatever.ext.torrent
2. If you ever want to reduce the size of a movie, there's simple, useful information for using mencoder at: http://web.njit.edu/all_topics/Prog_Lang_Docs/html/mplayer/encoding.html .

I get stressed when i can't find simple information such as that quickly. Hope those help someone.

When I say "bag" here, Latin American's hear "bike". When I moved to Brussels first, people couldn't understand me because of my Irish accent. It was strange because two second-language English speakers would be having a conversation in English, and when I'd join in they wouldn't understand me!

After a year and a half, I've learned how to speak plain English. Plain English means removing cultural references, saying things in the simplist constructs, pronouncing all the letters in each word, and trying to use international vocabulary. I still speak my own normal English when I'm with Irish people, but my plain English obviously still has some Irish artifacts.

Five days to the Education, Government, and Free Software April 29th event in Dublin, some last minute promotion help would be welcome.

It's the fourth and last day of FISL here in Brazil and I've had a great time. For me, the best part is the many people I've met and the discussions generated when more than four thousand free software supporters are in one city for four days. There are seven presentations happening simultaneously all day every day, but I've only attended four.

I gave a presentation on software patents. It went ok but a lot of people have told me they liked it. I guess software patents is an interesting subject here, which is good learn because there is very little discussion on the topic. In Europe, fighting software patents is a major topic, but in Latin America, many free software supporters are still wondering if they need to be fought and if they can be fought.

It's good to meet the people behind FSF Latin America. I'd met half of them before, but this time we got to spend more time together.

IFSO is hosting two talks by Federico Heinz in Dublin on April 29th, so it was nice to meet with him for the first time. I asked IFSO to arrange the event based on a second hand recommendation that Federico is a great speaker. Now I can give a first hand recommendation.

The best of the presentations I attended was Richard Stallman's presentation on the goals of GPLv3. I recorded most of that presentation and the Q&A with my digital camera, so I'll go into detail on that in another entry when I get that online.

I've also gotten a rare opportunity to spend time with Georg Greve. He's the president of FSFE, so it might seem strange that we use time in Brazil to talk to each other but we actually only see eachother maybe three times a year. FSFE is a very spread out group.