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:
-
If you ever need to download a torrent, install bittornado and the
command line is:
btdownloadcurses http://example.com/path/whatever.ext.torrent
-
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 Americans hear "bike". When I moved
to Brussels first, locals 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.
