I wrote a short article for the Decision Line magazine, on the topic of how law and code intersect and why it is important for us to pay attention to document formats. An excerpt from the article to tease your senses:

Now, imagine your collection of literary works, where, say, verbs become proprietary. What if your books refused to reveal their pages every 10 years or so because the publisher went out of business? Of course, all this sounds downright silly in the context of analog media, but digital media brings with it possibilities of encryption, lock-ins and DRM—Digital Rights Management. It remains to be seen as to whose rights are being managed.

The entire PDF is at http://www.decisionsciences.org/DecisionLine/Vol39/39_1/dsi_dl39_1ecom.pdf Read and feel free (pun intended) to pass it on! 

These are slides based on how one would go about translating text for different pieces of software on the XO machine for OLPC. Typically, translation involves a good understanding of different pieces of software, but Pootle makes it easy. Its a web component that allows anyone to type in translated strings and click a button. That's it!

See attached slides for more specifics. 

Update: Slides with newer screenshots are available at http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.odp and http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.pdf 

Towards the end of last week the SquirrelMail team posted information on their site about a compromise to the main repository of SquirrelMail. Two versions were compromised - 1.4.11 and 1.4.12.  The breach and poisioning were detected by a difference in digital signatures which are generated before the upload to a repository. Because the code was poisoned after it was originally uploaded to the repository, the digital signature (using MD5) did not match the original. A clean version -  version 1.4.13  - is now available.

Software Freedom Day events were a great success and of course, a lot of fun. There's something liberating about heckling passers-by and enticing them with free software.

"Free software, free software! Come and get it. Free software, free software! No strings attached. Nothing to sign. No forms to fill out. Come and get it. Free software, free software!"

SF State students from the Information Management Systems Association (IMSA) will be hosting Software Freedom Day on campus (Malcolm X Plaza) on Thursday, the 13th of September, 2007 from 10am to 4pm. As faculty advisor for IMSA, I'd like to invite you to come by their tables and find out how free and open source software can be of some use to you! 

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). SFD is a public education effort, not only to celebrate the virtues of Free and Open Source Software, but also to encourage its use, to the benefit of the public.

Relevant Links:

There are plenty of OpenSource clients for Windows, Linux, and Mac but what about  an online one that works in your browser?  Clipperz is one such beast that went live in March.  The source code is in Google Code and you can build the same file that's loaded to your browser when you log in to Clipperz.

Qualcomm, makers of many good things also make Eudora, a commercial e-mail client. However, the e-mail business isn't aligned with its core business of mobile phones, etc. So, Qualcomm has decided to move its platform to a Mozilla Thunderbird base and contribute to that project. Will it actually go somewhere? Its a wait-and-see game at this point.

From their FAQ section:

QUALCOMM has decided not to remain in the email market because it is not in alignment with the core business or strategic goals. By moving Eudora to an open source product, QUALCOMM can exit the Eudora business while still supporting Eudora users and advancing the Eudora e-mail client at a faster pace than before, through the power of the open source development community.”

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Linden Lab on Monday released as open-source software the viewer used to access Second Life and plans to follow suit with the server software that powers the company's virtual realm. Second Life is a virtual world where people's electronic incarnations--called avatars--can chat, fly, buy goods and interact with programmable objects. Basic membership is free, but Linden Lab sells real estate to those who want to set up shop.

More at: http://news.com.com/Second+Life+software+becomes+open-source/2100-7344_3-6148148.html

One key feature GNOME has lacked, in comparison to KDE, is a clipboard manager like KDE's Klipper. That's now about to change, thanks to the efforts of a project called "Glipper". The first distribution that will include Glipper appears to be Feisty Fawn Herd 1, which will eventually become Ubuntu 7.04. Ubuntu users who want to try it without using the barely-alpha Feisty Fawn can do so by downloading it from the Universe file repositories.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS5699540648.html 

gentoo is a two-pane file manager for the X Window System. gentoo lets the user do (almost) all of the configuration and customizing from within the program itself. If you still prefer to hand-edit configuration files, they're fairly easy to work with since they are written in an XML format.

gentoo features a fairly complex and powerful file identification system, coupled to a object-oriented style system, which together give you a lot of control over how files of different types are displayed and acted upon. Additionally, over a hundred pixmap images are available for use in file type descriptions.

gentoo was written from scratch in ANSI C, and it utilises the GTK+ toolkit for its interface. For more information and screenshots, please see: http://www.obsession.se/gentoo/