Archive for April, 2008

Thanks to the Fedora Project, LGM Goal Met

Published by
jon
at April 28, 2008 in Notes. 1 Comment

I wanted to send a big thank you out to The Fedora Project, Max Spevack and Greg DeKoenigsberg for their support of the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Poland, May 8 - 11!

Dave Neary wrote a good overview of the state of the massively successful fundraiser we put together with Pledgie.com (try it out if you want to raise money for your cause!).

It is still not too late to donate money (you can use paypal with the previous link ;) which will help get more developers to the event. Cheers to all who gave too and linked to the various posts thus truly shedding light onto the huge community of free and open source graphics users and developers out there in the world :)

Why am I in China?

Published by
jon
at April 20, 2008 in Notes. 4 Comments

There are many reasons why I am spending half of my time in China now including:

  • My wife and her family are from China (Guangzhou specifically)
  • Community and Business Development opportunities for Creative Commons and Open Source in Asia, China in particular
  • The contemporary art and web startup scene is exploding in China
  • China has the most number (>210 M) of people online and the longest overall average time spent online: “Chinese Internet users log an average of 2 billion hours online each week, while the figure for US Internet users stands at 129 million.”
  • The dollar, pound and euro still stretches further here, at least for the next few years ;)

And, CEO Ito (ok, just Joi, no longer Chairman Ito ;) just posted a nice chart showing approximate growth of GDP where China will eclipse the US in approximately 2030. Diversify your investment friends and push hard on reforms in china on the evironment and lowering the transaction cost on several economic barriers and IMO, decreasing the number of dropped and/or reset packets on the internet. Finally, the GFW needs to be turned off. Imagine 210M+ internet users all fittting through a huge (tiny) bottleneck of filters…it is a horrible barrier to efficient business transactions.

GDP chart over next few years

Lu is about to post some interesting things about the anti-CNN movement coming out of China post-bad-Western-press cropping.

links for 2008-04-19

Published by
editor
at April 18, 2008 in Notes. 0 Comments

We Need Your Help LGM2008 to Raise Rest of 10K

Published by
jon
at April 17, 2008 in Notes. 2 Comments

Click here to lend your support to: Support the Libre Graphics Meeting and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

That’s right! We have ~ 2 days left on our fundraiser to bring in USD$ 20,000.00 by April 18. We have ~240 pledges from community members totally USD$ ~10K right now and need to bring it home with 10K more by the end of the day! If you have a large contributions and/or are a business with a large contribution and would like to match this, contact me asap! We have received much press and attention from this grass roots campaign, and your support of this would help put us over the edge!

Who wants to be a big hero like the ~240 people who have contributed? This is an amazing fundraiser and its great to see the big numbers of people who have supported this campaign! Check out the stats in that we have over 720,000 views of this campaign! That is astounding!

Elsewhere on the web, others have made great posts about this like Andy’s post on LGM2008, excerpted below:

LGM is the only shared expense of all free graphics software. Certainly at worthwhile investment for the future of your unencumbered creativity!

you cannot put a price on quality, freedom and this much potential

Every year all projects gain a huge boost of development and vision thanks to the discussions that take place at LGM.

You cannot predict the amazing things that will take place at LGM.

  • will Blender uncover a new compositing method for video,
  • will inkscape enable a new type of spline through cairo?
  • will pango get used by fontforge ?
  • will ufraw and hugin share more code ?
  • One thing is certain;

All free creative software is improved during LGM. and everyone learns more in the process.
This is a one of a kind event!

Help us achieve our goal and bring together software developers to solve problems for all users of your favorite creative applications!

As a side note, I will be attending this LGM in Poland and will be in Berlin and Poland having some meetings and giving some presentations prior…if you are in the area, contact me and/or stay tuned for more.

Sensible Post on New Orphan Works Legislation

Published by
jon
at April 17, 2008 in Notes. 1 Comment

Ok, for everyone emailing me about the new orphan works legislation, read this sensible post and don’t freak out :)

links for 2008-04-17

Published by
editor
at April 16, 2008 in Notes. 0 Comments

The Many Olympic Torchings of the Dalai Lama

Published by
jon
at April 16, 2008 in Notes. 3 Comments

Isaac Mao has a great post about the Olympic torch:

It’s really bizarre recently after a series of blocking and un-blocking by the censorship system in China(GFW):
- Youtube was blocked after 3/14 tibet riot
- Youtube was released two weeks later
- English BBC News released 25th,Mar.
- Wikipedia English site found unblocked on 1st, April (not April Fool), including https://secure.wikimedia.org
- Wikipedia https://secure.wikimedia.org blocked again two days ago on 6th, April, because Chinese version of Wikipedia can be accessed via this channel
- Flickr picture farm1, farm2 found unblocked yesterday (7th, April)
Etc.

How do you think if the Olympic Torches behave the same?

In Amsterdam last week, Paul Keller, Jamie King and I came up with many great ideas such as the Don’t Drop the Olympic Torch video game. The objective is to not let the olympic torch hit the ground through crazy levels like the streets of Paris with mad beret wearing beats all around, Folsom street in San Francisco with tons of protesters in their hippy-outfits flanking, all the way to more advanced levels like Tibetan rioters vs Chinese Han. Of course, the final level would be bringing the torch all the way to Beijing and directly into the Olympic Flame. Who wants to fund this idea? :) I tried to convince Ton and the Blender guys to make this into their next Open Project…come on guys!

I have some other big ideas with olympic torches 2.0 whereby there are many copies of the torch so that torhces don’t get dropped. If lost, they only get rerouted :) Haven’t we learned anything as a society &mdash 911/WTC?

Also, note to self, pick up tons of fake Olympics memorabilia for future projects:

Fake Fuwa

Hey, why does that bad knock-off Fuwa have a mic! Gotta catch them all!

<sarcasm>
Eureka! I have it! The Dalai Lama’s followers should clone him so that he can’t be stopped and once one is removed, then it is reincarnated further into more Dalai Lama’s, whatever form they take. What a nightmare for the Chinese leaders if this happens, or is it? The fake copies of the Dalai Lama would probably get out of hand by all the pirate copiers…
</sarcasm>

If this is not ridiculous enough, check out this awesome thing Paul Keller, myself, David Bollier and Meika saw in Amsterdam at a bar:

paul keller photo of dog in bag

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