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Tag Archive for 'linux'

Photos from Guangzhou China Town Demolitions and Linux Photo Sharing Question

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at May 3, 2008 in Notes. 0 Comments

AhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHhhhhhh! Our time in Guangzhou is nearing an end for this spell. I have not adequately covered what Lu and I have been up to. Here are some immediate photos taken of Guangzhou which illustrate the dynamism of where we live right now.

Photos below by Lu Fang under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Book store in TianHe

We discovered this village a couple of blocks from our house was being destroyed to make way for new housing and skyscrapers which you’ll see at the end of this.

Also, a few of my colleagues will be happy to note that a W hotel and Ritz-Carlton are being built on these grounds — ironies abound. The other day as well, helped my wife’s parents plant some plants. They wanted me to help dig out this huge *rock* in the ground. That rock happened to be a big multi-colored chunk of rubble from the village that lays under where we live — some kind of rock!

I need to get into photo dumping online. What is the linux workflow that others use to get photos from camera, to desktop, to flickr, Internet Archive, etc? I just took a hard look at just uploading all my photos to Internet Archive, but the interfaces are not there for photo fun nor conversion to other formats, and the biggest part is lack of active community. Any thoughts?

ccLiveContent DVD and QEMU on Gentoo

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jon

at February 19, 2008 in Notes. 4 Comments

If you want to test the latest livecontent DVD, you can just use qemu and the iso disc:

qemu -kernel-kqemu -cdrom ./ccLiveContent-2.0-1202964485.iso -boot d -m 512

I don’t think I have kqemu working or something because its still super slow running on my thinkbook X61 with 4 gb of ram…hmmmm…

Backup Setup Advice + I Need Another Computer

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jon

at February 28, 2007 in Notes. 5 Comments

In my continuing series of lazyweb posts, I’m seeking the best and easiest backup option for my house. What I want to do and what I should do is probably two different things.

So, I’ve got my home setup on a big APS power backup, purchased a couple of 200 GB ide hard drives, and need one final component, a cheap computer with lots of storage bays. My goal is to slap these hard drives (and more in the future) into a new-old box, and start running Dirvish to backup my main desktop (workbox), my main laptop (lifebook), and my gf’s G5 (deerbox).

Is this is sane approach? Also, where is the best place to get a cheap computer. I really don’t want to have to buy one at all, and thought I would just come across some cheap/free computer over the last couple of months, but am afraid of going into Frys and other tech stores (to be honest).

(BTW: I backup my computers by syncing the home folders between them, so that they have the same good stuff. Also, I have a portable drive I’ve been backup up my home folders up to, but have been bad in not doing a full system backup…)

The other approach I’m considering is to just to do encrypted backups to my webhost, Dreamhost. I have 200Gb of storage on there, sooooo, why not just store it there past the inital burst of the first rsync

Inkscape 0.45 Released and Strategy toward Inkscape 1.0 :)

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jon

at February 5, 2007 in Notes. 0 Comments

Heya all, Inkscape 0.45 is out in the wild. Bryce and I sent out PR. The great thing about Bryce is that he is the master of planning. He helped to reshape Inkscape’s roadmap so we can get to 0.50 with SVG Mobile compliance and full Inkscape 1.0 with SVG 1.1 compliance. Need I say, the more contributors we get, the faster we will get there.

Would anyone out there like to help out with Inkscape by either funding development or with steps to getting involved in Inkscape? I can connect funding with developers and am eager to do so to accelerate Inkscape towards > 1.0 version numbers.

Check out the release notes and the press release:

Jon Phillips
Inkscape Announces 0.45 Release :: http://www.inkscape.org :: Draw Freely.
Draw Freely: Inkscape Announces 0.45 Release

February 5, 2007 - The Inkscape community today announced the newest
version of its cross-platform open source vector graphic drawing software,
Inkscape. Inkscape 0.45 features a new Gaussian Blur SVG filter.
Sponsored by Google’s Summer of Code program, Gaussian Blur allows you
to softly and naturally blur any Inkscape objects, including shapes,
text, and images. This enables a wide range of photorealistic effects:
arbitrarily shaped shades and lights, depth of field, drop shadows,
glows, etc. Also, blurred objects can be used as masks for other objects
to achieve the “feathered mask” effect.

Numerous other new features, enhancements to existing features, and bug
fixes have been included. A history dialog allows you to browse your
change history. Many new extension effects are added including Pattern
along Path and Color Effects. There are performance improvements to
rendering speed, on the order of 2-3% in general, and up to 5-10% for
drawings using heavy transparency and/or radial gradients. Compositing
quality is also improved through the removal of banding seen in gradients.

The Inkscape community invites anyone to contribute to the project. The
project is now working on the upcoming 0.46 release which will focus
on the initial stages of adding SVG animation support, increasing the
apps PDF functionality, and other refactoring tasks. On a global scale,
Inkscape is pushing for version 0.50 to have full compatibility with
SVG Mobile/Tiny. Then, the ultimate large goal is to get to Inkscape
1.0 which will be a fully W3C SVG 1.1 compliant application. The more
help the project receives, the faster the aforementioned goals will
be accomplished.

Download Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X packages:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438

For many more details, see the complete Release Notes for 0.45:

http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_Notes045

Community submitted screenshots:

http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/

About Inkscape

Inkscape is an open source drawing tool that uses the World Wide Web
Consortium’s ([[W3C]]) scalable vector graphics format (SVG). Some
supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, markers, clones,
alpha blending, transforms, gradients, and grouping. In addition, Inkscape
supports Creative Commons’ metadata, node-editing, layers, complex path
operations, text-on-path, text-in-shape, and SVG XML editing. It can
also import EPS, PostScript, and most bitmap formats,
and exports PNG, PS, PDF and various vector formats.

Inkscape’s main motivation is to provide the Open Source community with
a fully [[W3C]] compliant XML, SVG, and CSS2 drawing tool. Additional
work includes conversion of the codebase from C/Gtk to
C++/Gtkmm, emphasizing a lightweight core with powerful
features added through an extension mechanism, and maintaining a friendly,
open, community-oriented development process.

Press Contact

Jon Phillips
jon@rejon.org
+1 510.499.0894

CC Taiwan Conference Follow-up + Slides + Video

Published by

jon

at February 3, 2007 in Notes. 1 Comment

The CC Taiwan conference I participated in had to have been the most efficient and best-run conference I’ve been to in some time. Hats off to Tyng-Ruey Chuang and everyone who put that conference together. It also was interesting to be an official Creative Commons representative in terms of experience with the organization. I got to field many questions during the conference.

The fun of the event was getting to have a hack session with the CC Taiwan developers on ccHost the day after, which segued into a Wikimania 2007 planning conference (since its in Tapei in Aug. 2007 — mark your calendars).

I got an email from Tyng-Ruey today saying that video (ogm and wmv) is online from the conference, so check that out.

Also, I’m attaching my slides from the conference to this post here: CC Taiwan Open Content Library Presentation.

OpenMoko and Open Content on Open Devices

Published by

jon

at January 29, 2007 in Notes. 1 Comment

I wanted to add to the blogosphere about the OpenMoko first phone launch for developers on February 11. Looks like the OpenMoko team is sending me a test unit so I can explore development opportunities for this device and open content. That is great.

Check out Stefan Schmidt’s excellent todo list for his development efforts:

Port OpenMoko framework to the Motorola EZX phones. This includes making the Motorola TS07.10 vendor specifiec stuff ready for the new kernel infrastructure and getting the GUI ready for 240×320 and looking foreward into dialpad only handling. A lot work and a lot fun. I hope we have something nice in Q3 2007.

Sync with a linux desktop. One of the things I was pissed of by the most cellphones, even the linux ones, is the bad sync possibilities with a linux desktop. Why should we not be allowed to manage our contacs on desktop an cellphone without a hassle? This needs to be fixed.

GPS navigation under linux. This also itching me for a long time. I like to see two solutions here. First something working based on navit, maemo mapper, gps drive, etc. Using existing map data is fine for the start. Second step should be a always running and *easy* to use openstreetmap data logger. Not only gps tracks, but also something that allows tagging streets and POIs right while walking/driving. The current technics of osm are good, but need to be improved with ’smart autotagging’ and easy clientsoftware.

Suppourt for more phones. I like to see OpenMoko on as many phones as possible. For EZX phones we have already people promised to get it ready. I heard also about somebody like to start the work for the HTC linux port. What’s about greenphone and all the other linux smartphones? If you’re doing work in this area please add it to the wiki, it will open 2007-02-11. Whenever I’ll get my hands on such a device I’ll even take a look myself.

I will put this question out there. What do people want to see available on mobile phones and OLPC-like devices from the Open Content worlds? It is only natural to have Free and Open Content available on these Open platforms. This includes licensing and access to media collections either directly or through web services.

Anyway, it is so great to see the concerns about mobile phones getting addressed and encourage developers and others to look at OpenMoko. The OpenMoko code and devices are coming out February 11, 2007.