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Category Archives: floss

Phoning it in

Currently I own and use an iPhone 3G. I bought it almost two years ago, when the local phone provider LMT started offering the iPhone legally. I had a pretty good experience with it most of the time, but now it is showing its age: The two year warranty will run out in September The [...]

Hacker ‘Neo’ caught in Latvia

A scandal has been brewing in Latvia over the last half year and yesterday the activity spiked shocking the media and some IT people in the country. I’ll go back and explain what happened first, what is happening now and why this could have a heavy impact on IT and journalists in Latvia. At the [...]

Ubuntu 10.04 and NTFS filesystems

subj. don’t mix – just upgraded a simple Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 and it failed to boot. After careful examination, it looks that something replaced the munt line of my NTFS partition in the /etc/fstab and claimed that it is a VFAT partition and ‘mountall’ that is run during boot gets very, very confused [...]

Latvijas pavasara Ubuntu Bug Jam un Installest – 27.03.2010

The following is an invitation to the Latvian Ubuntu Bug Jam (in Latvian) sent for a bit of a wider circulation to catch people that monitor Planet Debian, but not Planet Ubuntu.lv. 27. martā LU Linux centrā notiks divi pasākumi vienā – Ubuntu Global Bug Jam Latvijas daļa un installfests. Global Bug Jam ir pasākums, [...]

Google Wave

So, the latest buzz on the web is all about Google Wave. I would urge everyone developing stuff for the Internet and technological people depending on the Internet for their daily work, to watch that introductory video. The concept is frankly mind-blowing. If this is done right and embraced by all the right people, Google [...]

Copyright infringement is like walking into a concert without a ticket

In light of Ted’s post on copyright, it is clear that we are bogged down by a hostile terminology. Copyright infringement is not piracy – gunmen on seas killing people, looting ships and holding hostages is piracy. Copyright infringement is not theft. When my bike was stolen, I no longer had it. Stealing a bicycle [...]

Slowfs

I have just encountered a bug in Gnome that is much more visible when the hard drive is slow or overloaded and responds slowly. This gave me an idea – how about a simple transparent FUSE filesystem that does nothing else than delay, slow down and possibly reorder filesystem requests? Such a filesystem would be [...]

Firefox 3.0 download record

Please help set a world record of most downloads in 24 hours by downloading a copy of Firefox 3.0 in the next 24 hours starting at 18:00 GMT today. Download yourself and get all your friends to do so as well. Only one download per computer is counted towards the record. More info on the [...]

More of a good thing?

There is one particular aspect of Microsoft’s document format going through ISO process that I had a hard time to find a counter-argument against: “Well it is better to have multiple open formats, isn’t it?”. Last night when I was presenting in a Document Freedom Day event, I finally got one. When multiple standards exist [...]

Quoted

A person that I deeply respect and who is very know in Latvian IT society recently said that he often uses a quote of mine in his presentations. I completely forgot that I ever said that, but it sounds very much like what I would say, so I wanted to write it down so that [...]