Schedule

The schedule outline for the conference has been drafted, and features a warm-up weekend and a number of parallel events that might interest the Gnome lover. Here it is:

sa 24 - training sessions
        GNU hackers meeting
        room for auxiliary meetings
su 25 - GNU hackers meeting
        room for auxiliary meetings
mo 26 - training sessions
        government sessions
        room for auxiliary meetings
tu 27 - GUADEC main conference program
we 28 - GUADEC main conference program
th 29 - GUADEC main conference program

More information about the GNU hackers meeting, training sessions and government sessions will be released soon.

If you are planning to get together with your team during or before GUADEC, please drop us a line (on the GUADEC mailing list) so we can accommodate your event in the room scheduling.

Call for papers deadline nearing

The deadline for the call for papers is nearing. You have until march 20th to submit a proposal for your presentation on the guadec website.

[18F4550]       ; pic definition
        0       ; config word: code protect bit mask
        0       ; config word: watchdog bit mask
        4       ; Word alignment for writing to this device
        300000  ; Configuration memory start address
        200000 0        ; ID Locations addr and size
        f00000  ; Data eeprom address
        0       ; number of words in cfg bits with factory set bits
        0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ; fixed bits mask
        WARP OLIMEX     ; bit map of supporting programmers

[18F4550:def]
        40 00   ; size of program space
        ff ff   ; width of address word
        ff ff   ; width of data word
        0f 0f   ; width of ID
        0f 0f   ; ID mask
        cf 3f   ; width of configuration word
        cf 3f   ; configuration word mask
        00 ff   ; EEPROM data width
        00 ff   ; EEPROM data mask
        00 00   ; Calibration width
        00 00   ; Calibration mask
        00 00   ; ??
        40 00   ; ??
        00 00   ; address of ID locations
        04      ; size of ID locations
        00 00   ; address of configuration bits
        07      ; size of configuration register
        00 00   ; address of data space
        01 00   ; size of data space
        00 00   ; address of internal clock calibration value
        00 00   ; size of clock calibration space
        03      ; additional programming pulses for C devices
        13      ; main programming pulses for C devices
        1e 0f   ; ?? ZIF configuration ??

[18F4550:defx]
        05 00 1f 1f
        83 00 00 85
        c0 0f e0 0f
        40 0f 00 00
        cf 3f 1f 3f
        87 00 00 e5
        c0 0f e0 0f
        40 0f 00 00

The guys and girls from ETH0 would like to bring your attention to the following. After co-organising Hacking At Random 2009 we are back in the saddle and making preperations for the next events. In 2010 ETH0 will bring you 2 events, these are:

- Our week-long outdoor summercamp, somewhere in August 2010
- A 3-day indoor party-conference, January 16 and 17, 2010

For both of these events we are looking for open source projects, developer groups, hackerspaces, interesting individuals, writers,
coders, DJ’s and VJ’s, builders and hackers who think they can add something interesting to our event. We are looking for people who want to do hands-on workshops, hold lectures, give demonstrations or presentations, teach and learn, talk with interesting people and make an impact on our visitors.

If you feel that this describes you, or if you know someone we must contact, head over to www.eth-0.nl / wiki.eth-0.nl and contact our Program Committee (Mail: program@eth-0.nl)

Eth0 2010 Program Committee
Jeroen Dekkers
Mark Janssen

–
Support the new hackerspace for Den Haag — www.revspace.nl

The conference will lead up to the GNOME 3.0 release in September 2010. Keeping with the 3.0 theme, the three primary themes for GUADEC 2010 will be Government, education, and end users.

The Hague was one of several locations proposed for GUADEC in 2010. It was chosen in part due to the excellent facilities at the bid site, as well as easily accessible site for those traveling to GUADEC. The conference will be held at the Haagse Hogeschool, the higher vocational education institute in the region with an existing affinity for open source.

“Free Software is of great importance to culture in the digital age,” said Kees Vendrik, Green MP and advocate of open source and open standards in the Dutch public sector. “It offers a fertile feeding ground for education, innovation, and the economy at large. My party is delighted that the GNOME conference is coming to The Netherlands and we believe it will inspire our governmental bodies to put policy into practice.”

The core team of the winning bid consists of Vincent van Adrighem, Koen Martens, Sanne te Meerman, Fabrice Mous, and Reinout van Schouwen. Each of the core team members are well-rooted in the FLOSS community at large, with network spanning the most active FLOSS organizations in The Netherlands.

“We are very excited and honored to host GUADEC next year,” said Reinout van Schouwen. “With the upcoming release of GNOME 3.0, we’re confident that the conference will be one of the most important ones in the history of the GNOME project. We would like to invite the Free Software communities in our country and abroad to take advantage of this opportunity and show the world that open technology offers solutions for everyone!”

GUADEC is now in its 11th year, and follows a successful joint conference, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GCDS), in 2009 with the KDE Project. As planned, GUADEC 2010 will be hosted on its own, but the door is open to another co-hosted event in the future.

Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, said that GCDS was “a great conference, and an opportunity to work with our friends in the KDE Project on areas where both desktops can benefit. We hope to build on that experience this year with GUADEC.”

See the GUADEC Website for more information about the conference. Registration details and information on the call for papers will be up by January 6th. Look for another announcement at that time with more details about the CFP and tracks for GUADEC 2010.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org and foundation.gnome.org.
Media Enquiries

GNOME Foundation Executive Director
Stormy Peters
Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
Phone: +1-617-206-3947

The short answer

   Contributors on ohloh.net (TWiki in red, Foswiki in green)

While strictly speaking, TWiki.org (distinguising it from its commercial guardian TWiki.net by the tacking on of .org) is still open source, it is far from open. A year ago, the entire existing community was locked out (by denying access to the twiki.org wiki, the collaboration platform for the project). They would only be let in again, after agreeing to a new ‘code of conduct’. The code of conduct reinforced Thoeny’s self-appointed role as dictator of the project, contrary to the mainstream tendency in the community to bring more democracy to the project. By now, the community exists of Thoeny and TWiki.net employees. A year ago, TWiki.net released some preliminary and alpha-level code to the community and then stopped contributing. TWiki.org has degraded into an outlet for TWiki.net marketing.

The details:

11 years ago, Thoeny initiated the TWiki project by forking off the Joswiki codebase. He has always considered it to be his project, which is only logical. But when the project grew over time, the community did as well. Until at some point, Thoeny’s contributions to the project were only in advocacy. He had successfully built a community around the project, full of enthousiasm to make the project an even bigger success. Over the years, the platform was rearchitected to the point that Thoeny lost touch with the codebase, diminishing his development contributions to zero.

Then Thoeny dropped the ball. True leaders know when it is time to take a step back, Thoeny didn’t know and persisted in his ownership of the project. He could not tolerate other opinions on the direction of the project. He framed these different opinions as ‘the dissonant voice of a small group of consultants who do not buy in to the TWiki.net strategy’. Said strategy, at the time, meant that all and any TWiki related business would be funelled through TWiki.net. A rather strict enforcement of Thoeny’s trademark on the name TWiki aimed to kill any competition in the market.

TWiki started out as Thoeny’s baby, grew up to become a teen that struggled from independency of its parents. Thoeny was afraid to let his child go, and held on to it as an overly-protective parent. In the end, the venture-capital fueled paranoia and untrusting nature of the parent led to a break between the community and the dictator. Thoeny kept the name, the community kept the enthousiasm, know-how and drive under the new name Foswiki. Out of the almost 40.000 subscribed TWiki accounts, only about 6.500 agreed to the code of conduct. Most probably didn’t know what they were agreeing on, considering it just one more ‘I agree to the terms and conditions’ checkbox one checks without thinking.

Meanwhile, TWiki.org has detoriated. The download page (archived here) is one huge advertisement for TWiki.net. The recent addition of a form collecting sales leads for TWiki.net completes the picture. How commercial does it have to be before one cannot escape the conclusion that yes, TWiki.org did go commercial?

In case you are not convinced, consider the community support area. The handling of support requests is almost exclusively done by one person: Thoeny again. What happens if Thoeny is unavailable, for some reason not able to work on TWiki.org anymore (as has happened frequently in the past). Can one person handle all these support requests? The current situation seems hardly sustainable. What if Thoeny breaks down and can’t handle the flow? You are left to paid support with TWiki.net, as witnessed by this recent support request or recent support answers on the TWiki irc channel.

This all paints a bleak picture: a one-man community is not a viable and sustenaible solution for the enterprise. The TWiki.org website is nothing more than a marketing front for the venture capital firm TWiki.net, which itself is mostly a marketing company. The latest contribution to the community is a video full of buzz-words but without much content.

So the answer to the original question, “Did TWiki.org go commercial?” should be a resounding “YES” to anyone who digs into the facts. It is a sorry state of affairs, but unfortunately one I foresaw when things started to rumble.

(ps, I am obliged to note that TWiki® is a registered trademark of TWiki founder Peter Thoeny, TWIKI.NET. The TWiki logo and the “Collaborate with TWiki” tagline are trademarks of Peter Thoeny)

#
#    retweet.py - retweet based on hashtag
#    Copyright (C) 2009  Koen Martens
#
#    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
#    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
#    (at your option) any later version.
#
#    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#    GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#    along with this program.  If not, see .
#

import json
import urllib
import os
import sys

hashtag  = '#revspace'
user     = 'revspacenl'
password = 'foobarbaz'

class MyUrlOpener(urllib.FancyURLopener):
    def set_user(self,user):
        self.user=user

    def set_password(self,password):
        self.password=password

    def prompt_user_passwd(self,host,realm):
        print 'auth host '+host+' realm '+realm
        return (self.user, self.password)

def get_searchurl(hashtag):
    if (os.path.exists('refresh.'+hashtag)):
      file = open('refresh.'+hashtag)
      refresh_url = file.readline()
      file.close()
      return refresh_url
    return 'http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=' + urllib.quote(hashtag)

def search(searchurl):
    sock = urllib.urlopen( searchurl )
    response = json.load( sock )
    sock.close()

    return response

def save_refreshurl(hashtag,refresh_url):
    file = open('refresh.'+hashtag,'w');
    file.write(refresh_url+'\n');
    file.close()

def update_status(user,password,tweet):
    data = urllib.urlencode( { 'status': tweet } )

    try:
      opener = MyUrlOpener()
      opener.set_user(user)
      opener.set_password(password)
      sock = opener.open( 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json',data )
      response = json.load( sock )
      sock.close
    except:
      sys.stderr.write( "Unexpected error:" + sys.exc_info()[0] )

searchurl = get_searchurl(hashtag)

print 'Search url: '+searchurl

response = search(searchurl)

for result in response['results']:
  if result['from_user'] != user:
    tweet = 'RT @'+result['from_user']+': '+result['text']
    print tweet
    update_status(user,password,tweet)

save_refreshurl(hashtag,'http://search.twitter.com/search.json'+response['refresh_url'])

“Why isn’t there a hackerspace in Den Haag?”. A question frequently overheard during Hacking at Random (HAR2009), the recent hacker camp in The Netherlands. And a good question as well.

Well, the answer now is: because you did not join Revelation Space yet!

There are quite a lot of hackers (which, for purposes of this article I characterize as intelligent people with a critical point of view on
the status quo) in The Netherlands. This fact is evident in the masses of Dutch people that visit hacker conferences, the fact that for a
country as small as ours there is a large number of IT security firms and the realized potential of the four-yearly Dutch hacker camps (HAR2009 being the latest of these).

Now, I do not know much about the history of the CCC, but I do know this club provides structure to the German hacker community. Something that has been lacking in the Dutch hacker community, rooted in the anarchistic Amsterdam eighties. Without something like the CCC, that for all its flaws gives the scene identity and a sense of belonging, the Dutch hackers are a loosely bound community. Hackerspaces might be able to add this structure to the Dutch hacker community, as has happened in Germany and the US already.

Anyway, back to Den Haag, international city of peace and justice. And, on a larger scope, the city-county Haaglanden: Zoetermeer (IT city pur-sang), Delft (home of one of our most well known technical universities), Voorburg, Rijswijk and more. It is only fitting that this region gets a hackerspace, where we can meet, collaborate and come up with great projects.

Not only does such a hackerspace have an inward function, it should also be a center of outreach. A source of education for the masses on how technology touches our lives, and how everyone should be critical.

To make this possible, we need you! Under the name ‘Revelation Space’, a group of hackers from the region are trying to make it happen. Set up the underlying structure, rent a space, decorate it, come up with nice projects and whatever else is involved.

I appeal not only to the hard-core kernel hackers that are out there, geeks who stay up late at night to wrestle through encryption protocols for fun and profit, but also to the artistic among us that play with technology or the social hackers that dive deep into the human mind and find tricks to exploit its design. In other words: hackers of all persuasions are invited to join!

If you are interested, make sure to head over to the RevSpace wiki, join the mailing list or join us on IRC. I hope to be able to say ‘hi’ to many of you in the near future!

Koen Martens (gmc)
gmc@har2009.org
http://wordpress.metro.cx/

Then had to coordinate some stuff, among which the harcade. It’s funny in a way, how a 100m walk suddenly takes half an hour, what with all the people asking for your opinion, decision or other input. It’s great though how all the people on the terrain are jumping at every opportunity to help out. That’s what i’ve been doing it for the past year!

Forgot to eat as well. Luckily there was some food left at Sabine’s, which I heated in the microwave and ate during the team-lead meeting at 22:00. After that I went around the terrain to hand out volunteer hats.

At the HARfm area, i found a lot of stressed out people. Turns out I arrived 15 minutes before they went live, so i sat down in the studio and joined in for the first chaotic hour of broadcasting. Looking forward to doing my shows on HARfm later on!

After that, I went to the HARcade, to find my ultimate wet dream. While I was busy doing boring money business, random people turned the large empty space into a gameroom that exceeds my wildest dreams! Great job people, I love you!

I’m so proud to be a part of this edition of the event, and so glad it is turning out to be such a brilliant kick-ass edition. Hope I can keep my eyes dry this wednesday, when i’m delivering the opening speech :)

The unexpected masses arriving has led to some improvisation: we basically weren’t ready for this much people. But everyone has worked very hard to get things up to shape. Amazing, really, to see how fast a random group of people can switch into high gear and get everything ready. Of course, sleep is among the first things to be sacrificed. When asking ‘how are things’, a frequent answer is ‘good, perfect, just a bit tired’.

So much happened today and yesterday, that I won’t even try to enumerate. Some personal highlights: the blinkenlights arrived in the HARcade! Next to ST:TNG and Adams Family, we now have Tommy. Tomorrow, a shitload of pinball games will be unloaded. The asteroids is there already, as is the voice-controlled racetrack and i’ve seen the floating ducks being set up. Can’t wait till the metacade is being put up! Some guys even arranged for DDR mats. We had some rain today, but Cinder promised that will clear up at 6AM. There are still tents being built. The HARfm tent is ready though, and the antenna is up already. A/V arrived in a big truck and two smaller ones, and is

The sudden influx sparked an email to our visitors, which prompted some varied responses. Apart from one or two whiners, who forgot that we’re not professional event organisers and are making it up as we go, the response to that email has been very understanding. Of course, people who come from far can’t just change their travel plans (think airplanes), but I think without the email we would have at least a 500 people here already.

I don’t know what to expect tomorrow. Will we have a 1000 visitors by the end of the day?? There is still a shitload to do, so i’ll be running to and from again I guess. I’ll try to keep you updated through the har2009 twitter feed though, as i’ve been doing in the past days!

Have been twittering like mad on the HAR2009 twitter feed, trying to catch the most noteworthy moments (and doubtless failing, missing a lot of the cool stuff). Hope the ppl at home like it though. Today, the porto’s were handed out. The endless pointless discussions on IRC translate well to the ether.

Tomorrow, the first beginnings of the power grid will be laid out, with the generators arriving. Hopefully at the end of the day I can plug in some UTP in the noc cabin, and catch up on my email. I doubt that there’ll be time for that though.

My personal hi-lite of the day: claiming a bike! No more feet-killing circuits around the terrain!

Anyway, it’s late. I’m signing off. Thanks for listening.