Bad news reported in a message to the PLUG list:
Date: 2006-02-27 13:54 +1100
To: plug
Subject: [plug] leon brooksIt is my sad duty to inform you all that Leon Brooks had a car accident on Saturday night and has severe head injuries and is currently in ICU.
Further details are sketchy at this stage.
🙁
Leon, I hope you make a speedy and thorough recovery. Get well soon.
Via Linux Australia
Well well well, here’s an interesting turnup in the SCO vs IBM case that’s been dragging on and on for years.
SCO finally had to submit a list of what they were accusing IBM of, with specificity,and did so with a list of 294 alleged misdeeds that they filed under seal, so the rest of the world couldn’t see. Obviously they’d gotten fed up with the world pulling the rest of their previous allegations apart.
But now IBM have hit back, they’ve filed a motion in the court to strike 201 of those 294 allegations immediately because, surprise surprise, SCO give no evidence at all for them. Apparently they don’t cite any lines of code from Linux, AIX, Dynix or System V to support those particular 201 allegations. What makes it worse from SCOs point of view is that IBM wrote to them on the 5th December 2005 pointing this out and giving them the opportunity to fix it, but they ignored the warning. So IBM has done the only thing that they could in the circumstance and asked the court to strike these items, mentioning in passing that SCOs unresponsiveness to flag that it’s probably not worth ordering them to do anything as they’ve already been asked and had over 2 months to provide extra details.
The sorts of things SCO is up to are time wasting tricks like this (to pick a random example):
Item Nos. 271 and 294 of the Final Disclosures illustrate the problem. Item No. 271 claims that “AIX and Dynix/ptx patented technologies, based on UNIX System V, were improperly released for the benefit of, and use by, the Linux development community in developing Linux.†SCO does not identify a single version, file or line of Unix System V, AIX, Dynix or Linux technology that IBM is alleged to have misused. Instead, SCO merely attaches 34 patents. None of these 34 patents lists any versions, files or lines of code. There is, therefore, no way of telling what, if any, Unix System V, AIX, Dynix or Linux technology SCO contends was misused.
But this is probably only the first in a series of blows to SCO, as if the court does rule that SCO have not produced any particularised details for these allegations as the court had ordered (several times) and strike these allegations then IBM can start on those where they’ve got some idea about what SCO is prattling on about and then it’ll get interesting when we see what they then do to defend themselves.
There is already something about this foreshadowed in a footnote to the filing where IBM say:
In Item No. 204, SCO provides a comparison of System V source code and Dynix source code to support the unremarkable, and uncontested, proposition that the Dynix operating system contains certain code modified or derived from System V source code; neither party contests the fact that IBM (through Sequent) had a valid license to include System V source code in Dynix. In fact, as noted above, SCO makes no claim of misuse of the material identified in Item No. 204. (See supra note 1.)
Truly a Homer Simpson moment.. D’oh!
Well it appears that Google has finally let their Jabber server talk to other XMPP messaging systems, meaning that if you use Jabber somewhere then you should be able to now communicate with Google Talk people (including VOIP if your client supports it thanks to Google releasing their Jingle specs openly as well as a sample library) as well as with anyone else on a Jabber server.
Nice one Google!
Thursday morning Donna and I fly off to New Zealand where I’ll be attending LCA 2006 in Dunedin and Donna will be doing a number of talks in Aukland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin (and I’ll be travelling with her to those).
Updates will be occasional, if at all, to the site until we get back to Australia..
Couple of interesting things today, first off is that the first draft of the GPLv3 has been posted for comment on the FSF’s website finally, so we get to see what they’re thinking. Then we have some news on a technology preview for Samba4 and finally why you shouldn’t put off packing to the last moment, like I’m doing..
Continue reading
For about a week or so now I’ve been hunting down and importing all my digital photos I can still get my hands on and importing them into DigiKam. I’ve got to say I’m very impressed with it, I added the current version (0.80) via Achim Bohnet’s apt repository for KUbuntu (recommended by the digikam folks) and it’s just blown me away.
Hierarchical albums are no problem, as is batch renaming (with easily customisable formatting), RAW image conversion (using dcraw), transformations and even a really nifty fuzzy-match duplicate finder!
But the two most useful features are (for me) tagging and the automatic calendar of photographs.
Tagging allows you to have a hierarchy of tags, you get 3 starters of Events, People and Places but then it’s dead easy to create tags below those, and then more below them, and so on. So, for instance, one particular hierarchy goes Places->Australia->VIC->Melbourne->VPAC. When (in tag view) you click on a tag at a certain level you will see photos from that tag and any tags that are children of it, so in the example if I click on the VIC tag I get any photos tagged just as Victoria, as well as those tagged as VPAC, Melbourne or anywhere else below that point.
The automatic calendar of photos is just that, as you import photos the date associated with them is used to create entries in a calendar. By clicking on a particular month you’ll see all photos taken then, and individual days with photos are highlighted in bold. Clicking a day will show the photos from that particular day.
Helpful hint: Importing photos into DigiKam works best when you’ve got the EXIF “DateTimeOriginal” set to the time the photo was taken. Most modern digital cameras will do this for you, but if they don’t you can use tools such as ExifTool (a Perl program) to insert such data. DigiKam will also allow you to add/subtract years, months. days, hours, minutes and seconds from a selection of photos too.
From the summary by a couple of good people (Chris Brown and Frank Sorenson) who attended the latest hearing in the SCO versus IBM farce, reported on Groklaw in the story “1st Word From the Court Hearing – Under Advisement“.
Chris Brown writes:
He stated that the discovery sought is plainly relevent including white papers, interim version, notes, & etc. That in the discovery obtained on the 20 developers IBM has turned over already, SCO has found documents that will support its claims. That in the requested discovery SCO seeks evidence of admissions that the source of infringing code is from Sys-V, AIX, or Dynix. He said SCO is entitled to show how that code came from those other operating systems. That SCO is not limited to code-by-code comparisons, but may show how it’s developed.
(Note: In fact SCO was dismissive of what it called “code-by-code” comparisons around a half dozen times during the hearing. Could this be foreshadowing their admission that they have been unable to find any evidence of infringing copied code?)
Frank Sorenson writes:
Normand says that SCO expects to find admissions from IBM’s developers in the materials that the source code came from System V, AIX and Dynix.
Under SCO’s theory, SCO is not limited to demonstrating through a code comparison. They want to show in IBM’s own words, through the developers notes, emails, etc. They expect that they’ll show IBM’s developers see a deficiency in Linux, they’ll implement it using knowledge and code from System V, AIX, and Dynix, then contribute to Linux. The developer may even mention the importance and improvement to Linux. He talks about the insufficiency of doing a code comparison, and how SCO would like to demonstrate using the internal IBM development notes.
So what happened to this then ?
“We’re finding…cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code,” McBride said in an interview.
SCO wouldn’t have been misrepresenting or just incompetent by some chance are now looking to cover their tracks ? 🙂
Groklaw has an excellent article written by Georg Greve (the president of FSF Europe) called The Complete Story of the Vienna Conclusions which tells the process that the UN and WIPO went through to reach conclusions and how Microsoft managed to get them changed without even the knowledge of the chair of the committee!
This apparently happened because of a comment by Microsoft on a blog that was, well, shall we say less than well used or publicised. You can read the full comment from Microsoft here.
The relevant quotes are:
p5/2. Digital Rights/Creative Commons
While we largely agree on the point that more choices should be given to creators and users (and the subsequent conclusions on Creative Commons or Wikipedia) we explicitly disagree on the notion that “increasingly, revenue is generated not by selling content and digital works, as they can be freely distributed at almost no cost, but by offering services on top of them. The success of the Free Software Model is one example” and propose to delete this text part completely, as it contains only an one-sided perspective on the ICT industry. The rationale for this is, that the aim of free software is not to enable a healthy business on software but rather to make it even impossible to make any income on software as a commercial product. We don´t see this neither as a viable not as a desirable path for the future economy of Europe.
That’s so bad it’s not even wrong.
P6/3. eLearning and eScience … Deletion of “…like the linux project” as this is only one particular – anti-commercial – specificity of the open source landscape. You could use instead of “Linux” the more broader term of “open source project”.
So Linux is “anti-commercial” ? Quick, someone better tell IBM, Redhat and everyone else who’s making money out of it to stop, quick!
Fab – just figured out how to talk to my Motorola V525 from Linux.
The standard KDE bluetooth tools sort of work, but the v525 is notorious for not quite doing bluetooth correctly, and so whilst I could pair with the phone and do some rudimentary browsing of the services the phone offered I couldn’t get access to the address book or SMS messages.
So I went digging around and found KMobileTools which, after a bit of faffing about, worked!
The faffing about that was necessary was:
sudo mknod /dev/rfcomm0 c 216 0
sudo ln -s /dev/rfcomm0 /dev/mobile
hcitool scan
sudo rfcomm bind 0 [mac-address]
kmobiletools
As people have pointed out, this would be so much easier with a wizard such as the one provided by K3B to configure CD/DVD burners, but given the software is at 0.4.3.1 it’s pretty amazing!
So far I can access my phone directory, dial/answer/hang-up voice calls and send/receive/save text SMS’s (interestingly a PXT looks like a pathname on a server somewhere). There’s no access to files, but the developer is looking interestedly at the Motorola 4 Linux project which is aiming for remote filesystem access to Motorola phones.
There is an interesting article at LWN about the shared subtrees work that is being merged into 2.6.15.