I write this in a youth hostel in Munich. I’ve just come back from a Munich suburb where I have spent two days with Sebastian, a German Ubuntu developer, talking about computers, the Ubuntu community, interaction design and much, much more. Sebastian lives along the railway line between Munich and Dachau, the village now mostly [...]
Yesterday, I was approved for Ubuntu membership and am now an official member of the Ubuntu community. Becoming a member is just about the most formal procedure in the Ubuntu community, and it is still very, very relaxed. New member candidates are approved at the Ubuntu Community Council meetings which are held every two weeks [...]
Late yesterday evening I arrived in Wiesbaden near Frankfurt am Main for the Ubuntu Developers’ Sprint. The sprint started this morning, and it is the big halfway point of the Edgy Eft release cycle. All of the Canonical-employed Ubuntu developers are gathered to recalibrate their efforts and coordinate the specifications that were approved in Paris. [...]
Why didn’t anybody tell me about how nice The The’s Dusk is? Oh, somebody did, I guess. 5 years ago, when I wasn’t really ready to appreciate it. Telling somebody at the age of 20 that “you’ll love this music in 5 years time” is a surefire way to make them avoid it. And then [...]
I just went through some of my old stuff, and came across my old articles for the University of Copenhagen Institute of Anthropology magazine known as “Den Vilde Tanke” – which is the Danish translation of the French La Pensée Sauvage. I helped with the layout, editing and writing for most of my first 3 [...]
As a not-too-technical person, my experience with the Ubuntu community has been somewhat rocky. The few non-technical projects – Documentation, Marketing, Translation – do not get very much attention compared to the technical tasks, and those involved are nowhere as well organized as the technical teams. As fellow non-technical Ubuntu contributor Matthew Revell noted: When [...]
Students always complain about their teachers. Teachers often complain about their students. But you know things are turning worse when students are complaining about their fellow students. But that is just what this American graduate student is doing in this letter: Consumerism as ideology manifests itself in the academy, an unfortunate development that I hear [...]
Welcome to WordPress. I’ve finally gotten around to moving my blog off Blogger, and getting into all the CSS and categorizing goodness of the Web 2.0. I finally got around to doing this when I read usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 weblog design mistakes, and I hope to have fixed most his concerns now. [...]
While I was pondering the Ubuntu philosophy below, I remembered the following quote which also sums up the that philosophy, but from a different angle: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, [...]