When I went to the Google HQ for the Ubuntu Developer’s Summit in Mountain View, I – and many others – were suitably impressed with the cute art installation that they had installed in the lobby. It is simply as screen showing Google search queries scrolling by: It is quite hypnotic to look at such [...]
Listening to the radio this morning before biking into town to work sitting at my newly-acquired thesis writing spot at the Royal Library in the centre of Copenhagen (nice), I heard a segment from Danish IT-news source, Harddisken, on Pervasive Computing and the hospital which sounded oddly familiar. The segment was called “Et hospital i [...]
I’ve had a quite interesting discussion with Lars Risan in the comments to my recent blog post on Launchpad about Lars’ paper on the role of technical infrastructure in Free Software development, and I think Lars does well to describe the central tension within these: I think Debian is a tremendously interesting case when it [...]
Lars Risan, a Norwegian anthropologist leading a group of researchers at the university of Oslo studying “The Political Economy of Free/Open Software” recently put up an interesting blog post about the Launchpad technical infrastructure’s effects on the relationship between Ubuntu and various upstreams, both with regards to Debian, but also with regards to the translation [...]
From time to time I get caught up in technological nostalgia. Sometimes I find myself missing phones with rotary dials: You got that tacit touch of the mechanism inside and you could guess at how things worked inside. Now phones are just black boxes that emit random beeps. In the latest iteration, they’re even trying [...]
Some time ago, Anne Galloway posted an excerpt from a talk by designer and HCI theorist Brenda Laurel on her concept of culture work which caught my interest. Laurel’s main concern is design which focuses on the bottomline, the way that most of the products we buy are designing with buying and consumption in mind, [...]
So with the release of the new version of Ubuntu, 6.10 (6 for 2006, 10 for October) I decided that rather than merely upgrading my system from 6.06 to 6.10, I would wipe clean my hard disk, wipe all my desktop settings and try to start afresh to see how long it would take me [...]
Under the impact of this information explosion, different degrees and types of anticipation result among the professionals who participate in the technology of the next generation of machine translation. [...] Each of these “users” has got hold of some major or side effect of the information explosion, and each is a potential supporter and advocate, [...]
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 [...]
One of the special elements of Ubuntu which seems to work to especially attract people who are coming to Linux for the first time, is the name and the implicit South African philosophy of shared humanity and common roots. The About Ubuntu page in the Ubuntu system menu says: A rough translation of the principle [...]