It’s my Birthday!

Happy Birthday to Freddy Martinez as well as myself for turning 21. Awesome!

Hello World?

If all went according to plan, I somehow or another managed to make myself onto the Planet Ubuntu webpage. Excellent! If not, then I fail at v i+ bzr + cp/mv commands. The first two are new technologies I’ve recently started using, and the last two reflect my recent obsession with dropping away from a GUI into a shell and really exploring the depth and power of the Linux kernel. I am madly in love.

I would like to briefly introduce myself. I have been using Ubuntu Linux since December 2006 when my brother (more on him later) came home and more or less told me outright that Windows was banned in our household. My Win(ironic name, i think)dows partition breaking helped move things along. I became involved with the Ubuntu-Chicago group, as well as the local CHIGLUG group, and switch schools to a private technical institution where I am pursuing a B.S. in Political Science, and a minor in Computer Science. I also work by day at a company handling their computer systems, uploading content to the website, mapping network drives, and other such small tasks. In the long term, I hope to graduate with a solid understanding of societies and the political forces surrounding them (influencing policy is one area I am particularly interested in), as well as a technical understanding of the technologies which surround social change, as a precursor to my goal of pursuing a degree in law. With that in mind, I want to work with OSS companies and softwares, to better mankind through work in Intellectual Property law.

On my spare time I listen to music very loudly (punk, hip hop, rap, classical/romanticist, avant jazz, what I call “radio rock” and most call alternative rock, metal of course, hardcore, etc.) and I love to skateboard, take photos, read, explore the city with my best friends, and play with my dog. Oh, and my family has hosted over 15+ exchange students in the past few years, so my house is always packed.

I am actively involved in the LoCo project side of the Ubuntu community, as the lead contact for the Ubuntu-Chicago Team, and I try to talk to the US team and general LoCo team as much as possible. As such, I have many many people I am indebted to for all the time they’ve put up with me as I learned my way around the community and the CoC as well as the technology in general. You will notice how much time I spend on IRC when I refer to people by their online nicks, not their real names xD . I hope I don’t offend anyone by forgetting them and they are as follows, with explanations:

Effiejayx my brother down South for keeping me up to date on the S.American news
Tyche a great guy all around from Arizona
Greg G keeping Michigan strong
John C what more can I say?
JJesse an all around great Kubuntu and doc person
Jcastro for helping launch the midwest Quad LoCo team
Jucato for hanging out with me in #kubuntu
Manchicken who rants about free software for hours on end
boredandblogging (who has a better online handle than myself… well no, but close )
Fransisco Athens for letting me SSH into his box for IRC
Jim Campbell an all around solid guy who deserves to be on this planet more than I do.
Kevin Harris for attempting me to switch to Foresight for hours on end (and hasn’t managed it yet!)

I have two more people I want to thank for putting up with me. They are Freddy Martinez, my twin brother and fellow Ubuntu member, and Richard Johnson, KDE/Kubuntu whiz and the best LoCo leader I could try to replace. You read it first here people: twin Ubuntu developers from Chicago invade your Planet and free your computers! A million thanks to Richard for putting up with both of us and making it happen.

-Eddie M. signing off.

ps. I sure hope this works, or else my super long blog post (with too many annoying links!) was a total waste of time.

If God had a desktop…

It would be Kubuntu Gutsy 7.10.

Apparently my brother installed Gutsy and I was caught unawares. So now my kernel panic issues will be ignored, at least until Sunday’s CoD LUG Install Fest. Linkhere

Kubuntu documentation isn’t up yet. In fact, Fesity documentation is missing from kubuntu.org/documentation. Weaksauce.

I’ve had several big issues with Kubuntu Gutsy so far. Firefox did not load at all (errors about security something or another. See Bug #154196 for more info.

Amarok crashes my computer every time I try to click on it. The screen goes black (NOT X crashing. Literally no I/o) and I have to cold reboot.

Add/Remove Programs thinks that I already have a root instance open, and won’t let me run Add/Remove. This happened about 5 times; when I tried to do it again for the blag entry, it worked perfectly. go figure.

KNetworkManager was not set to recognize and start automatically at boot. I had to ifconfig and dhclient the thing. Thanks to Luca for helping me out on that one.

There are core.12727 and core.12900 and core.14019 (you get the idea) files in my /home/user folder. What they are, how they got there, and what they are doing there is beyond me. However, these are program crash data files. File extension- unknown.

And more issues exist somewhere. Hopefully this will get ironed out as I go along.

This is bad news

In a conversation with my buddy Justin, he told me that he was running Windows Vista, blah blah. Of course he got it as free as in cost.

This is from MSDNAA, the M$ project to provide M$ software to universities for minimal (reduced) cost. Then they can tweak the code slightly, but of course it is NonGPL. Worse yet, this is a partnership they have with my old college, which runs windows exclusively. I know this because their servers always failed.

My response is not a real response. It is a question. Where is the Linux/Ubuntu equivalent. Why isn’t RedHat or Canotical not setting up similar programs? If there are, and I’m not aware, let me know. I sign up for the promotion of freedom in all it’s forms.

“MSDN provides the easiest and most inexpensive way to get the latest M$ software…” Give me a break. Here is why I use Linux: It works. The architecture/commands are logical. It’s free. It’s free. The community rocks when I have an issue. It’s free. It’s free.

In other news, Flourish is around the corner and Admiral_Chicago is coming in for the conference.

Keep it free. -Eddie

GAH GFDL

After reading the response Freddy (Admiral_Chicago) left on my post about (Free)dom, I was inclined to post about my preference for the CC, NC license that I use. Please note that this will be the last time I will speak publicly on the issue, or at least make it the main focus of my speaking.

My qualm with the GFDL is not that I like DRM or that I want to restrict anyone to read or see my work. Far from it. Thank you all you Chicago Ubuntu readers who have no choice but to put up with me on the planet. If you want to honor me, by all humble means, I would love for you to do so. My problem, as an author, is that I simply cannot let someone else edit my work. Par my understanding, anyone can modify the work as they see fit.

This is unacceptable in my opinion. I am working on a piece right now (beta) called ‘Chicago, winter nights. Typical night” with the following line:

Cold weather (holiday) lights
pinpoints
of life a the late nights, darkened by steel and photophobic concrete.

The point of focus ‘a the late nights’ is on the fence in my mind. I’m not even sure if this was intentional (that is draft #2 by the way), if it is a typo, if I mean to write ‘and the late nights…’ or ‘(ahhh!) the late nights…

To agonize over a sentence for a full hour, is a very trying mindframe. For someone to come along and change my work, and tell me that my sentence is wrong, is not my idea of freedom. What if I want to sell my work and have to jump through 50 loopholes to do so? Obviously it’s not impossible to do so, but that is a concern of mine. A big one regardless of the basis/legitimacy that it entails.

I’m not against derivative works either. If someone wants to change my story around and release it under the GFDL or CC that is fine. If you try to copyright it, we may have issues. I understand the point that Lawrence Lessig was trying to make in Free Culture about how copyrights and DRM are crippling society. I’m not trying to stop anyone, I just want my own contributions to be highlighted, because as I stated above, it is hard work. I will release a free version of any books I write, or of anything I publish. No DRM on anything I write, you will be allowed to distribute freely. To quote Ian Mackye, “I would rather have 100 people hear my songs then have 100 bucks in my pocket”.

I know Stallman is not after me, I know that it’s the best intentions going into the GFDL, yet I can’t support it, because it has too large a focus on the public domain and too small a focus on the author.

“You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute.” No I won’t. But if I had wanted a co-author I would have sought their help. I didn’t, so please don’t edit my text. I’ll even release all my notes, drafts and rewrites of a piece, but I refuse to release my hard earned license to someone who has done nothing to deserve it. If someone wants to quote me, or make a derivative work in the GFDL, they can, but for my purposes, CC, NC is the way to go.

As always, thanks for reading. If anyone wants to read “Chicago, winter nights. Typical Night” I have two things to say. I have no idea why you would, since I don’t think I’m too hot an author, and let me know where I can contact you so I can send it to you. Hopefully, this is the last I hear about the issue.

-Eddie Martinez

CC, NC

Free(dom)

In a conversation about non free file formats (Can’t use PowerPoint to do my bio presentation. Sorry…. Can I use Open Office?) with one of my lab partners, she became understandably confused. I noticed a look of dispair rising exponentially as I talked; NFF, DRM, license types etc. can be a bit much at first glace, so I let it slide. Her interruption however, was a slap in the face: “I just don’t get what it’s all about..” Is that how we look as a community to the general population? Geeks rambling on about 2 lines of text in a license or 6 lines of code in a program that we hardly think twice about, until it crashes?

Obviously this is a gross exaggeration of the conversation, as we have moved past that a society in whole, and my arguement is based on an account of my life. 1) Overexaggeration, 2) Story. 2 logical fallicies in one sentence? Wow, if Red_Herring wasn’t already taken, I might consider that as a nick. Actually though, RJ posted a blog that got me thinking quite a bit. In particlar, one sentence stood out:

Well the big appeal to getting a fancy shmancy Mac is the looks and OSX.

Here, we see more of the underlying fundemental issues come into play. Most people, what they are looking for in a computer, is not a super stable, editable, free software. They are not looking for quality or angsting for a quick fix to a pesty bug. “M$ has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace”, Bug #1. Well no, they dont own desktop PCs. They don’t dominate the OS market either. It’s much simpler and evil then that.