Social Critic with Verve
One can only wonder what activist, essayist and novelist Susan Sontag might be writing about this week had leukemia not claimed her life on Tuesday. An observer and critic of popular culture, art and politics, Sontag fought her own battle with breast cancer and dispelled the notion of disease as metaphor for social and moral decay in "Illness as Metaphor." An excerpt from the obituary[registration] written by Margalit Fox for the New York Times was published by the Herald Tribune.
Regarding the Pain of Others
"We were more generous when we were less rich, many of the rich countries, and it is beyond me why are we so stingy, really." - Jan Egeland
"The United States is not stingy. We are the greatest contributor to international relief efforts in the world." - Colin Powell
What might Sontag have said about the brouhaha that followed comments by United Nations chief disaster relief coordinator, Norwegian Jan Egeland?
The U.S. Secretary of State and the President said that he was misinformed and the U.S. was certainly not stingy. USAID administrator Andrew Natsios, was quick to point out, in a television interview, that the U.S. funds some of Mr. Egeland's office budget and that he was talking about development aid statistics, not disaster relief.
Nevertheless, the tourist videos of the Asian tidal wave and tsunami tagged images placed on flickr speak for themselves. Americans join with other world citizens in supporting relief efforts
by donating to organizations that are helping the survivors, such as the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.
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"Should I stay or should I go?"
-
The Clash
That question was answered this week by a
pitcher explaining his
move from the Boston Red Sox to the New York Mets.
"Money's not my issue, but respect is"
-Pedro Martinez
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Wednesday, December, 15th |
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Congratulations and thanks to designer Jim McHarg for his 2005 GUADEC logo. Jim's logo was chosen from submissions made by artists
from around the world.
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Here we go again...Next year marks the sixth year for the annual GNOME Users and Developers
European Conference!
Scheduled for Stuttgart, Germany on 29-31 May, GUADEC is the mothership of GNOME gatherings and clearly has established itself as the global free desktop conference. This year's GUADEC was attended
by participants from 30 countries.
The 2005 guadec-planning committee, already hard at work, has outlined nine areas of interest for talks, tutorials and presentations in its Call for Papers. Deadline for abstracts
is January 12, 2005. Go for it.
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In Foz do Iguacu, the first Forum GNOME was preceded by a huge tropical storm that overturned palm trees and tossed outdoor tables and chairs around like small lego pieces. The power of nature has no better demonstration than in the south of Brazil where Itaipú, the world's largest provider of hydroelectric power stands on the border with
Paraguay. Itaipú, incidentally, has 90% of its workers running the
GNOME desktop.
The Thursday morning opening of Forum GNOME brought a warm welcome by Rogério Santana, Secretary of the Ministry of Planning for Logistics
and Technology from Brasilia, Paulo Macdonald, Mayor of Foz do Iguacu,
Marcus Mazoni, President of CELEPAR, and Jon "Maddog" Hall. The Forum
participants, however, came to take care of their hunger for technical
talks and crowded around Federico Mena, Everaldo Canuto, Joao Bueno and Pablo Dall'Oglio for their first day talks. Behind the scenes of pulling
this landmark South American event together were Luciana Bastos de
Freitas from Porto Alegre and Izabel Valverde from Curitiba.
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Bad Poetry
The television has been draped in black.
Turned off, of course.
The home delivery introductory offer refused
No more newspapers, no more scoreboards
No more Joseph Campbell arguments
It's Saturday and the leaves are blowing away
Time to write bad poetry
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As Bostonians watch Game 4 of the World Series, the air around Fenway Park is charged. Satellite news trucks and police in black occupy the closed streets around the ball park while helicopters circle overhead.
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Ten Good Reasons why I haven't registered for the GNOME Summit :
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I am not coming. |
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I've been in meetings. |
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Release week. |
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7. |
I use Qt. |
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My hard drive crashed. |
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My girlfriend is coming from Montreal. |
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I thought my assistant did it. |
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I'm a Yankees fan. |
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I thought there was unlimited coffee. |
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My dog ate my wireless card. |
Name Tag Preview
Disclaimer: Illustration may not represent actual GNOME Summit badges.
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AT&T, the once dominant U.S. telecommunications company that sold UNIX under a proprietary license for up to $250,000, is now considering the Linux Desktop
for its own in-house use. Bloomberg reports that 70,000 desktops are in play.
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Wednesday, September, 29th |
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Birthday wishes to Michelangelo Antonioni and his wife Enrica.
Born 92 years ago in Italy, Antonioni lived through the years
of Italian fascism and went on to make post-war films of a different ilk from his Italian Neo-realist colleagues - De Sica, Rossellini
and Visconti. A master of composition, Antonioni advanced the
art of cinema and deconstructed screen narrative creating a rich
filmography including these films from the sixties - L' Avventura (1960) La Notte (1961), Il Rosso Deserto (1964) and the English language Blowup (1966).
Blow-up, set in swinging London of the '60's, was his commercial success for Warner Bros. The film, based on Argentine Julio Cortázar's short story, starred Vanessa Redgrave and David Hemmings, who went on to form his own film company, Hemdale.
Antonioni closed the Sixties with the wandering Zabriskie Point (1970), a film about student radicals alienation ending with repetitive, slow motion shots of an explosion of a modern house in the desert. Antonioni found his male lead Mark Frechette on a Boston street corner. Frechette was later convicted of bank robbery charges and died in the weight room of a prison in Norfolk, Massachusetts. He had been planning to stage an inmate production of "The Watergate Tapes" at the time. Frechette and his co-star, Daria Halprin, daughter of Bay Area dance therapist Anna Halprin, gave a 1969 interview in the last issue of a Boston underground newspaper, Avatar.
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Los Angeles, Tinsel City
One has to love a town where a hip neighborhood can have its very own film festival [flash alert].
On the other side of the Hollywood Hills,
the blue whale building is the location of a festival of a different color. West Hollywood's first conservative film festival will screen "Michael Moore Hates America," a $200,000 documentary partially financed by Brian Cartmell, who sold, eNic, his domain registration company to Verisign.
Asian Americans and Canadians
At MIT, this weekend another first, the Silkscreen Film Festival.
Right on the heels of the Toronto Film Festival is Vancouver.
A Global Fall Festival Season
In the Big Apple, the 42nd New York Film Festival will provide the
U.S. launch of Pedro Almodóvar's film, "La Mala Educación ." The New York Film Festival has long
been a cornerstone of international cinema exhibition.
NYFF is now followed on Long Island by a younger Hamptons festival. On the Korean peninsula there is Pusan; the emerald isle has Cork.
It's the Spanish who have the 49th Festival of Festivals in Valladolid. Pass the popcorn!
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Thursday, September, 16th |
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GNOME Summit 3
October 9 - 11, 2004
10:00 AM to 6:00 PM
Stata Center, MIT
WiFi in a building set upon a 4-ft thick concrete mat bearing on naturally deposited marine clay. Toilets that flush with collected rainwater. Such is
Building 32.
Gone is Building 20 leaving a rich legacy of science and invention. In its place stands the new $300 million home of MIT's merged Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Lab for Computer Science.
Stata in the evening
It seems only fitting that a GNOME Summit take place in this newly opened Gehry structure, the
Ray and Maria Stata Center.
Architect Frank Gehry has designed some unusual looking buildings - Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain, the EMP-Experience Music Project in Seattle, a dancing "Ginger and Fred" building in Prague and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. It took a long time for the Disney Hall to get above ground, but more about that on another day.
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"Alphaville: Silence - Logic -Safety - Prudence."
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If Outland agent Lemmy Caution from Alphaville had investigated Fenway Park in Boston last weekend, he'd have found himself no longer in the land of black and white. Among thousands of Parrot Heads in Hawaiian shirts and shark-outfitted white limos, Caution would have arrived in the technicolor state of euphoria called Margaritaville.
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"Wasted away again in Margaritaville"
A large circling blimp advertising "lo carbs" marked the arrival
of Margaritaville in Boston. For those of you who have never travelled there, Margaritaville is an imaginary Caribbean theme and mardi gras atmosphere where mostly middle-aged inhabitants wear grass skirts, funny hats and flower leis. Inflatable birds and plastic palm trees abound.
Margaritaville, you see, is the music, travelling party and lucrative entertainment business of Jimmy Buffet . While the usual tailgate parties of Buffet fans in RVs (recreational vehicles) were not permitted in Boston, the bars were full before and after the concerts. For rum and tequila distillers, visitors to this fantasy island boost sales.
No one seemed to know the exact origin of a margarita.
These changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes;
Nothing remains quite the same.
Through all of the islands and all of the highlands,
If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.
- CHANGES IN LATITUDES, CHANGES IN ATTITUDES - Jimmy Buffett
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Speaking from a circular stage
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"He has a wonderful dog, Barney, that likes to visit the Oval Office a lot. And he contributes to the president's ability to meet his obligations."
-White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr., addressing the Youth Convention.
A Small Audience
A sparse audience gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Kennedy School of Government on Thursday night to watch George W. Bush accept the Republican nomination on a big screen TV. The president spoke from a stage similar to one used by Mick Jagger in the same hall last year.
The bleacher seats, that were filled for John Kerry's nomination acceptance speech in July, remained folded up against the wall and multiple flat screens around the room were all turned off.
Bush Audience
A less than sympathic international gathering, the audience was comprised mostly of graduate students involved in the study of policy making. Upon hearing the President's phrase, "This progress involved careful diplomacy" many of those watching burst into sneers. Unlike the DNC viewing, there was no popcorn machine, just bags of potato chips and a bowl of party mix.
Kerry Audience
Thanks to The Gothamist in NYC for their RNC wrap-up. We wish them a good sleep and pleasant dreams.
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Local Hero
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Emmett Folgert
works as director of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative,
a youth center serving the Boston neighborhoods of celebrity Mark Wahlberg's past.
Emmett has his finger on the pulse of what's happening in the 'hood. As a writer, he
contributed to the story on which low-budget indie film Squeeze was based. Emmett uses digital photography and theater improvisation classes to keep youth away from gangs and out of trouble. One of his acting students, Jason Kelly, was cast for his first movie role by Clint Eastwood in
Mystic River.
Sometimes a number of rivals are released from prison at the same time. Back on the streets, as Emmett knows firsthand,
this can mean disaster.
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The War at Home
"They are just killing each other like birds - no value for human life. They need to get these damned kids more jobs, give them something to do, get rid of the guns." - Maryanne in Boston
Boston police may redeploy the federally-funded surveillance cameras used during the Democratic National Convention to city parks, as called for in a Boston Globe editorial .
Honor
In stark contrast to the hanging pots of flowers placed along Boylston Street before the Democratic National Convention, a Boston city park dedicated to Jermaine Goffigan, stands in disrepair. The park was named for 9-year-old Jermaine who was shot on his birthday ten years ago. It was only last week that the two men responsible for the child's senseless death stood in court and admitted their guilt. Justice, of a sort, was served.
"We sell tons of parks all the time," Seth Gitell, spokesman for Mayor Thomas M. Menino, said yesterday. "How come this one is so interesting?"
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Talking Points
Midnight fireworks, on a scale that dwindled the 4th of July display, were last
night's parting thank you to the residents of Boston from this week's Democratic
National Convention. Earlier in the evening, it was John Kerry's references to the U.S. Constitution that got the most applause from the multigenerational audience watching the C-SPAN cablecast at John F. Kennedy School of Government's Institute of Politics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Idealism, it seemed at Kennedy School, was taking a deep breath.
Blogging Thunder
Maybe it was the blogger's nimble use of technology that made something abundantly clear this week. The big network television approach to reporting on the conventions has become old fashioned and irrelevant. In an era of downsized news departments and Michael Moore's 100 million dollar box office gross, network television has abdicated its electronic convention coverage to local TV affiliates, cable television and funky reports from a new breed of bloggers. These bloggers, from Boston, New York and L.A., found their 15 minutes of fame this week as the
old media envied their presence.
It's Television
At U.S. political conventions in the past, there was real drama on the floor. State delegations brought, traded and cast their votes until one candidate had enough to win the nomination. Network television's realtime reporters covered both the suspense and boredom of such a political process. Gavel to gavel.
 
Today's political conventions are timed, decorated and framed for television. So, why not do as the Democrats and put the award show and Olympics TV producer Don Mischer at the helm? Mischer has a video segment in Being There listed among his credits. In this film, the
main character, Chance, is a recluse gardener who becomes an unofficial advisor to the President of the United States. Chance's simple thoughts fit into TV sound bites perfectly and the media hangs on his every word. Chance (Peter Sellers) tells the President, "Spring, summer, autumn, winter . . . then spring again."
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You don't have to be a celebrity to have your right of free speech infringed
upon in these days of corporate censorship. However, you certainly will make more news if you are.
Fear of Fox. Citing a "potential media firestorm" from a stand-up comedianne's political satire, the Human Rights Campaign has "uninvited" Margaret Cho from performing at a party on Monday night in Boston. Could preemptive censorship be the latest in celebrity trends of restricting free speech?
Linda Ronstadt may have sung in happier days, but like Rickie Lee Jones, she isn't stopping now. Maybe Whoopi Goldberg could join Linda Ronstadt in a return to Las Vegas.
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GUADEC Sails from Kristiansand
With the Annual GNOME Foundation Advisory Board meeting in Kristiansand today, GUADEC came to a close.
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Janis organizes volunteer schedule and the concert.
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With eight people I know of who lost their baggage on the
way to Kristiansand, six cancellations due to injuries or sickness, a
couple of travel and visa snafus, as well as one briefly missing official,
almost everyone has arrived in Norway for GUADEC V.
There are some rather aggressive swans; sleek HP terminals and thin
clients and at least one argument over whether the sun was setting
or rising at 1 am. Nearly
constant sunlight is something to be reckoned with.
Some people tried Paddy's. |
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Rolf Sigrud is keeper of the GUADEC database and is leading
the Technical team in Kristiansand for the conference. You want to test the
videoconference equipment? Talk to Rolf. Get the server configured for LTSP
and the WiFi? Call Rolf.
For Midsummer's
Night, Rolf took his boat out to the island bonfire celebrations. He handglides,
too. The sort of Renaissance man that every detailed-pressed organizing committee
wishes they could clone. More than once.
Program book designer Morty ponders how to layout the conference
program with missing bios and logos, while Ann-Kristin
estimates needed beer and sandwiches for the registered + unregistered.
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Working with Mikael Snaprud and Nils Ulltveit-Moe on guadec-planning has been a pleasure.
These are the guys who are responsible for bringing GUADEC to Norway.
Mikael lives in Lillesand, a little wooden village on the Norwegian south coast
that was a timber port in the early 17th century. In addition to coordinating
the local GVADEC committee since December, he teaches at ICT (Centre for Information and Communication Techonology) at Agder University
College where he is part of an Information
Society research group.
Nils lives on a farm in Norway and his neighbor raises championship horses.
He has invented a Linux based CNC mill, concrete loudspeakers and wooden puzzles.
In addition to doing software development for companies like Ericsson, he also
teaches at Høgskolen i Agder.
Nils and Mikael are developing the European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO) project for the the European Commission. There will be an eXpo poster about the project at GUADEC.
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With the 5th Annual GNOME Users and Developers European Conference
GVADEC set for
Norway, it is only fitting to hear that a CTO from the Norwegian city of Bergen
says the Linux desktop may be in their future.
One need not read Norwegian to know the boat is about to sail in Kristiansand.
While it is uncertain if there will be a KDE v. GNOME soccer game, there certainly
will be plenty of waffles.
Ingebjørg's waffles
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Kristiansand was founded in 1641 by King Christian IV of Denmark and Norway, with the famous words
"Here the town shall stand".
The center of Kristiansand, Wikipedia points out, is called Kvadraturen due to its square gridline of streets. Early arrivals in Kristiansand will have the opportunity to walk the grid on a complimentary tour of the town on June 27th, hosted by SØRLANDET Tourist Board.
The preliminary schedule
for the Fifth Annual GNOME Users and Developers European Conference illustrates how hard
this year's planning committee has been working. A trip to southern Norway this month
will be educational and unforgettable.
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When Dave Camp, Nautilus developer extraordinaire presents "Moving Forward: A Look at the GNOME Roadmap" at GUADEC in June, he should have a full house. In the auditorium, there will be developers not only from Europe and North America, but also from Brazil, Chile, China, India, Iran, and Turkey. Prior to Dave's "Moving
Forward" talk on the last day of the conference, there will be
a full crop of talks, panels and Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions.
Can GNOME hackers guess who will be presenting any of these sessions? A Math-Canvas for the GNOME desktop; Abiword; Automatic Verification Techniques to Improve OSS quality; Creating a common media standard for The Free Desktop; Collaboration Station; Deploying Linux on the desktop with LTSP; GNOME Middleware, Secure IPC; GtkSourceView: a future full of colors; GNOME and usability in military systems; GNOME: towards mobility on the desktop; gDesklets; HAL and GNOME; Integrating OpenOffice.org in GNOME; Typography & graphic design for programmers; Secure Programming for the Desktop; Writing a GIMP plugin; On Enterprise Users: Bringing GNOME to small/medium enterprises and JDS - GNOME and the Enterprise User; Reports on localization from around the globe: GNOME in Brazil, GNOME in Japan, GNOME in Spain. These are just a few. The full schedule will be released next week. Registration for the conference is http://2004.guadec.org/registration
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Wednesday, February, 25th |
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Met with
Siobhan O'Mahony, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School,
who is one of the early academic
chroniclers of the
open source community. I first met Siobhan when she was doing research
for her doctoral
dissertation on Community Managed Software Projects at Stanford. GNOME
Foundation was in its early formative stage. That was
then, this is now. Siobhan's looking at beginning a new research project on the
how corporations cooperate with the community on software development.
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