Once again I am at the French Perl Workshop aka Journées Perl. This year the Workshop is taking place in Strasbourg – the capital and principal city of the Alsace region in eastern France and is the official seat of the European Parliament. Strasbourg is a lovely City of approx a quarter million inhabitants. As I am sure you are aware Strasbourg has been under French and German rules several times during its very turbulent past. It is very difficult to go further East in France when you are in Strasbourg.
What is Strasbourg very well known for:
- The storks – unfortunately they do no longer adorn the central buildings but you can see hundreds of them in the Orangerie.
- The seat of the European Parliament
- The Gothic Cathedral with its famous astronomical clock
- La Petite France – home of the black and white timber-framed buildings
- Descriptive street names: Rue des Dentelles (Laces Street), Rue des Tonneliers (barel makers street), Rue des Charpentiers (Woodworkers Street), Rue des Serruriers (Locksmiths Street) etc.
I am told that Strasbourg hosts one of the nicest Christmas market – something to think about for the future.
What was discussed at the conference –
The talks were mainly in French with some English exceptions such as
- Matt S Trout (mst) – Moo – almost, but not quite, two thirds of Moose
- Jonathan Worthington (jnthn) – Meta-programming In Perl 6
- Carl Mäsak (masak) – Macros in Rakudo
- Tadeusz Sośnierz (tadzik) – Bailador — A Perl 6 port of Dancer
- David Morel (dm) – Big Data en perl reminded me that I should make people aware of our forthcoming Strata conference in London in October. Sorry that was in French.
Nothing breathtaking was announced – all the talks were about well-known subjects such as Perl 5x, Perl 6, DBIx etc.
What was new and very encouraging
The organizers were a little afraid that a conference outside of Paris would be a number catastrophe – not this time, there was a lot of delegates and also a lot of new blood. Students came and showed a lot of interest in Perl and hopefully will continue to do so.
And now for something not so new!
After dinner, a select few ended up in a lovely park. You guessed this was Chartreuse time! The French Perl Workshop tradition organized by Philippe Bruhat (aka BooK) is to drink Chartreuse, late at night in a public area – nobody knows if it is legal but who cares. Chartreuse is a liqueur made by the Monks of the Ordre de Chartreux since mid 1700s. It is composed of distilled alcohol aged with 130 herbal extracts. The liqueur is named after the Monks’ Grande Chartreuse monastery, located in the Alps in the region of Grenoble in France.
After a gap of twelve years, a new edition of Programming Perl (affectionately known as “the Camel book” to its many fans) was published earlier this year. That came as quite a surprise to many people who had given up on seeing a new edition. What has changed in the new edition? Does the book now cover Modern Perl? The answer depends on what you mean by the term “Modern Perl”.
The term Modern Perl can mean a couple of things to different people. Sometimes it means those two different different things to the same people. It depends on context. That’s a joke for the Perl programmers.
The first, and probably the most common meaning of the term is as a catch-all description for the big CPAN projects that have transformed Perl programming over the last five or ten years. Where Perl programmers once painstakingly constructed classes and objects using blessed references, we 
now use Moose. Where we once talked to databases using DBI, we now use DBIx::Class. Where we once reinvented wheels every time we wrote a CGI program we now use powerful web frameworks like Catalyst, Dancer or Mojolicious – all of which use PSGI to make it simple to deploy our application in various environments.
That’s not to say that the older approaches no longer work. Perl has a long tradition of backwards compatibility and many of these newer tools build on the older ones. A Perl class built with Moose will be exactly the same blessed reference as a manually constructed one and DBIx::Class still has plain old DBI lurking at its core. So using the old tools still works fine, but using the newer tools (the Modern Perl tools) will make a programmer more productive and a program easier to maintain.
So that’s what many people mean by Modern Perl a lot of the time. And is that covered in the new version of the camel book? Well, no. The camel book has traditionally covered the core of Perl and has largely ignored both CPAN and the practical uses of Perl. Which means that these Modern Perl tools largely fall outside of the book’s scope. The camel book doesn’t cover either database connections or web programming, so DBIx::Class and PSGI never get a mention. Object oriented programming is covered in chapter twelve of the book, but that’s almost all about the traditional way of writing classes in Perl. Moose gets a brief mention at the end of the chapter as an alternative approach which is well worth investigating.
If the camel book doesn’t cover these big Modern Perl projects, then was it really worth publishing the new edition? Is it worth buying a copy? Well, yes, because there’s the other kind of Modern Perl which is covered in some depth.
The third edition of the camel book was published when Perl 5.6.0 was the current version. We’re now on Perl 5.16.0. Between the two there have been about twenty stable releases of Perl. Over those twelve years a lot has changed in the core of Perl. It’s been slow and incremental and people who haven’t been keeping up with the perldelta manual page might not have noticed, but there have been a huge number of improvements. Little changes that make your Perl programming live easier, your Perl programs easier to write and easier to maintain. Here are a few examples.
- The state keyword allows you to to have variables that are scoped to live within a subroutine but which maintain their values between calls to the subroutine
- Perl now has a real switch statement
- File handles can be stored in scalar variables – and can therefore be automatically closed when a lexical variable goes out of scope
- Perl’s support for Unicode is equal to, if not better than, that in any other programming languages
- Regular expressions have gained many new features
This list just scratches the surface. Core Perl has gained many more new features in the last twelve years. There are also the many new modules that been added to the core distribution – very useful things like Test::More, List::Util, Time::Piece and autodie.
The Perl of 2012 is substantially different to the Perl of 2000. But many people don’t seem to realise that. Because the definitive Perl reference book hasn’t been updated, it’s easy to believe that Perl itself hasn’t been updated. On various mailing lists and web sites I constantly come across people who write Perl like it’s still 2000 (or, in many cases, even earlier). Their code still works, of course, but because they haven’t been keeping up with the way that Perl has evolved they aren’t using many tools and techniques which would make their lives easier.
That’s what I see as the most important reason for the new edition of Programming Perl. The definitive Perl book is now up to date with the way that the best Perl programmers now program Perl. No, it doesn’t cover DBIx::Class or PSGI, but that’s not important. It covers hundreds of small ways that Perl has changed and improved over the last twelve years. Programmers buying this edition will have their eyes opened to a whole new world of Perl programming. Their Perl programming lives will become easier. They will be using Modern Perl.
If you’re interested in hearing more about Modern Perl (in both of its meanings) Dave Cross (@davorg) is running a low-cost one-day course in London on 6th October. See Perl School for more details.
I remember hearing once that the average number of books per UK household was 2.5, one of which was usually a Bible. This statistic always shocked me (unsurprisingly, because it’s a complete fabrication it seems!)[1] – I grew up in a house full of books many hundreds, if not thousands of books – my mother was also a Librarian, so the idea of borrowing books from an even larger set than we had at home wasn’t an alien idea. Not all the books were new, in fact, even now I have, for my kids, books which have “Withdrawn from Camden Library” stamped on the inside – books which have been enjoyed by two generations of my family and who knows how many others whilst they were still in circulation.
The bookshelf next to my desk - the smallest and least cluttered of 15 or so throughout the house - these are the books I'm using most often - or like the most - or mean to read sooner rather than later !
My own house now is full of books, despite the internet revolution and the two Kindles that we own (along with four smart phones, three laptops, three desktops and a tablet), our own collection numbers over two thousand books (I estimated this by counting books per shelf – followed by number of shelves. I really have no idea at all!). There is a subtle shift though from the house that I grew up in – whilst there nearly all the books were fiction, with a few reference books thrown in, ours are a roughly 50/50 split of reference and fiction, with my wife’s “Kitchen Porn” (cookbooks for the uninitiated) – accounting for a very delicious hundred or so.
My Kindle is dramatically different though, its contents are 95% fiction with one or two reference books thrown in (usually only where the Kindle price is significantly cheaper than the print price), I think that this is because, regardless of the ability to tag, comment or index e-books, there is nothing quite like a handwritten note in the margin or a post-it note sticking out the top. The tangibility of information is important to me in recall and understanding. And I’m not the only one, I bought a book for my other half, both electronically and physically – she read the electronic one until the physical one arrived and then switched – a few months later (after carting the reference book around on a project) she mislaid it, although the same information was still available in electronic form she felt that it wasn’t as good as the book – she knew where things were in the book. Cross referencing a given topic was almost habitual, she could almost open the book to the correct page without looking – she was quicker using paper than I could be searching the e-book. There is just something about books – a je ne sais quoi[2] – that is going to persist for many years to come, and I really hope that e-books aren’t squeezing the print publishers as much as I fear they might be.
This started out as a very long opening to what I actually intended to write about when I sat down – I went out to find the book in question and got caught up in reviewing the books on the shelf, as I always do – finding things that I’ve forgotten I own and want to revisit (in this case two books on Agile Development methodologies…). In any case I should get to the point!
I bought my first Computer Security book in 1993, when I was 15. I’d have a few Computer Books before that, mostly about programming, but when I heard about this book, I just had to have it. It was ironic, the book was already out of date and out of print for 4 years, but I had to get hold of it anyway. I went to our local bookshop – a cross between Aladdin’s den and Dr.Who’s tardis of second hand books down a back alley and their first hand shop slightly up the road the size of shoe box[3] – they found a copy for me and charged me £17.95 for the privilege (I’d like to claim that my memory is that good, but it’s written in pencil in the front cover) – to me that was a fortune, but at least it set a reasonable expectation for the cost of computing books for years to come!
The reason that I had to have the book in question was because it contained detailed instructions on how to write a virus – including sample code. It was controversial at the time, but is an early example of “full disclosure” – something I remain undecided about to this day – I want full disclosure to me, not so much to other people… It’s called “Computer Viruses – a high tech disease” by Ralph Burger. I can’t emphasise how much the book actually shaped me as a professional – it taught me pseudo code, it taught me ethics, it taught me a hell of a lot about the way that computers actually work and I developed a desire to learn a programming language that could operate at the lowest levels (C – in my case – I could never stomach Assembler). I’ve never written a virus (for the record, I never even typed in the code), although the concepts and ideas still fascinate me, and actually I think that it is that naughty excitement that still drives me as a security professional today.
What I know for sure though is that the book, the physical printed copy, is with me to this very day – I pick it up and can smell the paper and ink – it’s old and smells different to my copies of the “Perl Cookbook” (a book so dog eared that there is more ear than page) or my coffee stained “The Practice of Network and System Administration” – it is full of memories, ideals, ideas and dreams that, sadly, my Kindle will never retain – however hard it tries.
[1] After a little internet research with many unsubstantiated claims of averages I found the following paper “Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations”, M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikora, Donald J. Treiman – this carried out research over 31 countries (not including the UK). Hacking their findings to get a guestimate I found that on average a household will have about 114 books. However there are still about 9.5% of households worldwide than have none.
[2] Josette, I’m sorry, that’s my limit on the French nowadays …
[3] For reference it’s called the Albion Bookshop and is in Broadstairs in Kent.
Si Biles ( @si_biles ) is a consultant for Thinking Security in deepest darkest Oxfordshire, ‘cos he’s a CLAS consultant he spends quite a lot of time doing things for the Government, outside of that he has a particular interest in network security, vulnerability analysis, penetration testing and incident response & forensics. You can read more of his blogging on his own site and on Forensic Focus.
Introductory Waffle
I am very lucky to live in the historic city of Stirling, in Scotland. I grew up nearby and, having done my time in London, I was pleased to move back here when I went into business for myself. The skyline of Stirling is dominated by two special buildings: Stirling Castle and the National Wallace Monument. Stirling Castle was a fortress built by the Scots to defend the north of the country against invasion by the English; Stirling was strategically important as the sensible point to cross the River Forth if you were trying to head north. The Wallace Monument is a large Victorian tower built in veneration of William Wallace, a local hero who fought tirelessly for the freedom from Scotland from English oppression. Apparently Mel Gibson does a pretty good impression. It is the Wallace Monument that I am particularly fond of; I can see it from my office window every time I sit down to get on with my work.
When I sat down to create Kolab Systems with Georg Greve, my friend and business partner, I had these two buildings in mind. You see a good Free Software company needs to embody the finer aspect of a castle and a monument. As a castle, a Free Software company should exist to protect its community and technology and, as a monument, it needs to venerate the work of those who came before and inspire the next generation into action. It should probably look quite cool, too.
To this end, Kolab Systems was built to support, grow and promote the Kolab community and, therefore, ensure that the technology is maintained as 100% Free Software for the benefit of its users.
Kolab Groupware
In short, Kolab is a groupware solution: it maintains the personal information of its users. In addition to this, Kolab supports for team work through the sharing of this information. Now when we talk about groupware, the information we are talking about is email, calendar, task management and notes. In that respect Kolab is no different.
But Kolab is different. Kolab is 100% Free Software: no “open core”, no “neo-proprietary”, no nonsense. Rather than built from the ground up, Kolab’s design is based upon using best-of-breed existing software: Cyrus IMAP for all storage, OpenLDAP for user configuration, Postfix for mail transport, Roundcube for the web mail and Kontact for the desktop client. In addition to always making use of best-breed-technologies the design of Kolab has a very strong focus on both scalability (it will quite happily scale from a few users installed on a Raspberry Pi, all the way to hundreds of thousands of users supported with fancy “stuff” like cross-site failover) and security. In fact Kolab’s design is so well respected, it has even picked up an award; Linux New Media’s “Best Groupware” award, in 2005.
Now in its mission to support the Kolab Community, Kolab Systems has worked hard over the last two years to solve a few problems with the technology: dated web client, lack of mobile sync and unusual packaging method. Historically the web client for Kolab has been Horde. However, in order to keep pace with users who have expectations of ajax magic, Kolab Systems invested many man-hours into bringing Roundcube to the technology. Roundcube is a well-respected web mailer with a vibrant community of users and developers around it. Kolab Systems has worked closely with that community in order to deliver an exciting new experience for web users. At the time Kolab Systems was founded, mobile sync was a large weakness with the Kolab technology; Horde provided SyncML technology, but ActiveSync had really already won the mobile sync race. With financial backing from the Nlnet Foundation, Kolab Systems worked to integrate Zpush (the ActiveSync implementation from Zarafa) into Kolab. Packaging was the thorniest issue; historically Kolab was packaged using OpenPKG, an RPM-based solution that allows you to install software onto Linux servers without being bothered what the native packaging environment is. Sadly OpenPKG never really gained mainstream acceptance and our hand was forced in the direction of packaging natively for each distribution.
Having worked on these issues Kolab Systems and the wider Kolab community has, over the last year, started on development of Kolab 3, which is due for release later this year. Kolab 3 has been an opportunity for the Kolab community to tear apart Kolab and put it back together again whilst still remaining true to the original design principles that made it popular.
How Kolab Systems Goes about its Business
Kolab Systems can only support the Kolab Community because it has the financial resources to do so. Now with Free Software there are multiple business models that can allow a business to make some cash; there is only one which does not damage the relationships between the business, the community and the users.
The trick to successfully managing the relationship between a business and a Free Software community is to remember that the company is just another contributor and that all contributors to Free Software communities have certain responsibilities to uphold: be open about your goals, be transparent about your strategy, be committed to the success of the project, be generous with your resources and be humble with your attitude.
Be Open about Your Goals
Kolab Systems is very clear on its goal (yes we only have one); Kolab Systems exists to ensure that the Kolab Groupware solution is actively maintained as 100% Free Software. It’s as simple as that.
Be Transparent about Your Strategy
Kolab Systems needs to make money in order to fund the maintenance of Kolab Groupware. To this end we have 4 primary sources of business: quality-assured packages, support contracts, consultancy (strategic, deployment) and training. Kolab Systems will also accept requests for development services where the development is to be upstreamed into the Kolab community.
Be Committed to the Success of the Community
Kolab Systems exists to ensure the success of the Kolab Groupware solution. We said this already, right?
Community is a complex “thing” in the Kolab ecosystem. Immediately around the Kolab technology we have a community of highly-talented system architects and integrators: they are taking our upstream technologies (Cyrus et al.) and creating the Kolab experience from them. This of course, means that Cyrus, OpenLDAP, Roundcube, KDE, Fedora, Debian… are also within the scope of our community. We are committed to supporting all these projects in any manner we can. Which leads us nicely on to…
Be Generous with Your Resources
Kolab Systems is not an over-powered, VC-funded corporate beast; the business is being grown organically from the ground up. We are also smart enough to realise that we can deliver more value to our community than through cold hard cash. Actions speak louder than dollars after all.
Perhaps you run a Free Software community related to Kolab and would like your own supported deployment? Just ask. Perhaps you would like to to see your Free Software project integrate with Kolab and would like Kolab Systems to send someone from the Kolab community to you project’s conference? Just ask.
Be Humble with Your Attitude
Being humble is of particular importance to Kolab Systems. Whilst the company is the custodian of the technology, it is also late in coming to the game. Some of the other players in the community have been around for much longer and have deeper insights and experience than the business. Kolab Systems learns from these community members and continues to work with them to ensure the principles upon which Kolab was originally designed are not forgotten.
Being Part of Kolab
As I mentioned, development of Kolab 3 is now well-underway and we are always grateful for new contributors to join in the effort. Later this Summer Kolab Sys will be sponsoring the first ever Kolab developer sprint in Berlin (details to be published soon) and you are more than welcome to join us. Meanwhile, we have recently released Kolab 2.4, the first release to include the new Roundcube web client; we would love for you to try it out and to hear your feedback
So, please feel free to come and find us (we are always available in #kolab on freenode or at kolab-devel@kolab.org and more information can be found here. We are always happy to help new contributors find their place within the community. Once you’re in, like the castle and the monument, Kolab Systems will always been on hand to help you protect your work (ensuring it remains Free) and celebrate your triumphs!
This article is based upon a talk given by Mirko Boehm (Agile Workers Software, a Kolab Systems Partner) at CeBIT, 2012.
Biography –
Trained as a software engineer and specialising in process management, Dr. Paul J. Adams is the Chief Operating Officer for Kolab Systems AG. He has worked in both academia and industry as a researcher and senior manager, covering a variety of Free Software-related topics. Paul was awarded Chartered IT Professional status, in 2008 and is a full professional member of the British Computer Society (for whom he is co-founder and former chairman of the Open Source Specialist Group), IEEE as well as of KDE e.V. and the Fellowship of the FSFE.
I just received this beautiful graphic from Meika Jensen. Meika wrote “If you like the graphic or think it’s a fit, feel free to share it.” – I don’t think it fits but it is pretty – so here it is. Enjoy and I am sure you can share it with your friends – if you like it of course!
Created by: MastersDegree.net
On Thursday 10th May, I went to Digital Seasons (Summer event) – the largest exclusive tech event in the UK. The event is organized by David Fanning from Tin Drum and IDG Communications. Seasons brings together key technology journalists and vendors of the latest tech products. This twice-yearly exclusive event is by invitation only. Companies are invited to demonstrate their products from consummer gadgets to high powered technical gear. The vendors are hopefully convincing enough to get an article written by the invited journalists. The companies that attend are invited to demonstrate their products to an audience rarely seen in one place. Varying from top consumer and lifestyle media, to the hard-core technical titles, the diverse audience offers unparalleled opportunities for coverage. taken from Digital Seasons
I wish I had time to talk to all the exhibitors but my timing was not all that good so managed only to chat with a few of them.
- iGo – their products really appealed to me since I travel a lot and seem to be always entangled with different cables, plugs etc. Their KeyJuice is ideal – charge and sync anytime, anywhere – made for iPod, iPhone and iPad.
- Elgato – live TV on your Mac, PC & iPad also on your iPad and iPhone. Unfortunately they will not stop bad programmes.
- Audyssey – makes your home theatre sound like a pro
- FileMaker, Inc. – I am sure I do not need to present you their products
- The House of Marley – creators of beautiful audio products, using natural, earth-friendly and renewable materials in the products and their packaging, such as sustainably sourced, FSC-certified woods, organic cotton and recyclable aluminum. The House of Marley also gives a percentage of their revenue to different charities see 1love.org.
Fitbit – presented the fitbit ultra (Wireless Fitness & Sleep Tracker) described as “New Fitbit Ultra is designed to help fit more fitness into your day.” You can see a picture of this gadget on the cover of our new book “Fitness for Geeks” that is just published. Sorry I know I should not plug our books but you must admit the opportunity was not to be missed.
In 2009 two friends/colleagues – Andrea Piovani and Paolo Sinelli – attended Over the Air in Bletchley Park, UK. They liked it so much that they decided to set up the same event in Italy. With their colleague, Riccardo Bosio, they set up the first barcamp in Cremona. Doing some research by digging into Twitter, they found out that a third Italian went to Over the Air – Alfredo Morresi. They duly invited Alfredo to the barcamp.
The next year they all went to “The Mobile World Congress” in Barcelona. Over dinner, the seeds were planted/sown for the first WhyMCA or Why Mobile Community Applications – that was February 2010. In May, the first WhyMCA took place – only a few months after the decision was taken. Scary, but I suppose that shows what one can do when the belief is there.
Approx 250 people attended the first one-day event in Milan – Success WhyMCA was no longer a dream! In 2011, there was already a big change: from a one-day event we are now on two days – again the venue was Milan and about 350-400 people attended. In 2012 there was yet another big change – it moved from Milan (northern Italy) to Bologna (central Italy). I should think this was a very difficult decision to make but what else can you do when you live in a very narrow but long country. Somehow you need to be in the centre to appeal to most of the community.
Not only do these 4 guys put a big conference together every year during their free time but they also organise small events such as:
- Hackathon
- Happy Hour
These events keep the community focused and up-to-date.
There might have been a couple of non-Italian speakers including Drew Robbins from Microsoft who gave a talk on “Windows 8 Platform for Metro-style apps”. One very popular talk was by Andrea Picchi from the Department of Computer Science at Pisa University “Le Variabili Cognitive del Processo di Esperienza Utente” that becomes “The Cognitive Process Variables User Experience” according to Google Translate. People were queuing outside of the door to listen to Andrea.
With some great sponsors – Nokia, Microsoft, Blackberry, PayPal etc. the conference is free as well as free coffee and free mojito.
What else can I say about this conference? Not one visible hiccup on the organization side, a fantastic venue – ideal holiday place and Bologna has the reputation of producing the best food in Italy. What more can one ask? Yes I know – when and where is the 2013 conference going to be… I suppose I will be told 3 months in advance.
ACTA has limited democratic credibility
ACTA as a threat to freedom of expression
ACTA as a threat to privacy
ACTA’s undemocratic institutional legacy
On the 9th June the UK will take part in the Europe wide day of action against ACTA with events being staged in Birmingham, Bournemouth, Bristol, Cardiff, Chelmsford, Glasgow, Liverpool and London (ACTA Demo 9th June). Other countries are taking part in the protest incl. Austria, Switzerland, Germany, France, Denmark, Poland etc. It would be quicker to mention the countries who are not taking part but I cannot do that to them.
Should you decide to support the protest or ignore it, make sure you read the following articles and then make up your mind.
Peter Bradwell gives a briefing on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement –
“We believe that ACTA pays insufficient attention to the interests of citizens and consumers and in doing so undermines the Internet as a tool for the promotion of freedom of expression and innovation.
For example, it promotes and incentivises the private ‘policing’ of online content through broad thresholds for its criminal measures. It exacerbates such problems by failing to provide adequate and robust safeguards for fundamental freedoms. ACTA may not be directly or explicitly aimed at our ‘everyday use’ of the Internet. But this is a target it will likely hit. Its provisions amount to a framework that encourages signatories to give away power over what happens online far too cheaply.
Similar problems afflict current EU laws on IP enforcement. With these laws under review, it is unwise to draft and sign an Agreement that binds Member States more closely to them.
For these reasons Open Rights Group believes that the European Parliament should reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and begin a more open discussion about the future of IP and copyright in the digital age.”
Please read the full article.
For those who cannot remember what ACTA stand for –
“The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a multinational treaty intended to create a new international legal framework for the enforcement of intellectual property rights. The treaty was formally published in April 2011, signed by Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, the US, and the EU. It will not come into force until six countries have ratified the agreement; so far, none has.” Taken from an article published by the Open Rights Group
And finally
ACTA Edinburgh: David Martin’s views by Jim Killock
“Last Friday, David Martin MEP organised a seminar on ACTA in the EU Parliament’s Edinburgh offices. He invited ORG to speak, alongside Susie Winter of the Alliance Against IP TheftInfringement, a chair from the EU Commission, and about 20 people attended the meeting.
Martin is the rapporteur for the lead EU Parliamentary committee for ACTA, International Trade. His views matter a lot, which is why his decision to recommend a no vote is highly significant.” Read on.
And another point of view –
Earlier this year, Michael Geist appeared at the European Parliament’s INTA Committee Workshop on ACTA where he reached the following conclusion –
“… ACTA’s harm greatly exceeds its potential benefits. Given ACTA’s corrosive effect on transparency in international negotiations, the damage to international intellectual property institutions, the exclusion of the majority of the developing world from the ambit of the agreement, the potentially dangerous substantive provisions, and the uncertain benefits in countering counterfeiting, there are ample reasons for the public and politicians to reject the agreement in its current form. In doing so, governments would help restore confidence in the global intellectual property system and open the door to a new round of negotiations premised on transparency, inclusion, and evidence-based policy-making.” <http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6477/125/>
Now we can understand why Michael Geist “was unable to post the full report until granted approval by the European Parliament INTA Committee”.
Just back from Portugal where I attended UXLX 2012 – As usual the conference attracted a lot of people. People came from as a far as Brazil, Chile, with a huge contingent from Switzerland and of course Germany, Norway, Sweden, UK and from many other countries. UXLX might be the only conference where the ratio foreigners versus locals is the highest. It felt that 80% of the people I talked to where foreigners.
Some great speakers were involved included some O’Reilly authors including –
Dave Gray co-author of Gamestorming. I had a very embarrassing moment with Dave. I nagged him to come to the stand and do a book signing. We had everything set for 10.30 on Friday. At 8.30 on Friday I had to admit that we did not have any books to sign – all sold out. Embarrassing but great, it shows how popular this book is. I am also told that his workshop “Gamestorming” is brilliant.
Peter Morville author or co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Search Patterns and Ambient Findability. Only had a very short chat with him. As well as a workshop “Cross-Channel Strategy”, Peter gave a talk on “The Architecture of Understanding”.
Jeff Gothelf author of the long coming Lean UX. I am sure Jeff’s talk “Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business” was well received. Unfortunately Jeff did not visit our stand even though I had some flyers ready of his forthcoming book.
I could not say which talk was the best but be assured that talks and workshops are not the complete conference – there is always a huge amount of side activities included.
- Pre-Conference Get Together
- Conference dinner – day 1 at the Buffalo Grill restaurant
- Conference dinner – day 2 at the “Senhor Peixe” restaurant
- After Party: Sunset Boat Cruise followed by yet another dinner at the Cervejaria Portugalia
As you can see this programme gives the attendees plenty of time to network, discuss work, technical issues and maybe just have a good old chat etc.
No I did not attend all these dinners – only one dinner and the cruise. The cruise was fantastic – cold wind and very dramatic sky and no rain.
What did I learn during this meeting? I did not learn what UX is as it seems that everybody has a different definition. A lot of the UX people seem to have a psychology background and a general complaint was that no university provide a UX course. I hope I convinced you that UX LX is a great meeting and hopefully I will see you there next year.
SourceDevCon 2012 is over – 6 days of intense talks, training and hopefully a little fun.
What is SourceDevCon?
. 38 speakers to share hundreds of years of experience in mobile and desktop web app industry
. Desktop Web Apps (ext JS) – intermediate and advanced level topics presented by Sencha and community devs
. Mobile apps (Sencha Touch) – Intermediate and advanced level topics presented by Sencha and community devs
. Client side JavaScript – Coding conventions, Browser databases
. Server side JavaScript – Node.js, MongoDB
. HTML5 – Gaming engines, canvas, animations
. Planning and Coding – Source code management, Social networks integration, Unit testing
For me the highlight of the conference was to talk to Douglas Crockford, author of JavaScript: The Good Parts (O’Reilly). Douglas’ talk sounded very interesting – Programming Style and your Brain. Unfortunately I was not able to attend. Douglas is working at Yahoo! and on that day, like all of us, he was awaiting the latest news. He also revealed that he was writing another book but keep being distracted… so it might or might not be written. If you meet him, please nudge him and do tell him that we are all waiting for a new great book.