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Mozilla Community needs you… for a quick survey: “Firefox in your country“.

I took it and it takes only 5 minutes, take it and help improving your favorite browser. The deadline is December 26th.

via [gioxx]… via [pseudotecnico].

Money isn’t always the best motivator, if you leave a fifty dollars check after a dinner with friends you don’t increase the probability to be invited back, and if dinner isn’t entirely obvious, think of sex.

from Yochai Benkler’s TED Talk on “the new open-source economics“.

Thanks to Francesco for pointing to the video in an interesting reflection upon enabling and leveraging “unconscious” collaboration.

Here comes a video demoing SeekTube functionality.

It seems that a pragmatic approach to ending procrastination is focusing on “small things”, and getting them done. As part of this today I focused on a long-standing “issue” of mine… getting YouTube videos link-addressable. You know, it happens you want to link to a precise (topical) moment in a video - e.g “when the kitten can’t finally keep up with the ever speeding treadmill” - and what you are left with is a “at X minutes and Y seconds in the “.

That said, having previously spotted the YouTube JavaScript Player API providing a seekTo function, I managed to leverage it (through Greasemonkey) to come to a solution: SeekTube.

SeekTube is a Greasemonkey user script to enable the same “link within a video” feature provided by Google Video also on YouTube videos.
[…]
Well, SeekTube enables the same functionality: i.e. you can specify a permalink to a precise time in the video by appending an “#” followed by the time formatted as HhMmSs to the video url, where H, M, S are sequence of digits indicating hours, minutes and seconds respectively (none of them is mandatory); e.g. you can take a look at the BeOS nice long degradation curve under heavy load(multiple multimedia streams and 3D graphics, half computing power down), happening at 7 minutes and 50 seconds (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VDYdaXApNk#7m50s) from the beginning of the video.

Note: it’s rather alpha stage, as I haven’t yet figured out a way to cope more gracefully with the security/sandboxing model of Greasemonkey/Firefox (see SeekTube page for details on the implementation).

As a note for the JavaScript-inclined, an interesting failing approach to get a working reference to the “player” object inside the Greasemonkey execution environment (without overloading the window.onYouTubePlayerReady function) is to wait for the player.seekTo function to be ready, i.e. defined, i.e no more undefined, which goes down to setting a recurring timeout until the player.seekTo is defined. This approach failed beacuse of Greasemonkey sandboxing; player.seekTo will be undefined forever. Here comes the code… (the GM_log() is GreaseMoney logger to JavaScript Console)

function seekOnPlayerReady(){
  player = document.getElementById(‘movie_player’);
  if(player.seekTo) {
    /* seek time retrieval from url */
    player.seekTo(seekTime,true);
  } else {
    GM_log(‘player not yet ready’);
    setTimeout(’seekOnPlayerReady()’, 500);
  }
}
setTimeout(‘’, 500);

PS: DiveIntoGreasemonkey, being not fully up to date, is yet a very nice introduction, js2mode (by Steve Yegge) for Emacs is great.

In the meanwhile I get the time to write down some (not so badly) articulated thoughts on the interesting event I attended in Ravenna on October 13th “Strati in Rete” (inside “Strati della cultura” for ARCI’s 50th year anniversary) I’d like to share (for no good reason at all) my notes. I met and took a chance to nicely talk about internet and participation with Alessandro Bottoni (future value of past failings - GNU Arch and BazaarNG), Frieda Brioschi (valorization of expertise and competence in wikipedia), Livia Iacolare (her experience with intruders.tv), Antonio Sofi (participation and new media distribution models - radiohead’s In Rainbows and Magnatune) , Alessio Jacona (the right channels for the right audience - how the participation is changing the way companies “talk” to their customers), Valentina Orsucci (second life and metaverses possible innovations in [e]learning processes and a nice “Prisoner’s Dilemma” based experiment in the classroom) and Elena Zannoni (open source and technology adoption in Public Administration), and other people I forgot to mention.

Kudos to Luca for the organization.

Disclaimer: the notes are (highly) rough and my handwriting is hieroglyphic at best, this whole thing is a kind of experiment.

Strati in rete Notes 1/4 on Flickr
Strati in rete Notes 2/4 on Flickr
Strati in rete Notes 3/4 on Flickr
Strati in rete Notes 4/4 on Flickr

Yesterday I upgraded to Ubuntu “Gutsy Gibbon“, via "update-manager -d"; the process went smooth and ended well, with only two minor bugs relating xserver-xorg-video-ati and firefox. The one with the ati driver was half of the first line of pixels turned always black (”Oh Gosh, Dead Pixels!”), which got solved in the evening. The other one concerns the firefox option “-ProfileManager” which does not properly work when a running firefox process yet exist: the “Choose a profile” dialog should be opened, instead, another window of the currently running firefox process shows up. As a workaround I added the option “-no-remote” (which should be included by the default with “-ProfileManager”).
The very few and very small bugs a part this Beta is pretty stable and the upgrade introduced pleasing improvements:

• The deskbar and the integrated Tracker powered search facility provides an easy entry point for many everyday tasks; I’m still waiting for the tracker to finish indexing my home dir (it won’t be quick as I set it to a low aggressive indexing).
• Dual Monitor configuration now works like a charm (no more xorg.conf thinkering and X restarting) from the “Screen and Graphics” system application.
• The integrated modem works (anyway I’ll never use it).
• Gnome 2.20 is pretty amazing (I feel it faster and more responsive).
• Overall aesthetic improvements… a few new icons (evolution) and theme make up, tomboy abondened the blinding red for links in favour of a smoother blue.
• A whole lot of new packages… among the many: gaim transitioned to pidgin, OpenOffice-2.3, django-0.96, availability of firefox 3 alpha (paradiso) as a separeted package.
• Many new features I haven’t yet got time to try.

Bottom line: if you have an Acer Travelmate 800 series you can upgrade to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon easily and in the end you’ll be very pleased with the result (this holds in the strong hypotesis of not having fiddled too much with the repository configuration). The only drawback is that you have to download 50-something MB of upgrades daily, this is happening until the official release comes out, which will happen in 9 days from today.

GNOME Community Celebrates 10 Years of Software Freedom, Innovation and Industry Adoption.

I am a GNOME kind of guy (far from me starting any GNOME vs KDE flame-war, just a matter of personal taste) so the least I can do is to wish a:

Happy Birthday to the whole GNOME community!

Ubuntu is dedicating today an Hug Day to GNOME, focusing on the collaboration between the two projects, by improving the quality of bug reports and ensuring consistency between Launchpad and Bugzilla reports.

For those “internet-archeologically” inclined “The GNOME Desktop project announcement” by Miguel de Icaza (the young hacker who got this great project started and keeps on with the hard work for GNOME neverending improvement, thank you Miguel!).

Here I post a convenient bookmarklet to generate a M3u File from the mp3 links contained in the current web page.

Here JouM3U is.

To save it just grab the “JouM3U” link to the Bookmark Toolbar (on Firefox), to use it just click the bookmark where you are in a web page containing mp3 links.

Here it is a really cool(ing) playlist to test it Frequenze Indipendenti: AntiWarmthWednesdayPlaylist.

Enjoy your listening!

From the home page…

FreeOSZoo provides ready-to-run images of QEMU virtual computers, pre-installed with a Free Operating System and a set of popular free software. To get started, you only need to install QEMU and download a single file from the FreeOSZoo project.

FreeOSZoo is targeted at end-users, who run proprietary Operating Systems because they are not aware of the existence of Free Operating Systems like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and other free alternatives. For this audience, FreeOSZoo is the perfect tool for testing an Operating System without modifying their computer.

Here is the page collecting the qemu images.

Virtualization is a quite powerful and useful abstraction: the availability of self-contained ready-to-roll system image really lowers the barrier to test, study, hack, develop operating systems. Assuming you are using a quite powerful machine (e.g. a 2.0 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM Memory is suggested to have a smooth run) testing a complete software stack (operating system, database, web server, programming environment) is a push-botton experience or, in other words, it is one click away from you. It is also a huge step forward in the repeatability of software experiments, and hence in the scientific accurancy of software development; “provare et reprovare” in Galileo’s words.

This is also a nice chance to take a look at some forward-looking experiments in operating systems design as Plan9, a complete rethought of Unix concepts in a network oriented environment by the Lab who gave us Unix. The Plan9-updated image doesn’t work, or rather I didn’t find a 30-second way of getting into rio, the Plan9 window manager, however you’ll be able to download Plan9 image from the official site and boot it as a live cd to step into a quick view of the OS.

Via Paolo Massa Blog

Petition for Open Access to State-Collected Geospatial Data

You might want to sign up the petition for Open Access to State-Collected Geospatial Data (in Italian).
We believe that state-collected geodata should be openly available to citizens. Please sign up below to support this manifesto.
All government-collected geodata should be open, that is, available for free distribution and re-use under a ShareAlike license.
Geodata is a public good. Open access to it, under a ‘Commons’ (ShareAlike) license, is the best way to see its full benefits realized by industry and citizens. At the same time such an arrangement, by requiring users to redistribute updates and improvements to the data, promises to deliver more and better data for less.

Availability of such information, as the remixable web meme shows us, could foster the development of an ecosystem of applications bringing a twofold enrichment, on one side of the value of the data collected, and on the other side of the web experience; briefly, spuring innovation.