Josef Assad

Man arrested for sketching in Lennon exhibition

joe — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:53:40 +0000

I'm not going to translate the whole article, (if you're really that lazy, here's a google translated version), but the tl;dr is as follows:

Your responsibility as a socially conscious IT consumer

joe — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:19:51 +0000

In today's increasingly corporate-intensive society, the argument can be made that you as a consumer wield more influence with your € or $ vote than with your political vote.

When you vote for a politician and that politician turns around and kills someone's puppy, that makes you culpable.

When you give your money to companies like Apple and Microsoft, you are also culpable.

enterprise trac

joe — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 12:16:16 +0000

Introduction

I have been using trac now to run a software aintenance and development project for a public sector client for over 2 years now. I work in one of the big Danish providers of IT and it's an area where this kind of job is normally done either by leviathans like HP Quality Center or BMC Remedy, or that other popular software lifecycle management suite, Microsoft Office.

It's a little atypical to be using trac in this environment. It doesn't cost 6 digits and it doesn't require several gigabytes of disk space, which probably disqualifies it from serious consideration more often than one would hope or believe. As mentioned above, other more "enterprisey" systems are prevalent in this area.

I chose trac for several reasons. The big one is that I know trac has such a huge userbase and community that the risk of serious problems is virtually non-existent. I also know python; this makes tacking any issues more feasible. trac is quite light and runs happily on a laptop; a third reason.

Google translate as a tool for increased transparency in politics

joe — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:52:25 +0000

Open Source is dead, long live Sustainable Software

joe — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:14:15 +0000

I'm clocking in eleven years of working with open source this year. Despite coming a long way in those years, it still appears to defy reason that the (often and not always) astronomically higher price/performance proposition of open source has not made it ubiquitous and the default choice. I don't believe in an open source software monoculture, but there is still too many examples of organisations acquiring expensive and inferior non-open source software when the technical and financial characteristics of the open source option were superior.

Speech at Danish Public Sector Open Source Conference, November 2010

joe — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 22:48:25 +0000

Better late than never, I discovered that the video of my speech from the OSSIDO conference in November 2010 was posted online. The speech is in Danish and the topic was the project I had been working on for the National IT and Telecom Agency on establishing a public sector open source community centered around the OpenLayers-derived VisKort web GIS component.

So someone stole my emacs reference mug today...

joe — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:02:43 +0000

I had an emacs reference mug yesterday (which I'd gotten from Linux Pusher), but I don't today. It has disappeared off my desk, to put it optimistically. Here is an old picture of my emacs mug on my desk:

Taxation for the Advancement of Open Source

joe — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:55:38 +0000

Looking from my admittedly narrow vantage point over European public IT procurement, I see today a structural and very fundamental incompatibility between how enterprise IT is expected to be transacted and how open source lends itself to commercial activity.

The symptoms are easy to spot. Take the recent example of the Hungarian government allocating over €40 million to open source. Part of the reason they were forced to such a drastic gesture was that the value of the contract they were putting out to tender was above the threshold set forth in the European directives (in Denmark, I think this is roughly around DKK 1,400,000 or roughly €200,000). Think about that, two hundred thousand euros. With proprietary licensing models, it isn't too difficult to hit that kind of threshold. The threshold is in fact set that high because it has been geared to traditional software procurement, which has been proprietary and expensive enough to suggest a threshold of €200,000.

This post is about windows and about sucking

joe — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:08:02 +0000

Granted, it isn't what you would expect when you type "windows sucks" into a text box on the internet, but I can still see how this would be a case of windows sucking.

Nokia N96 battery life fix

joe — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:15:43 +0000

The Nokia N96 gets a lot of stick for short battery life. When I first got mine it wouldn't last the day, but it turns out the fix is extremely simple.

The N96's behavior out of the box is to scan for wireless networks. This draws quite a lot of power from the battery. If you're using it the way I do, you end up using the same wifi networks most of the time anyhow and don't need the phone connected 24/7 anyhow, which would have been the main advantage of continuously scanning for wifi networks.

I turned this off and am now getting up to 2½ days of battery time.

Not the most interesting post ever, but no one else seems to have latched on to this tip so I thought I'd throw something up for google to munch on.

Now that I've bored you, you may move along.