So this is a new year and I hope that we can get the wheels rolling about FLISOL. This year FLISOL will be happening on the 28 of April which give us room to perform. I hope that FLISOL this year can help me get even more exposure and make it able for everyone to participate.
The event consist on having many more people involved and have a good place to share the knowledge on the topics. But also to have a more long term vision about the project.
Looking forward to 2013 from now is something that I would love to do, and being able to perform a national event with stronger presence will make it much better not just for the event but for open source in the country as a whole.
I think that the communication channels need to get off the internet a bit and more into the mainstream so that more people are able to contribute for real.
This means that more talks about how to contribute would be a good start to get things on a higher level of deployment and awareness.
Last week I was working with a local school about the topic of social network in education. Is funny since just a few months ago I had an email rejecting the fact of using Facebook in Education, and later on I even heard it from other people how Facebook is just a waste of time.
Of course I know that by that, what he meant is that their students usually use it for crap.
I am a long time user of Facebook and our group, TQVCancun is founded really in this Facebook group. However, I also acknowledge and see all the crap that is 'shared' on facebook and I agree with that waste of time.
That said, is a new day and I think that is important that teachers stop behaving like we are in the 20's and start for once taking the challenge and moving toward a digital life environment.
It sucks that is 2012, and most peope carry around Blackberries, and the SMS is a thing of the past, and everyone can have internet access cheaply, and even public transportation have wifi. Yet, we still behave in school as if nothing of that had to do with the class. They still using these stupid books, with outdated information and have a very low dynamics.
Funny enough, that was the week iBooks2 was introduced and the coversation about technology finally reaching education was reviewed.
The truth of the matter is that being involved in this education community such as OLPC is something that we really wish we could expand the idea of using computers to teach, not to teach about computers. And to once and for all break the digital barrier with the teachers and work as virtual community with digital presence and digtial awareness.
So lets get this straight, social networks are nothing new, virtual communities are all over the internet and tools exist focus to tackle the deficit of media to increment education. What I found however was interessting a wide range of talents from teachers that knew about the tools, to teachers that were so foreign to them and where basically already on thei way out.
As smart move from my part was giving a final survey to review the course where interesting things came to the surface, such as I lack patience to be a teacher. Which I agree. Thats why they are the teachers and I am the expert. Here is the full report.
Other thing that I notice was the classic posture of blaming the government for not providing. While at the same time, not feeling to go the extra mile to achieve their teaching goals.
But the most disappointing part was the lack of original thought. This information, which was a lot, should have been able to spark some original ideas and share them online, or during the class. I hope they were not just shocked and these ideas and techniques put to use.
Yesterday was my first #DevThursday in my hometown, and it was pretty good althought a bit amateurish. The big topic of discussion was the old battle of the languages. PHP vs Java and also VIM vs Emacs. Most of the developers were PHP and only one Java developer so the development of course was more on the venue of Development high impact sites an large communities where PHP rise as hugly popular and almost unmatched. Sure there are many development projects around Java but the popullarity of Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Moodle and other communities working on code builted on PHP. On the enterprise side, Sugar CMS and other enterprises like Facebook basing most of their development on the popular language.
Some of the arguments was the verbosity of Java, and the way JRE taxes the memory of most architectures and also how complex the language itself is.
PHP practicality to learn and deploy also makes it popular and viable as a business. The reputation Java on the enterprise has is also shun by how sucky the state of the enterprise is in Mexico.
C# and Microsoft was also mentioned including their Silverlight vs HTML5 argument about how Microsoft always seems to rely on the fud and how hard are the other platforms compared to them. At the same time, how most of this development become an issue when you need to debug and hack whatever the microsoft tools generate to them. Sure the tools save you time, but how much can they debug?
This was the openner to the discusion about the text editors versus IDE and most specifically vim vs emacs. With Emacs being the biggest challenge but also being the most rewarding as a geek. Emacs legacy is one of the most talked about, the shortcut maze to perform almost everything you could imagine is like the wholy grail of the competent developer. While IDEs on the other hand usually confuse people as in developing for a language as devoting to an IDE. Something that shows the rookines about how real man behaves.
A couple of weeks ago we celebrated the Software Freedom Day in Cancun, the first SFD in that city. The development of the event was quite nice since we were able to capture most of the moments of the event and include things that have become a signature of the events from Tequila Valley Cancun including the "Freedom Cake" and some gifts to give out after each talk.
The event was well promoted and included things like TV broadcast of the event, development of new web application and even some streaming.
Talks included new bleeding edge topics like Bitcoins, Git, and some more traditional topics like Creative commons and recomended books on cyberculture and hacker culture.
The idea of this event is step away from the traditional Linux OS and their application environment and learning more about the ideals that make software free. The opportunities and empowerement behind open technology and also inspire atendees to innovate.
So a few months back I had a discussion about the difference of using the 3rd party binding across dynamic languages. This is nothing new, and there has been quite a few of these bridges. However I am not sure how much has these been taking up.
The conversation was a comparison between using C# or other languages like Ruby for .NET. Granted that this was not really a .NET conversation but rather on the options in coding under the same API or VM. The JAVA version of the conversation would have been between things like using Java to use JVM or using something like JRuby or the more rooted language Groovy.
So after this conversation I went to understand the question better. Is really a whole new language needed to use an API? Should we just start becoming language driven as opposed of API/VM driven? After all given the options out there, these seem like a viable option.
So I have two different roads, one was making easy things (dynamic approach) to hard languages (JAVA), and using hard languages on toolkits that are usually develop with dynamic languages (GTK). So I took a look at some of the following implementations:
Using Jython with SWING
Groovy cookbook and hello world
Gnome-Java
GTK in C
PyGTK
So here are some snippets about how to use Jython with SWING (Java GUI Toolkit).
This simple two line code will generate already a window, label and action.
The next example is the opposite, and doing a Toolkit like GTK in Java language:
package button;
import org.gnome.gdk.Event; import org.gnome.gtk.Button; import org.gnome.gtk.Gtk; import org.gnome.gtk.Label; import org.gnome.gtk.VBox; import org.gnome.gtk.VBox; import org.gnome.gtk.Widget; import org.gnome.gtk.Window;public class ExamplePressMe { public static void main(String[] args) { final Window w; final VBox x; final Label l; final Button b;
Gtk.init(args);
w = new Window(); x = new VBox(false,3); l = new Label("Go ahead:\nMake my day"); x.add(l); b = new Button("Press me!"); x.add(b); b.connect(new Button.Clicked() { public void onClicked(Button source) { System.out.println("I was clicked: " + b.getLabel()); } }); w.add(x); w.setTitle("Hello World"); w.showAll(); w.connect(new Widnow.DeleteEvent() { public boolean onDeleteEvent(Widget source, Event event) { Gtk.mainQuit(); return false; } }); Gtk.main(); } }
Pardon my verbosity but half is becaus of JAVA and half is because of GTK. However we can see here that is just a matter of declaring variables classes and execution. Now we move to the C version:
During Campus party there was a great panel about the participation campaign with the government on topics such as governance, transparency, and the digital advocacy prepared with #InternetNecesario and #OpenACTA. As well as raising awareness with other important challenges which the community needs to work together to raise the issue to a national platform.
Things like the regulation of bandwith in the national telecomunication industry. With isssues such as why TELMEX, the telecomunication monopoly can't really offer high bandwiths as opposed to other countries.
How part time ignorance and part time corruption from the regulatory parts have a very permisive ruling upon the regulation of information across the nation and trasparency still a far cry as well as huge ignorance around internet surveilance mechanisms.
In the upcoming #SoftwareFreedomDay also come as a great timing in which many issues are arising across the internet. Where talks such as the globalvoices unveils evidence of hard internet surveilance in Egypt during the revolution. Where France president Sarkozy made declarations about "Government being the only legitimate representative of the will of the people" during the #EG8 a few months back. Which put things in perspective after also thinking that government have a monopoly on violence since they hold the army.
Culturaly speaking the Mexican state of affairs has a very tamed society where they look up for the government to take care of them. A very contrarian culture compared to the liberal American society where they inheritely don't trust the government. Besides that, is real that there are already movements like Wikileaks, LULSec and Anonymous which start doing digital protesting and whisle blowing.
The important point here is that the only REAL strangehold on government will come from an economic protest. So when digital protest and economic conspiracies match we would start seen a new level of forcing the government to act upon the will of the people.
But going back to the talk in Campus Party, @javierlivas took a somewhat extreme position on overthrow the current state of the government. Not just the president and legislators but current idea of how to handle democracy. An interesting point he mention a few times was that the organization for the current event was larger than the current effort to run the country. Which means that with the total ammount of people in the event would be more than enough to build this new government.
Unfortunately beside the ranting there wasn't a clear proposal. But the idea of digital governments are nonetheless being worked upon. Digital governments are being structured at least by lasindias.coop which talk about this phyle societies that self govern and are economically sustainable to build a more participatory model of governing as opposed to the distributed model derived from old analog systems. Real proposals on how to build the new digital patriotism for a group that breath and live on the web is an idea that usually has been suggested with the Internet map and "if Facebook was a country" analogies.
But having a real Internet state,with means of earning a living through independent economic systems like BitCoins and embracing a new nationality that give you access to benefits such as education, professional advice as well as maybe other benefits could start becoming something that people might start considering. Unfortunately challenges such as the movement of non-digital assets such as servers, electricity and access might present issues to believe this offering.
I usually remember the talk that I got in high school when our teacher describe to us the system which the mormon religion works. Where the religious tax also give benefits to their followers and the church really acts as a more effcient cooperative system to expand economically.
The talk covered also the other view of participating with the government in this change on a gradual pace. But we still haven't focus on enough social capital to make a movement at any level. Whenever is transformational or to enforce a gradual change, I think we got many things to work before we can make such changes.
As Software Freedom Day approaches things like own cloud and just ensuring our digital sovereignty will be at the center piece of the event. And topics like this one could become something important for thinking about and considering.
I want to share some of the conferences and panels that took place at the 3rd edition of Campus Party in Mexico city. Great conferences were delivered althought it wasn't the greatest ever there is definitely an improvement in the way they were documented and also some of the dynamics that were given. One of the things that I have seen failed and failed again is the lack of startups and this session seemed to be more focus on entrepreneurship. The same could be said about social media. However development has been less atractive and some might say that there was small to no development going on.
The need for creating digital assets such as development is something that we consider important to the goals of the digital economy. Creating systems and software that can indeed improve the stance of the current lifestyle.
Here are some of the conferences that stood out on the topic of devleopment:
First one was a conference more focused on the eduction of entrepreneurship and using FLOSS as tool to entrepreneurship than FLOSS itself. I didn't really got what I was expecting which was more of the tools that every entrepreneur most have and pay attention to. Nor was about opportunities in FLOSS world to innovate and build startups which was also another thing I was very interested. However the talk did focused a lot of enterprising something in Mexico and the unique challenges and how to handle them. The valuable bits were about social entrepreneurship, getting to know people but implement systems to process and manage the company and how to quickly act upon.
Another talk on entrepreneurship was also the struggles that entrepreneurs usually face and some of the lessons that have been learned through out the experiences on the panelists. Some of these we have already shared in our weekly geek meetups. Things like, understand capital, think globally and innovate fixing things that others haven't done so. Also think on a more pro-active way on supplying and addressing the issues that everyone might have. Think in english and relate yourself with people world wide, not just on your national or regional language.
Other panels also talk about the issue of funding and the resources available nationally and internationally. How many of these fundings are for the right kind of startup and who can actually reach them. Not just the classic, look how much funding there is, but also how hard and unreal is such funding for the digital startups and most of the innovation comes through. Conference starts on minute 21.
Finally there was another entrepreneurial talk "off-campus" but that goes more close to home in my hometown. About entrpreneurship about not overcomplicate too much with our ideas and how to treat them.
The thing I recomend was about trying to broad the conversation with other entpreneurs as well as how to watch the innovation from other companies. Researching lots of startups and reading books on startup as well as podcast channels such as This week in Startup where you can learn how to evaluate ideas and how to know what are the parameters on think about startups.
With the advent of google+ and the so called circles which is not much than lists. Not that different from all the other lists in GMail, Google Reader, Google Wave and Google Calendar. We get to categorize our content into diffrent colors, circles, groups, or whatever to be able to control our shared bits.
However, the question comes back to, what do we share? With streams giving me category-oriented streams (which is also availalable in facebook and twitter). I get to see by groups the value of whatever they share, unfortunately it also allow me to see the UNvaluable those shares become.
One thing I notice is that my mexican friends share a lot of crap. Even the geeks or so called geeks share really stupid posts. This is a reflection also of how they see the internet in itself. Do they see it as a educational, discussion, outreach or enterntainment platform.
Don't get me wrong, the internet usually and mainstreamly is seen as entertainment. Lots of free music, and videos of lots of cats doing stupid stuff.
However that is not really what the internet is all about. There is also lots of porn which I guess is also advocate to entertainment. However the value of social, is meant to become an outreach platform to exchange ideas. At least that was the original concept of ArpaNet and later the BBS. Discussions, bulleting boards which in the end is exchange of information. Get together, put people on the same page. Discuss from entertainment itself to also get on more serious topics like the revolution of a country for example. The creation of new economic systems, comerce, and hook up with people from exotic places like Barbados or Malaysia.
My question here becomes, are we just looking our share of my friends shares. Or is my network limiting itself to a very slim class of the whole internet is about.
Stupid stuff has been shared all the time, and this is just representing the chain lists stupidity poured into a social stream.
I still have visions through, from having a conversation about a movie on Justin.TV to sharing the newest emcee in youtube with the hotest tracks. I do have interesting conversations nevertheless, I do have great mailings lists on my day to day projects like OpenOffice.org, OLPC, and the different local tech groups like TequilaValley; also podcast based discussions like NoAgenda and even Keith and the girl.
Descargame Desde hace 10 días, la versión de 1.2 de OOo4Kids fue lanzado. Haz clic esta liga para descargarlo OOo4Kids ha sido lanzado para Windows (instalable y portable), Mac OSX (Intel y PowerPC) o GNU/Linux. Cambios Nuevo startcenter (gracias para Phillipp Lohmann para su grán ayuda) Cambia el nivel de uso directamente, usando la nueva entrada de menú Ver -> Nivel de Usuario Gracias a Ramtin Khoshniat and Julien Piret del Ecole Commerciale et Industrielle d'Ecaussinnes por su trabajo. Nuevo modo de cursor, para modo de anotación de Impress. Codigo probado de Benjamin Vialle y Clement Delafargue, de Ecole Centrale Nantes. Gracias a esto! Nuevo locales: Griegos (gracias a Anas Drakopoulos), Danes (gracias a Peter Leth para la traducción), Ruso y Ucraniano (gracias a Grygorij Gromko para la traducción) Optimización ARM (OMAP3, Freescale i.MX515 (ARM Cortex-A8 800MHz), and genric armv6+ instruction set) Gracias a Simon Guinot and Fabien Rendu por su ayuda. Otros cambios: mejoras de auto-corrección (gracias a Loic Breilloux), port OpenBSD (gracias a RobertNagy) y mucha mas...!! Para el completo cambio de lista, desde OOo4Kids 1.1 ver el changelog completo. Versión Debian / Ubuntu .rpm son disponibles, pero el .deb, ahora tenemos nuestro repositorio (no oficial) de Debian.Paso 1: pasa esta linea a la lista de apt-sources:Paso 2: corre run apt-get update (como root, o usando sudo) Paso 3: instalar la versión de localización de tu elección eg. Para versión francesa, solo corre, como root: apt-get install ooo4kids-fr (para versión francesa, pero otras estan disponibles, y solo debes reemplazar fr por tu localización) Localizaciones disponibles: ar, da, de, es, el, en-us, fi, fr, it, nb, nl, pt, ru, sl, uk, zh-cn, zh-twIMPORTANTE: procura desinstalar previamente el OOo4Kids. Instalar ooo4kids-$tu_idioma ejemplo apt-get install ooo4kids-fr versión XO Ver esta pagina. Gracias a Bastien Guerry Conocenos IRC: canal #ooo4kids servidor irc.freenode.net Nuestro WikiNo se te olvide donar Como puedes ver en nuestra página de descarga, estamos cerca a 750,000 descargas. La mala noticia es que las donaciones aun no se han dado desde hace 10 dias (solo 50 euros si no es que menos) Recuerda que te damos todo sin costo, pero no es que no cueste, y nostros debemos pagar el servicio de servidor y otros gastos. Gracias por adelantado.
