coffee.geek.nz

The NZ OLPC "Friends in Testing" meets every saturday in Wellington. This saturday will be the first meeting after a very successful Software Freedom Day here.
http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/wellington

This saturday is also the first ever meeting of the Auckland group.

What's involved is: brunch, coffee, conversation, intro to the green XO laptops, how the OS works, how to install an activity, and then you test your chosen activity, try to find some bugs. If we find bugs we send a test report back to the project.

If we don't find any bugs we also send a report saying how awesome the project is. Those that know python may wish to track down and destroy the bug, but for the most part we don't.

We've been asked to test the list of activities that are being deployed to kids in Peru soon

We're meeting at 10:30am, and tying the two locations together via irc (we're a bit bandwidth constrained in cafes.

Wellington is at the southern Cross http://thecross.co.nz
Auckland group is at Ironique, 448 Mt Eden Rd, Mt Eden.

Please join us - there will be many newcomers at both events.

p.s. People hacking on other projects are also welcome - we like "cross pollination". I know there are some koha, statusnet and drupal hackers coming.
p.p.s. If you have your own laptop, whatever flavour, bring that along too. The "sugar" software project that powers the OLPC laptops should run on most anything, and if it doesn't work on yours, we'd like to know that too.

OLPC Viewfinders - made on Reprap, originally uploaded by Br3nda.

Checkout out these thingies.

They're viewfinders - slot them into the OLPC XO laptops's top right hand usb port, and they're now in perfect position to be a viewfinder for the laptop's camera.

These were made on a reprap, the open source, open hardware 3d printer that's capable of printing copies of itself.

They're made from a milk byproduct polymer/plastic. They cost a fraction of a cent each.

These were printed by Vik Olliver, who also painted them XO green. THANKS VIK!! :-D

Get in contact with OLPC NZ if you'd like a copy of the file that prints these.

Who: Alastair, Grant, Tom, Tabitha, Brenda, Tim, Martin, Dave, Sigi, Carl

Downloaded Sugar on a Stick Strawberry

Pippy-29 found little problem, can write new but cannot open existing files

Catching up with Martin on school server activity and OLPC

Tim is working on Sahana - emergency management application that can help with finding and linking people together using Sugar/XOs as well as other hardware.

Brenda brought a cool pen called LiveScribe which we all loved playing with

Working on a website for Welly testers to help people find us and what we doing. http://laptop.org.nz - it has pointers to OLPC and Sugar sites, and feeds of our photos and our blogs.

Talked about Software Freedom Day (20 September 2009) and Linux Conference (January 2010). I put in a miniconf proposal for http://www.lca2010.org.nz/ - see it here http://laptop.org.nz/miniconf

Great day!

Wellington testing team

If you listened to recording industry lobbyists, you could be fooled into thinking the artistic and creative citizens of New Zealand are united in wanting Guilt apon Accusation in New Zealand law, and for copyright holders to have the right to take down any website or disconnect any person, business, school, hospital, or institute from the internet without trial, without proof of any crime and no penalty for false accusations.

These laws passed under the Labour government. National voted yes. (greens and maori party voted no). Most went into effect on November 1st - the remainder go into effect on 1st March.

If you're an artist, and don't want draconian laws made in your name, or just want more info on WTF New Zealand government and recording industry lobbyist have unleashed apon New Zealanders, head over to http://creativefreedom.org.nz

Buy an OLPC XO

There are so many fronts on which the "freedom" of the internet is under attack in my own country, neighbouring countries, and elsewhere.

Here in New Zealand a new copyright act went into effect on 1st November. The most controversial clause has been delayed until 28th February. This clause says that an ISP must have a policy of disconnecting anyone repeatedly accused of copyright infringment. ...

That's accusation only. There's no oppourtunity to defend yourself, no recourse for reconnection, and there's no penalty for false accusations. If you want someone off the internet you need only repeatedly accuse them of copyright infringement ("repeatedly" has legal precidents to mean 3 times). Aparently file sharing is so bad you don't even get a trial (can they not see where that logic leads?). Even pedaphiles get a trial before they are considered guilty and punished. I could not continue my occupation if i was disconnected.

There's also that great treaty called "ACTA" - Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which on the surface is defending against fake prada handbags, but also fake baby prams (won't someone please think of the children!).. and fake medicines. I'm unsure if they mean cheap generic medicines that infringes patents, or if they mean dangerous medicines that aren't what they say on the labels -- but regardless, the Music and Film industry have been asked for their wishlist (to crack down on those dangerous counterfeit music tracks). The problem is the countries participating in ACTA negotiations have signed with the USA that they will not reveal the contents of the treaty until after they ratify it.

The public were asked for submissions in New Zealand, but how the frack am i to send a submission on a treaty when i cannot see the contents of it?

In the EU a group of citizens used their official information act to force the EU council to reveal the contents of this treaty... the Council said No. Who are they accountable to? Aparently not to their citizens and not to their own laws.

Within the wishlists of RIAA is making ISPs liable for copyright infringement that happens through their networks.. This we need to be very vocal about. How's an ISP to know whether a data packet contains a copyright infringement?? by only allowing you to talk to sony.com + apple.com ?

In other news, Australia looks like it's about to force all isps to enforce a blacklist of IPs. The result is all of Australia's internet access being filtered, in the on going mission to stamp out child porn. Their internet is going to get horribly slow, and it's not going to stop child porn. You just know the black list (a huge collection of child porn website urls) is going to leak out straight into the hands of the folks who want these urls. I hear a politician is trying to get a list of all R18 sites and add that to a list also. That's some huge list to check against on every packet. (not just port 80, otherwise it'd be too easy to bypass).

The task has fallen to me to summarise Software Freedom Day to send away to the parent organisation.

The one problem is, there were 5 hackfest clusters, 3 barcamp rooms, 2 alcoves, 2 demo screens, 1 OLPC test corner and 2 long rows of installfest tables. Oh, and barristas and a some buffet tables too. -- I just couldn't be in all those places at once..

So, please, send in the summaries of the sessions you went to - the code you wrote, the ideas you discussed, the new things you encoutered, what you demoed, and whether you also changed you default shell to zsh yet.

Tomorrow is software freedom day, and Wellington's edition is looking to be not only packed with events and sustenance but also attendance. This is thanks to the grand scheming and incredible organisation skillz of Jayne Wallis.

yo ho ho my hearties, and a bottle of rum. It's all ship shape thanks to Jayne so hoist the mizzen and see ya at Software Freedom Day.

Need a project to lend your skillz to on Software Freedom Day?

Kete Project has some tasks that are idea for the day's hackfest.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/89208194BDC3A2AACC2574BE000C0301

Don Christie, president of NZ Open Source Society, interviewed on 95b fm.

http://95bfm.com/assets/sm/188651/3/DonChristie.mp3

Software Freedom Day - O'Reilly RadarSource: radar.oreilly.comSoftware Freedom Day is free and open source's open day, a chance for the general public who might have been curious about open source to come along and learn more. I'll be in Wellington on Saturday, September 20th, for Wellington's event. ...

The Venue for Software Freedom Day is both the Wellington city Town Hall, _AND_ the Michael Fowler Centre.

Town hall provides the bar camp rooms, barristas serving free Havana coffee and breakout rooms - as well as the Buffet table and bar.

In the Michael Fowler Centre, we've got couches galore, and table+chair for the SuperHappyDevHouse HackFest, and the WellyLUG installfest. All with a harbour view, and blinds so the sun it doesn't burns us.

The tw

• Why does Russell Brown look so very very unhappy on the webstock.org.nz photo?
• twittering too much.. this happens when they make me work on solaris.
• New post: Software freedom day in Wellington --- register before it's too late!! http://coffee.geek.nz/node/22146
• what is the perl equiv of ceil()?? /me forgot perl
• yay! happily using google in Te Reo.
• my October is looking crazy busy
• just made a matrix sheet of my todolist items...
• New post: The most successful geek event in wellington is... http://coffee.geek.nz/node/22156
• i kinda wanted a black hole to start destroying the world... but it's not too late i guess

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to be held this year on Saturday 20th September, 2008. This year SFD is to be held at the Wellington Convention Centre in Wellington from 12pm - 6pm. There will be free wifi, coffee all day at the venue, and pizza and beer as things wrap up at 6pm.

Wellington really is the place to be for Open Source.. Andy thinks so, and so do I.. OhLoh shows twice as many opensource hackers in Wellington than in Auckland.

i'm a finalist in the New Zealand opensource awards - not sure what category, but guess this means i get a ticket ;-) I'm waiting for NZOSA to update their website so i can show my mum.

Last year, the project my husband Callum commits to, Open GPS, won best project. This was great for the project as well as bring the committers+contributors together to meet face to face for the first time.

Some of my colleages are also 2008 finalists:

Wellington is fast proving itself to be the home of New Zealand's open source software movement with two major collaborative software events scheduled for the capital within days.

First up, on Saturday September 20, is Software Freedom Day '08, part of an international celebration of open source software that will gather together more than 150 software enthusiasts including programmers, website development teams and open source advocates.

read more

http://www.softwarefreedomday.org.nz/

Register for our hack fest -- so we know how many beers etc to find :-)

Come along and work on whatever you like, discuss what you're
building, and learn about free software projects that the Wellington
community contributes to.

You will need to bring your own laptop.

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open
Source Software (FOSS) to be held this year on 20th September 2008.

What is software freedom day?

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to be held this year on 20th September 2008. Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere!