A primary motivation for writing the Open Life book, as well as this blog, was not only to write about open source software, but to encourage applications of open source outside the world of software. Part four of the book covers such topics from Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg to a mining company releasing it's mining data to the public. Some of the chapters also propose some ideas that had not been done yet at the time of writing. One was open source movies.

Two independent Facebook related news stories caught my eye on Monday:

1) In Sweden about 10 thousand demonstrators showed up in a spontaneous rally against racism. This was less than 24 hours after a new immigrant hostile party Sverigedemokraterna had won the Sunday election and got 20 seats in the Parliament. The demonstration was called together by a young girl, Felicia Margineanu (17), who posted it as a Facebook event and invited her friends.

Last week Finland voted a law that next summer everyone is entitled to at least 1Mbit broadband connection. Not for free, just that it must be available to 100%, if you are a nation wide service provider.

Considering that Finland is a sparsely populated country, and service providers have in fact been removing cables in the country side. Indeed, the statute allows for some variances in the speed specifically to allow implementations with wireless broadband.

My parents had found a box of old stuff which they delivered to me and I went through yesterday. For instance, did you know that I appeared on a photo of Kellogs Frosties (with Tony the Tiger) in 1995! We have several of those boxes still saved, empty of course. No, I'm not a celebrity. I was in the audience of a hockey game in Lillehammer Olympics which they used on their boxes in 1995. All the more memorable then, since 1995 is still the one and only year that Finland won the World Championships!

If you are reading this it means the nameserver update is in effect and we have officially moved to a new web hotel. From its inception openlife.cc has been located on a GoDaddy.com server, and almost from day one I had my doubts about it: "BTW, is this GoDaddy server slow or what? Or is it just Drupal? I wonder what will happen when I actually get some visitors." Now I know what happened. After the site was added to planetmysql.com, response times went from slow (like 20-30 secs) to unusable (60 secs, which means 50% of the time you'd just stare at a white page after page timeout). I already relocated the Finnish sister site avoinelama.fi some time ago, and actually regretted my first choice of hosting provider DreamHost, only to find out that the current one HostGator, wasn't perfect either (doesn't support unix style directories /~hingo/, but at least allows a hacked redirect to save the day).

Wow, this is shocking...

Some time ago we had a discussion on the p2presearch mailing list about the deletionism movement that is rampant on Wikipedia. This led to Michel Bauwens spending a few hours finding out more about the topic. The results - posted on his blog - were shocking. (Also the comments to the article are good, some my own of course :-)

I didn't blog about it, but I'm sure you read it in all the other blogs, that the band Radiohead did a revolutionary thing in October of 2007. They released their new album for download on the Internet. Fans were able to pay a price they could determine themselves. This is great news for those of us who believe the old and stagnated recording industry has got it all wrong. We need people like the Radiohead guys to prove them wrong.

Years ago a company called SCO filed a lawsuit againt IBM for "stealing" code from "their" Unix and placing it into Linux. It was big news then, but most people haven't cared for years. Of course all of this was just a sham of the SCO management. It's been shown for some time that actually nobody stole anything for Linux, and in any case SCO didn't even own Unix in the first place. Recently SCO finally filed for bankruptcy, putting at least some kind of end to their misery.

I'm now one week into my summer holidays. Jee!

We spent some days at my (and also my wife's) parents in Pietarsaari. In the picture here I'm taking a swim in a small sandpit. The water was warmer than I expected. (Next day we went to the beach by the sea. No swimming there, it was still freezing enough to hurt my feet!)

The recent beta release of Apple's Safari browser for Windows made me reminisce of the history of browsers and recall a funny fact in the naming of them.

Did you ever realise, that all the major browsers follow a historical path in their naming tradition? First came the Netscape Navigator. (Well, skipping Mosaic, of course.) Then of course the navigators were followed by explorers, exploring the new continents as they were discovered. When the KDE developers decided to start creating their own browser, they set this tradition in stone by naming their browser Konqueror, with the explicit explanation that historically that's what usually followed the explorers. (Of course the fact that it's a word that could be miss-spelled with a capital K in the name was probably a factor too. You think?)