Today i had to finally buy some new clothes of the respectable kind before leaving to Brussels on Monday so I went into a shopping spree (as most geeks I hate shopping, but must is a must).
At first I terrorised all shops in the city to find a suit with maximum amount of natural fibersm but also with some elastic fibres (lycra or elastan). Finally I found a shop that sold those and had prices not in the 'Dolche Gabano' range. The second suit that I tried on suited me so perfectly that i took it right away, even though it was twice as expensive as I was expecting to spend on this.
While I was trying the suits, shopgirl also brought me a shirt - that shirt was a real party-starter. It must be shopping poison talking, but I really liked it, while I had to settle for something more subtle today.
The real surprise caught me in a shue shop. After choosing (but not yet buying) a pair of nice and affordable shoes, I walked in another shop to droll over their Ecco stand. To my great surprise one model had a discount that brought it to my price range. I could not resist those marvels - Ecco is like Apple of shoes, and these shoes were priced like a Mac-miny :)

Hmm, I seam to be very happy for the last few days despite the fact that I just took an academical break from my graduate studies. Or maybe it is because of that?

I wonder what is the problem with my network recently - whatever I download, it has corruptions in it. After I download something with BitTorrent - some pieces must be redownloaded. If I use HTTP, MD5SUMS fail.
Hmm, maybe my new shiny RAM is at fault ;(

Ha, I am now officially happy - my Palm Tungsten T has arrived from eBay. I wonder, how long will I keep admiring its wonderful simplicity until I (try to) install Linux on it :D

I finally can tell the word on what I've been working last serveral weeks.
No, it is not Nokia 770. I wish, that's one hell of a beautifully beast.

I've been working on http://www.economic-majority.com/testimony/. If you are a company based in Europe and would suffer from software patents, contact us - we need your help to stop that!

If you want to help colecting those testimonies, don't be shy - come onboard!

Got a paycheck today for one sidejob. Felt a need to celebrate. Bought 512 Mb RAM in addiction to existing 256 Mb.
I must say two things:
* RAM is cheap these days
* Get out of way .... I'm flying here! :D
Finally I can open 10+ Firefox tabs, run skype, GIMP, OpenOffice with a few docs and have BitTorrent running in the background without tapping into swap and thus without system load skyrocketing to 10+.

Dropcash News

An interesting idea, but I would really think that a separate money raiser for Open Source project bounties should be set up, propably with a cooperation of some existing eMoney provider, like moneybookers.com and it surely must provide lots of way to pay for a particular bounty (PayPal, check, postal money order, bank transfer, WU transfer, any other option). Hmm, how could this be actually made?

Today I started to work more actively for the FFII to counter the EU software patents directive. I am bringing SMEs in for the .economic-majority.com site and to Brussels to meet with MEPs. It seams that there are many SMEs interested in that kind of action in Latvia.

Also fixed two bugs and added one feature in TikiWiki. Yay!

Sidenote: If our hockey players win Sweeden today, then we will beat Finland to the top 8 in the World Cup :) (We played 0:0 with Finns yesterday.) Edit: Well, we all have dreams, but it seams playing a good game right the next day after a tough game is nearly impossible, thus we lost horribly

Today I noticed that last three days I've lingered aroung and have done allmost nothing. I mean - I made found some bugs in TikiWiki, filed them, got CVS access, did some more debugging in the stable CVS version, but I just couldn't quite nail the bug and finish it. Also, I've not done much about the rest of things I should have been working on - studies, jobs, preparing for tomorrows meeting in the ministry of education.
Strangely I just noticed the sudden flow of energy that I got when started writing this blog entry. There is a certain corellation between my activity and my blogging - if I do not do anything, then I don't blog, because there is nothing to blog about, but could there be a reverse link?
On a completly unrelated note - the Bush has been visiting my country (and my city) on this weekend. Funky stuff. All center of Riga was blocked by barricades. You needed a special pass to enter. And that area is a few sq. kilometers. All people of Riga were advised to go out of town for the day or at least not to stand by windows, not go to balconies and, most of all, not to do any sudden movements. Sounds worse then the barricade nights of freedom fights of 1991 :). Many shops that are near the area were closed, mostly because two (out of three) main bridges that unite two halfs of the city were blocked most of the day to ensure safe exit for Bush. I must say, it is freaky to hear a helicopter (with snipers inside) circling overhead for the whole day.
Diplomaticaly it was a great day for Latvia and the rest of Baltic states, but logisticaly it was a nightmare for the locals. When it became known what measures will have to be taken to ensure Bush's safety, the exmilitary base surronded Liepaja issued a call to accept all 'refugies' that are fleeing the Bush. There were tents and fires and a mobile sauna. Also the local prison (now a museum) was inviting everyone in for a night. That was a fun news item for a week, I think it got Liepaja quite a lot of tourism overnght.
Thanks, Bush. :)
P.S. I've seen dogs smarter then some certain USA presidents, but it is very much compensated by the local USA ambassador - she was on a local radio show recently speaking about her very nice music taste and her husbands iPod craze :)

Git Traffic #1 For 2 May

Linus Torvalds said: Did I already happen to mention that I think that the git model is the best model ever, and that I'm just not an incredibly good-looking hunk and becomingly modest, I'm smart too?
Davide Libenzi replied, You forgot, *again*, to take your medications !!

Now that's what I call entertainment. :) Seeing Linus and the gang make a SCM instead of a OS kernel ir really fun. You can see it as a 'Junkyard' for software geeks *or* as rocket scientists on a vacation creating the worlds fastest wheelchair. :D

This is an English summary of my Latvian rant about the activities (or lack thereof) of the Latvian Open Source Association (LAKA) in my other blog. Before someone misunderstands, I am the chairman of the LAKA's board, so this is not a plain ranting, but more of a plan pondering for future action.
For two years after the formation of LAKA we have quite little real work done - a few installfests, a visit by RMS and a MySQL executive, some work in the translation field, a little representation in the swpat issue, lots of flaming about site and logo design. That about sums up two years of a whole associations work. I must say that this is pretty crappy. Many good ideas remained just that - ideas, many needed projects (OOO translation, statistics for FLOSS use, .gov lobbying) just never started like they should. Also almost no business was interested in actually making something viable in the FLOSS sector, mostly because they so no viable business model.
It took me quite some time to understand why this was happening, but I think that I finally got it - there is noone to profit from it. And those who could profit from it, do not know about it.
I took a look back at us. Most of LAKA are system administrators and students. Why these people are interested in promoting FLOSS? Economies of scale gives them better software once more people start using it. Also students are interested in wider adoption because it makes their skills more profitable in the marketplace.
This would give them incencitive to create installfests, make some technical events, do some translation in the free time, but you would need a different type of motivation to make something more important, like actively lobby government, organize conferences for 150-200 CEOs of local SMEs, drive around the country organizing Infoday's, seminars, educational sessions, create and test business strategies, create a new market and bind several million EUR of investments.
Sysadmins and students are not interested in such activities, but the question is who is? According to the free software project management paradigm ("Scratch your own itch") the ones most interested in these events are the ones to make them happen.
The most obvious candidates for this role are the big international companies that are actively supporting the FLOSS movement and are making quite a buck from it. IBM, Novel, Sun, HP, Oracle and many others might be interested to invest some funds to create a whole new multimillion market.
This was the basis for the project I named LAKA2. At this point in time, two discussions are taking place - one in IBM and Novel and one in LAKA, both are trying to make this idea better and more suited for both sides and for the society as a whole.
Stay tuned, I hope something good will eventually emerge from this.