While Poland saved all of us from the danger of software patents about a month ago, the danger will be back very soon again. As reported by Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure:

During the meeting of the Council of Ministers next Monday, the agreement on the directive “On the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions” is scheduled to be officially adopted. The Ministers of Agriculture and Fisheries of each EU member state will represent their country there.

The directive in its current form would pave the way for software patents. The EU parliament, which would have to deal with the directive next, would have considerable problems to prevent this.

Help us to draw your minister’s attention to what they have to account for on Monday. Sign the open letter and place it on the home page of your web-site. If that appears too drastic for you, just link to the letter with a banner. When your minister uses the web, she or he should not miss what is of importance to many people. Also, complaining directly, e.g. by sending sending a fax, can be very helpful.

Similar net campaigns have, in the past, successfully caught public attention and gained influence. For further coordination of activities (e.g. translations/traductions/Übersetzugen/traduzioni), the Wiki page FishDemo0501En is a valuable resource.

Don’t forget to register your support.

Thank you!

So this is why you see the big Something fishy going on at the fishery meeting? at the top of my blog. I call all other bloggers to participate in this net campaign. Afterall, it is your freedom and rights that are at stake!

I decided that during these winter holidays I will also try to learn some PHP basics. I already know HTML and CSS quite well. But I guess it would be nice to know at least some basics of PHP scripting to be able to make web pages more dynamic. I started with PHP tutorial on PHP homepage and I will also take a look at PHP tutorial at W3Schools. PHP is very useful if you also know some SQL to use it with databases like MySQL, But learning SQL will have to wait. I have more then enough work with teaching myself C++ and PHP (which are quite similar in many ways). And I must not forget about exams at university and translation and beta testing of KDE 3.4.

After a very long wait ATI has finally released some 64-bit Linux drivers for people who are running Linux for AMD64. And some of use are running 64-bit Linux for AMD64 for about a year or even more now. Too bad I will not be able to test them out as I got fed up with all the wait and just bought myself a nVidia Geforce 6800 which has 64-bit drivers for AMD64 available for quite some time and they are working very well.

Although the installation instructions for Gentoo Linux are written very well, many would still like to use a graphical installer. In fact, for some people the missing point-and-click installer is also the reason why they are afraid to try Gentoo Linux in the first place. Developers of the source based Linux distribution know that very well and some time ago they started the Gentoo Linux Installer project. Work is still in progress and you can see some of the results on screenshots here.

Developers of Gentoo Linux have started work on splitting monolithic KDE ebuilds in portage. This way you will not have to compile and install the entire, huge kdepim package while only needing only one application from it. So this can save a lot of hard drive space and compilation time. Updating also becomes easier and faster as bugs are usually only in one application. There will also be meta packages (like kde-meta, kdeedu-meta, …) that will enable you to install all the ebuilds/applications belonging to them. For KDE 3.4 we will have both, monolithic and split, ebuilds. Starting with KDE 4.0 there will only be split ones.

More info about all this is here:
The KDE Split Ebuilds HOWTO

About seven years ago ESA’s Huygens probe, together with Cassini spacecraft, started its voyage towards planet Saturn. Two days ago Huygens successfully landed on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. This is the first landing of a man-made probe on a world in the outer Solar System. Images of the surface show ice blocks scattered around and drainage channels leading to a shoreline. You can view images here and here.

You can get more news and information about the Cassini-Huygens mission here.

While reading FootNotes yesterday one news title caught my eye: Free Software Magazine - issue 1 is out! Free Software Magazine (or FSM) is dedicated to all free software. Not just for Linux but for Windows and other operating systems also. High quality articles are first published in printed version and then after some time they are also released to public under some free license, like GNU Free Documentation License for example. You can then download PDFs of the whole issue or read articles online in HTML format. Tony Mobily (editor in chief) and his team are determined to stay on the scene for a long time. I wish them all the luck. And don’t forget, to support excellent articles and have early access to them, you can also subscribe to receive the printed magazine.

Issue 0 and 1 are already out for a free download. You can get them here or if you are using some ED2K compatible application (eMule, xMule, …) you can download and share PDFs using links posted here.

A new development version of KDE 3.4 desktop for Linux is out. One month long holidays have also started at our university and all this means it is again time to search for bugs, report them to developers and translate KDE into slovenian language. Gentoo already has KDE 3.4 Beta 1 in portage. It is masked and for some reason it is not marked as ~amd64 I hope it will compile if not I will try to use the packages from Gentoo KDE CVS Project, as I did last year. I hope it still works. Using CVS is the best way as you can quickly test if patches for bugs you reported are OK.

Just a few days after release of version 7.0 of Adobe Reader for Windows Adobe has also started a beta test program for Linux version of the application. A lot of people needed a new Linux version of this PDF reader for quite some time, version 5.0 is very old. Adobe decided to use GTK2 toolkit (I wished it would be QT since I use KDE). Rendering speed is reportedly quite a bit faster then in KPDF (which I use now). On bad thing I have read about it is that it is 110 MiB in size (no debug data and not statically linked)!!! Sounds like a huge bloat to me. It looks like I’ll just be waiting for the next version of KPDF, with some cool new features, that just got merged into KDE CVS.

Happy new year to all people around the world. Especially to poor people in south-east Asia which have little to celebrate in current situation. I hope they get their homes back to normal as soon as possible and that they get as much help as possible.

Don’t forget to help them by donating whatever you can to humanitarian organizations. People here in Slovenia (Mobitel GSM subscribers and Mobi users) can also help by sending an SMS message to number 1919 with a keyword CUNAMI. This way you give 230 SIT for those who need it.

Let us all do as much as we can to prevent more natural disasters and stupid wars like the one in Iraq. Let us make the year 2005 a better year!