Brian Behlendorf, primary developer of the Apache Web Server, co-founder of the world’s first dedicated commercial web site creation company and a member of the Mozilla board has joined the World Economic Forum as the organization’s CTO, he announced on Twitter this morning.
Via Apache Co-Founder, Mozilla Board Member, Becomes New CTO of World Economic Forum.
I like the sound of that!
All I have to say to the following is it’s about freakin’ time…
In what appears to be a 180 degree turn, Michelle Courchesne, Présidente du Conseil du Trésor of the government of Québec, announced that any governmental organization and any other entity depending on the government must consider open source software for any IT project, at the Salon du Logiciel Libre in Québec city.
Via Montreal Tech Watch » Québec Government makes way for open source software in IT infrastructure.
I’ve upgraded our household netbook to GNU/Linux Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat (10.10, from 9.04), and the latter is now the default boot-time option instead of Windows XP.
Twenty of the drive’s 160GB are dedicated to Linux, as ext4. The rest is divided between the legacy NTFS partition for Windows, and another partition (~5GB) with Acer’s eRecovery tool, so I can reset the machine to factory defaults if ever needed. Since I was able to resize the partition dynamically right in the installer, I didn’t even need to move the files we had under Windows. The NTFS partition mounts in full read/write mode, so why bother for now?
Teagan (11) has been using it for a few days now, with Chromium/Chrome as his default browser and VLC as his default media player. The latter two being the apps he spends 99.9% of his time in.
For the record, I did try Ubuntu Netbook Edition, but I couldn’t get used to the dashboard-type UX, being a long-time Gnome user… The rest of the family would have probably been fine with it, but I figured I’d stick with the original for now. We can install the netbook remix interface on top later anyway.
We live in quite extraordinary times. We live at a moment where many of the most important politicians in our country and in some others overseas are actually eager to stand up and say that open data is an important priority for them, and for their nations. Just pause and think about it for a second: politicians! Talking about data! At all!
via Premise: Open Data: How Not To Cock It Up.
See DataSF for a great example of open data provided by a (municipal) government and some of the projects citizens have been rolling out with the said data.
Chinese coder Liu Liu has released the code for a JavaScript based face detector. There is a demo here and the code is available from Github. It appears to be a proof of concept at the moment, but could have more significant uses.
via Hack of the Day: Face Detection with HTML5 & JavaScript.
tekArtist 