RT @kirschner: Interested in #freesoftware in #education? Talk to #fsfe 's education team at #FOSDEM http://t.co/bl6MyYFj @guido

RT @kirschner: Interested in #freesoftware in #education? Talk to #fsfe 's education team at #FOSDEM http://t.co/bl6MyYFj @guido

Interested in #freesoftware in #education? Talk to #fsfe 's education team at #FOSDEM http://t.co/bl6MyYFj @guido

The presiding judge in the Apple v. Samsung litigation in San Jose, CA, the Hon. Lucy Koh, has issued four rulings on the parties' post-trial briefs. No to a new trial for Samsung, as she views the trial as fair. No to more money for Apple. They failed to prove they were undercompensated by the jury, she writes without conscious irony. And she has ruled that Samsung did not willfully infringe.

Next stop, appeals court, where we will find out if they agree with Judge Koh that the trial was fair. Meanwhile, poor Apple will have to make due with a mere $1 billion as its jury award. We'll see if that stands on appeal too. A billion dollars for infringement that was officially not willful. Your US patent law at work. How do you like it?

Shutter lets you schedule automatic PC shutdowns and more:... http://t.co/egANv501 #Article #FreeSoftware #KnowYourPC |http://t.co/rBRuAeYo

KTouch Touch Typing Tutor

One of the perks of doing the release notes for the upcoming KDE SC 4.10 is that you get to try a lot of new applications. One of the highlights of tonight’s webmonkeying certainly is KTouch. It’s actually been around for a while, now Sebastian Gottfried has taken it under his wings and modernized the user interface. KTouch welcomes the user and takes it through the lessons, I’ve got to say that it’s all works rather spiffy, easy to understand and quite fun to use.

The user interface is done in QML, it uses Plasma’s QML Components, transitions and subtle animations. The application also nicely presents statistics about your performance and progress, it guides, but doesn’t restrict the user. Well done. :)

The new version of KTouch will be available with the KDE Applications 4.10, to be released on February 6th.

Changes:

dput-ng (1.4) unstable; urgency=low [ Arno Töll ] * Really fix #696659 by making sure the command line tool uses the most recent version of the library. * Mark several fields to be required in profiles (incoming, method) * Fix broken tests. * Do not run the check-debs hook in our mentors.d.n profile * Fix "[dcut] dm bombed out" by using the profile key only when defined (Closes: #698232) * Parse the gecos field to obtain the user name / email address from the local system when DEBFULLNAME and DEBEMAIL are not set. * Fix "dcut reschedule sends "None-day" to ftp-master if the delay is not specified" by forcing the corresponding parameter (Closes: #698719) . [ Luca Falavigna ] * Implement default_keyid option. This is particularly useful with multiple GPG keys, so dcut is aware of which one to use. * Make scp uploader aware of "port" configuration option. . [ Paul Tagliamonte ] * Hack around Launchpad's SFTP implementation. We musn't stat *anything*. "Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wabbits" (Closes: #696558). * Rewrote the test suite to actually test the majority of the codepaths we take during an upload. Back up to 60%. * Added a README for the twitter hook, Thanks to Sandro Tosi for the bug, and Gergely Nagy for poking me about it. (Closes: #697768). * Added a doc for helping folks install hooks into dput-ng (Closes: #697862). * Properly remove DEFAULT from loadable config blocks. (Closes: #698157). * Allow upload of more then one file. Thanks to Iain Lane for the suggestion. (Closes: #698855). . [ Bernhard R. Link ] * allow empty incoming dir to upload directly to the home directory . [ Sandro Tosi ] * Install example hooks (Closes: #697767).

Thanks to all the contributors!

For anyone who doesn’t know, you should check out the docs.

Sometimes I wonder, given all the things that have ever lived, what would scare me the most?

In today’s world we have Orcas and white sharks in the water, lions and tigers on land. And though not really scary, you probably don’t want to mess with a Cape Buffalo. There are definately extinct species that can really scare you, any kind of Tyrannosaurus or Spinosaurs are scary. If you don’t want to be eaten by one large dinosaur then being mauled by a bunch of large pack hunting chickens doesn’t sound like a particularly fun way to go either.

But there’s one thing that just frightens the hell out of me, Dunkleosteus. A large bony fish from the Devonian (~370mill years ago), this guy is the honey badger of extinct fish; first off, look at this skull:

Norwood Matt

(Wikipedia)

This thing is just a swimming nightmare, I mean, come on, ya gotta be kidding …

I even found this (uncredited) pic, not my idea of a good time:

So basically you take an Alien’s head from Alien and attach it to a fish. It doesn’t even have teeth. Those “teeth” you see are actually extensions of it’s skull; it’s basically skull teeth.

@sil happy birthday! Also, no blog post this year?
Rob “‏@dealmeida” De Almeida

This will make the tenth of these little celebrations of me inching one year closer to death.

And people are already being nice to me on Twitter, even though it’s after midnight and you should all be in bed before you turn back into pumpkins.

It’s my birthday. This year I am thirty-seven. This seems, all of a sudden, to be old. Thirty-six… well, that’s a nice mathematical number, the square of six, the number of possible dice throws, the number of gallons in a barrel of beer. All this makes it seem closer to thirty. Thirty-seven…that’s basically forty, isn’t it?

Forty. Dammit. At some point I wasn’t paying attention, and while I wasn’t paying attention I got all old and responsible and stuff.

On the other hand, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Most of the things I dreamed of when I started writing on this site have come to pass. Or, as someone famous didn’t quite put it, this isn’t victory, but you can see it from here. I have a fabulous daughter, I have a present from my girlfriend sitting in the kitchen waiting for me to open it (which I am itching to touch but I promised her I wouldn’t), my job is great, the entire world’s knowledge is at my fingertips, the internet is available to me even when standing in a field. I’ve learned that the 2003 me was mostly a moron but had the kernel of some good ideas. I’m even learning to cook. Tickets at the Arsenal cost sixty-two quid and we’re once again fighting about DRM (this time in HTML5) and weathering the storm of uneducated commentary, but in the last thirty days we’ve seen the first 3D-printed building planned, facial recognition software defeated, and the Ubuntu phone released. It’s an exciting time to be alive, even if you’re nearly forty.

Happy birthday to me.

The Ohio Local Community Team helds its inaugural educational session on Monday, 28 January 2013, in #ubuntu-us-oh on FreeNode IRC. The topic covered was "The Joy of BeagleBoard" and after the main presentation a lively discussion ensued. The transcript of the session has been posted with PNG graphic exports of the slides interleaved to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OhioTeam/IRC20130128.

There is not a known plan for what may be in store for February 2013 yet.