As recently announced, the fifth Italian Perl Workshop will take place in Pisa (Italy) on October 22nd and 23rd. 120 people subscribed already, and more are expected by the first day of the Workshop. A full list of the accepted talks is available.

Two major Perl events will take place in Italy, thanks to the effort of the Italian Perl users and the Pisa.pm users group.

Here are the details!

About two years ago I published an article about Firewall Builder. Now that the version 3.0 is out I had a catch-up interview with its creator, Vadim Kurland, and I discovered a number of new interesting features.

MM: Hi Vadim, and thanks for answering my questions. You are the main author of Firewall Builder (FWB), but your name seldom appears even on the website www.fwbuilder.org. So, just before we start diving deep in FWB, would you like to briefly introduce yourself?

The guys at Perl.it are at it again! The fourth Italian Perl Workshop is taking place next September in Pisa, Italy.

I have been saying this for many years: free software must not be associated with an ideology or political party. Doing that would:

1. be an utter falsity;
2. damage our ability to advocate.

I am not the only one with this opinion! As you may know, we’ll have elections in Italy next Sunday and Monday, and the Italian Association for Free Software is now promoting two remarkable initiatives.

The word is finally out. It was just a suspicion about a month ago, but it was finally, sadly, confirmed.

The OpenWengo project ceased to exist last November, and all the developers have been laid off. You may want to read the whole thread and see how much sadness there is amongst the developers and the community. All of the developers have to find other jobs, while we, the community, have to find some good alternative VoIP & IM software.

And it’s going to be hard.

Lately I’ve been working on an updated version of the comparison between Skype and Wengophone I wrote on June 2006 for Free Software Magazine. While I was working on it, I spotted a number of rather worrying signs:

The best thing for a programming language is to be powerful and popular at the same time. Perl was like that some time ago, but over the years it has slowly lost its appeal, even while retaining and increasing its power. And Perl 6 has just come too late to save the day.

One popular screensaver in Ubuntu is “Floating Ubuntu”, which displays a number of Ubuntu logos floating around the screen. This screensaver exists in many different flavours; for example in Ubuntu you can also find “Floating Feet”, that has the GNOME logo instead of Ubuntu’s; or, on Debian you have Debian’s “swirls” floating around. I thought that it would probably be easy to customize it and have an image of my choice floating around instead. Unfortunately, screensavers in Ubuntu are not configurable using the GUI so I had to hack the screensaver myself.

Days ago I was appointed as the on-call support on our TIBCO installation. So I have been given a personal mobile phone, a personal laptop and, lastly, a Vodafone Mobile Connect Super UMTS card. You may well be interested in the fact that Vodafone Spain developed a Linux driver, the card seems to work very well with Linux, and that it was quite easy to configure it!

I am going to describe how I configured it to work with Vodafone Italia as the provider. Please feel encouraged to comment on this entry and fill in the configuration you made for your own Country or distribution. What follows is the configuration for Ubuntu 7.04.

It’s a story I learnt about from FSdaily

It’s a story of life and death.

For the few that liked my blog and, after a couple of months of silence, thought that I was dead… well I am alive and kicked (no that’s not a typo; I know it should be “kicking”, but the reality is that I feel like I’ve been kicked in my back). What happened… well, a lot of work and, finally, a two-week holiday in Brittany kept me out of the real World. And, now that I am back, I am taking a look around. A number of new interesting news items stand out from the rest.

On March 23rd the OpenWengo project released the second release candidate of their Wengophone, a free software VoIP client with integrated support for SMS, video calls, conferencing, and Instant Messaging for many protocols. So, while they are steadily moving towards the final 2.1 release and I am filing bugs on their trouble ticket system, I had the pleasure of interviewing two of their “frontmen”: Philippe Bernery and Dave Neary.

Update: March 12th, 2007: The 2.1 RC1 is officially out. Go get it

With voice and video calls, file transfer capability and support for almost every instant messaging system on the planet, Wengophone candidates itself as the main free software competitor to Skype. With the 2.0 release, a pretty unstable, beta quality release, they failed the first attempt. What about the second?

Issue 16 of FSM came out a few days ago. The PDF version went out as well, but… out of the window! A lot of people, including myself, cried and asked for it to come back.

I am now writing this open letter to Tony, asking him to just discard many of the requests that wanted the PDF back.

Those of you that are fans of car racing will probably recognize this post’s title as the famous phrase that gives the official start to the Indianapolis 500. If it happens that you are a fan of both car racing and free software, you may well be interested in TORCS (The Open Racing Cars Simulator).

This post is actually a continuation of the two I posted in December, which left a couple of open questions:

1. Is it legal to create MP3 files out of music CDs you legally own, to take them away with you and listen to them more comfortably (e.g.: with an iPod, or an MP3-enabled car stereo)?
2. Is it legal to create MP3 files out of music CDs you legally own and then lend the original CDs to someone else?

The answer, of course, depends on the laws of the country you live in.

While I am still waiting for the information I need aboutthe legal issues of making MP3s out of your CDs,I didn’t want to sit here in silence and eat all thepandoro I can get.So I’d like to help you create your own Christmas/New Year’s card withthe GIMP

First of all, get a suitable image to work on. I had one handy: mychild in his bath with a foam beard that made him look so similar to Santa Claus.

Scaling your postcard

Mylatest blog entry began with this paragraph:

Messing with MP3 files is, for some people, a synonym for illegal use of copyrighted music. Well, actually it’s not.

The reason I wrote that incipit remained unclear to many, that didn’t seeany link between this first phrase and the rest of the article. I therefore decided towrite a few blog entries on the subject. This time I’ll talk about theMP3 format in itself.

Messing with MP3 files is, for some people, a synonym for illegal use of copyrighted music. Well, actually it’s not.