Creative Commons is looking for a new CTO. Come work with me!
Do you know anyone good? Yourself?
From the announcement:
This is a fun job that offers technical, management, and communications challenges and opportunities for growth and impact. Using technology to enhance (rather than suppress) sharing has always been an important part of the CC story.
And the job description.
Feel free to share with other FLOSSy communities!
If your credit union has this on your front door:
Then I shouldn’t see this on your ATM:
Good thing my credit union (the wonderful SF Fire Credit Union) will let me deposit checks with my phone starting on January 25th.
#confused #lackofsolidarity #smallpartofthe99percent #ows
Even though I am a recently minted new parent, I am still keeping up on outside world obligations (barely!) and as such, I will be traveling to some upcoming conferences. Will I see you at any of these?
State Education Technology Directors Association
January 19th – webinar
One that doesn’t need travel is a webinar for SETDA this Thursday on Open Educational Resources and how K-12 schools can really harness the power of open licenses.
American Library Association’s Midwinter Conference
January 20th-22nd – Dallas, TX
I’ll be speaking on a panel titled “Getting the Rights Right” about Creative Commons and Open Access (essentially, why OA is truly transformational when paired with CC licenses).
February 15th-17th – Houston, TX (Rice University)
Connexions is a great platform for writing, editing, and sharing open textbooks. I’ve only been to the conference once before, and just as an attendee, but this year I’ll be speaking about the metadata work I am doing at Creative Commons under the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) project.
If you’ll be in either Dallas or Houston on those dates and want to get a beer, let me know!
I’ve recently started using Foursquare (me), ironically, because a friend who works for the EFF has a favorable opinion of it.
During my usage in the last month or so, I’ve come to realize that there should be a version of Foursquare that is for new parents. This is how I envision a timeline would look:
3:00pm – Bedroom – “Trying to take a nap”
3:03pm – Back porch – “Rowan’s crying, getting him some sun.”
6:00pm – Kitchen – “Where are those left-overs?”
8:00pm – Bedroom – “Bedtime!”
10:00pm – Breastfeeding rocker – “He’s up”
10:45pm – Bedroom – “Sleep!”
12:30am – Breastfeeding rocker – “up again”
1:00am – Diaper changing table – “Ewww”
1:15am – Bedroom – “yawn”
4:00am – Breastfeeding rocker – “what time is it?”
4:30am – Bedroom – “no comment”
- You’ve earned the Breastfeeder Badge!
6:00am – Breastfeeding rocker – “always with the eating…”
6:30am – Back porch – “Well, I guess he’s not going back to sleep… good morning!”
8:00am – Living Room – “We made it to the living room!”
- Whoa! You’ve just earned the Explorer Badge!
I’d sign up for that service in a heart beat.
PS: Joining the Boston crowd, we now have an Iron Blogger SF, of which I am participating.
While I haven’t fully figured out the answer to my previous photography related question (on the archiving, not simply backing up, of photos) I am getting closer.
I have a question about the archiving of RAW files.
One of the commenters, Damon Lynch, provided some insight to a collection of best practices (“DPBestFlow”) developed by the Library of Congress (an organization that I trust when it comes to the process of archiving materials). [He also linked to a Free Software tool he wrote to quickly download and backup photos from your digital camera, Rapid Photo Downloader.]
Just your daily photo of Rowan.
The DPBestFlow site introduces me to a file format that I was previously unaware of, DNG, or Digital Negative. The DNG format, created by Adobe, is a ‘universal’ RAW format with an open (ie: not patent encumbered) specification. This is in stark contrast to the slew of proprietary formats that are camera maker specific (closed formats that might include encrypted portions) such as NEF (Nikon’s) or CRW/CR2 (Canon’s).
There was even an initiative to garner wider adoption of open standard RAW formats back in 2005 started by Juergen Specht called OpenRAW (Wikipedia).
Now, I am a huge proponent of open formats and standards (obviously?) but my question really is:
Also, why am I not simply reading the many discussions already had on this topic? Because I want to get the uniquely free software view on the issue.
Thoughts?
I recently (end of November) bought myself an early Christmas present: a Nikon D3100. I did this mostly because our first child was due on December 10th (he came December 11th! – photos).
Now, as you imagine, as a crazy happy new dad, I’ve been taking a lot of photos. And I’ve been especially good about making sure they are all backed up. I have them on my laptop, my external RAID array, and now on my in a different state colo’d server.
But, since that D3100 is a DSLR I’ve been playing around with RAW images, and those can be pretty big. So far, just since I got this camera around November 30th I have about 17 gigs of photos already. My harddrive, which is an SSD, is going to fill up soon enough and it would be full now if I had imported all of my previous photos from my previous camera(s).
So, I’ve been looking for a smart way of dealing with large photo collections where part of it is on my laptop and part is ‘archived’ on an external harddrive or in the cloud or wherever.
What I see as a perfect work-flow for this is:
The killer feature here is the Archive button. Admittedly, Google revolutionized webmail with that button (while getting tons of other things wrong with GMail*), who is going to revolutionize photo management with it?
Do any photo management applications out there do this without having to do stupid painful things like this (which makes me remove photos from one library and add them to a ‘backup library’ where I can’t see them all in the same Shotwell session).
* Like non-threaded email, non-standard IMAP server, etc
As many of you may know, I’m really quite facinated by my email system. By system I mean the suite of tools that bring email sent to me to my eyes. I’ve written before on my setup (note: that is out of date now) and its migration across systems. As you can see, I’m a fan of Mutt.
I do have a confession. For the last few months (since mid-December ’10) I was using Thunderbird 3.3a2. Why? Why throw away all that time and effort setting up Mutt/Offlineimap/Imapfilter to be as effecient as possible and just go with TBird? Search across accounts.
Yes, search.
Ever since I started using Mutt I found myself sometimes popping into my gmail account to search for a specific message (if it was sent to that account, of course. My personal account is not hosted by gmail, just my work account). I felt bad about it each time. “Why can’t I just do this in Mutt?” I would ask myself. I tried various email searching systems but none of the quite worked exactly how it should/I wanted.
Then came Notmuch.
Notmuch promised to be exactly what I wanted. A text-based, threaded, and search-oriented mail reader. Perfect! Except, due to some limitations at the beginning (basically, you can’t move messages without making Notmuch angry) I never could use it full time.
But the Notmuch developers fixed that! I didn’t know that though. I missed that announcement. Where was it? Why wasn’t it being shouted on the roof tops? NOTMUCH CAN NOW SYNC WITH IMAP CHANGES!
Oh well.
This whole time I’ve been using Thunderbird (mostly) without issue and loving the ability I had to search across all 3 of my email accounts which something that even GMail, the master of search, could never do for me.
So what brought me back to Mutt from Thunderbird 3.3? Search. You see, just like Lucas I saw Zack post about how a long flight gave him the time to integrate Notmuch and Mutt.
Now, thanks to notmuch, I can do a quick search across all 3 of my mail accounts and even recreate threads from just a single message. Simply amazing.
Do you like Mutt and wish you had top-notch search? Give mutt+notmuch a try!
