Dr. Matt Lee's Close Personal Friends
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Useful products from afar that I have managed to locate in Boston in the last 72 hours.
January 22, 2009
Salt and Vinegar Crisps Lucozade NyQuil (though, I already knew about this one)
OpenID
January 20, 2009
Exploring Freedom is now OpenID enabled™ — please use this post for all and any OpenID related testing. If you don’t already have an OpenID, you can get one...
Building desktop applications without C or C#
January 20, 2009
First up is Vala — using C#-style syntax. With a self-hosting compiler that translates Vala source code into C source and header files, Vala uses the GObject...
Back again
January 19, 2009
So, Exploring Freedom is back again for 2009. Rob and I are still working hard on the book, but we want to make it extraordinary, so keeping up the activity...
Of course gNewSense doesn’t include non-free software!
September 13, 2008
That’s the reason gNewSense exists, it’s the reason we developed GNU in the first place — to escape from proprietary software and to help others to escape as...
Exploring Freedom: the book
August 4, 2008
Coming later this year — Exploring Freedom: the book, by Matt Lee and Rob Myers. I’m pretty excited about this. It’ll be our first product, my first...
Act on ACTA
July 21, 2008
Nobody knows yet what the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will consist of, but the few available indications are so ominous that the Free Software...
Freudian
July 18, 2008
“I would say anarchism is about the adsense of heirarchy.” — #gnewsense.
The Wikipedia “Naming Controversy” by Joshua Gay
July 16, 2008
On the English version of Wikipedia there is an article that discusses the naming controversy over whether one should call the operating system “GNU/Linux”...
libtool
July 14, 2008
GNU Libtool is a set of shell scripts which automatically configure UNIX and UNIX-like systems to generically build shared libraries. Libtool provides a...
autonomo.us activist group to focus on freedom in network services
July 14, 2008
BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA—Monday, July 14, 2008— A new activist group called autonomo.us has launched an online presence to focus on issues of software...
Changes, changes…
July 6, 2008
After seeing simple redesigns from Mark and Stuart, I decided to do the same. The good thing is that I can now republish in under a minute.
Corruption of the Wikipedia
July 5, 2008
“Wikipedia is not only amateur-friendly, but expert-unfriendly. They pretend not to be, and give lip service to the importance of expert editors. But when...
introducing identi.ca
July 5, 2008
Today, I stopped Twittering. Yesterday, I became aware, as many did, of a service called identi.ca — the first thing I thought was “Wow, that’s the end of...
With humility…
July 5, 2008
One of the most important things I’ve realised in my own life in the last few years, though I was unaware of the term, is this concept of humility, and...
How does your garden grow?
July 4, 2008
One of the best things about getting married, apart from all the cake you get to eat, is the amount of cool, random things people will buy you. One such gift...
Identi.ca
July 4, 2008
identi.ca is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero GPL. It’s similar to twitter and others, but it’s free.
IE6 == WYSIWTF
July 4, 2008
37signals — no more IE6 Apple — no IE6 support for their new web offering The greatest thing Microsoft could do with IE6 now would be tell everyone on...
It’s not the Gates, it’s the bars
July 3, 2008
To pay so much attention to Bill Gates’ retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of...
Going Dutch
July 2, 2008
My friend, Andy, has moved from Manchester to Amsterdam with his new job. Going Dutch is new blog, talking about life in mainland Europe, and his ability to...
WordPress.com updates
July 1, 2008
I had a little chat with Matt Mullenweg from WordPress earlier about my previous post. I’m glad to say that a few things got ironed out. Firstly, Litespeed,...
Friends don’t let friends use TypePad?
June 25, 2008
There’s some Typepad vs WordPress.com going on. Again. I jumped in and left my two cents worth. At first, I used Movable Type for my blogs, but I dropped it...
Free culture in action
June 25, 2008
My band, furny, have released all the tracks from our two EPs as free downloads. They’ve been available elsewhere, including Last.fm and for sale as CDs for...
Bye George…
June 23, 2008
Bye George. We’ll miss you. You spoke out against the injustice of censorship in the media, and for that, you’ll never be forgotten.
Bill Gates and the importance of source code
June 23, 2008
An interesting article on Bill Gates and the importance of source code – in it, it refer to Bill Gates statement in a recent BBC interview that he and Paul...
Making virtual machines in Fedora
June 22, 2008
One thing I really like to do is to download older releases of free software, and run them in virtual machines, to see how things used to be, but also to see...
Fedora niceties — polish
June 21, 2008
Man, Fedora feels polished. It’s quite hard to explain it. The fonts look better. The mouse cursor has a little shadow on it. Even system updates feel.....
Fedora problems – emacs and cvs
June 21, 2008
Part of a continuing saga of posts outlining any difficulties I have with my switch to Fedora (from a heavily broken hybrid of Ubuntu, Gobuntu, Debian and...
FudCon 2008
June 21, 2008
Today I went to FudCon 2008, which was being held at Boston University. What’s FudCon? Well, according to the website: FUDCon is the Fedora Users and...
Comments are back; fixed
June 10, 2008
After a while away, my comments are back, and working. Please, come leave a comment.
Smart UI: Google Groups
June 10, 2008
Google Groups is an alternative to being on a bazillion mailing lists, and has an interface to Usenet as well. Google Groups is not free software, but rather...
Why is Opera not free software?
June 10, 2008
A few years ago, Opera stopped charging money for its browser, but they would show you ads at the top of the screen while you were using it. If you wanted to...
Exploring YUI!
June 8, 2008
I’ve been playing with the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI) for the last few days. So far, I’ve only really looked at the CSS stuff, which is my main area...
Playing with old free software
June 7, 2008
I have to admit, I used to really struggle to install GNU/Linux…Many years ago, before I had any experience of my own Unix-like machine, I had played a...
Usability idea: Internet Radio
May 7, 2008
Yesterday Mark introduced me to a new streaming radio station, Beatles Radio. It’s a stream of Beatles, Beatles-covers and Beatles-related acts. To listen, I...
Some cool jobs for freedom
April 25, 2008
Open Rights Group is hiring a part-time campaigner in London Free Software Foundation is looking for a systems administrator in Boston
The Day The Music Dies
April 23, 2008
After the end of August, music purchased from Microsoft’s now-defunct MSN Music store will no longer be able to authorize itself for new devices. Put more...
Remix Radiohead. Rickroll Radiohead.
April 1, 2008
We’re no strangers to love… Radiohead is having a remixing contest. I suggest you take a good, long look at the terms and conditions before you take part,...
New iPastures
March 31, 2008
So, there comes a time when we all have to figure out what makes us happy. For me, I finally think I’ve found a place I can be truly content. A lot of my...
Where everybody knows your name…
March 9, 2008
Just a note to say that from Tuesday 11th – Thursday 20th, I’ll be in Boston, staying at the uber-exclusive Acetarium. I won’t be going to Cheers though, as...
Defeating blog comment spam – an experiment
March 9, 2008
I’m getting a lot of spam comments on here, even with Akismet and other spam filters enabled. I’m going to try a little experimentt for a week – if you want...
BBC iPlayer on GNU/Linux without Flash using only free software
March 8, 2008
Please note. This will only work if you’re in the UK. A bit of background to this. The BBC is funded by every single household with a TV in the UK (except...
Red Vines – win. Twizzlers – fail.
March 5, 2008
Back from Houston. I have a wife now. A quick one – why do Red Vines taste so good, and yet, Twizzlers, a very similar looking product, taste so bad?
A musical experiment
March 2, 2008
My pal Josh is trying a little experiment with an EP he put out. Get a free download of his record, and if you like it, pass the link on to your friends. His...
Bug me not
February 24, 2008
None of the distributions mentioned in this blog are recommended. Software always has bugs, and free software is no exception to this. When we think of free...
O, internet
February 22, 2008
> Christ. Fuck you, Google. Fuck you so hard. One man discovers his youthful posts to alt.personals are still there for everyone to see.
GPLv3, LGPLv3 and AGPLv3 logos.
February 13, 2008
The FSF published logos for LGPLv3 and AGPLv3 today, along with the existing GPLv3 logos. They’re very cool, and it’ll be neat to see them used on more...
Wither .co.uk
February 8, 2008
After almost 8 years of being at mattl.co.uk, today that changes. In all my toing and froing over Wordpress.com and Litespeed, I noticed that Matt Mullenweg...
Goodbye WordPress… Hello Movable Type.
February 6, 2008
So, I’ve moved back to Movable Type, and back to self hosting. I’m frustrated with WordPress, for a couple of reasons. * The amount of security fixes...
Stuart Langridge – Manchester Free Software
January 31, 2008
Our next meeting will be February 19th 2008, with Stuart Langridge (also known as Aq) of LUGRadio fame joining us for a talk about his experiences with free...
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