Flickr around the world

While browsing around the web a few weeks back I discovered a fabulous new way to waste occupy my time while waiting for code to compile in the form of FlickrVision. A globe showing satellite imagery of the Earth, spinning around every few seconds to show a newly uploaded & geo-tagged photo from Flickr.

For those without flash it also comes in a plain old 2-d format, but that’s not nearly so entertaining.

Presentation is everything

CNet are running an article with a nice scary sounding headline

“Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion”

Pretty clearly trying to imply that open source software is a threat to the entire existence of the software industry. Don’t fall for such FUD. Just look at the headline from the other side of the fence

“Free Open Source Software Is Saving Customers $60 Billion”

Not nearly so scary sounding now. In fact it is probably quite appealing.

On the one hand, you have a small number of large software companies sitting on their monopolies and extorting cash through licensing fees. On the other hand, you have hundreds of thousands of companies saving money by using open source software, paying for services with tangible value for their business, rather than an arbitrary software “tax” (license fee). Open source software benefits the many, at the expense of the few. A worthy trade-off.

Dilbert + flash: epic fail

For some incomprehensible reason it has been decided that presenting Dilbert cartoon strips as a plain old image isn’t sexy enough. You now need a flash plugin to display the same old static image as before. Seriously, WTF.COM ?

The only positive, is that there is a now an RSS feed for the strips, which does have the static images inline to the feed. So now I can avoid the nauseating website completely and just read the strips from the comfort of LiFeRea.

New CPANTS test criteria for Fedora suitability

CPANTS is an automated testing system for Perl modules hosted on CPAN which checks various Perl Kwalitee guidelines. There was recently a hackathon to add more guidlines to the testrig and interestingly a couple of these are focusing on distribution integration points.

• fits_fedora_license – this validates the module license against the allowable Fedora license list. In particular this seeks to fail modules which are Artistic v1 only – modules need to be dual Artistic/GPL to be suitable for Fedora. This is a great example of how Fedora’s rigour around licensing is raising awareness across the open source community & helping to identify and solve problems before they get to the distro.
• easily_repackageable_by_fedora – this is a compound metric which validates that the fits_fedora_license and no_generated_files metrics were satisfied by the module.

Unfortunately with all these new metrics I’ve got a whole bunch more failures to address in my CPAN modules.