Life, the Universe, and Everything

Yesterday I spent another great day in Ghent, at the second Barcamp to be hosted in the nice IBBT environment. It was, without doubt, the greatest barcamp I ever participated in. They quality of the presentations goes up and up each time. Also, my own presentation, this time a hands on demonstration of some cool new features in HTML5, attracted more people than ever. Maybe, because the Netlog lead designer and I decided to do a 40-minutes dual-presentation.

There was much ado about the main language of the unconference. Obviously, 99% of the participants are Belgian out of which 99% are from the Flemish region. Of course there’s no doubt that most of the presentations will be in Dutch. I didn’t like it that much, however, that it was specifically announced before, that the complete event was to be held in Dutch.

I’ve been to unconferences in France, Germany and Norway. In France and Germany, they were single-language unconferences, too, and I found them far less accessible for myself, even though I do speak and understand French and German. (In Norway, most of it was held in English.) I found it very nice of our own barcamps to be very easily accessible for non-native-Dutch speakers. Pitches were held in English and before every presentation, we used to verify if somebody in the audience didn’t understand Dutch. Is that so hard to keep up? After all, most of the slides of the talks I attended were in English anyway, and so is the wiki where we self-organised the event. It’s also very striking to see how much English sentences and constructions we use in our talks anyway. Moreover, sharing our barcamp experiences with the world afterwards is so much easier if all was prepared in English anyway. Think about the videos, presentations and all other material that was captured.

It’s a very small world already, so let’s try our best to include foreigners and non-Flemish Belgians too!

Don’t get me wrong. 115 Flemish people should not speak English amongst each other. But let’s not send out the message that it’s a Dutch-only event. Of course, at the end of the day, it’s up to the presenter himself to decide which language to use.

(And, whatever we do, let’s agree on a single #tag to use: is it #barcampgent2 or #barcampghent2?)

Word on the street is that next barcamp will be held around April in Antwerp. Before that, there is a Mobile Webcamp announced in Hasselt, next February. See you there!

I’m a very late adopter of new technologies. It has to do with the fact that I first want to identify a certain need for something before I try it.

On the other hand, whever I find something useful, I tend to stick to it. I still frequent IRC and usenet, for example. Call me conservative. :-)

So, even though most people describe me as a “techie”, I got my first mobile phone only in 2004 (I got one from my employer at that time). I started blogging in January 2008, which is pretty late for the people in the environment I work in. My very first laptop ever is only 2 years old now. I bought my first USB-stick last month. And today… I created a Twitter account (b_b_b_a_r_t).

Seems like I started an overtaking manoeuvre… :-)

What’s the use for it? Well, it appears that twitter is becoming the source of more and more interesting discussions. Recently, there was a twitter discussion about article about Europe’s success. That one wans’t that interesting, however. :-) Litrik only commented the language and grammar. Atog mistook Flemish language influences for Pakistani ones. Koen Vervloesem seemed to get and agree with the point I tried to make.

Too bad someone else took my nickname (bbbart) already. :-(

Yesterday was probably the best Profoss session up to now. Too bad, only 30-ish people showed up, but the quality of the discussions was pretty high. It was also one of the first Profoss’es where business models and market promises of Open Source software vendors stood central. Too bad, however, that all four speakers (OpenBravo, OpenERP, Compiere and Adampiere) were not very proficient in English. You could tell after 5 words where they came from (The Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany). :-)

One thing which got stuck in my head was a remark form the Microsoft representative in the audience. He mentioned that all the industries in Europe where we’ve been doing very well and are successful with worldwide, are in sectors where Intellectual Property rights are very well protected and laws are in place to do so. He gave the pharmaceutical industry and the GSM communication standard as examples.

Now, he might be right for certain definitions of “success”. They are the industries where venture capitalists like to live. They are the sectors with the so called money-printing companies. But, as someone in the audience gave as a remark, haven’t they stretched the limits of profitability too far? Isn’t the financial crisis we are in right now a symptom of that?

The Microsoft guy went on to express his fear that by adopting the Open Source idea so quickly, Europe is putting itself in a more vulnerable position as compared to the rest of the world where huge companies are still being formed around (software) patents. And that’s where I strongly disagree.

I believe, and not only for the software industry, that the Open Source philosophy forms the best sustainable business models, as a whole and in the long-term. Janssen Pharmaceutica might never have been so huge without it’s patents on the medicines they “invented”, but now it appears that for the last 25 years the whole company just survived on those few patents. Now that they have expired, all of a sudden Janssen is in trouble and recently had to lay down some thousands of people. However… now that alternatives for those medicines are allowed, they all of a sudden become far cheaper as the factor of choice appears. So which Europe (or Belgium, for that matter) is the most “successful”: the one where huge companies can get monopolies and allow some to get astonishly rich, or the one where medicines are affordable by anyone (without the need of too much medical insurance intervention)?

Isn’t the reason that Europe became what it is right now because of the rapid and free expansion of science and exact knowledge? ( As a matter of fact, I agree with Michael H. Hart that Isaac Newton has had a greater influence on our every day life than Jesus Christ. But that’s a different discussion. )

But… doesn’t Janssen deserve to be paid back and generate revenue to support further research and development of other, great medicines? Well, of course they do. But why didn’t they do it then? Why are they now, after 25 years of artificially stretching the time constraints of their patents, getting in so much trouble? Haven’t they had the time to invent something else profitable? ( One could also argue that for matters as health and hygiene, research should be left to public entities as universities. Again, that’s another discussion. )

The other example I want to tackle is the GSM one. GSM is, in my eyes, one of the great failures of humanity. Compare it to, say, TCP/IP. Both are communication protocols. One is proprietary and heavily regulated. The other is open and free. A couple of years after it’s existence, TCP/IP shaped the Internet, changed our entire world and allowed millions of business and even completely new business models to flourish on top of it. On the other hand, with these stupid mobile phones, after 10 years we still can’t do anything but calling and sending crappy text messages. MMS was supposed to be a big innovation. Ironically, we had to wait for TCP/IP to arrive on our mobile devices, before we could start doing useful stuff with them. Before we could do fun stuff that we didn’t have to ask permission for. Before we could be free.

Why is the iPhone such a success? Surely not because it supports GSM.

Just like Janssen, the great mobile operators might get in trouble when everybody starts using VoIP on their mobile phones. Sitting on top of their governmentally protected industries, they have done nothing to protect themselves.

Yes, GSM regulation has made it possible for huge companies to form where, in Belgium, Mobistar, Proximus and Base are offsprings off. But it has killed all innovation around it.

So again, what’s the most successful Europe?

Those Open Source ERP vendors might not get the big venture capitalists backing them. And none of their CEO’s will be the next Bill Gates. But they are forming the shape of the software business of tomorrow.

Yesterday, I attended the first CloudCamp in Belgium, which was held in Brussels. It was at a very nice venue, and the attending and presenting crowd was of very high quality.

There was much to be seen and more to be learnt. However… it wasn’t an unconference at all. Yes, at the end of the schedule there was a piece left “unscheduled”, but that time was wholly consumed at the bar.

Oh, wait… so maybe it was an unconference after all then… :-)

I especially enjoyed the talk of Raphaël in which he stressed the need for openness in the cloud, as that is exactly what made the Internet such a success. If the “cloud” is willing to turn into this next layer on top of the Internet, it indeed will have to make sure that it’s as open as can be. Otherwise, all we’ll get is another useless network like we have today with the mobile phone network and it’s few übermasters.

By the way… MyOwnDB is as open as can be! ;-)

Dag,

In follow-up to your PS, I would like to refer to a statement I did in the past about blog comments (4^th paragraph). Please also mind the spam notice.

I’m sure you knew already, however. :-p

I must agree with Philip that Usenet remains the best platform for online non-real-time discussions. May we welcome you at be.comp.os.linux?

Dag,

Thank you for follow-up.

I recognised the difference between automated spam and normal people trying to advertise commercial websites through on-topic comments. But from the point of view of my original post, they are the same. They both consist out of normal, plain <insert a language here> text with more or less correct grammar and spelling. When manually put into the SPAM marked auto-learning queue or self-learning spam filters, they both result in too strict scanning, as the distinguishing line between unsolicited email and genuine messages gets blurred more and more.

In Mollom speak, this results in the widening of the “unsure” strip in between the “spam” and “ham” extremes.

I’d like you to meet Hanna, a charming blue-eyed blonde, brunette with brown eyes.

Did you get the “mistake” in the previous sentence? Without reading it twice?

Today, the following mail made it past our spamassassin installation:

I am a charming blue-eyed blonde, brunette with brown eyes, and I'm
looking for an intelligent man to communicate by e-mail, Skype, or on
real dates!

Write me a message by email: Hanna@superflh.com

I find it very interesting to see spam mails like this appear. Nothing is being sold here, no links are being made to commercial websites, no attachments came with it, … and it’s clearly an autogenerated text, meant to make sense in a way. So what is the purpose?

I guess they are trying to hit the so-called self-learning (mostly bayesian) spam-filters at their weakest point: that they are but computers. In many situations, mails like this will be manually marked as spam, and this make it into their learning system as such. Many of these mails eventually lead to spam-filters marking legitimate mails as spam, which for many people is totally unacceptable. And those people might just turn off their spam filters because of that. They “don’t work” anyway, right?

Similar things happen elsewhere too, apparently, trying to fool Mollom.

Does this reasoning make sense?

Anyway, Hanna does seem interesting to me. Let’s drop her a line… ;-)

Hmm, I just found out something strange.

• Click this link: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22mieke+van+loon%22&start=20&sa=N
• How many pages with search results does Google return? (6)
• How many search results? (1,330)
• Now click on Next at the bottom
• How many pages with search results does Google return? (5)
• How many search results? (1,330)
• Now click on Next at the bottom again
• How many pages with search results does Google return? (5)
• How many search results? (46)

Can somebody explain?

Doesn’t this make all those “proofs” based on Google fights moot? I can understand Google is not counting exactly how many results a search query resulted in for optimisations sake, but going from 1,330 to 46… that’s a but far off, isn’t it?

(For the record, Mieke Van Loon is a member of my family and I was looking up her personal web page.)

Live from the Gardemoen airport in Oslo. I’m getting better and better in getting free internet access at airports lately. :-)

The last two days, the small town of Skien held three conferences at once: Open Nordic, the eZ conference (including the amazing eZ awards event) and the very first Mobile Open Nordic.

I learnt one interesting fact. Most of the current Web 2.0 revolution we see now, happens on top of the LAMP stack.

Let’s have a look where these technologies come from:

Linux:

started in Finland (Linus Torvalds)

Apache:

mainly American, but apparently has many Nordic contributors

MySQL:

Swedish/Finnish company

PHP:

started in Denmark/Greenland (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Basically, the Nordic countries can be held responsible for 75% of the LAMP stack! (ok, Norway isn’t in the picture here, but they have Opera, for what it’s worth ;-))

I was very happy to see that Nokia (+ Trolltech), Sun, IBM and other big players were represented by technical people, not by marketing people. In fact, the most interesting talks I attended, were presented by people of those larger companies. They really are trying to keep up with current trends.

Most interesting was also the main keynote speaker and opener of the conference on the first day: Bart Hanssens from the Belgian federal government (Fedict). He held a talk about the recent ODF guideline implementation at our federal government.

Personally, I had a wonderful time. Met many new people, mostly of the eZ crew and realised the sheer joy of such an internationally orientated SME (especially at the midsommernatten BBQ the last day). It felt great speaking 4 languages through each other once more, especially increasing the level of my Norwegian again. :-)

Yes, Norway… I completely fell in love with the country just once more…

Hooray! We have another one!

Again, a website from our federal government is down. Nice to see though that Drupal seems omnipresent up there (looks like Accenture didn’t get all their business after all :-p).

Again, it’s a database problem. I guess Dries is right when he says that the database is the hardest part of a Drupal installation to get right.

Luckily, there will be a really good solution for that! As soon as we have a PHP connector to MyOwnDB out there, installing Drupal won’t require any local database administration any more. Let alone taking care of backups, scaling up your installation or ensuring high availability of your data… Great times are a-comin’!