Foro.Carajal.Info

Today, I spent the day at the Morfeo General Assembly. It was held in Madrid, in the premises of Telefonica I+D. For me, it has been a very interesting day, with the usual networking and all that. But in addition, I’ve found several aspects that I enjoyed especially.

The first one has been a certain change in focus. Instead of an Assembly by Morfeo members for Morfeo members, it has been quite open, showing in fact how Morfeo is well related (and even mixed) with other organizations, initiatives and communities. From this point of view, the presentations about Tibi, ASOLIF and Open Telefonica were quite interesting. Also, presentations by people from Ministry of Industry and CDTI about R&D projects (Avanza, Iberoeka, etc.) were quite clarifying about how those programs work, the chances of preparing proposals for them (and being granted!), the role of libre software in them, etc.

People attending the Assembly were also quite interesting by themselves. I guess that a large fraction of the Spanish innovative companies in the area of software and services were here, which produced quite interesting discussions during the breaks. BTW, many friends and old acquaintances around: this was also a good place just for keeping touch with them.

The surrounding IT infrastructure was a good complement, both for those in place, and for those who participated in the distance. Twiter helped a lot to have a sense of what was happening. This idea of broadcasting twits live to attendants (two projectors were used for that), which is becoming customary in many conferences, helped a lot to have out-of-band chatting. The Assembly was also streamed, and a nice mashup, built using EzWeb service (a Morfeo project), showed twits, pictures, web pages, streaming, and all the rest in a convenient single place.

Last, but not least, we had our presentation of the CENATIC Report on free software in Spanish Universities and R&D Centers (in Spanish), in which GSyC/LibreSoft has participated.

The idea of having short talks about project proposals and ideas, as a first step to formalize the kind of informal interaction that has been so productive in the past was also encouraging.

About three weeks to the Workshop on Public Data about Software Development (WoPDaSD 2010) deadline. As usual, co-located with the OSS Conference, this year hosted by the University of Notre Dame (IN, USA). This year registration will be free for those registered to the whole OSS Conference, but those willing to attend only WoPDaSD will be able to register for a small fee. Some papers presented at the workshop will be invited to submit improved, extended versions to an special issue of IJOSSP. As usual, papers using FLOSSMole or FLOSSMetrics data are encouraged, but other papers on the subject will also be accepted.

Should professors at Universities do research? Should they do teaching? Both? [Can both be done?] How should curricula be? (more practice, more theory, an equal mix of both?) Why are they as they are? If you teach (and/or research) at a University, probably you have had many coffees while talking about all of this. And lunchs, and even Department meetings . Certainly I’ve had more than a few of them.

That’s probably why the blog entry “What’s new here: how academic research has ruined our education system“, by Roger Schank kept my attention, up to the last word. Quite an interesting opinion on why many curricula in Universities are like they are… In the end, it is a nice way of elaborating about the common say “In University you are supposed to do good teaching, but you’re only evaluated by how good you’re at research”. An (almost) quote that probably summarizes it all: “students are not told that for (many) professors research, not them, is first”.

By the way, quite a nice motto for the blog (Education Outrage) itself: “There are only two things wrong with the education system: what we teach and how we teach it”. Feed for thought!

[Thanks to pheras for the link]

The 3rd Morfeo General Assembly will be held on March 10th, in Madrid. The agenda is already out, and includes the usual “state of the Morfeo project”. There are three main “events”: one will be devoted to business. another one to the media (including a press conference), and finally one devoted to the community. This is going to be the 5th anniversary, which is a long time since we had the first discussions on how to structure and bootstrap the Morfeo community. Let’s wait and see what will happen during the next 5 years!

I’m spending the morning at the Madrid Android Developer Lab, which we (GSyC/LibreSoft)are co-organizing with Google. The morning started with fresh Nexus One for everybody (about 200 people!), so lots of smiles. First talk was general stuff about how well Android is doing in the market, how are Android apps performing, and so on.

Quite an interesting Q&A part. I asked about the comments on Android forking the Linux kernel, and not contributing back to it. I was answered that Android is only forking for a while, because they are doing pretty specific stuff for the kernel, and have a really quick development cycle. But that they intend to contribute back to the main line of the kernel at some point, that they have no intention of forking away. Well, we’ll see… My impression is that it is both in the interest of Android developers (and Google), and Linux developers, to find a way for getting improvements and support for new hw back to the main Linux line. Other (many) companies have done that in the past, and ways can be figured out.

After a break (a lot of chatting about the Nexus one, a lot of known faces, no coffee ), we’re now dealing with technical stuff: code and information about the Android 2.x API. Lots of ideas to check and test.

Overall, this is being quite a nice seminar!

While preparing for the Madrid edition of the Android Developer Lab, which will happen in a few hours (you know, why doing something in advance, if you can do it at the latest hour), I found an installation problem in my Debian testing (Squeeze of the day) box. I was installing the newest (2.1) Android SDK, via the Android installer (as found in tools r04). When trying to get the list of available packages, I got:

Failed to fetch URL http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/repository.xml, reason: Network is unreachable

After some tinkering, I found the problem (and fix), in How to resolve an issue “Network is unreachable” in Java applications. It seems that it is related to how applications capable of both IPv4 and IPv6 work, and it can be fixed by writing in /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf the following line:

net.ipv6.bindv6only = 0

…and rebooting, since the kernel needs to read this option when booting.

Apparently the problem happens not only in Android, but also in other Java applications, such as Eclipse.

En marzo comienza el Master de Propiedad Intelectual de la Escuela de Organización Industrial, en el que participaremos varios libresofteros. A pesar de su título, tiene un enfoque bastante novedoso, con asignaturas como “Obras libres” o “Movimiento Open Acces”. En otras palabras, tamibén se tratan las situaciones donde los autores consideran que les conviene no reservarse todos sus “derechos”. A ver qué tal sale…

Hace ya mucho tiempo, un amigo interesado en la informática y las comunicaciones, pero sin tiempo ni muchas posibilidades para ponerse al día, me comentó lo difícil que lo tenía para no perderse en el mundo de la tecnología. Al final su única opción era hablar con amigos o compañeros, leer alguna cosa aquí y allá, y tratar de aprender de esa manera. Echaba de menos cursos intensivos, a los que pudiera asistir sin demasiado impacto en su vida personal o laboral, y orientados exactamente a su perfil.

Años después, veo que hay quien ha detectado el mismo problema, y además le ha puesto solución. La cosa se llama “Barnetegi Tecnológico“. Junta a los “alumnos” dutrante un día (una tarde/noche y la mañana del día siguiente) y les da un baño bastante intensivo. El esquema se podría adaptar a fines de semana e incluso podría haber versiones para familias. Y se podría adaptar a necesidades específicas: conocimientos de software libre, de formas de comunicación en Internet, de tecnologías móviles, etc.

Las claves, desde mi punto de vista: organizado de forma que no hagan falta conocimientos tecnológicos específicos (esto es, orientado a profesionales no-TIC), muy focalizado en lo que les puede interesar, y combinación de “muestras de tecnologías” con manos en la masa y “enseñar a aprender”. En fin, una buena idea…

[Gracias a dacal por el puntero]

Esta tarde he estado en Cáceres, participando en el Congreso Internacional de Software Libre. La participación ha sido en una mesa redonda (o charla-coloquio, como la han clasificado), “El papel del software libre en la recuperación económica“, con Luis Casas (EOI) y Anabel Labarta (Penteo), con Paul Brown (Linux Magazine) de moderador. Interesante experiencia, aunque al final nos hemos ido un poco por las ramas, hablando más sobre la Universidad que sobre el software libre. Me llevé unas breves transpas que no usé (porque el formato no lo permitía). Mejor, ha quedado mucho más dinámico que si cada uno hacemos nuestra presentación…

Aprovechando el viaje, charla con mucha gente, como siempre en estos saraos Y esta vez, asistí a una charla y todo: la de Andrés Martínez (TID) y Manuel Velarde (CENATIC) sobre Morfeo Formación y los planes de formación de CENATIC. Interesante… Tenemos que estudiar cómo encajar nuestro master en esto…

Hoy en Palma de Mallorca, en la jornada “El Software Libre en el Sector Turístico” (organizada por la Fundació iBit), estaré en un ratito hablando sobre “Posibilidades de negocio en el campo del software libre” (transpas). Trataré de explicar cómo una empresa puede desarrollar su negocio en el campo del software libre, sobre todo como productor, mantenedor o integrador de software. Pero también tocaré, si hay tiempo e interés, las ventajas para las empresas que son usuarios de software.

Mientras me toca salir a la palestra, escucho (y veo) una interesante charla de Marco Táboas, donde entre otras cosas nos está contando cómo usar Wordpress para realizar marketing en Internet.

Muchas gracias a Benjamí Viloslada, que me invitó.