Pie Charts In The Plains, a set on Flickr.
Flying from Chicago to San Francisco today I was struck by the fact that there were bar charts, pie charts and many more visible everywhere.
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If you don’t like whingeing by frequent fliers, skip this post!
I spent all day Tuesday travelling back from Brazil on TAP. Having taken four flights with them (LHR-LIS, LIS-GRU, VCP-LIS, LIS-LHR) I feel partially qualified to say that TAP are not a great airline. To recite the litany in no particular order:
I tried really hard to think of some positive things to say here. So thanks to the great cabin crew on the LIS-LHR flight for redeeming things, and to the security checker at Lisbon who was lots of fun (and who I expect will read this as she has my card!). I actually missed being on United, if you can imagine that. I’d only fly them again if the fare was really cheap (maybe that’s a positive – they aren’t on my no-fly list!).
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Just ending a relaxing Sunday with friends in Brazil, who have these coffee plants in their garden. It’s getting close to the time the berries need harvesting, although as we discovered last time we tried it the work involved to make coffee from them is substantial. Anyway, watch out for news of FISL and more in the coming days.
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While the journey is a long one, I always enjoy visiting Brazil. Some of my best friends live there, and the whole place infused with a positive energy that’s unique in my experience. So I’m delighted to have been invited to speak at two separate venues next week.
The first is the University of São Paulo, where I will be spending Monday afternoon delivering a seminar called Open Source Concepts and Realities. I’ll explore some of the ideas you’ll find on my essays page, as well as hopefully engage in discussion with other attendees.
The second is one of the world’s longest-running – and largest – Free Software conferences, FISL. Held in the far south of Brazil in Porto Alegre (which means the mid-winter weather may prove a little colder than the name “Brazil” usually evokes), it is attended by a wide range of delegates from business, education and government. I’m speaking twice; on Wednesday at 9am, explaining the restructuring the OSI Board envisages for OSI, and on Friday at 11am delivering my keynote explaining why “Software Freedom Means Business Value”. I also expect to attend the meetups for LibreOffice (Friday at 1pm) and for people considering the Apache OpenOffice project.
If you’ll be at FISL in Porto Alegre, I’d love to see you – I already know that many old friends are there too. Please use my contact form if you want to arrange a meeting.
Filed under: Events, Travel | Tagged: Brazil | Comments Off on ✈ Talks In Brazil Next Week
Filed under: Photography, Travel | Tagged: Austria | Comments Off on ✈ Old Vienna Reflected In New Vienna
Usually when I want to illustrate the capricious and arbitrary nature of cloud-provided services, I use other examples. But today Google has shown me that they too simply can’t be trusted to provide a service one relies upon. They are perfectly happy to leave you stranded without explanation or remedy.
As well as shutting down the Gizmo voice-over-IP service they bought, without any explanation or alternative but at least with a little warning sent via e-mail, they have also taken away the ability for anyone to use the “Call Phone” capability within Google Talk in GMail while outside the US. You probably won’t have used it if you had Gizmo set up, but now you need it – it’s gone.
So if you were using Google Voice for your phone calls while in the US and then relying on either using your Android phone with a VoIP client or the Voice support in Chat to manage your calls while you are travelling, forget it. They just turned it off, without warning, explanation or even the courtesy of a response to users in their online forums. That calling credit you have is now useless until you get back to the USA.
This is not the behaviour of a reliable service provider. I’m sure they are technically within their rights; there’s probably a load of weasel-words in some terms of service somewhere. But to provide a service that people depend upon and then withdraw it without warning, explanation, alternative or apology is simply unacceptable.
Filed under: Cloud Computing, Travel | Tagged: Gizmo5, Gmail, Google | 4 Comments »
I’ve been quite lucky with shots taken from aircraft. My photo of Mount Shasta has been purchased by a publisher as an illustration in a geology textbook, and my photo of the San Francisco Bay salt pans has been used to make fabric for an exhibition in San Jose. I still try to get a window seat if I know I will be traversing interesting areas.
Filed under: Photography, Travel | Tagged: San Francisco | 3 Comments »
My favourite photographer is the late Galen Rowell, whose books (especially The Inner Game of Outdoor Photography, sadly out of print for UK readers) were my inspiration for returning to photography as an adult. My favourite Galen Rowell photograph is “Last Light At Horsetail Falls” – I have a numbered print of it on the wall at home. It epitomises his approach of visualising the photograph you want to make and putting yourself in the place where you will be able to create the image you have visualised.
So I was thrilled to discover that the US National Park Service, as part of their excellent series of Yosemite videos, has create eight delightful minutes about the natural phenomenon Rowell was able to represent. It makes me realise I have still never made a winter visit to Yosemite; I really need to do that.
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One of the best travel purchases I have made is an unlocked high-speed USB 3G modem. It allows me to get broadband-speed internet access for the duration of each trip abroad for a per-trip price comparable to one night of internet access at a hotel, using a locally-purchased pre-paid data SIM at each destination.
The modem I bought is a Zoom 3G Tri-Band USB Modem (that’s the UK link, looks like it’s also available in the US), and so far I have used it successfully with SIM cards for TIM Italy, Mobistar Belgium and 3 UK. In each case I inserted the SIM, selected the network provider from the software and it worked instantly, usually at the 7Mb HSDPA speeds. There’s simple and easy Windows and Mac software pre-loaded on the stick – I’ve not tried it with the EeePC and Ubuntu yet, I’d be interested to hear from people about their experiences. The SIM card I bought today from Mobistar in Belgium was €15 and gave me 275Mb of bandwidth to use over the next month – more than enough for broadband everywhere at FOSDEM.
Until we see the regulators sort out Europe’s mobile market and get rid of the ridiculous avaricious feudalism that blights us, this is a great solution for reducing the cost of getting online everywhere and I recommend it.
Update: As you’ll see from the comments, I also use this with a Zoom Travel Router (also available from Amazon in the US). I just plug the USB stick into the router (which is battery powered as well as working with a power supply) and it provides WiFi to multiple devices. It also allows you to connect to a wired ethernet and provides WiFi acces the same way Apple’s Airport Express does.
Filed under: How-to, Travel | 7 Comments »
I just got home from a week in Brazil, where I gave talks for IBM and for a large ForgeRock customer and also at the remarkable Campus Party. This is the second year I have spoken at Campus Party in Brazil and once again it was an interesting and overwhelming experience.
Campus Party started in 1997 as a LAN party in Spain (where people bring along their computers to connect to a massive network and play computer games) but has spread across the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world to become a global activity. The event in Brazil is held in a huge exhibition centre. Delegates pay to attend, then live on-site for the week, camping in pop-up tents inside the exhibition centre.
That was the source of one of the off-the-wall activities I participated in. Every delegate received a bath-robe from one of the sponsors, and near the end there was a bid to establish the Guinness world record for the largest crowd wearing bath-robes. Only a fraction of the Campuseiros participated, and there was still a dense crowd exceeding 1,500 people. Check the video:
The noise in the place is phenomenal and draining. There’s no daylight inside, just 24-hour activity. To get a flavour of the energy and variety, take a look at the Fickr photos. It’s now far more than a LAN party for two big reasons:
The most striking difference takes a while to dawn on you, though. Usually at a conference there’s a theme – a programming platform, a social issue, a research thread. But not here. Unlike any other event I have ever been to, there is no single theme bringing everyone together, apart from the uniting motif of being a young adult in the 21st century. What’s brought people together is the Internet and the future. That has to be the ultimate post-post-modern un-conference possible.
Filed under: Events, Travel | Tagged: Brazil, Campus Party | Comments Off on ✈ Campus Party
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