2007-08-02 Books Preservation

There are numerous enemies of books : from fire to autodafé. Another enemy is water or humidity… if your books start to smell moldy. That's not good a sign. A little bit worry about that, I installed a small sensor in one of my bookshelf. The purpose is to monitor humidity and see if the relative humidity level is going to the famous 75% limit. I'm using an USB-based humidity and temperature sensor made by Raphaël Assénat. The software and the hardware design is free software/hardware but you can purchase from him the assembled version (maybe a good way to help the initiative). You can see on the today's graph that the humidity increased when it was very rainy outside and a window was opened. But nothing critical for the books. I'm just wondering when Ikea will include by default a humidity sensor in each Billy bookshelf ?

Tags: archiving humidity preservation books sensor

geo: Les Bulles, Chiny

2007-08-15 Affero General Public License Version 3 Draft

The Free Software Foundation just released the Last Call Draft (2) of Version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License. For those who don't know what's the Affero license is, it's a GNU General Public License with an additional clause to cover distribution over the network (e.g. web-based services or any network services). The purpose is to keep the software free including when the distribution is only via remotely accessible service. The comment process is now open… I added a comment about a potential (or not?) loophole. The usefulness of such free software license is increasing due to the exponential use of web services.

Tags: affero fsf gpl freedom freesoftware

2007-08-18 Second Hand Market and Public Domain

I have a very bad habit when I'm in a second hand market selling old books. Before looking deeply into the table of content or the content, my eyes are always attracted by the date of publication. You never know, sometimes you may find books that felt or will fall soon in the public domain… that's a potential source to be put in Wikipedia or any other project collecting works. If those works became accessible, they could be used/mixed with other works. In that scope, there is a nice summary table of copyright term in US (for Europe there are some differences but that's already a good starting point). A table to keep in his pocket or his moleskine when you are in a second hand market…

Tags: freedom publicdomain archiving copyright books

2007-08-26 Java Is Bloated

Sometimes I'm reading the blog of Jonathan Schwartz but I shouldn't…

JAVA is a technology whose value is near infinite to the internet...

Jonathan, are you sure ? PHP, Python or Perl (and sometimes Ruby) are infinitely infinite to the Internet in such case.

Tags: blog complexity python java perl internet

geo: Les Bulles, Chiny

2007-08-26 Joshua In Gaume

When living in a rural area, lots of people think there is nothing or not much social activities but this is not really true at least in our area in Gaume. Looking for a proof ? Friday night in the next village called Jamoigne, Joshua played live in a small concert organized by a local youth club. Joshua played really well with a nice energy (helped by a second singer called I.Q./IQ ?) and nice touch of electro. Good vibes… I'll look forward to purchase their album.

Small notes for Joshua (the band and their webmaster) : please make your website not only in the proprietary flash "technology" but make your website (plain XHTML/HTML) readable by human and machine (like the Google Bot). It will be easier when we are looking for you… and your good music.

Tags: blog rural live electro music joshua

geo: Jamoigne, Chiny