January 22nd, 2010
John Gruber on Vimeo’s new HTML5 player:
“Nice. And, just like YouTube’s, it only works with Safari and Chrome because they’re using H.264. Firefox supports the HTML5 video element, but only for Ogg Theora video. Get with the program, Mozilla.”
Mr. Gruber, I subscribe to your blog in my feed reader because I enjoy feeling like a rational human being. I am still a recovering Apple zealot, and it’s interesting to see how much my views have changed over the last five years.
Some of my friends know that I started with Linux simply because it was free and accessible to me, but I stuck around because of the philosophy behind it—most notably, the concept of free software, and the concept of what is “bad” software because you can’t change it or legally use it.
When I hear comments such as Mr. Gruber’s—”get with the program, Mozilla”—I wonder if people really understand the patent issues that surround the HTML5 open video debate. (Read more on the debate from Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul.) Long story short, H.264 is patent encumbered, Ogg Theora isn’t (as far as anybody can tell). Full stop.
Unfortunately here in the United States, we still permit software patents. Also unfortunate is that somebody is charging for patent licenses to the H.264 codec.
There’s a reason Mozilla is staying away from H.264, and it’s not just about the monetary cost of a license. Mozilla has taken on the responsibility of providing a free-software solution for browsing the web, which often directly conflicts with anything that requires a separate license. Even if Mozilla did want to pay for the patent license, even redistributing Firefox with the H.264 codec would taint the very freedom that it touts.
So, Mr. Gruber, et al.: Get with the program. Understand what Mozilla and its hundreds of contributors want to do. Help put an end to software patents. Or, help to make Theora better, making it more useful to YouTube and Vimeo. It takes a community to have real action, not just the beck and call of the few and powerful.
Tags: fedora, html5, mozilla, ogg theora, open video, rant | 16 Comments »
December 20th, 2009
Edit: I did the first one myself :)
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December 7th, 2009
During an extremely long hackfest today at FUDCon Toronto 2009, I planned to work on resurrecting fuse-mediawiki from its 15-month slumber.
I failed.
After talking with Jesus M. Rodriguez for an hour or so, we both determined that FUSE is not the right way to go about this for what I want to accomplish. The only thing we were planning to use FUSE for so far was downloading the wiki pages; everything else would be done with helper scripts.
We discussed things like “pull” and “commit”. It started to sound like a bastardized VCS. So we wrote a bastardized VCS. :)
Introducing mw: a command-line program with subcommands like “fetch” and “commit” to work with MediaWiki installations. I spent all day creating the framework for commands and all sorts of things, and ended up creating the init and fetch commands to start a mw repo and fetch some pages.
Currently: useless. Future: promising. I’m hoping that I can get the committing portion ready to roll within the week, and have fetch get all the pages of wikis and categories soonish.
Some key awesomeness: attempts to merge instead of just giving up (haha, you suck, MediaWiki), unified diffs, logs, and anything you really feel like doing.
Clone it now and read the README and HACKING:
git clone git://github.com/ianweller/mw.git
Edit: If you want to discuss this with me at FUDCon tomorrow, by all means do. Ping me on IRC to see where I’m at. :)
Tags: fedora, fudcon, fudconf13, mediawiki, mw, python | 1 Comment »
November 21st, 2009
Huge interface rework. A lot nicer looking. Go test it—F11 and F12 are in Bodhi.
Tags: fedora, gwibber | 6 Comments »
November 9th, 2009
It’s a meme!
Me, exhibiting the new BlurryArm feature in Fedora at SouthEast Linux Fest. Photo by Jeremy Sands, stolen from Facebook with assumed permission :)
Name: Ian Weller
Quest: To seek the freest software
Favorite color: Blue. (This seems fairly obvious.)
IRC nick: ianweller (Also fairly obvious.)
Channels: Practically #fedora-* on FreeNode
Location: Salina, Kansas, USA
I’ll be at FUDCon Toronto 2009!
Tags: fedora | Comments Off
November 2nd, 2009
Down at FAD Fedora Talk 2009, I spent most of my time working on a mockup for how we could create a new interface to control Fedora Talk in Fedora Community. Here’s a screenshot of what I ended up committing to a new talk branch:
The hope for this interface is to provide a drop-dead simple way of starting a conference and selecting whether to stream and record it or not.
Tags: asterisk, fedora, fedora community, ftalk, moksha | 2 Comments »
September 10th, 2009
During my summer internship with Red Hat’s Community Architecture team, my main assignment was to build an automated platform (which eventually was built into Fedora Community) for generating and displaying statistics within our community.
Needless to say, it didn’t get done. :) But it did get a healthy start, and even though the last couple of months I haven’t been extremely active in Fedora, it’s still alive and well.
This week, I started working on a research paper for my independent study at my high school. This independent study just happens to be continuing work on the project that I started a couple of months ago. The paper will include mostly primary sources of what people have said on Stats 2.0’s discussion page on the wiki, but I would love to talk with people on IRC about what they think is important to track so we can analyze not only the growth of the Fedora, but the growth of the community.
It doesn’t end with the one-semester independent study. I am presenting on this subject at UTOSC 2009. In this presentation I will discuss many of the variables of a free software community that can be tracked, and even provide example code and where to get started on automatically tracking them.
So, there’s the state of the Stats 2.0. Would you like to speak with me on IRC sometime about what you think is important to be tracked?
Tags: community, fedora, free software, high school, red hat, statistics, utosc, utosc 2009 | 2 Comments »
September 5th, 2009
Just performed a clean upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4 since I badly needed one. Let me know if anything’s broken.
Blog post to come later today on Fedora’s Statistics 2.0, my upcoming UTOSC speaking role about it, and my independent study revolving around it as well.
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July 21st, 2009
“Is the origin zero or awesome?”
Tags: red hat, Teaching Open Source | Comments Off
July 21st, 2009
- Got a temporary badge for the Red Hat offices. I can open doors!
- Participated in discussions on the history of free software/open source/good stuff and the sort of “network(ing) operations” of free software hacking
- Ate lunch (om nom nom)
- Pestered people massively over IRC
- Ran a camera (video and still)
- Triaged email and sat on my butt, as well as floors and desks
- Ate a damn good pizza
Tags: fedora, red hat, Teaching Open Source | Comments Off
![[FSF Associate Member]](/pub/88x31/fsf-member-7305.png)
