Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

You probably read it on /. or elsewhere, but here is the important part of a PR about a lawsuit:

FACIL, a non-profit association, which promotes the collective appropriation of Free Software, contests the Quebec government purchasing methods for software used within public administrations. FACIL has filed a motion before the Quebec Superior Court in order to bring an end to these methods which the association believes are not in the best interest of the Quebec government, but more importantly, not in accordance with the regulation for supply contracts, construction contracts and service contracts of government departments and public bodies (R.Q. c. A-6.01, r.0.03).

In short when the Québec government spend millions of tax payer money buying proprietary software, after bending its rules to not have to call for bids, it does not get unnoticed. The fact that only Free Software advocate are raising the issues is just revealing.

It started a while back, in March, with a potential bidder: Savoir Faire Linux' declarative judgment request

Coverage:

• Official press release
• CBC
• Michael Geist
• Technaute (in French)
• The Inquirer
• Savoir Faire Linux own story (in French)

For hackweek, I have been working on implementating the "rendering" in libopenraw. This mean I need to extract metadata for the various parameters need for the demosaic and color correction, including linearization tables^[1] and camera to XYZ matrices. For this I'm trying to stick to the DNG data model as it likely already abstract the different formats.

I'm at the Novell offices in Provo, UT for hackweek. The YOW -> DTW -> SLC flight was uneventful. There will be attendance at the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 as well.

What are my plans for hackweek? Some libopenraw work in order to have a version releasable with more and more features. If that release can be usable to actually render RAW files, then it will be great. So far I have committed some changes to the test suite and and fixed the detection by content.

Joel Cornuz posted and excellent summary about Linux and digital photography.

That summarize pretty well my goals with ''Niepce Digital", with one more priority added: Freedom. Not that it is the exhaustive list of what you'll find at first, but it clearly describe what I think needs fixing. Fortunately, with the power of Free Software, lot of thing can be reused and/or shared.

The Sunday before GUADEC, I went to visit a few of the must-see places in Sultanahmet in Istanbul.

This was at Haghia Sophia, a cathedral from the 6th century, turned into a mosque in the 15th century. During the day it is crowded by a lot of visitors:

Shot at 50mm, 1/80, f/1.8, ISO 200. - Istanbul, Turkey - July 6th 2008

For the little story, I think I got that shot because I saw that Czech photographer, with whom I was talking earlier, using a Leica M8, pointing into that direction.

These pictures brought to you by the idiots at the ISP techsupport that don't read infrastructure tickets and instead try to be the wizard.... and mess up^[1]. Yes I was offline, I didn't get distracted too much.