I am very pleased to announce that I will be presenting the Underweb at LiWoLi 2012 in Linz, Austria. My talk is scheduled for 18:00 on May 24th at the Stadtwerkstatt.

“LiWoLi is a community festival, open lab and annual meeting spot for artists, educators and developers using and creating Free Software (FLOSS), Open Hardware and Open Design in the artistic and cultural context. This event is all about sharing artistic skills, code and knowledge within the public domain and discussing the challenges of an open practice.”

http://www.liwoli.at/programm/2012/

facebook is going public, the effects of which will eventually influence and change the shape and dimension of this gigantic online communication space. The impact on the web will be massive. We can only speculate now about how this change will unfold. However, if the registration statement by Mark Zuckerberg is any sign, we can expect facebook to have an even more-confusing relationship with its users.

Zuckerberg starts his very personalized statement with:

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

This is an interesting statement to make considering the fact that facebook was started as an online undergraduate social space. Despite its teeny bopper roots, the un-company has grown since its humble and tainted beginnings. It now hands over this social mission to a board of trustees and investors.

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I’m posting here some material from the presentation I gave at the Piksel festival in November. (more…)

“Adobe has confirmed that it will cease development of Flash on mobile devices, saying that it will instead focus on HTML5 and apps for mobile platforms.” http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/09/adobe-kills-mobile-flash/

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I am excited to be presenting the Underweb ideas and application at this years Piksel festival in Bergen, Norway.

The Piksel festival is a unique festival of art and free software. Started over a decade ago by artist Gisle FRØYSLAND, the Piksel festival gathers artists, hackers, researchers, activists and developers for a few days to discuss and present the latest and greatest of the free cultural scene. (more…)

Check out Tim Berners-Lee on TED. It’s hard to imagine all the naysayers he encountered when presenting his original WWW idea. His innovation on previous hyptertext formats and frameworks was so subtle and dependent on participation that many others simply were unable to envision it properly. (more…)

Pbuilder will allow you to build your ubuntu package in a simulated and clean environment.
To set, it up, you will need to get the needed applications:

sudo aptitude install pbuilder debhelper devscripts build-essential

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Since starting the Underweb project a number of years ago, much has changed in the look and function of the WWW. Just three years, ago HTML5 was a distant reality. Just two years ago, the browser market was still dominated by IE. Now that the market territory is loosening up, more players are stepping up to the plate. The latest contender in the oncoming browser war is, surprise-surprise, Amazon.

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Because of the way I have re-factored my code, I needed to update libpeas. By refactoring, I discovered a mysterious bug that seems to be eliminated in more recent versions of libpeas. I found some packages available at:
https://launchpad.net/~ricotz/+archive/testing. However, this requires a number of gnome 3 updates, which in turn require an entire dist-upgrade; something that I am trying to avoid as a dist upgrade would solve the original libpeas problem.

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I was trying to update the libpeas PPA, which in turn necessitates an update to the pygobject package. Unfortunately, pygobject3 is not in Ubuntu Natty. Updating this PPA would require a new gobject-introspection, which in turn needs a new libglib2.0 package. The rabbit hole opens up from there.

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