A better world

Following the steps of Michael and Peter I’ve just started to blog on ZDNet Asia yesterday. My writings there will be a lot more “journalistic” than my random stories over here and covering Linux and Open Source in China, and not what I personally get involved with. Most likely I will also add the feed to the BLUG Planet but only once I’m done writing a feed filter that removes the add in the default feed. If there are any specific topic that you would like to be covered just leave a comment at either place.

Some of you might have received a SMS from me this morning, I have switched mobile provider and therefore have a new number. I’ll keep the old one for another month during the transition period. Why did I switch? Well the main reason is that I am getting about 10 to 20 SMS and 1-3 MMS spam a day with China Mobile. Being a “Diamond member” (the highest membership level at China Mobile) I did call them a week ago to ask to solve the problem (there are many many technical solutions they could implement) but the only two things they could tell me is that they got an award for fighting spam (???) and that I should install a software on my phone to do that. Note that I started to get spam from day one with them. I suspect their staff are just selling customer data for a few bucks. I still told the customer representative I gave them a week to address the issue or else I would switch carrier. Nothing has happened, so here I come China Unicom. On top of not getting spam (at least at the beginning) I’ll get the pleasure to enjoy 3G on my phone (as China Mobile only supports the Chinese 3G standard on overpriced handsets made only for the Chinese market) and flat rate calling all over China.

I won’t post my new number here, but for those of you who know me, do not hesitate to either send me an sms or drop me an email to get the new number.

I hope everybody had a great time over Christmas and the new year festivities. It’s not really my preferred time of the year for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean other people can’t enjoy ! So I have been focusing my time and energy on Open Source stuff, namely RUR-PLE, some GNOME.Asia related stuff, Greenboard of course, our pilots in migrant schools and Software Freedom Day planning for 2010.
On top of those activities I will start blogging for ZDNet Asia about Linux and Open Source in China, most likely organize the Beijing chapter of the Global Ignite Week with O’Reilly and the cool guys from the Beijing LUG, while trying to get a Hackerspace started in Beijing with a few other enthusiasts from various communities (but mainly from the BLUG though for now).
And finally I am happily providing hosting space for two open source projects, the Phnom Penh LUG, a growing Linux community in Cambodia, and moonOS, a lightweight Ubuntu based distribution (using Enlightenment) started by a cool Cambodian guy with whom I chat almost daily nowadays as we’re working on other open source stuff together. I’ll probably come back to all of those but for sure it’s more than enough to keep me away from writing here…

Catching up with life since my return from GNOME.Asia Summit as a lot of things have happened as well last month. On December 1st the SFD General Assembly was held (IRC meeting) and as our former president Robert Schumann stepped down I was elected the new president for 2010! This is definitely a big responsibility and I will try to keep up the good work that has been carried out since 2004. The good thing is that we have more board members this coming year (some new ones and some older ones) which hopefully will help us to do more. I want to thank everyone for their support and more specifically my colleagues from SFI, our sponsors, the members of the Beijing LUG and all the SFD team leaders around the world without whom we would never have done so much. so, Thank you all!

and she said YESSSS. For those knowing us it won’t be a big surprise as we’ve been already over 6 years together. For those knowing me, it’s probably a surprise as you know what I think about “getting married” (I’ve just lost a few beers). Overall I believe it was the right thing to do and considering the YESSSS I got, definitely it did make Pockey happy!

As some of you know, both Pockey and I were at the GNOME.Asia Summit in Ho Chi Minh City this month. A lot of things happened and I will have to get back to this later. I just wanted to thank Lemote and more specifically Zhang Fuxin for his continuous support to the Beijing LUG and Open Source. On top of taking part in Software Freedom Day this year and using this opportunity to announce their new all-in-one desktop computer they have also agreed to sponsor the GNOME.Asia Summit with two Yeeloong laptop that were used for short Linux courses during the conference and that will be then donated to the computer lab in Ho Chi Minh City to be used as hacking devices. We all hope to see a lot of Vietnamese Open Source Software be ported to MIPS and more participation to our growing Loongson communities. And for those who can read Chinese you’ll be happy to know that Lemote has just launched a new Chinese version of their website!

Just as a reminder to myself, this year is the first time since I live in Beijing (winter 2002-2003) that I witness heavy snow (30cm) so early. It actually snowed the whole day of November 1st 2009 and it was freezing cold (we just lost 20 degrees Celsius in 1-2 days!). Today is slightly warmer (4°C) and sunny so it’s slowly melting for now.

As an occasional reader of The Linux Game Tome I just stumbled upon a very interesting article about Linux and indie games:

Indie game developer Koonsolo just revealed some surprising sales statistics on the Linux version of their game. 7 months ago they released their game ‘Mystic Mine‘, and in that time the Linux version sold more copies than the version for Windows. Yet they get plenty more website visits from Windows users. Koen Witters, the founder of the company, explains: ‘For every 232 Linux visitors we get on our website, one of them buys our game. If you compare that to the windows users, we need 526 of them to get a single sale.’ So it seems Linux users are more eager to buy downloadable games than Windows or even Mac OS X users. This data definitely asks the question if Linux is a more viable platform for game developers than anyone currently assumes. The full statistical analysis can be found at http://www.koonsolo.com/news/?p=33.

Definitely something that should make game publishers think twice, and which reminds me there were similar results found about online purchasing frequency and amounts between Firefox and IE users. Really makes you wonder why Chinese websites (and online banking!!!) support for Firefox is still so poor!

I would like to extend a HUGE thank you to Daniel for making the SFD Schwag Packing Video this year. Daniel actually already did the Beijing SFD 2007 video which got us elected as Best SFD Event that year and will follow us during the whole Software Freedom Day in Beijing, where we will have 10 teams pushing Free and Open Source Software (and 85 teams nationwide thanks to SFI, BLUG, COPU, Sun and Mozilla – more about this later). So right now just sit back, relax and enjoy the show!

SFD 2009 Goodies Packing from Daniel.

For the second consecutive year, BLUG is packing the schwags that pre-registered SFD teams are entitled to. We’re actually having 12% more pre-registered team this year with a very different country split (compared to 2008). The volunteer group just made it to BLUG office and are working diligently on each team pack. Our “movie maker”, author of the Beijing SFD ‘07 video, also joined and is documenting the whole process. Thanks to everyone from BLUG and hopefully all the packs will make it on time for your SFD events!