+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a></div>
+ <div class="date">15th April 2015</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
+computer system for schools I've involved in,
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
+being used in India. But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
+interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
+Agarwal.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
+historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
+My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
+installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
+fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
+few software start-ups as well.</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
+years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
+anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
+educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
+nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
+it was known then. Since then I have started using the various
+education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
+software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
+figuratively). Even if I take the simplest software which is
+gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
+the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
+pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
+
+<p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
+as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
+possibility of a larger life span. Of course with both it's more a
+question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
+for the developer per-se.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
+think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
+help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
+
+<p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
+that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
+However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
+pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
+but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
+Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
+still) I have had for a long time :</p>
+
+<p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
+each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
+far would each travel and similar questions like these.
+
+<p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
+be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
+interactive manner. While sites such as the
+<a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
+Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
+inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done. I dunno
+if there is a free software which does something like this. The idea
+being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
+this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
+colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
+or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
+This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
+the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
+psychics and everything in-between.</p>
+
+<p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
+one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
+meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
+also be used.</p>
+
+<p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
+enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary. I don't think it
+should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
+sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
+from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
+the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
+the user's input.</p>
+
+<p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
+palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
+needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
+copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
+nature, history etc. and let it loose. This could turn to be really
+huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
+commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
+stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
+both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
+lot. This is more so in educational software as these applications
+need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
+immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
+maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
+of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
+maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
+aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
+quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
+between kpat and Aiselriot. In desktops it's a tie between
+gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
+whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
+Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
+school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
+people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
+various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
+
+<p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
+passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
+then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
+well.</p>
+
+<p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
+instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
+there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
+Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
+
+<p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
+and upgrades. People have this myth that each update and upgrade
+means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
+innumerable times. That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
+like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
+it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
+changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
+the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
+releases.</p>
+
+<p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
+is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
+is aimed at.
+
+<p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
+around 2 years, and
+<a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
+some experience</a> there. Some of the things we learnt/discovered
+there was :</p>
+
+<ol>
+
+ <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
+ and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
+ portion/syllabus given.</li>
+
+ <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
+ is in the syllabus.</li>
+
+ <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
+ times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
+ you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
+ say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
+ as recognizable as say a
+ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
+ Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
+ possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
+ which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
+ parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
+ something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
+
+</ol>
+</div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html">I'm going to the Open Source Developers' Conference Nordic 2015!</a></div>
+ <div class="date"> 7th April 2015</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
+href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
+Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
+
+<p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
+where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
+<a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
+it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted). As
+part of my involvement with the
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
+association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
+conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
+Hackathon with our friends
+over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
+<a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>. This part is
+named the 'My Society' track in the program. There is still space for
+more talks and participants. I hope to see you there.</p>
+
+<p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
+submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
+</div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html">Proof reading the Norwegian translation of Free Culture by Lessig</a></div>
+ <div class="date"> 4th April 2015</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
+<a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
+<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
+At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
+inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
+I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
+check the text up to chapter 13. The current status is available on the
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
+project pages. You can also check out the
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
+and HTML version available in the
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
+directory</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
+you find any.</p>
+</div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a></div>
+ <div class="date"> 9th March 2015</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
+where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
+open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
+come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
+The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
+audience. For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
+<a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
+Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
+the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
+some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org). I fill
+all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
+the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
+
+<p>The list of NUUG videos
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
+include things like a
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
+Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
+re-implementation</a>, the
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
+the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
+video</A> and many others.</p>
+
+<p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
+Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
+spread the word there. I also hope to find useful recordings from the
+Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
+channel as well. But this require locating the videos and their meta
+information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
+recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
+focus on this. Perhaps you want to help. Please join us on IRC,
+<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
+if you want to help make this happen.</p>
+
+<p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
+filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
+today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
+web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
+channel. Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
+do not properly sync the video and sound. It is generated by recoding
+a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
+Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
+produces acceptable quality. Help needed, please get in touch if you
+know how to fix it using free software.</p>
+</div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html">The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway</a></div>
+ <div class="date">28th February 2015</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
+<a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
+finally will show up in Norway. According to the magazine
+<a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
+made for
+<a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
+distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
+This is great news. As part of my involvement with
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
+a friend have
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
+to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
+were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it. I am happy he did, as
+the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
+it happen ourselves.
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
+can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
+is.</p>
+
+<p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
+here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
+</div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html">The Norwegian open channel Frikanalen - 24x7 on the Internet</a></div>
+ <div class="date">25th February 2015</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
+<a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
+strong. It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
+television. It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
+browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
+Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
+api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
+national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV. But only between 12:00
+and 17:30 Norwegian time. This has finally changed, after many years
+with limited distribution. A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
+stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
+the channel the rest of the day. This is presented on
+<a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>. And
+since a few days ago, the channel is also available
+via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
+UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
+the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
+to one of these sources. The first should work with most players and
+browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
+with VLC.</p>
+
+<ul>
+ <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
+ <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
+and audio is slightly out of sync. We have not been able to figure
+out how to fix it. It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
+transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
+Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar. If you have ideas how to
+fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no. We currently
+use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+./ffmpeg2theora.linux <OBE_gemini_URL.ts> -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
+ --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
+ --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 <pw> /frikanalen.ogv
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
+I am curious how far the multicast stream reach. It do not make it to
+my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
+Norway that I am aware of.</p>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff