Petter Reinholdtsen

I am working on publishing yet another book related to Creative Commons. This time it is a book filled with interviews and histories from those around the globe making a living using Creative Commons.

Yesterday, after many months of hard work by several volunteer translators, the first draft of a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the book Made with Creative Commons from 2017 was complete. The Spanish translation is also complete, while the Dutch, Polish, German and Ukraine edition need a lot of work. Get in touch if you want to help make those happen, or would like to translate into your mother tongue.

The whole book project started when Gunnar Wolf announced that he was going to make a Spanish edition of the book. I noticed, and offered some input on how to make a book, based on my experience with translating the Free Culture and The Debian Administrator's Handbook books to Norwegian Bokmål. To make a long story short, we ended up working on a Bokmål edition, and now the first rough translation is complete, thanks to the hard work of Ole-Erik Yrvin, Ingrid Yrvin, Allan Nordhøy and myself. The first proof reading is almost done, and only the second and third proof reading remains. We will also need to translate the 14 figures and create a book cover. Once it is done we will publish the book on paper, as well as in PDF, ePub and possibly Mobi formats.

The book itself originates as a manuscript on Google Docs, is downloaded as ODT from there and converted to Markdown using pandoc. The Markdown in modified by a script before is converted to DocBook using pandoc. The DocBook is modified again using a script before it is used to create a Gettext POT file for translators. The translated PO file is then combined with the earlier mentioned DocBook file to create a translated DocBook file, which finally is given to dblatex to create the final PDF. The end result is a set of editions of the manuscript, one English and one for each of the translations.

The translation is conducted using the Weblate web based translation system. Please have a look there and get in touch if you would like to help out with proof reading. :)

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Today I was pleasantly surprised to discover my operating system of choice, Debian, was used in the info screens on the subway stations. While passing Nydalen subway station in Oslo, Norway, I discovered the info screen booting with some text scrolling. I was not quick enough with my camera to be able to record a video of the scrolling boot screen, but I did get a photo from when the boot got stuck with a corrupt file system:

While I am happy to see Debian used more places, some details of the content on the screen worries me.

The image show the version booting is 'Debian GNU/Linux lenny/sid', indicating that this is based on code taken from Debian Unstable/Sid after Debian Etch (version 4) was released 2007-04-08 and before Debian Lenny (version 5) was released 2009-02-14. Since Lenny Debian has released version 6 (Squeeze) 2011-02-06, 7 (Wheezy) 2013-05-04, 8 (Jessie) 2015-04-25 and 9 (Stretch) 2017-06-15, according to a Debian version history on Wikpedia. This mean the system is running around 10 year old code, with no security fixes from the vendor for many years.

This is not the first time I discover the Oslo subway company, Ruter, running outdated software. In 2012, I discovered the ticket vending machines were running Windows 2000, and this was still the case in 2016. Given the response from the responsible people in 2016, I would assume the machines are still running unpatched Windows 2000. Thus, an unpatched Debian setup come as no surprise.

The photo is made available under the license terms Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution International (CC BY 4.0).

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.