YGingras^.net

March is a busy month in the Free Software world. From 2009-03-21 to 2009-03-22 I'll be attending Libre Planet in Boston then from 2009-03-25 to 2009-03-29 I will be at PyCon in Chicago. Lot's of great speakers and two days of advanced hands-on tutorial by the leaders of the industry. You can't go wrong with that.

I still don't know how I will travel to Libre Planet though. Traveling by train would require going up to New York then back north to Boston and all the bus fares that I found so far take 12 hours or more to reach Boston. I might end up taking the plane but the best option would be to find someone else for car pooling. If you are in on around Montreal and that you plan to attend Libre Planet by car, let me know.

update: I'll be car pooling with Pascal Charest from Laboratoires Phoenix. Woohoo!

• Comments (0)

I'm really excited to announce that the Gazest development is being sponsored by Savoir-faire Linux. The demo site will now run much faster: they have server farms with big fat pipes scattered across Montréal. Cyrille, their CEO, has a great understanding of post-industrial economy: the market of services where knowhow is the main capital. It's always a pleasure to talk with him; he sees free software not as an altruistic endeavor but as the only logical choice for corporations to compete in the modern world. He believes in the economic viability of free software and the current sponsorship is the testimony that those are not empty words. More exciting news to come shortly, stay tuned.

• Comments (0)

We had the pleasure to hear a talk by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation on copyrights. The event was organized by many volunteers. Strangely, most of them were not from hardcore geek groups. You could even see hippies advocating the benefits of homegrown berries and comic writers debating about the proper inking techniques.

The first part of the event was featuring various kiosks by several organizations active in the Montréal area. There was my former employer, several GNU/Linux user groups and few free speech activists. There was not many visitors. Given the lack of prior notification that was understandable but still disappointing. Nevertheless, it was fun to see former coworkers again. I finally had the occasion to brag about by new π memorization skills. At university, I'm affiliated with the LaCIM, the lab Simon Plouffe was affiliated to when he came up with his formula for the computation of digits of π. Simon Plouffe is also a former world record holder for remembering digits of π so I don't impress anyone there.

• Full text (2305 words)
• Comments (0)