These are strange times indeed. While they continue to command so much attention in the mainstream media, the 'battles' between old and new modes of distribution, between the pirate and the institution of copyright, seem to many of us already lost and won. We know who the victors are. Why then say any more?

Because waves of repression continue to come: lawsuits are still levied against innocent people; arrests are still made on flimsy pretexts, in order to terrify and confuse; harsh laws are still enacted against filesharing, taking their place in the gradual erosion of our privacy and the bolstering of the surveillance state. All of this is intended to destroy or delay inexorable changes in what it means to create and exchange our creations.

"Schneier sused the word «hacker» to refer to security-breakers, but that's a misunderstanding."

"...In this section, you'll learn how to set up Remember and take quick notes in Emacs. We'll start by configuring Remember to save your notes to a file, and how to configure Remember to save to different places depending on the content. You'll also learn how to quickly search your notes file for entries. You can also integrate Remember into other note-taking systems in Emacs. The sections that cover those systems will also show you how to configure Remember to save your notes there..."

"...The Renaissance ideal can be expressed as a creative synthesis between cultural disciplines, standing in stark contrast to our traditional focus on scientific specialization. This panel presents a number of experts who approach the synthesis of art and science as the modus operandi for their work, using it as a tool for creativity, research, and practice. Understanding these approaches allows us to identify the roles of synthesis in successful innovation and improve the implementation of interdisciplinary synthesis in research and practice..."

"...I'd really like to deploy a customer relationship management (CRM) package to allow us to better track our relationships with our donors, big and small. I was a bit surprised to turn up next to nothing when I typed "perl CRM" into Google..." -- via perl-buzz

I have just discovered that ext3 defaults to reserving 5% of its partition exclusively for root, as a precaution measure that your system does not get FUBAR when you use it for your root partition.

While I rarely get excited over free applications, the KDE news-feed reader Akregator is proving to be an exception to the rule. This simple tool has made my life so much better that it's difficult to talk about it without sounding like a late-night infomercial for OxiClean.

FOSSDev is an year long (Jan '08 to FOSSMeet@NITC '09) contest which aims at promoting contributions to FOSS projects. Total prize money amounts to Rs. 23,500 (will increase, subjected to sponsorships). If you have any queries regarding FOSSDev, make a post in the forum.

It is announced as part of FOSS Meet@ NITC 2008 and its focus of bringing more student contributors to foss. Programs like Google Summer of code is helping more student contributions to foss from India. 60 students got selected in this years program. List of students selected for Google Summer of Code from India