Last weeks flashback: this year started quite busy. In the near past I was and am still working on top secret customer web projects. A project I am allowed to announce is the ThinkFinger project at sourceforge.net. As my notebook has the fingerprint reader for which the developers of the project are developing a linux driver I felt that I should give them something back. So why not doing some webdesign?
Linux consumed a big portion of my time too as I was playing around with beryl as window manager under kde. And today I spent some time on updating several wordpress blogs. Some time ago version 2.1 was released (named ELLA) with some nice new features.
Yesterday I applied as a developmember at the amazoop project at sourceforge.net and we’ll see if I can be of any use to the developers. Oh… and I almost forgot about my new platform which allows you to share your books/dvds/etc. in communities. One active community is setup at honya.desu.at (which is japanese and means something like “this is a book store”) which is focused on items related to Japan. Guests visiting the site can only see the items and descriptions but cannot access the community features: see to whom the book belongs and see to whom the owner lended the book.
And last but not least I was testing lots of google features (analytics, adsense, etc.).

Now it is time for something completely different. Let me introduce you to something which I think was, is, and will be very important in the future: inter humanity. Do not be afraid. It is not some spiritual plan to save the world or anything. It is just some codex/charta/guidelines I want to write down and improve with the help of others. Before it is too confusing let me point you to my inter humanity pages where you can read on. Have a nice day.

So what is keeping me busy? Basically it is our new company. Now legal things are almost through and we expect to get our commercial register entry within the next weeks. Of course pulpmedia is not new but it’s legal form will be brandnew soon. Expect to see our new webpage (which will replace the placeholder page) online within the next four weeks.
The most recent project was the Car Jet Calculator of Alpha Airways which brought us into local television too. Hooray… we are famous.
Besides the private stuff many things happened. Dr.Hu built a DataMatrix J2ME application which works like the qrcode application but with the DataMatrix.
And guess what: Adobe managed to release their Flash Player 9 for Linux.
Linux community in general is very vivid at the moment. Probably you want to read on the homepage of my favourite distribution about some new eyecandy for graphical desktops.

PS: Did I mention that we are going to Paris next wednesday. Expect some gallery update within the next two weeks.

PPS: Is it just me or did you too realize that I keep announcing things within designated time ranges too often?

Sorry… being really busy lately. Just dropped by to write about one hot topic. In some week Europe is going to vote for or agains Software Patents again. Emphasis on “AGAIN” as it was already dropped last year.

As much as I like the European idea I dislike the European Commission. Can’t I do something to get rid of it? The parliament should be enough.

Unbelievable how corporations are lobbying the European Union to death. After a lot of pressure by the people the European parliament said no to software patents last year. But the case is still hot. The European commission is preparing to force the Europeans to introduce patents on software.

Wouldn’t it feel good to escape the dictatorship of the lobbies and to show them that they cannot control everything like they want to?

Why don’t we show the lobby to go back to the place where they came from? I really do not want to wait until it is too late, to wait until the European commission just enforced the law. Let us show them that the people have a voice too. Let us organize ourselves now and demonstrate against this practice before bad things happened. Everyone who is interested but too lazy to follow the topic can drop me an email with his/her details wolfgang (@t) hafenscher (dot) net and I will inform him/her about the current situation and give him/her details about public demonstrations and other activities near his/her place.

I am not going to found any new organization but will rely solely on existing organizations. My goal is to be the interface to the existing organizations for those who are interested in the topic itself but do not have the time or the will to follow all the activities.

Get information about the whole case at http://swpat.ffii.org/
Some other background info at
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.truth50.com/