iphone and me

Beginning of this year,my close friends and colleagues had this iphone mania, I certainly
wasn't into at all. They were obssed by macs anyhow, still few of them do graphics, which seems
logical. But for me, the apple mania died last Christmas when I gave my macbook black
to my sister as present under the tree and switched to more suitable and reliable old
fashioned linux, since sometimes I do want to hack a bit, and on macs I founded my hands bounded.

Long story short, I bought a iphone cos of the deal, not because of the device. I wasn't reading about them at all, so basically I had only opinions of the iphone and i nerds, which wasn't really objective at all.
Phone costed less than 25 euros, and it seemed the best choice comparing the price and power.

What I discovered after having it for few days was quite shocking for me. First of all, you turn your iphone on,
it ask for a pin code and when you cancel it you can normally use the device without any restrictions except GSM/3G services. Which means, If I lost my iphone, anyone can read my emails which I have there, my smses, my notes, my anything, I even think that you can synchronize the whole god damn bloody thing and literally steal all the shit from it. This made me realize a security code policy, which actually solved the problem, anyhow it's still annoying to turn your phone on, put a security pin and then a regular pin. Do that every morning for two weeks and you found yourself crazy.

Paul Watson - problem of the earth

Paul Watson is one of the original activist in greenpeace and founder of sea shepherd observation society for upholding international regulations on fishery and ocean protection. He is leading one of the most radical green movement on planet, he sunk whole whaling fleet of 8 ships and ended whaling in northern sea. Paul:

I think the problem is that we don't really understand what we are, in essence of we are coincided naked apes but our mind is some sort of a divine legend, and we see our self some sort of a god. We think we can walk on the planet and deciding what who will live and who will die, what we will destroy and what will prevail. The truth is we are just a bunch of primates without control.

We are now in the middle of third world war, but the enemy is not ourself, the objective is to save the planet from ourself. There is no hope for masses of humanity, anything they never had and never will. All social changes are from passion, intervention of individuals, small group of individuals. Slavery wasn't ended by any government or institution, woman got the right to vote not because of any government. Civil rights movement is the same thing, India with Mahatma Ghandi, in South Africa Andela. Again is always individuals, you need those individuals with passion and energy to get involved. I don't know any government or institution doing anything to solve this problems. All over the world I am seeing individuals and non government organizations that are passionate to protect ecosystems, species, civil rights. That where I see some optimism, that's where the change is happening.

There is no species on the planet that has survived ignoring the basic laws of ecology and we are breaking those everyday in every way that's going to be on our demise in a very short period of time in less we learn to live harmoniously with the natural world.

Future generation are going to look back on us and they gonna think of us as barbarians, the same way we think of slave trades. There are going to look at us as barbarians, the fact that we are burning all the fossil fuels in few generations, that we wiped out the oceans, we driven species to extinction.

This is the worst, we know what we are doing. The scientist know, the environmentalist know, the companies know and the general public knows and we are allowing ourselfs to do it.

We are the top predator to choose which species will survive and which not.

Floating brain

Sometimes you feel a bit deserted about yourself, like a mindless walking corpse. In such cases I try to focus on creativity, which most of the time bring me back to myself again. You cannot be creative all the time, it's possible for almost all the time :)

I'm glad the Christmas madness is over, cos you spend so much money, throw so much energy and the results is just presents and happiness for small amount of people. What about these other thousands of millions out there? That's what I'm thinkin most, how I can live to help others and still survive as a normal person.

One needs to have time for himself to think about the stuff around. Sometimes it's matter of hours, sometimes days, it never been longer yet. I needed a plan for this year, something to accomplish, far beyond I did before. It's calling, pushing the limit, push it as far as you can.

I decided that is allright for Slovakia to host a OpenOffice.org conference (OOOCON). It will be hard, to hopefully get it approved by the OOO team and finally realize it. I started to make the steps from now on, so I can overlook some fuckups from some nasty Slovaks which are full of shit.

I started to put together around 10 EU country partners for a Framework Programme 7 of the European Commission, and the best is that the government office of Slovakia is willing to participate in such open standards and Free/Libre and Open Source Software projects. It's because of the egovernment and initiatives of the commission like IDABC. For the sake I believe it will be a way different than the Ministry of Finance losers, who are generally incompetent in anything and signing "great" deals with Microsoft.

January is a snail for me, the seed has been planted and I must take care of it until it grow into results. And everybody love the harvesting season, isn't that right? :)

Pushing the limit

I spent this weekend in Kosice, second biggest city in Slovakia, which is located in th eatern part, so you can imagine. I had a nice apartment suite where I spent most of the time, since the weather was getting crazy cold with strong northern winds. I had a lot time to think, without beign disturbed by anything, I also slept like a 14hours a day without interrupt, this doesn't happen so often.

And now I'm home with clearer mind, with bare hands and I just seeded more projects into my life.
I registered freegov.eu, which from the start should be like a get together of news around EU related to open source, open standards and government. I read this news almost everyday, so why not share them and have them together somewhere, why not here?

Second one is a bigger pie, I was thinkin about this a lot, cos I was, or I am activist in the field of information technology and this one was slightly a different story. Still something I have in me for longer time, which is changing me, different angles of view, confused feelings and still unable to do something about it. I'm talking about the cause. I mentioned it couple of times here and there, but still it was mostly clouded in shadows, now it will be clearer.

earthcause.org. the underline is the cause of the earth

As I said, this is a really hard topic and project to say so, and It can literally beat the shit out of me. In this topic is everything, everything bad what I see in this world, it's not only technologies which opened my eyes, it's all the evil stuff we, the people of this earth our doing everywhere. To each other, to nature, to everything which matters more, and which needs to be preserved, protected and saved.

I learned a lot durring my life, a lot about how not to stand and look but go there, reach beyond and create what is missing. I'm glad I'm like this, but my attitude will eat me alive.

Next year I want to shoot, I need to shoot, with video camera, not with guns
and I need to snorkel, scuba dive, shoot underwater, shoot on the ground,
and share what I see, what my eyes receive and the links in my brain.
I need to create and share.

Itapa first day, first feelings

I'm siting a bit ex halted at home after the last two days of madness, there is still a piece of peace over the accomplishment today. I would say we as always rock with the amount of open technologies around ITAPA, one may say it isn't enough, I find that misunderstood. The problem is on the other side of government, over the river of citizens and boats of business.

You may find a clue in a small city of Banska Bystrica, which took pro-open source government edition, and are pushing, and deploying more and more. You may also see a clue over the IDABC project, the European Interoperability Network, the repositories or even more. And you can see a difference in agreement of a document standard structure in federal government of Belgium. All this benefits from the wisdom of the people involved, those who are closing the information and knowledge gap.

I see a huge gap, in the competencies, mostly in the knowledge of the key people, the gap consisting a lack of know-how and information about the world around us. Decision we make are consequent over the years, one must know.

Now I head over to the "private" party of ITAPA, in the Inn hotels network, hopefully maybe I rather fall a sleep :)

patent Bio-shock

Today I attended the EPO "Patenting biotechnological inventions in Europe" conference and I was a bit shocked by something new for me, such as biotechnology patents. EPO practice in granting and examining biotechnological "inventions" based on DNA reproduction, cloning, altered version of various seeds and/or plants or such. However if you look at the EPC, section Chapter V, Biotechnological inventions,

• biological material which is isolated from its natural environment or produced by means of a technical process even if it previously occurred in nature
• plants or animals if the technical feasibility of the invention is not confined to a particular plant or animal variety

well, it seems I'm going to put a lot more interest into these issues, since my involvement with EPLA in 2006/7 and CII directive back in 2004/5, I see a lot of similarities in this treaties, since the software patents or the biotechnology ones are just a consequence of bad patent system and lack of democratic control. The second problem is EPO itself, since in first hand they say No revival of software patents debate
and in other hand they are granting obvious software patents masked as technical one add a computer, and the EPO will give you software patents.

I don't find this really trustworthy and ethical at all, EPO is lacking democratic control, it's diplomacy is misleading, such as mentioned above and I'm just waiting when the decision makers started to see there is no place for such as EPO in the EU.

13% world already visited

I was just surfing arond to find a way how to map my travels, and the quickiest free thing avoiding to use google maps I found TravBuddy.com which only map visited countries, so it ain't the right one I was looking for, but still it's a start :)

next time I try to find something more interesting, like how many times I did travel somewhere, since this year I took around 60 flights, which I will find a bit insane and 10 more are planned until end of 2007, maybe even more...