OpenLife

NPO/NGO Media & Technology Calendar. Very useful for learning about new upcoming events. Thanks to Jonathan Robin for this link.

Yesterday - Wednesday 15 January 2003 - we had yet another meeting in the informal network called Open Source Forum. Our guest this evening was Egon Troles who is working at the Koordinierungs- und Beratungsstelle der Bundesregierung für Informationstechnik in der Bundesverwaltung, a part of the German Ministry of the Interior. Egon is heading the Open Source Software in der Bundesverwaltung project.

During the evening Egon gave a lot of very interesting and persuasive examples of projects within the German public administration where it was decided and succesfully implemented to migrate to open source serves and desktop. However, the most exiting moment of the evening was when he presented KNOPPIX which is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.

I tried today to boot my laptop from the KNOPPIX cd-rom. And it worked. Within less than two minutes I had the Linux OS, the KDE desktop and tons of applications available on my laptop. My network card was recognized and configured automatically and I had immediate access to the Internet. Fantastic! The KNOPPIX is available for free download at http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html. Check it out!

I just finished reading Peter Pettinger’s Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings - a biography on my favorite jazz musician: The pianist Bill Evans. The book at times seems to require somewhat to much knowledge about musical theory or piano playing experience - neither of which I possesses. However, the book gives a fascinating picture of his life and times. Interesting how Bill Evans’ life in many ways seems to coincide with another of my favorite piano players: Glenn Gould.

It seems that emergence of new technology and new threats to national security necessarily leads to overreactions and hysteria. A newly published Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report titled Assessing the Risks of Cyber Terrorism, Cyber War and Other Cyber Threats concludes that the risk to national security in forms of attacks to critical infrastructure such as electricity supply, military capabilities, water supply and so on because of cyber attacks by terrorists is vastly overstated. Instead of cyber weapons used by terrorists being viewed as weapon of mass destruction they should by viewed as weapons of mass annoyance. The report also points to that focus of governments should rather be directed at the use of the Internet by terrorists for cybercrimes such as fraud and espionage.

Unfulfilled expectations:
http://mortenlund.blogspot.com/2002_10_01_mortenlund_archive.html#85534214.

Hmmm