Ubuntu used in a p2p demo in Spain

This morning, a group of people in Bilbao, Spain, have proved that sharing is legal (at least in Spain). Some mass media and associations like SGAE (the Spanish RIAA equivalent) are trying to make the citizens to believe that sharing culture is against the law and will kill the music.

Laptop downloading a song

The original story is at Compartir es bueno (Spanish), and an extract:

We proved it: sharing is not a crime. Today, at 11:07 we have downloaded the song “Get on your knees” by Teddy Bautista in front of the SGAE building. There was the press and some curious people. Nobody has stopped us. The police knew the facts because of a burofax was sent the last week. If music downloading were illegal, police would be forced to stop us, because they are enforced to avoid a crime if they know it’s going to happen.

Note: sorry for the bad translation but I’m not very inspired today (some jet lag yet)

Don't use zeroconf

Please, don’t use zeroconf (avahi) or you’ll get a bunch of network admins over your head.

If you’ve read and followed the last James’ post on avahi please undo your steps.

Thank you :)

PS: Of course, if you aren’t on UBZ you can fuck up your network as much as you want

What's wrong with Launchpad

Browsing the Launchpad wiki, I’ve found the page which explains everything. I’ve been wondering for some time why there was such an information overdose and poor design in Launchpad pages. The answer is at TotalExposure

Every piece of Launchpad information, except for internal database ID’s, needs to be exposed in the web UI for Launchpad, in two places: first, in at least one page, as part of the main body of the page, and second, in a portlet for the object of which it is an attribute, or a related object.

This is a possible approach, but there are others…

About the new remote from Apple:

Dell Media Experience remote = 60 buttons you’ll never use.
Apple Remote = Just the six buttons you need.

Or the Basecamp manifesto:

We believe in Less Software
Basecamp is simple on purpose. We’ve kept the confusing, complex stuff out. Basecamp doesn’t do everything, but what it does it does extremely well. That’s focus and that’s the baseline principle of our “Less Software” approach. Not more stuff, just the right stuff to help you get your job done.

Which is better designed? Which is nice to use and which makes you feel pain when you try to achive a simple operation hidden in an information sea?

I read somewhere (I can’t remember the source):

Something isn’t perfect when there’s nothing to add, but when there’s nothing left to remove.

Amarok's bizarre sorting

These days I’ve been using KDE and discovered amaroK. This app is pure crack :) I love it!

But yesterday I discovered a bizarre “bug”:

Bad sorting of amaroK

amaroK sorts the album list by year (desc) and then alphabetically (asc) so that’s what we get (4-3-1-2). I’m not sure if it has an easy solution but I’ll file the bug and let’s see what happens.