Press review 09-02-2013

This post starts what I hope to be a weekly review of press articles. The idea is to have a collection of news pieces to read on a snowy Saturday morning or a hot Sunday afternoon. These are articles that usually don't make it to the front pages but that are relevant to our society in transition. Otherwise it may just things that are interesting.

Guardian
Windfarms break energy record in Spain
Monday 4 February 2013 09.56 GMT

Over the last three months wind farms produced more electricity than any other power source in Spain for the first time ever, an industry group has said.

The country delivered over six terawatt hours of electricity from wind farms during January, according to data from grid operator Red Electrica de Espana, the Spanish Wind Energy Association said in a statement.

"Since November 1, wind has been the top technology in the electrical system," the group said in a blog posting. "The last time any technology exceeded six terawatt-hours of monthly generation was in 2010, when it was combined-cycle gas turbines."

Migrate a SVN repository to Git preserving tags

I've used SVN for code versioning for as long as I can remember. Both on Windows as on Linux, it has been perfect to manage and store source code and documents, especially in a context where few users commit changes and public access is only considered at the later stages of a project. In the MUSIC project the context has been quite different, there's a multitude of code projects that compose a larger system and public access to the code has been a requirement early on. One of my collegues suggested us to start using Git for the purpose. I remember when initialy reading about it that Git was like colour TV, once you've seen it you'd never want to go back. Although Git is far more complex than SVN, making it easier to mess up, it is indeed quite more powerful. Beyond that, the GitHub web/social repository gives coding a whole new meaning.

So here's a use case: migrate a local SVN repositoy to Git, correctly keeping tags identifying releases and then push it to GitHub. This happened to be not so easy, so here's this log entry for future reference.

Thomas Zwijsen - 2013 - Nylon Maiden

Oh no! not another Iron Maiden tribute. That's the case but there are great differences between this tribute and previous works that make it deserve this highlight. First of all it is not issued by a collection of old school rock bands trying to boost their retirement, nor a mangle of unknown wannabe tribute musicians. Neither does it come from established musicians in other genres that want to venture into the rock world and cash in dividends. And in second place because this LP avoids being the same boring parcours through the old school radio hit list.

Thomas Zwijsen is a very young classical guitar student that happens to be an Iron Maiden fan. He has studied Flamenco, Jazz and Classical, already achieving remarkable technical capacities. About one year ago he started producing arrangements of his favourite songs for the classical guitar; he uploaded some home recordings to YouTube and showed to his friends. A couple million views later he decided to go to studio and record these tracks properly; the end result is Nylon Maiden, released earlier this month and reviewed below.

Ubuntu phone OS: a glimpse of the future

I came late to the laptop world. A couple of years into my first job I inherited a battered portable machine from a senior colleague. It weighted over 3 Kg and had a 14 inch screen, but had a profound impact on my relation with computers. It had all the CPU power I needed for my work and in a backpack it could be carried everywhere. Beyond that, at home I could use it to read books, or I could plug it to the Hi-Fi or the TV and use it as a CD/DVD player. Soon I understood that I'd never buy a desktop computer again.

That was some 10 years ago, and this past week I got the same feeling again. With the relatively surprising announcement of the Ubuntu phone OS I'm pretty sure I wont buy a laptop again. A new age in personal computing is dawning and Ubuntu seems to be riding on the crest of the wave. Below the fold is the video announcement of this new OS by Mark Shuttleworth, something that might have a serious impact on personal computing in the following decade.

Obituary - Huw Lloyd Langton

I learnt yesterday that one of my favourite guitar players passed away. Huw Lloyd Langton got notorious through his work with Hawkwind, a collaboration that spanned a good number of decades. Master of spacey reverbs and long improvisations, he could create dense atmospheres but still produce songs for more straightforward listeners. I never had the opportunity to see Huw playing live, and now I'm sure I never will. Folk that worked with him paint a personality of kindness and openness, someone pleasant to do music with. Good bye Huw, you'll be missed.

Petition for a Better Ubuntu

In this post I introduce an online petition addressed at Canonical requesting the removal from Ubuntu of all default data collection features. The following paragraphs detail a bit further the reasoning that lead me to create this petition. To immediately read and sign the Petition for a Better Ubuntu, please jump to Avaaz.

Not much has happened since I reported on the potential incompatibilities of Ubuntu 12.10 with the European data protection legislation. At the time I got the impression Canonical was not even in tune to personal data protection and the company remained almost silent on the issue, avoiding to address it directly. I find this somewhat strange, for Mark Shuttleworth, the company CEO founder, claimed to have the root password of all Ubuntu users some good weeks before that. When Ubuntu 12.10 was officially released it portrayed an important small change to the Shopping Lens, the addition of a privacy policy note. It addresses some of the concerns I raised, but at the same time confirms that personal user data is being collected and stored by Canonical. This is the crux of the matter and Ubuntu 12.10 effectively does it without user consent.

Update: The text of this petition has been kindly translated into French by Vince.

The MUSIC project