Congi – Somnium (Triangle/Circle/Square) from Paulo R on Vimeo.

POP LE CHEVAL from Kristof Brandl on Vimeo.

Madeon – Pop Culture (live mashup) from Harde Baas Paard Productions on Vimeo.

She Woolf Daydreaming from Kid Loco on Vimeo.

Friends Of Mine from Kid Loco on Vimeo.

• Have you ever listened to Soma FM? I know it’s a popular group of webradios that started out with a strong emphasis on electronic  music but broadened their audience the past two years. Still it’s not broadly known outside people who usually listen to web radios. They need your financial support too.
• The Groovera web radio. I had some conflicting opinions about this radio. On the one hand I think it provides even better music and tunes than Soma FM, but on the other hand they came up with all sorts of “protective” measures and ended up, for some time at least, to be only accessible via iTunes. It seems to be different now in all fairness as I can stream their music from VLC but it was not always so. For the amateurs of nice and beautiful electronic music though, this radio is a must-listen at.
• This one is not a radio, but a set of mixes available by podcasts. I like them and they’ve been providing very nice tunes for quite some time. Be aware that this is not the same team developing the Khavi CMS system..
• Something from the Paris underground , a collection of links leading to podcasts or webradios, mostly electronic but brace yourself: it’s not all macarons and chic in Paris.
• I love Gregorian chants but unfortunately web radios or podcasts with this sort of content tend to be hard to find on the Net. This one is a pretty interesting resource but it’s somewhat linked to extreme-right groups, although it could be a bit overblown. Music is music anyway.
• Music is music, but sometimes you also want to have open and free content to stream and download. Jamendo is very famous but what’s even better is that their content has really improved in quality over time. If you would like an overview just try out their selections that are presented under the “Radio” section.
• Another music streaming service that only provides creative commons with mp3 and ogg downloads is DogMazic : you’ll find more underground things there…
• This one is for the Cognoscenti: Ayeko 
• Last but not least, I will not end with another webradio but with a psychedelic, vaguely hip magazine I like: The Cake Magazine (no connection with cookies though). You should give it a try but don’ t hope to find any logic in its editorial line…

Enjoy your 29th of February!

I am not explaining that France is not an indebted country. In fact, very few european countries can claim they have clean public debts, and I won’t even mention the US debt. But the debt has been piling up in France and elsewhere since 30 years, thanks to a rather twisted amount of policies -cutting public spending, worsening economic conditions and lowering salaries while shoving more and more money to the top of the pyramid combined with reducing the amount of taxes collected, most of the time in favour of the wealthiest- and the beginning of the crisis in 2008 that prompted governments to offer bags of money to the banks and then having the same rating agencies who were claiming everything was fine tell the world the same governments were broke.

It is easy to see that governments were trapped in what could look like a pincer movement; but then there are pundits who might explain the whole unfolding of the events was “irrational” and happened “on the spur of the moment”. I rather see it as a whole set of rational decisions that were taken at some level while some levels down it appeared as some sort of unavoidable outcome from random, short term decisions. But whether one thinks of all this as a process or as an accident the issue we face today remains the same.

We have a huge national debt (granted, way smaller than anything the US have, even compared in proportion) that is fixable, but we also have governments who rush to do whatever they think the “Market” will like. More often than not, it means that the little people and the ever shrinking middle class must be punished . For what, we don’t really know, but the real question should rather be instead of whom . Because if there’s a categoy of people and entities who continue their  “economic growth” in these times of crisis, that would be some of the wealthiest people in our nation and abroad. You may call them the 1%. You may call them the “Elite”. You may call them otherwise, but it does not really matter at this stage. What’s important to realize is the power and influence of money that makes up the incentive for governments to dismantle public services and to make life harder for the rest of the population. What is also important to realize, and what is much less discussed is how some entities and people actuall benefit from the crisis.

Part of the “reforms” to “reimburse the debt” (which turns out to be a dubious concept itself as France, since 1973 cannot devaluate its money just like any other country outside the euro-zone) always (why?) involve selling off entire, profitable parts of public service. Such a pawning operation never benefits the people, but always benefits a few. It is often seent that the same people who benefit from this sale by taking control of the new privatized structure are powerful, and part of the people who usually advise the same politicians who keep on explaining that we must make more efforts to “repay the debt”, the debt that we could in fact manage much better, but that some people don’t want us to, as they might lose money in this. So while the republic itself loses power, stops its people from benefiting from social security and other public services, it graciously offers to a selected few the ability to monetize these services. I always wondered why, if we really had  to sell these services, the government did not auction this to its very own people . For instance, as public service XYZ gets privatized it is sold to thousands or even millions of people (each one putting anywhere between 10 euros and 100 euros) , and therefore would remain in the public trust. That was a common operation during the XXth century, but guess what, it seems that it does not please some very few people with a lot of influence.  (I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational explanation on why simple people cannot own such a structure and that it must be pawned off to major corporations).

So what did France lose by  losing AAA? In fact, not much, as the dices had already been thrown a while ago. A nice, velvety red curtain just fell of this past week, that’s all; and now things will become officially more difficult for most of us.

Happy New Year everyone…

Picture by Eliane Domingos of the Document Foundation

This year we didn’t go party and celebrate the new year with friends. For some reason we felt lazy and decided we’d spend the new year’s even with our family, (parents, cousins) at my parents’ place. In the end both Melissa and I knocked on the door sick with sore throat and some mild flu. Needless to say, we didn’t drink much, we mostly ate and were dosing by 1am. It wasn’t a very exciting new year’s eve but it felt good to be among our loved ones; it was a really good new year’s eve and I’m glad we were able to spend the first hours of 2012 and most of the first day with our family. May love, health, success and joy fill your life for 2012. It’s likely to get tough, business wise, but I think we’re going to have some real fun.

Picture by Eliane Domingos of the Document Foundation

If you wish to read our official wishes, we have them here, and they come from all of us. My thanks go to everyone who is making the LibreOffice project possible and what it is today. We have grown quite a lot in 15 months, probably more than we would have thought. 2012 is going to be the opportunity for the Document Foundation to solidify its successes and turn them into a powerful entity and structure. It will also be the year where several strategic project, such as LibreOffice OnLine, will see their development hopefully take off. Adoption-wise things are already well on their way. Deployments are ongoing on a worldwide basis, large and small, and what we  need at this stage is to push our brand name in a more consistent way. It will also be the year where our friends at the Apache Foundation release their first Apache OpenOffice; what will be interesting will be not their first release(s) but the one that will see most of the Lotus stack be injected into it. This will actually be a good opportunity to clearly differentiate Apache OpenOffice, and that in turns will improve the Apache OpenOffice project’s health and its relation with the outside world (LibreOffice being one example).

But 2012 will be the year where you will be able to experiment the benefits of the LibreOffice development’s effort as we will bring the 3.5 and the 3.6 lines to life. I think it will illustrate that a community-based development model does effectively work and brings real and regular improvements and changes to an aging codebase.

On a more personal note, 2012 will be an important year: I’m getting married in June (expect full delays in blog posting) and this is something I was not expecting even a few years ago. But there are a few people in this world (in this case, only one) who can change everything for the best, and for this I’m truly blessed and very, very happy.

Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to my family and my friends at the Document Foundation and at Ars Aperta for making all this a reality. You truly rock. What else is there to wish? Health, happiness, and love.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year 2012.

• I hear and read that Breivik is demented, that he’s in fact insane and should be locked up in a lunatic asylum. I disagree: the man is meticulous and seems to be fully aware of what he’s done. To label him as lunatic is to refuse to see how human his actions were and to deny him (and others, in a broader sense) complexity and responsibility for the tragedy. It’s like saying that Hitler or to a lesser degree Ben Laden were insane: They were not, and they’re responsible.
• Some people seem to have issues dealing with the fact that what happened wasn’t coming from muslim terrorists. Let’s be perfectly honest here: I, as well as many others, if not 95% of the people who learned about the news that day first thought about muslim terrorists. If you haven’t and were suspecting someone else, good for you. But let’s not try to be shy about this; it was our first thought, our first movement, the first blame we cast. We could not imagine -or rather, we had forgotten a simple truth: Extreme right activists and terrorists exist, and they do kill. They killed in the twenties, the thirties, the forties and all along the twentieth century. They do kill as well in our present century, all around the globe. Hate is not the monopoly of Islam. It’s so comfortable for some to think so . You can call yourself Christian and kill in the name of Jesus Christ; that just happened in Norway but it happened many times before. You can kill in the name of the Judaism; that actually does happen; you can kill others, or you can kill your own people, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the blood shed and the false pretense that your action is going to lead to your desired result.
• As a consequence, not just the extreme-right movements of the western world (including the tea-party spin doctors) are getting uncomfortably agitated, but the conservative and neo-conservative parties are dancing around the topic in an interesting way. Their Weltanschauung has been once again invalidated. It’s not that a conservative view of the world and society is necessarily wrong; it’s that the ideology that has seized the conservative wing of the western world politics ever since the nine-eleven events has proven, just like any ideology, to be fundamentally anti-democratic, and has led to failure. They failed to see the rise of the Arab revolutions spreading in the quest of true democracy and freedom, just like they failed to find the much sought-after weapons of mass-destruction in Iraq. Now they failed to see that you don’t have to be a Muslim (and therefore suspect to their eyes) to be a terrorist. And in front of people like Breivik, rest assured that the Neo-Cons are not overly moved, because Breivik has carried their unconscious or conscious fantasies to the extreme realization. The extreme right thinks Breivik was right, but that it came at the wrong moment, allowing then the whole “leftist” press (I wonder if they’ve ever heard about Murdoch) to paint them in a bad way.

If there’s any personal conclusion I could be making, aside the expression of deep sadness that I feel, it would be this one: let’s stop being angelical about the values of the Western world. They are worth being fought for, but we won’t have the clash of civilizations hoped by the extremists of all kind, and better yet: our values are not under siege by some foreign  civilization or religion: they’re under siege because we are so intent on destroying them ourselves. The western world economies are often crumbling, our politicians often corrupted and seemingly never able to get a hold of the special interests driving most of our policies, while this state of things only frustrate their own citizens. What can be done to fix this beyond the manufactured slogans and pseudo miracle rules advertised by lobbyists? This is the question that the Oslo tragedy asks, again and again. Will we have the courage to answer it?

I am thinking about the victims of this catastrophy, and I would like to express my deep sorrow. I hope that the rescue teams will be able to take out all the victims who are still alive under the ruins. We had some good news from Japan: It seems that the Japanese team of LibreOffice is safe -I am not sure if everyone is though, but I really hope so. Also, my good friend and longtime contributor to the OpenOffice  project Hirano Kazunari is reported to be alive and safe with his family. I had real concerns about him as I know he lives in the norther part of the Honshu island (the main island of Japan).

The issue is that our world is not just being torn apart by natural catastrophies; man also kills man. I would just like to express my solidarity and support to our users and volunteers of the Arabic world; people from Egypt, Tunisia, perhaps even Lybia, Yemen and elsewhere. Some of them have to fight for their rights, or sometimes for their own survival.

In these situation, the Document Foundation cannot do much, of course. But we are all humans, and we are a community, the Document Foundation’s community. We hope you and your relatives are well, wherever you are, and we hope to work with you in the future and for a very long time.Take good care of yourself and your relatives.

(If you live in Japan and you’re susbscribed to any of the TDF lists, please, say hi. We’d love to hear from you. Also if you live in Lybia, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrein, Yemen… please ping us as well.)

Sometimes I do take off my computer. That’s the case this week-end as I’m in Cassis on the French Riviera.

May you enjoy your week-end as much as I am enjoying mine.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Merry Christmas to you all, filled with love, warmth, presents, joy and health. I would like to give a special thanks to my family and Melissa with whom I will be blessed to spend this Christmas. I do look forward spending many more Christmas with them! I would also like to think about people I know and may not know who are sick and who will spend this end of the year in hospitals. That’s not a fun place to be, even without their sickness. I hope they will recover soon. Last but not least, I would like to say how privileged I am to be part of two great teams, the one at Ars Aperta and the one of the Document Foundation.  I look forward working with all of you in 2011! Finally, I have shamelessly copied the Christmas pictures from Prete-moi Paris… Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

Snow on a boulevard in Paris

from: http://i1.trekearth.com/photos/125553/galeries-laffayette-xmas-2010.jpg