jonathan carter

Political Tendencies

// September 28th, 2008 // 12 Comments » // Free Software, Jonathan, Politics, Project Mayhem

The Stereotype

Recently, Jordan Mantha blogged about being excited about Palin joining McCain‘s campaign. Some of the comments were quite harsh, some even suggesting that it’s wrong to support the Republicans, being a free software developer and affiated with the Ubuntu project. I will admit that I was quite surprised to see his support for the McCain myself- from the vast majority of posts I’ve seen on Planet Ubuntu, Planet Debian and Planet Gnome so far, most free software supporters seem to support Obama and the Democratic party. Being a supporter of free software (or Ubuntu) shouldn’t imply what kind of political tendencies you have. Statistics might show that most free software supporters might choose something, that doesn’t mean that everyone has to.

The Political Compass

In CLUG, many of the people in our IRC channel participated in the Political Compass test. It asks you a series of questions and then gives you co-ordinates on where you stand politically. Michael Gorven put together a Python script that takes the results from Spinach (our channel bot) and plots it on a graph using Gnuplot:

In the graph above, it’s clear that everyone in our LUG that participated landed in the Libertarian quadrants, and not a single person in the Authoritarian quadrants. Most people are in the Left-wing Libertarian quadrant, with quite a few in the Right-wing Libertarian quadrant. In this case, the graph supports the stereotype that free software supporters may be more inclined to be left-wing libertarians. There are other things that this graph doesn’t bring into account though. Everyone in our IRC channel are also South Africans. Could that perhaps have an effect on our choices and tendencies? We also discuss *everything* on our IRC channel, and we mostly read each other’s blogs. Could it also be that we shape each other’s political views, if only we sway it by the tiniest bit on a continuous basis?

I think it’s natural of humans to make assumptions about other people and the world around them. I think it’s wrong of people to take offence when these assumptions and generalisations do not fit into their little view of the world. While we’re not all unique little snowflakes, we are all different, and tolerance and acceptance goes a long, long way.

SARS Communication Suckiness

// August 27th, 2008 // 5 Comments » // Free Software, Jonathan, Politics, Project Mayhem

(rant)

I’m so frustrated with SARS (South African Revenue Service). They sent me an e-mail to notify me that I’ve received communication from them that require my attention. I click on the link which takes me to their website, enter my username and password, and it takes me to a page where I have to download the contents of the documentation in a PDF file. So, I do so.

When I opened the file with my PDF viewer, and it displayed that I require the latest version of Adobe Reader. This was already a bit frustrating, having to do so much work and still not being able to read my message. At least Adobe reader is packaged in Medibuntu, so I add the repositories and install it. 20 minutes worth of downloads later, I open the PDF. Yet again, it displayed “You need the latest version of Adobe reader to open this file”. Grrr.

I head over to Adobe.com, saw a link that says “Adobe Reader download”, where it also said “Latest Version”, and downloaded it. Turns out it is also Version 8.1.2, the same version available from Medibuntu, and it also doesn’t want to open the document.

After trying all different kinds of things, I’m still unable to open the PDF. Thanks Adobe, for implementing such horrible technologies in our government, and thank you SARS, for absolutely not caring about free software users, even when our government has a mandate to move over to free software itself.

Then again, it’s not like any government ever had a good reputation for keeping its promises. I don’t know how I expected ours to be any different.

Cool stuff today

// August 26th, 2008 // 7 Comments » // Free Software, Politics

Akismet

By the time I write this, Akismet will have caught a quarter of a million of spam entries on my blog. Thanks again, Akismet!

Michelle Obama

This morning while driving to work, I heard excerpts from Michelle Obama‘s speech that she delivered in Denver yesterday. I haven’t cried in nearly 13 years, but every now and again something happens that brings me close, that speech got brought me one of those moments. I think Michelle Obama will make an awesome first lady.

Monopoly World Edition

Hasbro (the company behind the popular game, Monopoly), will be releasing a new version of the game that contains popular cities around the world. The cities were chosen by votes on their website, and they have made the results public. My home town, Cape Town, got in at number 3. Awesome.

To sanction or not to sanction

// July 13th, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Politics, Project Mayhem

Jeremy Thurgood recently stated a question regarding the sanctions against Zimbabwe:

Have a look at the following BBC news article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7503135.stm

Now consider this. South Africa had sanctions imposed (and rightly so) because a legally elected government was oppressing part of its population. Zimbabwe doesn’t have sanctions imposed because an illegal government is oppressing all of its population?

This whole thing makes me sick and is a reminder of why I should stay as far from politics as I possibly can.

I tentatively think that not apposing sanctions against Zimbabwe was the right thing to do. Saying it tentatively may appear a bit cowardly, but I can’t really say that I have enough insight into the situation to make a clear decision, for example, I can’t really find information on exactly which kind of sanctions have been proposed. What leads me to this view is, in South Africa, in the Apartheid era, it was a minority that oppressed a very large group of people. Even though the government at the time was legally voted, according to our laws at the time, it doesn’t meant that it was moral. I don’t think the issue of whether the government was legally elected or not is really the issue here. I think the issue here is that the people in Zimbabwe have no real freedom, they are suffering under a cruel dictatorship.

I think the real issue here is who it would hurt if sanctions would be ruled against the country. First of all, who would it hurt most if sanctions would be placed? I think it will put the people of Zimbabwe in a horrible situation. They may lose access to medical equipment and services, food, educational content and more. I doubt that the Zimbabwean government cares much if their people will be deprived of day-to-day necessaties (judging by their activities in recent years), so sanctions would just be a terrible idea in my opinion. In the South African context, the sanctions mostly hurt the elite and rich oppressors. It sent a strong international message, I agree that it was indeed necessary at the time. I don’t think it’s the wisest thing for Zimbabwe right now though. I respect the opinions of people who feel otherwise, but if it was my vote, I would also vote against the sanctions.

Minister slams software patents, Microsoft spreads ignorance

// March 26th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Free Software, Politics

From Slashdot, Karl and Tectonic: The South African minister of public service and administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, said that software patents pose a considerable threat to the growth of the African software sector at the Idlelo 3 conference in Dakar, Senegal. She also said that it is “unfortunate” that the leading office suite provider (which would imply Microsoft by market share) have not adopted the ODF standard.

Paulo Ferreira, platform strategy manager for Microsoft South Africa, then spread ignorance on the matter by saying “There is no such thing as free software. Nobody develops software for charity“. He also said “For innovation to continue, there needs to be value – and even open-source applications have some form of market model, which incentivises them to continue innovating”. You would expect that someone who works for Microsoft would at least do a bit of research on the subject before attending a large FOSS conference such as Idlelo. I think that the average staff at Microsoft simply do not understand free software, or the economics behind it.

Stig for Facebook president?

// March 12th, 2008 // No Comments » // Politics

Maybe not, but at least he’s more popular than Hillary

Feeds

// February 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // Education, Free Software, Gadgets, Games, Jonathan, Music, Politics, Project Mayhem, Sport

When I started my blog, I used to post about 2 posts a month. Over the last few months, this has increased quite a bit, and it is likely do continue. WordPress (the great blogging software that I use) has support for multiple feeds, so I decided to make use of it, and created a page containing links to feeds that WordPress automatically generates based on categories and tags.

Selecting a feed for a specific category/tag may be useful if you only want to read posts about certain topics, or if you want to add my blog to an on-line feed like a Planet while only filtering through relevant posts.

A list of the available feeds are available here:

http://jonathancarter.co.za/feeds