Software Freedom Day was held on Saturday 20th September. It was a chance to raise more awareness of GNU/Linux and free software. I got involved with the day, and setup an awareness stand with my friend Jake. We burnt off about 25 copies of Ubuntu, 10 copies of Open Disc (containing OpenOffice, Firefox and more free software), and about 5 copies of Open Education disc, which contained free educational software for students.

The day went from 10am till 4pm. Software Freedom Day for our team consided of a few lengthy discussions based on GNU/Linux, showing off the Compiz-Fusion project, demonstrating a few features of OpenOffice, and of course, teaching some newcomers what GNU/Linux is about.

There was an issue with physical screen size detection some time ago, in a version of X. This caused extremely small, or large fonts to be displayed instead of normal sized fonts.

The problem is effected within the development versions of X within Debian lenny/sid, perhaps on other distributions as well.

However, there is a work around using the xrandr command (which is used to set size, orientation and/or reflection of the outputs for a screen*).

Last Friday I had the privilege of seeing Richard Stallman give a lecture on “Copyright and Community in the Age of the Computer Networks”. It was a rather interesting lecture, where he raised some informative points, which I agree with.

About a month ago, I came up with a idea to produce Linux game reviews. The game reviews being for any genre, the game must be free, but not necessarily open source.

It’s been at the back of my mind for a while, using objects from cache, without destructing them, and only initializing them once.

Many thanks to Memcache this is now possible. Memcached (daemon) stores arrays, objects and variables in memory available for clients to access them at any time. This speeds up the process of a web application a lot. Instead of having to create a new object each time the page is loaded, you can simply retrieve the desired object from Memcache and operate on it normally.