I switched to running the Sidux distribution not too long ago, at the same time I upgraded to a 64 bit AMD machine. It's my first foray into Debian based distros and has been pretty nice until I went to install Skype. I won't regurgitate the other message boards, but in a nutshell here was my solution:

• Add Medibuntu repository to my apt sources. I had to manually select the hardy.list file to download since there were no sid.list files.

The biggest annual event for me and OSGeo is fast approaching. The FOSS4G conference event, held this year in Sydney, Australia, will be held in October. I'd love to meet you there if you would like to chat about open source, GIS, cartography, programming and all such related topics. Attend a workshop to learn to make maps or run web mapping sites. Or just come to hear talks from leaders in the open source geospatial community.

I recently came across the 40fires.org project - "a forum to develop energy-efficient cars using an open source approach.".

While waiting for more information from them, I did some thinking about what parts of this kind of project would interest me or how OSGeo or other geospatial projects could help them out.

There is a common online question about migrating from Apple's Mail app (Using .emlx format mail files) to Thunderbird (or any other non-Mail app). I looked at a few options and have decided, as strange as it may seem, that installing an IMAP service was the best solution.

I’ll describe here a procedure for the evaluation of the tranforming parameters necessary to effect coordinates change among reference frames materialized on different Datum.

In order to have the changing of Datum it is used a geometric transformation of correspond (conforme) type through the resolution of a last squares system based on a homologous points series, in order toobtain the direct changing from plane coordinates in one of the two Datum to the corresponding in the other Datum.

Over the past few months I've been picking away on various hardware projects, particularly configuring my Arduino board as a USB joystick device and fusing in Python code, GPS signals, etc.

During this time I met Massimo Di Stefano (aka epifanio) who is also doing a bunch of neat controller work with ossimPlanet. You may know him from the #osgeo channel in IRC. We both feel we are just playing around in our spare time, but have some common goals. We are both interested in open source, hardware, ossimPlanet, Python, GPS and UAVs.

His work is encouraging for me and I think it is really cool. To help share some of his work, he'll be blogging on here from time to time (he has his own feed).

As official Slashgeo day I wanted to make mention of this service for geospatial related news topics. When I'm too busy to browse through lists of blogs and websites, I can always depend on some interesting headlines from Satri and the gang. They are sure to point out much open source related news as well, which I always appreciate.

See: Slashgeo.org

A friend pointed out this Guardian article about Stallman's (and others) perspective on the cloud computing direction. From an open source perspective I've felt similar concerns re: the shift to GMail, but I know that many users (like me) merely use it for mail mirroring, not a wholesale dependency.

What better way to spend a long weekend that experimenting with a new Linux-based file-sharing and networking platform? ;-) Amahi Linux Home Server aka the Home Digital Assistant is a set of pre-configured tools and services that are added on to the Fedora Core base. I just learned about it and thought I'd give it a try.