This one is, to me, because with it I have climbed to the mountaintop of my computing landscape.

I started climbing when on the computer I installed the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. After many years of knowing Debian, coming to use it felt like a privilege. The program is a masterpiece of understatement, and the contrast with Ubuntu, which I have used for a long time and which is based on Debian, jumped to my face.

Ubuntu, the sleek, thoughtfully-interfaced youngster; Debian, the utterly modest, simple clockwork giant… I found the sight of the elegant construction, fitting inside and taking care of the little machine, to be simply marvelous. Here was to a third kind of beauty in software: Not that of a simple, focused, resource-sparing program; Not of a clean, crisp and fluid interface; Rather, the beauty of the multitude of pieces coming together in an orderly, tidy and functional fashion. Debian’s mission seems to be to Just Work. It does it Well and Beautifully.

Words were failing me as I played within the elegant construction, contemplating all of the marvels made available to me… a modern, secure web browser running less than two minutes away from powering up. A CD read&write drive that works, with software to run it; software to edit maps, to transcode videos, to chat, to draw, to write, to share; tidy menus and automatic updates for them all.
I had always perceived software freedom as a race, a permanent battle for existence, and one that we were slowly losing. But beyond market share, network effects and all the mean technical and legal tactics, in front of that little computer I realized suddenly how much there was left: how much would never need to be re-written, because it works, and it empowers the users, and it’s compatible with everything else. I thought of all the components written already, up from the little core utilities like cp and mv and echo, all the protocols and formats, all the layers of abstraction, that were finished for good and ready to be built upon. The loving work of two entire generations of programmers fitting elegantly on a single CD and an Internet connection.

I was searching for words, and those of Eben Moglen were in my head; it struck me then that I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Yes, the breeze up there, and the perspective! Turning this old computer on, I feel like I am stepping in the library of Alexandria, suddenly able to appreciate its construction and the depth of its contents. It is an emotional, intimate, humbling and joyful feeling.

Using the snippy software center, I installed Tor. Running the program (through its little graphical interface Vidalia) makes my computer part of the Tor network, which anonymises communications on the Internet. Now, my computer is one among several thousand nodes run by volunteers, which relay information from one to another, not knowing the recipients and unable to comprehend what they are transmitting.
On the edge of the network, ordinary people communicate. People like you and me read and write freely;  they install the Tor Browser Bundle and they are only two clicks away from being able to exchange information without surveillance. In China they can read news which contain the keyword Tibet; in Iran they can discuss about political protests; in Mexico they can write about drug cartels without their life ending in horror; in Thailand they can hold political views without being jailed. Everywhere, they can browse the web without feeding the great corporate databases that are auctioned off to unscrupulous organisations.
A tiny part of that traffic transits through the laptop in my apartment. I acknowledge that some of it is reprehensible. I know that some of it is of immense human value — so immense that several totalitarian regimes have my IP address blacklisted now. I take joy in knowing that most of it is ordinary — youtube videos of cats and emails with pictures of the latest baby in the family.

In a process so streamlined that not even the fan can be heard, so well designed that only a few clicks were needed to set it up, my laptop encrypts, decrypts, relays information, from unknown sources to unknown recipients, contributing minutely to a better world, on the table on which I take my meals. This is my mountaintop.

All I hear all year round about the Internet and computing in general seems to relate to things made for distraction. Broadband providers behave like the Internet was their television network. My government thinks Internet is a city in which it will re-mold the unpleasant parts. Many journalists and most of my work colleagues mistake it for Mark Zuckerberg’s or Eric Schmidt’s private toy.

When I think of Internet and computing, I think of the mountaintop in my apartment… the purest machine I know, peacefully carrying unknown tokens of meaning day and night, connecting souls. That’s the word — it’s a soul machine.

Finalement, elle n’a pas acheté le bel ordinateur blanc. Mais d’une manière ou d’une autre, elle est formidable, ma sœur.

[…] Si vraiment tu reprends la racine de ce jeu informatique que tu décris, tu retombes sur l’« in-forme », le partage de constructions de l’esprit. Le cluster, machines lointaines dans un sous-sol contrôlées depuis le bout des doigts dans un jardin.… Sweave, le mélange de deux des plus purs et libres langages de partage d’idées… SVN, le partage structuré en dépôts (et attends seulement de découvrir git !)… tout le plaisir vient de l’ingéniosité que l’on déploie soi-même pour travailler.

Le monde d’Apple est le partait opposé de tout cela. Depuis le plus petit bout de logiciel auquel l’on confie ses données jusqu’au dernier bout de plastique sur le boîtier, le Mac est travaillé, abouti, peaufiné, et… fermé. Il émane de cette entreprise un désir profond et constant de faire de chaque utilisateur un consommateur épanoui, satisfait d’utiliser un produit lissé et contrôlé, gardé propre et sûr par la grande maison de Steve Jobs.

Le fluide et élégant logiciel OSX ? Tu n’es pas digne de la confiance de Steve pour qu’il te montre vraiment ce qu’il fait, ou te le laisse partager avec ton voisin, même si tu peux toujours consommer de la musique-et-des-films-qui-disparaissent avec iTunes. Le bel et émouvant hardware, qui fait envie à tant d’entre nous ? Tu es bien trop bête pour en ouvrir le boîtier toi-même. Seuls les employés de Steve pourront facilement en changer la batterie, avec les tournevis spéciaux qu’ils ont fabriqué pour.

L’idée dans tout ça, est bien sûr de finir par te faire acheter un iPhone ou un iPad, sur lesquels j’essaierai de ne pas m’étendre… l’achat consacrerait Steve comme ton deuxième Papa, puisque tous tes appels, contacts, fichiers, déplacements, e-mails et lectures seraient enregistrés dans sa maison. Machines tellement épurées, abouties (et je suis moi-même ébahi de cette excellence), qu’il aura purement et simplement fallu bannir les logiciels libres de leur App Store, pour nous protéger d’un malsain désordre.

Enfin bon, je m’emporte un peu, mais je voulais juste dire que cette joie d’expérimenter soi-même est finalement ce qui compte le plus dans l’informatique. La première commande à distance, le premier commit SVN, la première compilation Latex, la première installation d’un AdBlock Plus, d’un Firefox, le premier « Sauvegarder sous… » sont des étapes fondamentales, des petites prises de pouvoir, une progression dans l’idée, une petite victoire de l’immatériel sur le triste matériel.

Comme je veux célébrer ces victoires in-formatiques, je serais triste de te voir encadrée par une entreprise qui les combat toutes car les utilisateurs libres comprennent trop tôt qu’un fichier n’est qu’un nombre, qu’un “streaming” n’est qu’une restriction, et que leur curiosité les élève.

Et c’est pour ça que le Mac me fait lorgner mais que l’ordinateur moche et lourd emporte mon cœur. Le premier a un logo corporate luminescent au dos de l’écran ; le second pourrait tout autant avoir un autocollant qui dit : my hardware sucks because my software is awesome.

XO

Olivier.

For me, discovering Firefox a number of years ago was a great joy — the browser is grown by a great community, and it strongly encourages customization. Discovering that I could block advertising was altogether a different step. Not only can we choose how we browse the web; but we can also control which information is displayed on our screen.

I never looked back. Since then, my use of computing has been a great and fun walk upwards, going from content-and-software consumption to an empowered exploration of all the different ways in which we share information. So there is to empowerment of users: give them acute ability to select what they read, and they end up pursuing and exploring all the facets of their software-grown liberties like they fell in love.

Wladimir Palant, the extension’s lead developer and a thoughtful blogger, started accepting donations this month. If you still do with all the blinking nonsense, give the extension a try. If this great little empowerment is part of your daily life, you could consider giving the developers a tip to further the project.

1. To have your items (eg. bullets in lists) appear one by one, the most efficient way is to select them all at once, add appear custom animation, and then indicate Start: on click.
   In this way there is no need to set-up a custom animation for each of them (and they will each appear on click during the talk).
2. Modify a toolbar (View > Toolbars > Customize) to add three or four alignment buttons. Centering images or moving text on the sides is both faster and less frustrating.
3. Use Styles and Master Pages. Start using them today. The later you start, the more work it’ll cost to switch.
   • Styles (Format > Styles and Formatting) define the styling of paragraphs, just as in Writer or Calc. You should focus on Title, Subtitle (ordinary text), Outline 1 and 2 (for bullet points).
     Each master page has its own ensemble of styles. [AFAIK] It’s not possible to copy styles from a master page to another.
     Note that language is defined together with font (a long-time OO.o idiosyncrasy).
   • Master pages (View > Master > Slide Master) define where the styles are laid out on the slide.
     Each master slide can be laid out in a multitude of [useless] ways using the Layout tab on the docked task pane. AFAIK it is neither possible to assign a default layout to a given master, nor the opposite.
     If you are not interested in bullet points and (rightly) only want ordinary centered text on your slide, edit the Subtitle style to your needs, even if cannot visualize any example text for it. When using that ordinary-text-only master, pick the Title slide layout.
   • The Click to add text boxes might repeal you (I hated them) but they will now save you countless hours. Soon you will refuse to do without.
   • It is not worth creating new styles inside master pages, for you will have to assign them to text manually all along. Just edit the existing ones.
4. If you set a background picture, do not use PNG, for it’ll hog the already sluggish thumbnail generation. Quit (rightly) ranting about how superior the format is and use JPEG instead.
5. Impress does not handle large files very well. Once you exceed fifty 1 MB photos you will save time by splitting your presentation in multiple files.
6. To get a clean multiple-slides-per-page handout, make a normal, one-page-per-slide export to PDF, and edit the PDF with an external program (Impress just isn’t good at that). On Ubuntu, evince does a wonderful job printing PDF files to new PDFs, re-arranging layout in the process.

Working daily with Impress (I work with several thousand slides) isn’t without some amount of swearing and requires patience. But then I remember here is a freedom-respectful tool that, in perspective, allows me to do extraordinary things, and earn my living. Given by a community. For free.

Thank you, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice people.