June 2007

Tonight I had only one break instead of my usual two when I ran.

I left around 9.30 pm and it was colder than usual. When it's not too hot, I prefer to run a bit earlier in the evening that this, especially when I'm alone. The route goes mainly over the Duke campus and it's completely safe, but it just feels better when it's not fully dark.

We run a few times per week, usually the same track. Tonight I calculated the exact length of our route. It's 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) which is not as far as I was used to running in the Netherlands, but the route is much more elevated than in Haarlem.

Tonight I attended a lecture by Sapna Kumar, a faculty fellow at Duke University Law School.

The lecture was organized by TriLUG, the Triangle Linux User Group at Red Hat in Raleigh. Before the meeting Larry and I had dinner and later a cup of coffee with Donald K. Rosenberg, author of a book on Open Source licenses.

The topic of Ms. Kumar's lecture was v3 of the GNU Public License (GPL), a popular open source license, and the relationship between patents and open source software.

Ms. Kumar gave a good talk on the new provisions and new aspects of the GPLv3, insightful and brought with a sense of humor. She gave an excellent overview of the recent developments around software patents and how they relate to GPLv3. She took a lot of questions from the audience.

Sasha is now traveling to Finland where she'll give a presentation on Saturday.

Sasha was invited to a conference in Helsinki to present a paper she wrote last year. In the morning I worked from home (PowerPoint, mainly) and we went to the airport together.

The journey to Europe didn't go as smoothly as planned due to a thunderstorm in Raleigh, but she's now boarding a flight to London and she'll will travel from London to Kopenhagen, and from there to Helsinki.