Today I called Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) to ask for a price estimate for MUC-EDI. They are asking for 426 . That is, if you spend the night on a train, sitting upright, then walk through Paris for half an hour with your luggage for a total travelling time of 18 hours. Double both price and time if you also want to go back. Seriously. Update: Since it was suggested that flying might be even more expensive: The cheapest flight MUC-EDI costs 180 EUR both ways, including all taxes and fees.

GCC 4.3 changed pedantic preprocessor warnings in C++ code into errors, in line with the C++ front-end. Because of this change, preprocessor warnings are now errors. This leads to a number of errors that are in my opinion too strict and I've started a discussion about this problem on the GCC mailing list. I hope this change will be reverted, or that some of these errors are downgraded to warnings again, but users of current gcc-snapshot package might encounter these errors. I haven't filed bugs about these issues since I'm waiting for a census from GCC developers. Nevertheless, it makes sense to fix these problems if they are present in one's package. This change has caused at least the three following errors which are all fairly common. error: "xxx" redefined It's not allowed to #define something twice, as in this example:

#define TEST "foo"
#define TEST "bar"

This code will lead to the following error:

test2.cc:2:1: error: "TEST" redefined
test2.cc:1:1: error: this is the location of the previous definition

Most typically, this occurs because something is defined in a header that is included and then redefined in the current source file. It can also happen when a #define is put in the code but also on the command line, e.g. via -DTEST="bar". This will lead to:

test2.cc:1:1: error: "TEST" redefined
<command line>:1:1: error: this is the location of the previous definition

The correct solution is to avoid redefinitions directly or to use #ifndef to make sure that something has not been defined already. extra tokens at end of #endif directive While an #ifdef obviously needs a second parameter, it's not allowed to give one to #else and #endif. Unfortunately, this is commonly done as a reminder for what is being tested for:

#ifdef TEST
#endif TEST

This code will lead to the following error:

test3.cc:2:8: error: extra tokens at end of #endif directive

missing newline The last line of a source file has to end with a newline. If this is not the case, the following error is now shown:

test4.cc:1:19: error: no newline at end of file

I went to the Co-operative Group's South-west region Annual General Meeting in Taunton last Saturday (5 May) and I'll be writing this up over the next few days. It's taken me that long to find time to reread my notes. I'll try to blog the two bits that I think are interesting to other regions today, because more AGMs are happening tomorrow.

"The AGM is one of only two [formal decision-making] meetings open to members each year, when they can recieve information on the performance of their Society, and hold their elected representatives to account. Afternoon sessions will again be less formal, and include topics such as food retail, ethics, our banking and insurance businesses, and healthy eating."

(from A Cambridge Co-operator). There are other meetings for members during the year, of course, but they tend to be consultations and workshops and so on. The meeting was opened by the Woodcraft Folk, who I didn't know much about, but they seem to be like an outdoorsy co-operative youth club. Then there were introductions by the chair, a presentation by Catherine Staveley from group head office about ethics, environment and community, the annual reports and then a motion:

"This meeting is disappointed that we fail to declare our distinctive, mutual, consumer ownership and ethical values in our trading outlets. In our large outlets, wall space is left vacant and little attempt is made to promote what we stand for. We undersell ourselves as an alternative form of business enterprise which has principles. Therefore, we request the Regional Board to pursue the prominent display of messages to proclaim our ownership structure and promote the causes fundamental to our unique consumer appeal."

After many speakers in support and one against, the regional board came out in support and the motion was passed overwhelmingly. Finally, there were the questions and the report of the Party. More on that soon.

Now I've got my tickets, I've put some tips about finding cheap debconf land travel onto the debconf site. (I know that was selfish, but debconf's travel deadlines sucked and it refused to help pay for travel, so please excuse me looking after myself first.) Damog emailed me, grumbling about how hard it is to find cheap/quick land travel from a major English city to Edinburgh. I sent back three options for under GBP 35 return, but I've heard nothing more. Hope it worked. Simon Richter wrote GyrosGeier's blog - Why the environment loses out, again. complaining that Deutsche Bahn quote 426 ? (EUR, I guess) to go to Edinburgh from Munich. Well, I just asked Lufthansa and they quote up to EUR 1400 to fly Munich-Edinburgh, but I'm sure you can find that cheaper too - obviously, if you get only one quote from a dominant supplier, that may not be the best price available. I don't know about travel from Germany, but someone already left a link to another ticket agency in the comments.

One of the things about living in the country is that there isn't all that much predictability. You can have your water supply disrupted by ants, sewage issues, power supply problems, etc.

But today was a new one that disrupted my morning commute.

It wasn't mud, or harvest.

No, it was traffic. On our driveway, just a few feet in front of our front door.



Takes only one of those standing on the driveway to make a traffic jam.

More developments on cycling and the Highway Code: There was a written answer in parliament about the Highway Code which completely avoided the question - cyclists are voting 'no' to its 'Does this answer the above question?' poll. I have. bikeuser wrote about the Highway Code with excerpts and links to me and also linked Eleanor Blair - More Highway Code which mentions the Early Day Motion in parliament with a suggestion that you write to your MP and ask them to sign it. In a comment, Anonymous asked:

"I agree with you that cyclists should have the right to decide that a cycling road seems too hazardous. However, other than that, any reason why cyclists should get to use roads when cycle paths exist?"

Yes. The most important reason is that most cycle paths are built to a very low standard (design speed of 18mph on an unladen hybrid bike) which is unsuitable for commercial carriers and even ordinary road bicycles (what I used to call racers). Even national government suggests to use the road if you want to exceed the design parameters of cycle paths.

"As a general rule, if you want to cycle quickly, say in excess of 18 mph/30 kph, then you should be riding on the road."

Also, cycle paths usually get the lowest priority of all highways at every junction (contrary to national guidance) and are hopelessly badly signposted. Would you choose a bumpy-road that gives way at every piddling side road when you have the choice of a flat, smooth A road? I doubt it - that's the basic form of traffic calming in bypassed villages like Blisworth. There are some cycle tracks I use, but even those are so badly signed, it's taken me weeks to figure them out - and I've been visiting family in this area for years! For example, I don't enjoy riding on the exposed Somerset Avenue dual carriageway and the adjacent purpose-built shared-use path is segregated, with few junctions or pedestrians, but consider the junction complex at West Wick (the aerial picture shows the cycle path, but the roads on the bottom right have changed). It's faster to use the underpasses, cross Churchlands Way into Yew Tree Drive and then use the Summer Lane underpass to reach North Worle, but which way do the cycle route signs send you? Yep, round to the left, across four sets of traffic lights where the cyclists get the lowest priority (and a 'Cyclists Dismount' sign for good measure) and then along a path that level-crosses an estate road completely blind (under construction in the aerial pic, above the roundabout). Oh, and the cycle route map's wrong for that area, just to make it even more confusing. Because of the bad signposts and maps, it's also very difficult to report any problems with cycle paths and tracks to the highways maintenance team. Cycle paths often don't have names and I've sometimes had reports come back with "there is no fault" when it turns out they've looked at the nearby road, not the cycleway. Forcing cyclists to use cycle paths will probably always be the wrong choice, but there's a lot of improvements needed before you can expect many cyclists to use them by choice. Doing so now would be like directing all cars onto unsigned B-roads instead of motorways that exist for the same journey, just because vans and lorries have a bigger need for the motorways. I like having B-roads available for journeys which would be much longer otherwise, but I wouldn't want to be forced off the motorways just because they exist. Even if you're a car driver, write to your MP and object to directing classes of traffic off of roads that are safer than alternatives. Else, if you tolerate this... The bigger question is "why is so much money spent on the cycling equivalent of B-roads?" and I don't know the answer to that. We would do much better to widen roads to add cycle lanes (or allow safe in-lane overtaking by cars), instead of widening the adjacent paths and painting them as shared use.

Another beautiful day here in Paradise. Montreal is fantastic in the late Spring/early Summer -- it's a great time to be here in the city. Yesterday, Amita June and I went to Parc Jean Drapeau, the beautiful park on an island in the St. Lawrence, the former site of Expo 67. We played at the (really cool) new playground, ran around in the grass, and looked at the river rushing by. Today I rolled out a new table-of-contents layout on Wikitravel; you can see an example on our page about France. It's the culmination of about 11 months of debate and compromise amongst Wikitravellers, me, Maj, Internet Brands, and pretty much everyone else under the sun. It took a looong time, but we eventually got something that most people could live with and (shock!) some people actually liked. It wasn't easy, and my earlier unilateral decisions about it were so upsetting to people that it produced our current Wikitravel:Technical infrastructure policy. It's been great to finally reach some closure on this particular issue, since it was such a source of learning for me. tags: wikitravel wiki montreal amitajune toc

RoCoCo -- one week and counting We've got about one week before RoCoCoCamp starts. It's going to be pretty exciting; we've had a lot of responses and the list of participants is growing strong. But there are still a lot of infrastructure things to be done -- I'm going to be really impressed if we get them all done before next Friday. I'm getting more and more amazed that the folks in Portland (Oregon) manage to put on RecentChangesCamp there. It's pretty hard to do a three-day unconference. tags: rocococamp barcamp barcampmontreal recentchangescamp

Kanren So, I've just finished re-reading The Reasoned Schemer, the sequel to The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen. Reasoned is a really nice introduction into what seems to be a classic compulsion for Scheme freaks: re-implementing the logic language Prolog more-or-less in Scheme. The little language that unfolds in Reasoned is elegant, simple, and best of all, extremely Scheme-y. There's a really long digression into binary mathematics and deriving bitwise operations for arithmetical functions, which all seems to be the long way around the block since it's unlikely that users of their system would use anything but the math system built into the host language, Scheme. The implementation in TRS is laid out at the back of the book. It's a learning version of a bigger project, called Kanren. I've been fiddling with the system, which has re-inspired my dream of creating a declarative language framework for Web applications. I'd like to see what Web programming in Kanren would be like... I'll see how it goes. tags: kanren scheme the reasoned schemer logic prolog

Domains Another way I spent my time today was that we've finally gotten around to transferring the wikitravel.org/.net/.com domains to IB. IB's owned the site for a while, but we've never really had a reason to switch the domains over, so it's gone undone for a long time. And I'm kind of glad. It sucks transferring domains between registrars. wikitravel.org was on Joker. which used to be my registrar of choice, but which has been superseded by Godaddy. Transferring a single domain took 6 Web forms (on two different sites), 3 security codes, and 4 email confirmations. Thankfully, this also gave me a chance to transfer over my speculative domains phonojournalist.com (for telephone photos) and phrygiancap.org, for general freedom issues. I like the phrygian cap, what can I say? All right, so I have a lot of domains that I'm unlikely to ever exploit. If that's so wrong, I don't want to be right. tags: domains ib joker godaddy phonojournalist phrygian cap

I asked: does anyone want to recommend good recipes that don't mind the ugliness of frozen mint? Holger wrote:

"Jamie Oliver recipe: SALMON WRAPPED IN PARMA HAM WITH LENTILS looks probably doesn't matter as it wilts a bit anyway and volumewise most is made up by the spinach. Also: With green tea the looks doesn't matter that much if you brew it in an opaque tea pot."

alephnull wrote:

"Another way of freezing the mint is to put it into ice cubes. Just pack them into an ice tray and top them up with water. They don't wilt as much and look better too."

Thanks, both! I'll try them later.

Steve Kinsella wrote:

"Your right to ride on the road is in jeopardy. The revised Highway Code says cyclists should "use cycle facilities where possible". [...] The implications of this are bad. First, we will suffer more abuse and intimidating driving. Secondly cyclists will be disobeying the Highway Code when they assess that a cycle lane or path is dangerous and act accordingly. Thirdly, if a cyclist is involved in an accident and tries to claim damages, the insurance companies are likely to argue that the rider contributed to the accident by not using the cycle facility. The Highway Code has been laid before parliament. It will automatically be approved possibly by 20 May unless it is referred to a House of Commons Committee which cannot amend it and can only recommend the whole document be rejected. [...] There is a petition on the government website. One can be sceptical about the value of these petitions but the publicity is valuable as can be seen from this Sunday Times article of 7 May. It is interesting to note that 35 MP's objected to the original revised wording. Unfortunately, the replacement wording is worse. 11,000 objections were received to the previous wording. There are 70, 000 in the CTC alone who should now be objecting. If this Highway Code is approved by government cyclists will effectively lose the right to ride on the road where there are alternative routes or adjacent facilities. Please register your name on the petition and persuade others to do the same."

(via nscycle )

Continuing the theme from my previous post – the first and fundamental thing any distro needs to have, and thus the first and fundamental thing to think about disintermediating, is some way of distributing software. That might be burning CDs and sending them out to resellers or OEMs, or having your stuff available for download, whether by putting it up on your own server, hosting it via a dedicated high-reliability provider like akamai, or maintaining a network of mirror sites and keeping them up to date. And, of course, anyone who wants to distribute their own software has to do the exact same thing – which either means doing it themselves, and not being able to take advantage of the scalability the distributor has already made work, or going through the distribution and dealing with the problems that entails, as well as the benefits. In this case, disintermediation and decentralisation are pretty much one and the same thing: and decentralising content distribution is already a well understood problem: that’s what peer-to-peer is all about, and peer-to-peer distribution of, well, distributions is already very successful – at least when it comes to CD (and DVD) images. Which means that just about anyone can create a CD image, and distribute it to the world in exactly the same way a major organisation like Debian or Red Hat would – upload a torrent file, run a seed, and let the magic of BitTorrent do its thing. Scalability is no longer something you need a distribution organisation to manage, instead it’s built directly into the technology itself. Unfortunately BitTorrent is designed for large static images – not something you update on a daily basis. And for better or worse, my preferred distribution (Debian testing, currently lenny) does update that frequently. Fortunately, though, BitTorrent’s an open protocol and has dozens of open source implementations – so last year I was able to propose it as part of the Google Summer of Code, and was lucky enough to get a few responses and a student to work on it. It didn’t get much further than that unfortunately – the student lost internet access not long into the programme (and for most of its duration), and that was pretty much that. So when this year’s SoC rolled around, I didn’t really expect much, and didn’t put the idea up for consideration again, but lo and behold someone came through and asked if it was still possible and if there was any more information, and when I forwarded on some of the mails from the previous year we ended up with a second chance at the project. So far it’s looking pretty good – we’ve had a lot more success at keeping in touch, and thanks to the extended schedule for the SoC this year we’ve been able to do a much better job of keeping on top of what’s going on. So much so, in fact, that there’s a first (alpha) release out before the SoC is officially due to start! Wonderful stuff! What it does at the moment is allow you to take a Packages file (the stuff “apt-get update” downloads, which includes descriptions of all the packages that are available, how they inter-depend, and so forth), and from that information create a usable torrent from which to obtain the packages themselves which can then be used to share and distribute the packages. There are two crucial steps in that: the first is allowing the torrent to work without requiring huge amounts of extra information to be distributed (which would introduce scalability problems of its own, instead of solving them), and the second is that the pieces that make up the torrent are selected in a way that matches the actual packages, so that when you upload a single new package, you are in fact only making a minor change to the torrent, rather than having it (on average) completely redefine half of the torrent (and again introduce scalability problems rather than solve them). There’s more information on the DebTorrent wiki page and Cameron’s blog if you’re interested. Anyway, it’s just an alpha release at the moment, which means while there’s code that does something, it’s not actually all that useful yet. The current plan is to next add some code to make it automatically prioritise packages based on what you’re actually using – so that rather than downloading all the debs it see, it’ll only download the ones you’ve got installed, or maybe only newer versions of the ones you’ve got installed, which should get us pretty close to the point where it’s actually useful for something. The end result, of course, is to build a tool that you can point at a Debian archive, run it on a machine connected to the Internet, and you won’t have to do anything more to have a reliable, scalable and reasonably efficient means of allowing your users to distribute and update their systems. In this case, scalable means that if you end up with as many users as Debian or Ubuntu, your users will have a comparable experience, as if you’d arranged for a similarly comprehensive mirror network, without actually having to do the leg work. And heck, presuming that works, it doesn’t even matter if no one else actually does that – it’s worth it even if it saves Debian or Ubuntu the effort of keeping track of a mirror network by hand. There are interesting possibilities at smaller scales too, of course. :)

Traditionally, the german ministry of the interior has been taking patronage for the LinuxTag. Which per-se is a good thing.However, the current minister of the interior has been publishing some "anti-terror proposals" that pretty much all opensource people see as a serious attack on their freedom, and that actually violate the constitution (or even the human rights, such as his statements towards torture).So this is a very odd situation: everybody would like to say "no" to him, but at the same time, welcome his ministry because of the good cooperation with opensource people the last years.IMHO, LinuxTag needs at least make a statement that while they welcome his efforts to establish the use of open source software in public administration, they can not agree with his political efforts with respect to the "war on terror", which pose a serious attack on the freedom of individuals.After all, there will be security experts at LinuxTag, and who if not they are capable of judging that e.g. the famous "federal trojan" won't be able to help much against organized crime (including terror organizations) because these can also organize computing safety (e.g. by not using Windows and not accepting executable data in email...). Or show up how much data abuse his proposals with respect to data gathering allow.

Interesting work Junichi, but I guess that you've missed some users. Your data:

• 30000 unique IPs were used to access merkel.debian.org using apt-listbugs
• 3% of all (wrong, popcon) Debian users install apt-listbugs
• Number of popcon submissions considered: 48641
• = 1,000,000 number of users

I disagree with the number of users, because there's a important number missing: How many people said no to popcon. Even if your number is right or close, do you see the 1,000,000 - 48641 difference above?

The only thing I'm sure now is that we've much more than 1,000,000 users. With just the data above it isn't possible to reach the exact number. It was like ask just a few developers who will be his first option for DPL and give as a result the number of DDs and not a estimative on who's going to win.

Reference: http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2007-May-9.html.en#2007-May-9-21:13:02

Yesterday I hacked asynchronous wrapper for python-gammu. It is start of progress to make Wammu behave better while talking to phone. My plan is that all operations will go through this asynchronous wrapper and will be completely non blocking to Wammu. This means no progress bar will pop up to front, but entries will appear in window as they are being read. Progress will be of course still shown, but only in status bar. The current code is only first step, next thing which has to be implemented in python-gammu are virtual commands. Those will be used for things like getting all calendar events from phone, so all you will have to do for getting all is enqueue GetAllCalendar event and worker will do all for you including progress reporting. If you want to write own application using this new wrapper, you can look at example which is in sources. It shows all current possibilities, but it will be enhanced in future.

The first release is complete. You may now download debtorrent version 0.1.0 from the alioth project file list. Some notes:

• it's an alpha release, so don't expect too much functionality
• there's currently no communication with apt, so a download will be the entire archive (unless you write a really long priority list)
• there will be very few people using it, so seed a torrent yourself to test, or check out the tracker to find torrents that are seeded

Here's the changelog:

• Initial release, based on BitTornado 0.3.18
• Added variable-sized pieces capability
• Modified programs to create/use .dtorrent files
• Added ability to use Packages files directly

It finally happened. I installed Debian Etch on my last Woody box, a 400 MHz Pentium II with 576 MB RAM named gsa which is my home desktop since I bought it at LinuxTag 2003 in Karlsruhe. And no I didn’t do a dist-upgrade, neither direct no via Sarge. As already planned I removed some no more necessary operating systems from that box and installed Etch on the freed disk space. Woody is still installed on that box in parallel and was recognized perfectly by Etch’s installer. I took a few hours but also was big fun to go through Etch package list and to decide what to install. Overall the installation of 5 GB of software took about half a day. In general everything went fine, the only thing I’m yet missing is sound. Etch didn’t seem to recognize my soundcard at all although it’s a well-known brand and defacto standard for many other soundcards: a Creative Labs Soundblaster. Well, the 16-Bit ISA version, needing the full length of the slot. Worked fine under Woody. Well, I hope I’ll get it working again manually. What on the other hand is really nice with udev hell —eh— hal and all those new automatic bells and whistles: The desktop (well, at least GNOME Nautilus as well as XFCE, but probably also KDE) recognises when I insert a 3.5” floppy into the drive and shows me a nice floppy icon on the desktop. You think, that’s impossible? Floppy drives don’t inform the rest of the system when a floppy has been inserted without you polling the drive every few seconds? Well, USB floppy drives can. And they do. :-) I still need time to migrate all the old settings from Woody to Etch. I’ll probably stick with FVWM, but perhaps will use the GNOME enabled version. What’s already done is the migration from tcsh to zsh. On all new or dist-upgraded systems after Etch I’ve chosen zsh so with my last Woody installation retiring I’ve also fully migrated to zsh. So I’ve got now most of my active private boxes running Etch. Only the noone.org web and mail server “sym” (an amd64 box) as well as my 133 MHz ThinkPad “bijou” are still running Sarge, both with 2.6 kernels. So with switching to Etch on gsa, I also got no more Debian box running a 2.4 kernel. The only 2.4 kernel I run is on my FreeWRT WLAN router named pluriel, which runs 2.4.33.3. But I expect that 2.6.18 will be as stable and long lasting as the famous and rock-solid 2.4.18 from Woody. 18 seems to be Debian’s favourite kernel minor version recently. ;-)

I did it.
We did it.
The whole lot of us did it.
And we liked it.
In fact, we loved it.
Today, Spencer Tunick held his long awaited session in Mexico City. I signed up a long time ago, yet could not believe this was really going to happen - And man, did it happen!
For those still wondering who is Tunick (lazy you, as with the first link, it becomes just obvious), he is an artist who enjoys gathering large crowds, getting them all naked, and photographing them. Some people (including me, until this morning) erroneously categorize him as a photographer - No way! Out of Tunick's own words, out of many comments I heard and read today (i.e. at El Universal's forum), I can assure you only a participant can feel Tunick's art - A sensation of togetherness, of freedom, of clean enjoyment, throwing out the denial and repression we have regarding ourselves and our society. I was quite skeptical. The Mexican society is well known for being conservative on many issues. Nudism in Mexico is basically something not even talked about. There are a couple of nudist beaches, but they are closely associated with relaxed morals and drug abuse, and are just not safe for, say, women on their own. Nudists are seen as sex-maniacs... And, yes, this is as far as it gets from truth.
As I said, not only did it happen here, but how! We were between 18,000 and 20,000 naked people in the Z calo, Mexico City's main square, the third largest square in the world. The previous attendance record for Tunick's works was at Barcelona, Spain, with 7,000 people. And the surprise is not just the number - I insist, it fills me with joy to recognize a positive change in my country, to recognize we are not that retrograde anymore.
Nadezhda and I were there, as many couples, groups of friends, even families (although, yes, people under 18 were requested not to come - they would be expelled if found). I think the main age group was people in their late 20s, but there were many people from every age group. We met people who travelled from Jalapa, Veracruz (5 hr away), to be here today. I read reports of people coming from Guanajuato (5 hr), Oaxaca (6-7 hr), even Durango (14 hr)! We met near the Z calo at 4:30 AM, as Tunick likes making his work with the early morning light. As you can imagine, and after quite a busy and tiring day, I feel like minced meat... So I'll leave this for now. I expect to come back to the topic in the next couple of days - But anyway: This was amazing. Incredible.

Unfortunatelly, Mr Sarkozy winnig these elections does not come as a total surprise. Still it is not something you have to passively accept. You still have a democracy. What is needed now is a strong and watchful opposition, in and outside the parliaments. Remain alert, protect and defend your R publique and the rights its residents have! We're with you! Best,
Meike

Pete Nuttall rants about how online shopping sucks. I agree that it has problems, but the core ones are perhaps not the problems he identified. Pete argues that while "in a real shop, you hand them their goods and they carry it away", fulfilling an order is much harder for online retailers. It is, but it can also be much easier for a shopper, especially if you want to buy something not available locally. But a real benefit of online shopping is that delivery happens asynchronously; that you don't have to hand the customer their product on their way out the door. This lets my sister find native plants on her property, put them up for sale, and only dig them up when she gets an order. It lets Cafe press and many smaller outfits create customised products on demand. It lets me shop at 2 am. Asynchronousity is good. Pete thinks that needing to have a paypal account is a problem, comparing it to needing to open a new bank account to make a purchase. Of course, this ignores the fact that once you get the account, you won't want to buy from many online merchants who don't accept paypal. As someone who's worked on credit card processing backends for random online merchants, I know that I don't want to give my credit card account to a random merchant if I can avoid it. This, coupled with the ease of use of not needing to enter all my purchase information every time, means I'll chose a merchant who accepts paypal over one who doesn't, nearly every time. The real problem is that both online shopping and payment promote centralisation. There's a pull toward centralising as much shopping as possible in one mega-site, because customers come to trust that site, and understand how it works. That's why there is only one amazon, and only one ebay (effectively). Handling payment is even more centralised, with just a few credit card companies and paypal. And I think that the problem underlying that is that our model of payment is all wrong. It's based on money immediately changing hands, with an overlay of a promise of payment; it should instead be based simply on a binding promise of payment. A merchant expects to get money transfered to their account as soon as the credit card processing goes through. That money really comes from the credit card company, based on a customer's promise that they will pay back that credit. The customer indicates this promise in the most stupid way possible: By entering a sequence of numbers that only they are supposed to know, but that is not unique to that purchase. As I've said before, it should be technically possible to kick out the credit card middlemen, and make payment much simpler and secure by changing the buyer's promise of payment into a legally binding, unique, cryprographically signed message that's sent directly to the merchant. But for this to happen, we'd have to change the model of payment, so that merchants don't expect to get money immediately, but instead asynchronously (the same as they ship things out asynchronously). Even harder, we'd have to somehow interest companies in supporting that. Since companies almost always prefer making money by promoting centralised systems, I don't have much hope of this happening anytime soon.

Dan has been complaining I haven't been ranting enough lately. I have been waiting for the Scottish elections to sort themselves out, because thats a nice mess and easily due some ranting. However, given the need for a placeholder, I wrote this little moan on the subject of internet shopping. Everyone knows that the future of shopping is online. Every year, more money is spent online. Christmas last year was marked by getting a few parcels a day from amazon. However, I find it fraught with all things of annoying problems. Over the last few days, I have attempted to buy a t-shirt and a bottle of whisky online, while buying a pair of sandals and a book offline. While the wo aren't the same, it was still instructive as to the problems of internet shopping. Taking money from shoppers. To actually take money from people has to be the most important part of running any sort of shop. However, it is someone hard for me, the shopper, to give websites my money. Consider the example of Geekz Shop. To pay them, it appears I need to have a paypal account[0]. On examining the paypal signup page, I see references to the FSA. While its good that Paypal are actually registered and regulated these days, it does strongly suggest that they are a bank, and as such opening a account with them is the same as opening a bank account with HSBC or someone. In other words, I need to open a new bank account just to buy a t-shirt. Thats a lot of hoops to jump though. In their defense, they did offer a collection of other ways to pay when emailed about it, but its still a lot more work than walking into a shop and giving them cash. In more general terms, as a shop, its important to make it as easy as possible for your customers to give you money. Its common to outsource this to someone else, but any general solution serving lots of sites will suck[2]. Of course, doing it yourself means you are stuck dealing with credit cards - which is a pain, or BACS which is a joke. Oh well. The next issue you have is giving people their goods. In a real shop, you hand them their goods and they carry it away (massive generalization). Unless you are selling somthing completely electronic, for example domains, then you have to get the goods to the person. Once again, running your own service is hard - far harder than your own online payment system. However, it and your website is the thing people see of your shop. The classic problem is late delivery. You have to make some sort of claim as to when goods will arrive, but getting it wrong will result in arguments. My best example of this is a christmas present bought off amazon last year - it arrived in January, despite amazon's claim of having it to me before christmas day. The other classic example of getting it wrong is the apple store. It doesn't quote a delivery time - instead it quotes a "ready to ship" time. This is the time needed for apple to put your purchase in a box and stick a label on it. The problem with this is that your poor customer thinks that his new mac is going to show up in a couple of days. It doesn't, so he is massively disapointed. You've disapointed the guy before your product has left your warehouse. Thats one step aay from employing a bouncer to beat your customers when they leave your store. Having thought that delivery problems are an issue, consider people returning stuff. If its hard, they just moan at their credit card company. If your support and sales folk are in a call centre and can't be reached, then they spend the next week explaining to their mates about how dire you are and why they would sooner deal with the devil than you. Oh, and neither email nor rt is a way to deal with this. The final problem with most online shops is usability. Usability is hard - full stop. Its harder to sell something when the customer can't pick it up and feel it. While some shops are quite good, the number that force me to think when filling out the checkout forms or looking for products is amazing. Its like they don't want my custom. From this, I have claimed that a good online store needs a good way to take money off customers, a good way to get goods to customers, a sane way to deal with problems and a usable website (Next week, I'm going to blog about how water is wet). However, lots of sites, including big ones, fail at this. I don't think internet shopping is going away, but I do think that the shops that fail to take money off folk, that have sites that can't be navigated, that give goods to couriers who "lose" them, will go out of business. I hope that most shops steadily improve on these areas, just so I spend less time being pissed off at them BTW: this post was inspired by my mother's attempts to buy photos of my graduation online (no - it hasn't happened yet). The site in question was apparently so confusing that she has given up and has asked me to buy them. Sorry for ranting.

• [0]: Yes, I know it says you don't need one. Try making a purchase. I did mail them about this problem.
• [2]: Show me a payement site that doesn't suck and I'll show you one that you don't use.