"a monthly public demonstration of Free Open Source Software (FOSS), aimed primarily at beginners. It's not specifically for Linux, as the software will be demoed on a WinXP system to lure people in ;) -- however, I will make some live linux distro CDs for the event. Here's the details: Title: Introduction to Free Software
Date: Wednesday 18th April
Time: Lunchtime 1-2pm
Place: Cube Cinema, Dove Street South, Bristol BS2 8JS
Map
Price: Free
The website"

The second one will be on 26th May 2007 at the Cube Cinema, Dove Street South, Bristol BS2 8JS (Map), 1pm-3pm, and is hopefully a music one with a barbecue (weather permitting!).

I've started using the phrase "tragedy of targets" recently for those situations where someone does something stupid to meet an ill-specified target, instead of working towards the result in the way the target-setter expected. This gem was published by a Conservatives candidate over in my home county of Northamptonshire and was mentioned in today's Weston and Worle News

"an offender visited approximately 550 domestic properties in Weston-super-Mare with a fake comic relief sponsor form. This person obtained property by deception, (i.e. convinced them to part with money) from no less than 542 separate victims. Following good work from the police, he was caught, arrested, interviewed and I understand he will be cautioned for all the offences. My sources tell me that as a result of the arrest, the North Somerset District was or is planning to claim 542 'detections' for this one job. This will prove to be an amazing result for the bean-counters and has no doubt salvaged the whole 'performance target' result for the area in 2006. Indeed, the local Police Community Support Officers have spent the week going door to door in an attempt to locate every household that was conned, and get them to sign a pro-forma statement of complaint to bolster the clear-up rate"

Do you know other examples where setting a target has had unintended effects? Do you have a suggestion how to set better targets for the police here? Me, I like the suggestion of one anonymous commenter:

"The Police should be measured on the absence of crime not by detecting it."

Two semi-related things. Firstly, I just got notice that North Somerset Council are going to let North Somerset Housing pointlessly tarmac over a square of grass near us. Planning application 07/P/0464/F claims to provide 3 additional car parking spaces, but it tarmacs 7m width of grass while marking 6m width of current tarmac as no-parking: a net addition of 1m! Not enough for even one additional car! Now they've made this officially-acceptable reasoning, I reckon it will feature in a planning application for building more houses on the village's green spaces. How about: you can build a new house as long as you mark an existing house as uninhabitable? Secondly, Clevedon residents are petitioning the Prime Minister to stop Tesco expansion as reported in the Mercury. Expanding the Tescopoly in Clevedon will harm what already looks to me like an endangered town centre. OK, it's not the PM's responsibility to stop one store expanding in one town, but it is his government's planning policies which are aiding and abetting the continued growth of unsustainable 'big box' stores. I can see Clevedon from my office window. I'd need binoculars to spot Morrisons, but I think Tesco is visible with the naked eye already from the top of Worlebury hill. Every Little Hurts but they just keep on rolling like Renard, not noticing the pain.

Rolandas commented:

"Do you know, that you can get free listings from broadcasting data services by going to http://www.bds.tv/ and registering as person? You need to pay money if you making money out of it."

No, I didn't know that. Thanks for the tip. It's hard to register with BDS because it isn't accessible - anyone know whether the listings are in a useful format? Still doesn't really change that the TV listings tax is unjust: why shouldn't we be able to publish remixes of this data that we already pay for?

Update: Francies commented:

"I also emailed Barclays regarding their non-listing of Linux and had the "128-bit encryption" where again Linux was not mentioned (have they even heard of it? A friend mentioned today that he has read that Barclays will be issuing chip and pin or card devices to all online banking users so could it be that these will be Windows only? If so the Linux community should complain in case all banks get the same idea."

I've also seen Barclays announce the chip-and-pin readers and a BBC report about them. Anyone seen these before? Comment form at the end of the page.

Who are the next generation of Debianists? Are they all still coming to us out of different OS backgrounds, or do we now have the significant beginnings of a home grown generation, born and raised in Debian-using families and now making their voices heard? I hope that Debian Jr. will encourage this kind of generational growth of the project. When recently I rewrote the guiding principles of Debian Jr., my vision was a Debian that children would identify as their own. I expect they will be eager to add their own ideas as they grow up with it. It was pointed out to me today that there is some evidence that this is already happening (thanks for the link, Matthew Wilcox). As for my own kids, ages 16, 15, 12, 9 and 5, only the oldest have ever used some system at home other than Debian¹. They all comfortably use our Debian systems daily, discussing regularly with me what they need. This leads to filing bugs and patches on their behalf², and inspires further development of the Debian Jr. project. So, in at least this sense, the children of Debian are already contributing members of Debian, if not voting members. The ideas of families are improving Debian for everyone. As the project grows, I expect the ways in which families will change Debian will be more significant, not only technically but also in Debian’s character.

¹ Before we started using Debian in 1995, the family system was a VT-420 terminal connected to the Solaris system running our community freenet. At that time our kids would sit in my lap and play at typing into pico for their amusement.

² For instance, I was pleased to discover the other day that my egoboo patch was accepted. That was a direct result of my kids asking me to make it work for them.

Smigs commented:

"perhaps the ultimate example of this is the ebay uk announcements feed - the items date back to 2004 and it totals 267.86 kB - so big that the livejournal syndicator refuses to use it at all. I went so far as to contact ebay about it, but they didn't do anything."

I'm having a little problem getting some money from ebay (which I might write about after I resolve it), so the above comes as no surprise to me. That sounds like the Carlsberg of feeds: probably the fattest feed in the world. Martijn wrote:

"I think a feed should contain all content the other versions of the page have, it's an alternative (link rel etc.) after all. Imho, parsers should just be made smarter, and drop things they consider to be 'too old'."

I agree that a feed should be the same content as other versions (or at least the main one of them should... see my site's filtered feeds) but my comment about being too big and too old applies to the non-feed versions too: Recent Changes pages should drop items which aren't recent. I disagree that parsers should drop things that are too old because it would do more harm than good: generally, you can't tell how old an item claims to be until after you've read it; and a lot of publishers have subtly broken clocks (which is why my aggregator uses ordered lists, instead of sorting by timestamps like planet). Related link: Problogger: 34 Reasons Why People Unsubscribe from RSS feeds.

Update: niq commented:

"Calm down! It only says "may not work", not anything about "enforcing". That reads to me like butt-covering rather than anything more sinister."

I know the public pages don't yet say it, but the report by Kit that I linked wrote about a message on a logged-in screen:

"Just logged into my account today to find that Barclays online intend to support and guarantee to work with only certain browsers and operating systems. Linux is not listed. Seem to be travelling in the opposite direction to Scottish Power whose website appears to have lost all vestiges of its original "no Linux" stance."

Who to believe? A later message from Dave Liquorice reports:

"Had a reply from Barclays, it basic boils down to them insisting on 128 bit encryption."

Surely free software has done 128-bit for a long time, so why isn't it listed?

Because of the problems with my aggregator's memory use, I'm unsubscribing from some feeds that are too big, too slow and not vital enough that I'll miss them. So, it's goodbye to: no2id.net newsletters - too big (144k), too slow (dates back to February) and not vital - I'll keep the events and news release feeds for now. www.thewildbeast.co.uk - too big (72k) and too slow (dates back to May 2006). scobleizer.com - I subscribed to this after a recommendation, but it's too big (128k) and actually rather irritating IMO, waffling about things that I'm not interested in. www.sbs.gov.uk - site seems to have vanished without warning. Typical failure of our government to make life easy for small businesses. aphoc.org - site has been offline too long and I don't remember what it was. There's a couple more which I'm keeping under review, but they've earned their keep for now. (Update: removing just the above has shortened the merge time from 3mins to 30secs.) My feed is about 29k at the time I write this: how big is yours? If your feed is larger than about 50k - particularly if you don't send a Last-Modified or Content-Length header - you should take steps to slim your fat feed. Consider reducing the number of items, particularly if you have stuff more than three month old in it. Am I lazier than most at unsubscribing from feeds - my main feedbox still contains more than 70 - or will people with fat feeds already have lost lots of readers?

Dave Pattern has been conducting a survey of librarian views of their OPACs. He's posted the results to his opac-survey blog category and it might make interesting reading for other koha developers. Or maybe I'm just a survey nut.

One step nearer removing OS X form my iBook. Now I got java running so I can log on to my net banking account. The following works on my Debian Etch (-ish):

1. Download IBM’s java-package from http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/linux/download.html (registration required) - you need the 32bit iSeries/pSeries version in tgz format
2. Make sure that the package includes …/jre/bin/libjavaplugin_oji.so (somehow I got a package which didn’t have the file)
3. install java-package
4. run make-jpkg <tgz file>. If it complain about “no matching plugin was found” look in /usr/share/doc/java-package/SUPPORTED and rename you tgz file to something supporte of almost the correct version.
5. Install the resulting package and restart firefox (whatever it is named today)

I downloaded a file called ibm-java2-jre-5.0-4.0-linux-ppc.tgz and renamed it to ibm-java2-jre-50-linux-ppc.tgz and it seems to work.

Removed: Barclays (previously described as "by far the best online banking system I've tried"; "Barclays allows one to download statements as CSV files. Sadly, Barclays are ****s, which does rather compromise one's ethics...") because uk.comp.os.linux reports that they will start enforcing these operating system requirements.

I just rewrote my aggregator (schcyrssmerge2) which still works roughly on this algebra from 2004 (still the basic set theory rule of blog aggregate generation: aggregate_i+1 = (blogs/aggregate_i) u (aggregate_inblogs)) but now calculates agg1 a different way. First, there's agg0 - the items from the input RSS file - and I store only the post ids of agg0 as agg0i for speed. Previously, I was reading in all the blogs and doing the above set theory calculation in one go. With a couple of ill-behaved blogs (full-content feeds of a few hundred kb), mzscheme's memory usage was just getting silly, topping out at hundreds of megabytes to merge 4Mb of feeds into a 3Mb aggregate. I think some of the problems are PLT's - reading a 3Mb RSS file in with

"(define a (call-with-input-file "friends.rss" read-xml))"

seems to result in mzscheme (v352) holding 100Mb. What's with that? Anyway, now I've written a newitems function which extracts new items not listed in agg0i and old items which still appear in a blog and adds them to lists. Then, there's a function which tail-recurses over all the blog filenames, parsing the RSS, calling newitems on each one and building the lists of old and new items. Finally, agg1 is the new items appended to the old items. That is only calculated as it gets written out as a RSS file. I'll give it a few days of testing, then I'll publish a tarball. I use this to build my all.rss feed from my various source feeds, in case you didn't realise, as well as to run some planets for public and private use. Anyone got a suggestion how best to reduce the read-xml memory consumption? Upgrade? Switch dialect? I'd like some XML read/write functions and the SRFI list functions.

Carpenter Mukti Mitchell has set off on a tour of the coastline of Britain in a zero-emission microyacht promoting low carbon lifestyles. During the course of his voyage, he will be stopping at 40 ports and towns around the country with events organised to promote low carbon products and services. He doesn't call at Clevedon or King's Lynn (I guess they're too far inland) but he's currently in South Wales and should be calling at Wells-next-the-Sea on 21 July and Sheringham on 23. More dates The Phone Co-op (agent 471) is a co-sponsor of this event with, among others, Ecotricity, Resurgence and Co-operative membership so at least two of my co-operatives are supporting it.

Over at Bristol Wireless:

"Computers for sale from 50 ... 5+ in stock ... internet-ready, virus-free computers from our base in St Werburghs Community Centre."

(seen via BBLUG)

Kris Marsh commented:

"Thanks for the blog, I'd never have known about the BBC4 open source slot otherwise! Unfortunately I missed it, but I did notice that it's available on BBC's "listen again" feature "

So, what did you think of it? Post comments to my site or to fsfe-uk.

Argh! It was a busy blog day (sort of catching up after the double-holiday weekend) and now a second late-notice item. (Don't get used to it - I'll be back to my usual slow rate soon.) I think someone mentioned this before:

"Open Source BBC Radio 4: Wed 11 Apr, 21:00 - 21:30 30 mins Paul Bennun finds out how Free and Open Source software is making its impact felt across the world, fuelling development and saving businesses millions of pounds. [...]"

Frequencies and more blurb are on the BBC site It's not on Long Wave unless the Cricket World Cup match finishes extraordinarily early. So, what do you think of it? Post comments to my site or to fsfe-uk.

Until September 2006, I lived in King's Lynn, so I still have friends there and look out for some topics to do with it. I'm also still helping to update some community websites for that area. On Wednesday 11 April, Friends of the Walks will meet in St John's Church at 6pm. Topics for discussion include the group's future role after the heavy work has finished. There will be more updates to the website in the next few weeks. (Apologies for late notice - I only got the letter second-class cross-country.)

Ofcom publishes research on media literacy

Analysis of a research report: "Certainly a useful document to have on hand, if only to deconstruct."

Karen Bremner - The Apprentice Series 2

A new art form: go on a reality TV show, start blogging to raise profile, get hired by Old Media, then leave the site to bit-rot. How many of these "reality TV star headstones" sites are there now?

predicts problems and confusion for consumers

If anyone doubts how much big media gets bad PR from trying to use their big influence to direct the market (such as making their films only available in their format), check the first comment: "I'm waiting for the corporate idiots to decide"

xmltv, was: [Debian-uk] Getting wired in Manchester

Another thing on my "must try that when I get my DVR built" list.

theLargePrint.com The New Media Landscape and the BBC's Lost Horizon

Nice criticism of BBC's link-up with anti-competitors. I recently wrote about the BBC-Google link, which raises some similar problems.

BBC NEWS Business Fewer charges for website content

Figures from 2006 (I'll do media linkposts more often in future).

Time to read the papers?

I only get time to read one paper per week, unless I'm travelling.

Number 10: Tony Blair Interview with Stephen Fry

Fantasy TV shows number 10: A bit of Fry and Blairie.

BBC NEWS Technology Broadband switching set to ease

They say new rules came in on 14 February, but sites like moneySavingExpert.com are still full of tales of woe.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ban tv competitions/quizzes which charge extortionate caller rates (eg The Mint).

Sign this to clear UK digital TV of all these scam quizzes. I see that after just a taste of humble pie, itv play is back on air overnight on itv1.

Via BBLUG I've heard about

"a monthly public demonstration of Free Open Source Software (FOSS), aimed primarily at beginners. It's not specifically for Linux, as the software will be demoed on a WinXP system to lure people in ;) -- however, I will make some live linux distro CDs for the event. Here's the details: Title: Introduction to Free Software
Date: Wednesday 18th April
Time: Lunchtime 1-2pm
Place: Cube Cinema, Dove Street South, Bristol BS2 8JS
Map
Price: Free
The website"

Anyone going?