I was one of the plain clothes who went into the Apple Store first of all. As suggested, I started on the upper floor, but I found the staff:customer ratio too unfavourable. It seems that the top floor has a lot of the expensive hard-to-secure products, so there's a lot of staff and some visible security. I had a chat with a few people, but I wandered back downstairs long before Simon's fairly visible leafletting tour was shown the door. While downstairs, I noticed the huge till queue, which was attractive for three reasons: it had no security (I guess shoplifters rarely queue for the till), most of them are standing around waiting for something to read and they are almost certainly Apple customers, so who better to inform? [...cut from feed version...] Then, I got a bit bored and started putting the leaflets into Apple's product leaflet dispensers (in front of Apple's - no leaflets were removed), which soon got me rumbled. I left and spent the next two hours helping the pavement teams, which other people have described well. I was mostly working out towards the street corners, or walking up and down with the flow of pedestrians. I tried a few of the different posters, to see how well they worked:

1. The iTunes hand-tied poster worked well a bit further away from the store, catching crowds who were walking towards it. I suspect some people who took the leaflet after seeing this poster were loyal Apple-fans who thought it was an Apple promotional offer. It did get some very strange looks, especially from women - maybe they thought it was an ad for iPod-themed bondage;
2. The simple DefectiveByDesign.org worked well when people had seen the HazMat crew, along with the question "Do you want to know what the yellow suits are about?" Unfortunately, some people thought we were protesting about the exploding laptops problem. Do MacBooks and PowerMacs explode too?
3. "Eliminate DRM" got some takers for the "What's DRM?" question, but I didn't find it worked as well as the other two.

Some passers-by asked me questions: [...cut from feed version...] We handed out 3200 leaflets in about 150 minutes, which I think is pretty good going. Sometimes, it seemed nearly everyone passing through took a leaflet. Given that distribution rate, I was surprised how few ended up on the floor or in the bins at each street corner: the leafletters weren't too aggressive and I think that helped to get leaflets to people who would read them, although I think some were discouraged at how slowly they seemed to be handing out leaflets. It was also good to meet a few people from around the country, although I fear I'll forget which name links to which face soon. I had to rush off before talking to too many people (the joys of cheap transport tickets) but there were still some interesting chats.

There was a protest/rally outside Apple Store in Regent Street, London, England from 2pm on Saturday 2006-09-30, just ahead of 2006-10-03's Day Against DRM. First coverage I saw was from Simon Morris on fsfe-uk. Gareth Bowker's report has links to pictures and so on. This picture cracks me up in several ways, including the presence of other relevant subvertising and outdated BT advertising.

"How are things going with the public review process? Not so well."

Comment from ~Evan following Newsforge: Creative Commons revisions face same challenges as GPL

As I red the post of MJ Ray on planet, I contacted the gnuzilla project and offered to join them in order to make them a good upstream for distributors that cannot obey the new mozilla trademark policy. My current preference is to use snoweagle for thunderbird. IMO it would be a good choice, as it would be in the same spirit as iceweasel for firefox. Anyway, more ideas are welcome …

I noticed some [vitavonni] comments [raw output] about renaming Firefox to various things, to avoid the Mozilla trademark licence bugs. Then ams@gnu told me about Gnuzilla and IceWeasel. Can we use/help them? Update: asac "contacted the gnuzilla project and offered to join them" - great!

Sadly, it uses the broken GPLv3 comment system. Please let me know if you have problems with it, or can help to make it work in a Firefox-name-changed browser. View the draft guide.

You may remember that I've had trouble with BT's junk mail (twice) following leaving them in 2004. As mentioned in "A note on phone numbers and forms" recently, BT seems to have delayed my line from the Phone Coop to the new house (waiting for BT engineers to fix some problem at the exchange). Today I got a postcard saying "There's never been a better time to make savings with BT. [...] Come on, come back to BT's best ever offer and start saving." Where did they get my details from? I suspect it's the engineering request from the Phone Coop. I think I'll try to do some damage to BT now and make this bad practice more expensive for them. I can't believe this isn't abuse of a dominant market position. BT owns the only telephone network here and is the largest retail telco, despite having IMO the worst service.

There's a protest/rally outside Apple Store in Regent Street, London, England from 2pm on Saturday 2006-09-30, just ahead of 2009-10-03's Day Against DRM.

It sucks that despite (and apparently maybe because of) not being a BT customer any more, they can still delay my new phone line and broadband until a fortnight after moving in. (Ask not how I am online at the moment, for it is truly evil.) It sucks more that online forms for some essential services won't let you register a change of address if you don't have a telephone number. Bad Anglian Water. Bad North Somerset Council. It sucks even more that online forms for Wessex Water try to make you agree to even more restrictive terms than if you use the equivalent paper forms - I'm pretty sure their online terms break the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regs, but I'm not starting that fight just now.

; history awk ' print $2 ' awk 'BEGIN FS=" " print $1 ' sort uniq -c sort -rn head -10
history not found Yes, I'm so paranoid/simple that my shell has no external command history store... go rc!

Finally, I'm on the west coast of England, after living most of my life in East Anglia. I'm going to be slow-to-respond for the next few days while I update various location pointers (at least 36 of them, by current estimate) and then I'll describe the whole tortured saga. I didn't want to do so while it was happening, in case solicitors read this. It is so cool being able to look out of my office window and see Wales across the sea, though.

Like other people, I'm also getting bounces about mails sent to debian lists in 2005 that appear to be from MAILER-DAEMON@orange.fr - but on reading the headers of the error and the attached triggering message, it seemed to be some orange.fr user who has misconfigured their MTA and is injecting it with a load of old mail from a yahoo account. I'm told the user has been unsubbed - only 12 months of bounces to go...

Net Audio London is a free internet music festival in London on 15 and 16 September 2006.

Had an interesting chat at the door the other day with a rep from Action For Blind People. Interesting mix of information, advocacy and employment and - unlike some other blind groups - the web site's pretty accessible too, as far as I can tell.

Tom Chance notes that the Green Party in England and Wales has motions put to its Autumn 2006 conference to boycott Microsoft, Google (both for supporting the Chinese info-goolag) and Yahoo (supply of evidence to China and censorship of trade union adverts).

Yesterday, I helped a friend install an Edimax wifi USB stick. I've been using wireless networking lots for a year or two without much trouble, even testing experimental drivers sometimes, so I thought this would be straightforward. How wrong was I? First complication: the target machine is running the latest Windows, but still needed a driver CD-ROM loading. The instructions were quite clear that this must be done before plugging in the stick. What it doesn't tell you is that the stick has to be plugged in at a specific point during installation - cue mad unpacking. Second complication: the autorun program on the driver CD tries to do DNS lookups. Why on Earth? This is part of installing a network device. There is no working connection to the network, else we would probably not be installing this... Third complication: the questions in the install wizard are nonsense. For example: "Do you want to optimize for performance or for wifi operation?" Erm, I'd like it to operate as a wifi device with good performance please. The installation manual didn't explain what the questions meant, but did at least give recommended answers. Final complication: the driver utility has at least two ways of setting which wireless network to use (as well as the target AP, there's a BT Home Hub and some other BT kit somewhere nearby, according to their ESSIDs, although the USB stick only saw the Home Hub). One of them works. One doesn't, with the same settings. The only obvious way to find that out is trial-and-error. There's no useful error message when it fails - just no working network connection. Yes, lots of Linux stuff is harder to install than it needs to be, but at least its questions mostly make sense and most things give proper error output that helps to debug it. Windows is still in the dark ages on these two. I guess it's the lack of peer review: I didn't see any way to send a bug report to the dodgy driver designers. By the way, the Edimax stick works pretty well (although their web site is terrible). I think I'd recommend it, particularly if you're not using the Windows drivers... It says on the box it works on Debian and it looks good on linux-wless, but I've not tested that.

Following the original idea and some other commentaries, this quote sums up my view:

"I've done this before, in various forms, and most of the time it follows the same predictable route: 25% of the time you get a really good committee and it's a blast for all involved; 25% you get a diabolical committee and it stands a chance of dying; half the time you get an average committee and it continues as it was before. The whole "committee" idea has some fairly major pitfalls to avoid: cliques, irrelevance and legality to name but three. [...] I think we should NOT form a committee." -- Me, April 1999

My language-jumping post in English about a German advert got the entirely fair feedback of "That's the worst Germanism I've ever seen giving me the creeps!" as well as a pointer to German influence in US English.

MJ Ray talks about AJAX and Accessability, as much as I hate most things JavaScript, and most things on the web (it's full of bad designers, and pages that I just can't view with a text based browser... grrr ;), I have do disagree with AJAX inherently breaking accessability - that'll be bad web designers. AJAX and JavaScript are supposed to be used to enhance the user experience when run on a platform that supports it, they are not there to replace the job of the server in the first place, good web designers know this, and when they use AJAX it's to minimise data transfer when JavaScript is enabled, but otherwise everything should have safe fallbacks, ergo they're still accessable. It's not the technology that is the problem, as usual it's the crowd of "ohh, shiny" that don't use any common sense. Fix the people, fix the web. While people are still in the "oh shiny" mindset, we're going to see more problems, it's quite simple. New technology, expecially stuff that really actually isn't new, it's just been bent in to "shape" by a bunch of people that had more time than sense and wanted a set of libraries to make sick things possible... make things simple, people use them. People use them, they use them incorrectly. It's been the way of the world for many years. Simple solution to the problem, force people to use a text based browser for a day a week - no, not w3m with javascript support, that'd be cheating... watch as the web (slowly) became a better place. Anyways - that's my 2p on the issue.

Ajax is devolution [vitavonni] is a good argument based on the pain of writing Javascript and the drawbacks of running complex Javascript on most browsers, but says nothing about the accessibility problems.