I ve been asked why I dislike surveymonkey surveys, I don t want to reply fully in that forum (because it s off-topic there) and I want to publish this for your feedback now. surveymonkey really frustrates me. In short, it s often confusing, I think it doesn t follow UK accessiblity laws and I m unsure if it complies with our privacy laws. It seems like another triumph of marketing over good sense. It s a free market failure, possibly based on lack of information on the drawbacks of this option. If a survey is on Surveymonkey, it s easiest for able-bodied users of full-fat browsers with low security and privacy settings to answer. Using NoScript or a privacy tool? You ll get an error message (which contradicts the VPAT_SurveyMonkey.pdf description). Unable to see graphics clearly? The forms will be hard to read because they ve replaced the browser form widgets (such as checkboxes and radio buttons) with javascript-driven images for no good reason. Those sort of faults will probably bias results a bit how much will depend on the subject. It s a particular case of a problem I first mentioned in the last-but-one bullet point on my debian surveys page back in 2006. Basically, I think you should keep open surveys as open as possible. Statistics literature is littered with bizarre spurious results from when the survey method accidentally favours some particular subset of the population. Finally, surveymonkey surveys can be left with answer requirements which make no sense, such as ticking Other requiring a text input, but the text box not accepting input. Is that the fault of the survey owner not being able to work the admin interface, or the interface having some subtle flaws? I m not completely sure, but I ve had that experience a few times. So, can I persuade people to use limeservice, doodle or even Google Docs rather than Surveymonkey, please? I think Limeservice is better because it s based in Germany (so EU data protection and privacy laws apply) and is cooperatively-developed FOSS software. Doodle and Google aren t, but are quicker and easier to use for straw polls. If you want something to install on your own site and the downloadable limesurvey software seems a bit heavy, then askpeople seems another good option. Our co-op can host either of those if you re willing to pay. (If someone would be willing to sponsor it, we d host some free surveys too let me know.) Lots of people use surveymonkey, but popularity doesn t always mean it s the best tool. Please consider the alternatives and pick the best tool for the job.

Our co-op registers domain names for others. Like most registrars, we now cannot register Chinese (.cn) domains. There s a bit of background discussion on WebmasterWorld. While it s always disappointing to offer fewer services, I don t think we ve ever registered a .cn domain and especially not for anyone in China. Most of the .cn domains we see are in spam. If this tighter control makes any dent in the amount of spam and scam sites, that s probably a good thing. I ve not felt any significant reduction in spam since this change, though. I suspect the scammers have just moved to another top-level domain with a long-time idle government, while a few legitimate users of cn domains will also be punished along with the scammers. Will we ever shut out the spammers? Even if we kick them out of all domains, they ll find some way of using IP addresses or something. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

While I was under snow last week, the world saw a flurry of Koha company news. We found out that PTFS is to acquire LibLime and ByWater Solutions and BibLibre are partnering for the U.S. With the past ByWater Solutions and PTFS, Inc. partnering, it seems like four of the younger Koha companies (established 2005, 2007, 2008 and PTFS started with Koha in 2008 I think) are now linked together, so it s not entirely surprising that ByWater congratulates PTFS on the purchase of LibLime. What did surprise me is the impressed with PTFS s resources quote from Liblime owner Josh. Some librarians are asking What will the acquistion of Liblime mean to Koha libraries? but I m wondering what does this mean for the Koha project? Well, there s still our co-op (established 2002) and the other older private Koha companies (Calyx, Katipo and so on), as well as the rest of the younger ones, so I think there s still the motivation for a vendor-neutral non-profit group to host the project. Recent history has shown that it s too painful if any one private company hosts it. It ll be interesting to see how the recent private company deals help that work. If all goes well, a bright new day for Koha, as wizzyrea hopes. On another level, I m a bit disappointed that a theoretical Free and Open Source Software player (even if things like LibLime Enterprise Koha had muddied the water) has been sold to a mixed FOSS+proprietary player. I m almost cross with Liblime s owners for selling up, but I don t know if that s fair. Selling up is a fairly common exit move in private companies, so shouldn t I expect it? Do librarians expect it? Is this why some seem reluctant to buy from start-ups which are still independent? As you may know, TTLLP software.coop is in common ownership, so we can t really be bought. This is a self-defence or legacy-guaranteeing mechanism for our cooperative, where our assets are pledged to other common ownership cooperatives if our corporation dies. I think it also has the fringe benefit that we re a fairly safe home for things like trademarks. This unbuyability means that I feel I m watching the sales and cross-linking of our competitors from the sidelines, from a viewpoint more like Koha users than the other vendors, waiting for the dust to settle and the chips to fall where they may. Whatever happens there, software.coop will still be here. Unsurprisingly, there have been a couple of new entrants into Koha support, although the Liblime-controlled Koha project website doesn t show them yet and reportedly its new support company submission form has been broken for weeks, which is irritating. Interesting co-op-y things are happening in the wider library systems world, too, with Karen Coombs going to work for the OCLC library cooperative and Polaris Library Systems workers buying the company although I m not sure yet if they re becoming a worker co-op or merely employee-owned. I suspect many of these announcements are timed for #alamw10 which is a big US library conference. Has anyone seen more co-op or Koha announcements which I haven t spotted in the conference PR flood?

It s nice to see that Emacs isn t being outdone since Thunderbird 3 Introduced Reply-To List: Alok G. Singh got in touch and pointed me at Gnus s support for List-* headers. I ve updated my page of email clients that support mailing lists.

I read The Iliad recently; see my review of it here. This article isn t about The Iliad, but about Shmoop s coverage of it. I have never been a person who puts much stock on study guides before, and my own prejudice is that they have probably earned their reputation as useful for little more than a tool to help students pass exams without reading the material. However, I felt rather unequal to reading The Iliad; after all, it has been many years since I had been exposed to Greek mythology, and even then it was very brief. I had remembered from Amazon s blog that they are offering some of the classics with a Shmoop study guide built in. I figured the $2.39 would be worth it. But I m not sure it was. The resulting ebook has two sections: the main text, and the Shmoop overview. The overview contains essentially the information available for free on their site. This information is pretty good. It has some overviews of the entire book, plus summaries of each chapter. They helpfully provide the backstory in the chapter summaries, so I know why certain gods are on the side of the Trojans and the others on the side of the Achaeans. It helped me figure out the point to some of the actions described on the text. These are linked to at the beginning of each book (chapter) of the Iliad, which was a bit inconvenient because I prefer to read them after reading the main text. Nevertheless, it wasn t a big problem. The summaries were written colloquially, sometimes too much so. I grinned as the less grabbin , more stabbin summary of the Achaeans being told to salvage armor from the dead later and keep fighting now. I cringed as no way Jose , and rolled my eyes as it described how one of the heroes got owned . That would have been less clear than the original for many. I would probably have given the Shmoop edition 4 or 5 stars on Amazon were it not for numerous boneheaded mistakes they made. The commentary uses one translation (Lattimore), while the included text uses a different one (Butler). That s bad enough, but it gets worse: Lattimore uses the Greek names for the gods and heroes, while Butler uses the Roman ones. So you can be reading through the text, learning about Jove, Ulysses, Juno, and Mars. But the commentary refers instead to Zeus, Odysseus, Hera, and Ares. Now, some might have memorized the Greek and Roman names for everyone, but then such people probably aren t wanting a study guide. I finally had to print out a page to help me understand the study guide. That is terrible, and completely inexcusable. They should have used the same translation for the text as the commentary, or at least have provided parenthetical notes throughout the commentary. Next, they really did a poor job of the main text itself. They have apparently grabbed the Butler ASCII text from Project Gutenberg, and cut and pasted it into some editor. I say this because each line renders as a paragraph; that is, the text doesn t reflow to fit the screen as every single other book does. Worse, it s too wide for the Kindle. So you get one line full width, the next only half as wide as the display (some of the first having wrapped), then the next full width again, on down. Butler is a prose, not a poetic, translation, so this is pointless. Moreover, the line endings are exactly where they are at Project Gutenberg. So, what we have here is that somebody at Shmoop cut and pasted from their own website and Project Gutenberg, and nobody bothered to check if the resulting product was crap. At least with the new Kindle firmware you can read in landscape mode to prevent most of the lines from wrapping. Still, I m very annoyed at this. There are other flaws. They highlighted some passages in the text. Clicking on them goes to some commentary about it. OK, fine. But why are some passages highlighted in the text, and some mentioned in the chapter summary? There seemed no rhyme or reason. The highlighted passages commentary was iffy in quality. Sometimes it was useful, and sometimes it asked a question of the sort I might expect in a jr. high English question When has pride helped you in your life? or some such. Worse, not all of the highlights linked to the correct place, and they also suffered from the Greek/Roman name issue. In all, Shmoop has helped me understand The Iliad and place it in context. But they need to spend a lot more effort on copyediting. Even a couple of hours of someone actually looking at their Kindle product on an actual Kindle would have immediately shown these problems. They could have made a far better product with a few hours more effort.

A clear announcement went out in plenty of time and the meeting agenda is already posted for Wednesday s SPI board IRC meeting which will be at 2100 UTC (an hour later than recently). As I write this, it s a pretty lean meeting, though I guess that s understandable when the run-up included holidays for most people. What do you think SPI s new year resolutions should be?

VLC is free and open source portable media player software that supports a lot of formats and inputs and can also convert and stream. I think it s been pretty useful for users who didn t like MPlayer for whatever reason. Nicole Engard writes that VLC for Mac has no more developers. I don t like or use MacOS and definitely don t have the skills to maintain VLC on it, but if you do, can you try to help it, please?

The Tool Factory closed its doors on 31st December 2009. As you may remember, our co-op is one of few LLP co-ops and we mentioned 2amase LLP in our case study as one of the others. 2amase were closely linked to The Tool Factory LLP. Their goodbye message lists multiple reasons for the closure, but a key part seems to be a dispute between members about the copyright of their proprietary Business Plan Writer tool. I think there s a strong resonance between cooperative principles and free and open source software, so I m not suprised that proprietary software development has contributed to failure of a co-op, but it s still a shame. Goodbye and best wishes for the future to The Tool Factory workers. I hope to promote links between cooperatives and free software more in 2010. New Co-operatives UK head Ed Mayo mentioned it in his first speech, so the time seems right. If you d like to help put on some co-op FOSS events, leave a comment here or get involved in this open co-op discussion, please.

The Koha Community Blogs was broken over Christmas. It s now back online and using the same collection of feeds as the microblogging services. A full list of Koha Social Networks is on the wiki.

Amazon Kindle Un-selling Books was the most-viewed news item on my blog this year. Once again, a lock-out/bad-business story takes the top spot. I don t think that one got as much coverage in the mainstream media as they usually do, which probably contributed to the relatively high reader numbers. I feel like I get criticised often for commenting about business ethics, but it does seem to attract a fairly big audience. The repost of Tribute to Richard Rothwell came a fairly close second. Again, not something that the mainstream tech news covered. the world is a sadder and lonelier place without him, and the rest of the world has lost one of its brightest stars. Top-placed technical item was HOWTO Apache httpd 2.2 PAM Authentication Modules which was a distant third. It was posted in late 2008, but I suspect that will keep getting viewers until everyone s upgraded. It s currently the top recipient of search engine traffic for the site. Other technical stories in the top ten were Windows 7: Released with known critical bug in fifth, ssh security in sixth and Top 8 J2ME MIDP Applications in tenth place. The only completely non-technical topic was the Cooperatives-SW Board and Housing Enquiry in ninth place. Cross-over topics complete the ten with 2009 Software in the Public Interest Board Election in fourth place, New #ukgovOSS Action Plan in seventh and Meeting about forming a Koha Foundation in eighth. Finally, I think the strangest three search phrases ending at my site this year are spi bike week , request free t-shirt and will britannia building society demutualise . Happy New Year! Found any easter eggs in your web stats?

I started to write this review last night, and went looking for Wil Wheaton s blog, where many of the stories came from, so I can link to it from my review. It was getting late, I was tired, and so I was a bit disoriented for a few seconds when I saw my own words flash up on the screen. At the time, his most recent story had excerpted my review of paper books. Wow, I thought. This never happens when I m about to review Dickens. And actually, it s never happened before, ever. I ll admit to owning a big grin when I saw that one of my favorite authors liked one of my blog posts. And Wil Wheaton is one of my favorite authors for sure. I enjoy reading others too, of course, but Wil s writing is something I can really identify with like no other. My parents were never in a London debtor s prison like Dickens were; I was never a promising medical student like A. C. Doyle. But I was, and am, a geek, and Wil Wheaton captures that more perfectly than anyone. After I read Just a Geek a few years ago, I gave it to my wife to read, claiming it would help her understand me better. I think it did. In The Happiest Days of Our Lives, Wil recounts memories of his childhood, and of more recent days. He talks of flashbacks to his elementary school days, when he and his classmates tried to have the coolest Star Wars action figures (for me: calculator watches). Or how his aunt introduced him to D&D, which reminded me of how my uncle got me interested in computers. Teaching himself D&D was an escape for the geeky kid that wasn t good at sports, as teaching myself Pascal and C was for me. Between us, the names and activities are different, but the story is the same. I particularly appreciated Wil s reflections on his teenage years. Like him, at that age, I often found myself as the youngest person in a room full of adults. Yet I was still a teenager, and like any teenager, did some things that I look back on with some embarrassment now. Wil was completely honest with himself he admitted crashing a golf cart on the Paramount studio lot, for instance, but also reminds me that he was a teenager then. He recognizes that he didn t always make the best choices and wasn t always successful with what he did, but isn t ashamed of himself either. That s helpful for me to remember; I shouldn t be unreasonably harsh on my 16-year-old self, and need to remember that I had to be a teenager too. I also identify with him as a dad. He wrote of counting the days until he could teach his boys about D&D, about passing on being a geek to his sons. I ve had a similar excitement about being able to help Jacob build his first computer. Already Jacob, who is 3, loves using the manual typewriter I cleaned up for him, and spent an hour using the adding machine I dug out on Sunday while I was watching the boys. (I regret that I didn t have time to take it apart and show him how it worked right then when he asked). And perhaps his 2nd-favorite present of Christmas was the $3.50 large-button calculator with solar cell power I got him as an impulse buy at the pharmacy the other day. He is particularly enamored with the square root button because a single press replaces all the numbers on the screen with completely different numbers! I can t find the exact passage now, but Wil wrote at one point about his transition from a career in acting to a career in writing. He said that he likes the feeling he gets when his writing can touch people. He s been able to redefine himself not as a guy that used to be an actor on Star Trek but a person that is a good author, now. I agree, and think his best work has been done with a keyboard instead of a camera. And that leaves me wondering where my career will take me. Yes, I m an author, but of technical books. Authors of technical books rarely touch people s hearts. There s a reason we read Shakespeare and Dickens in literature classes, but no high school English teacher has ever assigned Newton s Opticks, despite its incredible importance to the world. Newton revolutionized science, mathematics, and philosophy, but Opticks doesn t speak to the modern heart like Romeo and Jiuliet still does. Generations of people have learned more about the world from Shakespeare than from Newton. I don t have Wil s gift for writing such touching stories. I ve only been able to even approach that sort of thing once or twice, and it certainly won t make a career for me. Like Wil, I m rarely the youngest person in the room anymore. His days of being a famous teenage actor on a scifi series are long gone, as are mine of single-handedly defeating entire teams at jr. high programming contests. (OK, that s a stretch, but at the time it sure felt exciting.) But unlike him, I m not completely content with my niche yet. I blog about being a geek in rural Kansas, where there still aren t many. I m a dad, with an incredible family. And I write about programming, volunteer for Debian and a few other causes, and have a surprisingly satisfying job working for a company that builds lawn mowers. And yet, I have this unshakable feeling of unsettledness. That I need to stop and think more about what I really want to do with my life, perhaps cultivate some talents I don t yet have, or perhaps find a way to make my current path more meaningful. So I will take Wil s book as a challenge, to all those that were once sure of what their lives would look like, and are less sure with each passing year: take a chance, and make it yours. And on that score, perhaps I ve done more than I had realized at first. Terah and I took a big chance moving to Kansas, and another one when we bought my grandparents run-down house to fix up and live in. Perhaps it s not a bad idea to pause every few years and ask the question: Do I still like the direction I m heading? Can I change it? Wil Wheaton gives me lots to think about, in the form of easy-to-read reflections on his own life. I heartily recommend both Just a Geek and The Happiest Days of Our Lives. (And that has nothing to do with the fact that the Ubuntu machine he used to write the book probably had installed on it a few pieces of code that I wrote, I promise you.)

A friend of mine is interested in trying out the Automatic Rule Based Time-Tracker arbtt which I programmed. Unfortunately, he is using Windows and up to now, arbtt only worked on Linux. But as I wanted to check out Haskell s cross-platform abilities for a while, this was a good opportunity to do so. I don t have Windows installed myself (and did not plan to do so), so I did all this under WINE, the Windows compatibility layer, which works very well: It takes only a few minutes to install the Haskell Platform for Windows and then I was able to run wine ghc --make and cabal install. I played around with some simple programs and was surprised by these timings:

$ rm *.o *.hi; ghc --make fourfours.hs ; time ./fourfours > /dev/null
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( fourfours.hs, fourfours.o )
Linking fourfours ...
real	0m1.909s
user	0m1.692s
sys	0m0.208s
$ rm *.o *.hi; wine ghc --make fourfours.hs ; time wine ./fourfours.exe > /dev/null
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( fourfours.hs, fourfours.o )
Linking fourfours.exe ...
real	0m1.631s
user	0m1.376s
sys	0m0.092s

So it is faster to run a compiled Haskell program on top of a compatibility layer than directly on Linux! The world is in order again, though, if optimization is enabled:

$ rm *.o *.hi; ghc -O --make fourfours.hs ; time ./fourfours > /dev/null
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( fourfours.hs, fourfours.o )
Linking fourfours ...
real	0m0.981s
user	0m0.876s
sys	0m0.108s
$ rm *.o *.hi; wine ghc -O --make fourfours.hs ; time wine ./fourfours.exe > /dev/null
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( fourfours.hs, fourfours.o )
Linking fourfours.exe ...
real	0m1.270s
user	0m1.036s
sys	0m0.072s

Funny. Anyways, I wanted to port arbtt. The only platform-dependent part is the capture module that gathers the list of open Windows. The Win32 package that comes with the Haskell Platform did not cover all the functions needed to do so, but creating additional function bindings is really easy with Haskell, as can be seen in the Graphics.Win32.Window.Extra module. I also replaced the locking code that prevents two instances of arbtt-capture to run at the same time by equivalent code using Windows mutexes (module System.Win32.Mutex). With these small changes and some CPP conditionals to make the code compile for either platform, the porting was done! Even accessing the files in ~/.arbtt works correctly on Windows, where it will look in the Application Data folder, without changing the code, thanks to System.Directory.getAppUserDataDirectory. But Windows users won t like compiling software on their own. They won t even like installing software by copying various files to certain directories. Therefore, I also had to create a Windows Installer. I picked Inno Setup, because it s Free Software and seems to be simpler than NSIS. The installer puts the compiled .exe files, the example categorize.cfg and the HTML documentation in the right spot, adds icons to the Start Menu ( Edit categorize.cfg , which fires up wordpad, a link to the documentation and the uninstaller), puts arbtt-capture in the Autorun folder, puts the path to arbtt-stats in the PATH variable and starts arbtt-capture at the end (the last three points being optional). Of course it undoes all this when removing the program again. I integrated the call to the Inno Setup installer into the usual ./Setup build process of Haskell packages. Some more details of how to create the Windows installer are mentioned in the README file. Now all this does not magically add a graphical user interface to arbtt, so users will still have to work with arbtt-stats on the command line even on Windows. If this is not a problem for you then you can fetch the latest installer from the arbtt homepage. And if you happen to become a serious user of arbtt on Windows and want to help maintaining the Windows port, I ll gladly share some responsibilities. I m very satisfied with the process and the result and I m happy to know that I can offer some of my programs also to Windows users in the future.It is also a big plus for Haskell with Python, shipping a program for Windows users is likely more difficult. The next step will be providing gtk-based graphical Haskell applications for Windows, including a nice installer that ideally includes all dependencies (gtk etc.).

Contained in the recent billionth-spam report from Project Honeypot is the revelation that The volume of spam drops approximately 21% on Christmas Day and 32% on New Year s Day. (Thanks to Raphael for the pointer.) Happy Christmas to those of you who celebrate it

My personal site s copy of this blog and some of my other sites moved servers last week. A few differences in Apache configuration between 1.3 on the old server and 2.2 on the new server tripped me up and it was Monday morning before some missing pages were back where they should be. By the time you read this, the dynamic pages should also be back. Sorry to anyone whose viewing was interrupted. The old server was the last one built by TTLLP still in service, I think. In the end, rising power prices and improved power efficiency have seen it replaced by younger, greener hardware, so I m not that sad to see it go.

This is a bit of a silly note for a Saturday while I m currently working on translating the co-op s web pages into Esperanto. The old site was translated, but the new site launched as English-only. I d like to have other languages too, but I ll start with the one that s easiest for me as a test case to get the internationalisation working again. That means that I m currently lost in django-blocks language settings. Apparently both our co-op and Google speak Esperanto. Facebook is mostly translated. Most Plone-based sites have some translation, but often it s only the standard Plone parts and any customisations remain in English, which looks a bit odd. Have you seen Esperanto on other major websites where you weren t expecting it?

Widgets are little web applications run on the client side. They re not particularly new and there are a lot of them about, but there s little consistency between them, so they re a bit of a pain to use in practice still. The good news is that W3C have published Widget Packaging and Configuration W3C Candidate Recommendation which should help to encourage consistency. The bad news is that Apple has made patent claims about the Widgets 1.0: Access Requests Policy First Public Working Draft. A Patent Advisory Group has been set up, which means that Apple s patents have probably delayed that part of widget standardisation to at least next February. You may remember that Apple also patent-bombed the Widgets Updates work earlier this year and work has only just resumed after the patent detour. Two things come to mind:

1. Why are Apple being the new World Wide Wallies?
2. Can someone see how to total up the delays to W3C work caused by patents? That might be useful for anti-patent campaigns.

Advance notice of WordCamp UK 2010 on 17-18 July 2010 in Manchester. Ticket sales expected in early April 2010. I voted for the Portsmouth bid, so of course Manchester won(!) I ve passed the event details to our co-op for consideration. Do you think we should go and if so why? If not, why not?

I ve kept a page of email clients that support mailing lists for a while and it s been a bit disappointing that I couldn t suggest Mozilla Thunderbird or its freer derivatives (IceDove?) as good clients. They work fine in most other ways and it s nice having something good that we can suggest to users on MacOS and Windows, but there was a long-standing bug requesting support for the List-Post header. In an email discussion on ALUG s main list, a couple of people mentioned that Thunderbird 3 was released last week with a working reply to list command. This is excellent news, removing the need for the Reply To List add-on. I hope we ll see it in IceDove soon. Fantastic work. I wish it was in the release notes so we d spotted it sooner. Now there is even less excuse for MUNGing the Reply-To header, even on lists where Windows users are present.

Having excitedly bought an Arduino from the nice folks at tuxbrain.com while they were at DebConf9, I was then a little deflated to discover (while attending the UKUUG's Arduino Workshop in August), that the IDE is written in Java. While I can see that the authors might perceive this as the easiest way to provide cross-platform pointy-clicky-ness, JREs have a half-life of about an hour on my systems.Anyway, I fought with Java to show willing, until I'd determined that the IDE didn't seem to be happy running under xmonad (rendering menus so that they were unclickable) and gave up -- spending the rest of the tutorial proving to myself that I could compile and upload C code for the little beastie, but failing to compile Arduino sketches on the command line.Ever since, I've been meaning to work out the required CLI incantations, and finally made time over the weekend. The incantations turn out to be rather simple, if not very obvious, so I thought the world could benefit from a package that encapsulates the required knowledge.I've pared the source tree down to the c++ code and some examples and tweaked the Makefile so that it'll do it's work out of tree, referring to the files that the package installs for you, which allows you to apt-get install aurduino-core and then cut&paste a few lines from the contained README.Debian in order to get an LED blinking for the first time.The resulting git repo is now on Alioth. The binary-indep package it produces I've called arduino-core -- hopefully I've left enough room for any fan of the Java IDE to shove that back into the upstream branch and add packages for the full IDE, and maybe throwing in another package for the GTK IDE that's out there.I'm very mildly concerned by the fact that Arduino is a trademark of the Arduino Team, but that trademark is for the circuits, not the software, so this is probably irrelevant. If you think I should care enough to rename the package to freeduino, say, please get in touch.Anyway, if you have an Arduino (or similar) please grab a copy and test it.

Yesterday webex started failing for me. I did not change anything related to java recently so I was a little perplexed.

Checking it turns out that even the standard test your java page failed. strace revealed the nice error:

$ grep ffff /tmp/TRA
6938 connect(22, sa_family=AF_INET6, sin6_port=htons(80), inet_pton(AF_INET6, "::ffff:72.5.124.95", &sin6_addr), sin6_flowinfo=0, sin6_scope_id=0 , 28 <unfinished ...>
6938 connect(22, sa_family=AF_INET6, sin6_port=htons(80), inet_pton(AF_INET6, "::ffff:72.5.124.95", &sin6_addr), sin6_flowinfo=0, sin6_scope_id=0 , 28) = -1 ENETUNREACH (Network is unreachable)

Notice that I don't have IPv6 connectivity!

Googling it turns out that you can disable IPv6 in java by modifying to ~/.java/deployment/deployment.properties the line:

deployment.javaws.jre.0.args=-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack\=true

and all is now well. Until I need to access an IPv6 device with java of course :-(.