After seeing Five to launch on Freesat over on the DTG website, I tried rescanning 28e and a channel called 6335 (or similar) appeared in the channel list but it had a FIVE logo in the corner. Maybe those DOGs do serve some purpose sometimes - but it would be better if they actually set the channel name correctly. So, if you have a free-to-air satellite set pointed at 28e (which most UK dishes are), then you now have Five. If you have Freesat, you’ve another week before it appears on your EPG. It’s better to be free-to-air. I’ve not seen much of five since leaving Norwich about a decade ago: North End King’s Lynn is “fringe” reception for even the main channels, while neither the Kewstoke nor Cardiff transmitters broadcast it yet. It looks like it’s changed quite a lot. Anyway, I’ve updated the alt.satellite.tv.europe FAQ to move five into the list of FTA channels. Anyone know about getting the Freesat EPG on MythTV yet?

We celebrate Software Cooperative News being reunited with its .coop domain by celebrating this Bloggers Unite event. If you’re not aware of it already, please find out more about the problem of refugee separation from Refugees United. Thank you.

A lot has been said about the elections already. I just want to share my personal experiences about it. During the weekend, Tom invited us to his place in lower Harlem (we live upper Harlem) on 123rd St and Adam Clayton Powell Jr Ave, for Tuesday night. As Tuesday arrived, we didn’t see too many people too excited about it. Living in Harlem, we were pretty used to black people supporting Obama, so getting closer and closer to the elections, we didn’t feel people anxious. On Tuesday, we commuted to work and some of our co-workers got to work late because they have been standing in lines for a couple of hours to vote in polls. The whole day was about talking on how much that day was representing for the US and the world, guessing how they results were going to end up, etc. Later at night, Greg, Phil, Raquel and I headed to Tom’s place for his watch-the-results party. His fridge was full of Blue Moon beer, but he also had some Red Stripe Since I like to go light on politics, I preferred some other American variantion, Coors Light Vermont, Connecticut and a few other New England states were claimed by the Democrats. Matty, a friend of Tom attending the party brought US maps with the electoral votes on each one for people to color them as they were called. It was pretty fun. At some point we forgot about the maps since it was pretty clear that Obama was gonna win. But when they called him at around 11 pm (and I was starting to feel nicely drunk), the whole neighborhood and people in the streets just went completely nuts. It’s something I hadn’t experienced at all in my life, it was like if Mexico would have won the f tbol World Cup (which yes, it will never happen anytime soon :P), but nicer. People went out to the Harlem State Office Building square were cars were honking, and a huge amount of people gathered to celebrate, play brass music, cheer “Yes We Can”. Ghetto guys, white hippies, curious latinos, Africans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, just a lot, a lot of people, all kinds of them, just a clusterfuck. They projected Obama’s speech from Chicago and people went nuts. It was just, fucking amazing. The images they projected from Harlem to the outside world was in that same square we were in. Our Flickr set for the celebration here.

So, as everyone knows by now, the party which is a lot like our Conservatives won the US elections (instead of the other party which is a lot like our Conservatives). I’m particularly touched by Aq’s comment:-

The mood in America has been likened to the one here in 97 when we managed to kick the conservatives out for the first time in about 20 years, which amuses me. However, the fact that ours failed to live up to that optimism doesn t mean yours necessarily won t

Oh well, at least it was better than drifting further to the right (in both cases). I’ll wait and see whether it lives up to the optimism. As you may know, SPI is associated with the Open Voting Foundation. That doesn’t sit well with me - while paper voting is imperfect, it seems more verifiable and scalable than machine voting. I’ve been assured that OVF seeks to replace current election machines, rather than spread machine voting to new places and it looks like my area is not under immediate threat (ORG latest news), so I’m not working on it just now. Broadly, I agree with Simon Rumble on Voting machines: a solution searching for a problem?

So without even going into the serious problems with voting machines, it seems they don’t actually solve any actual problems, and I suspect cost a lot more to operate

I’m currently finding out more about standing for election to The Cooperative Group committee and ThePhoneCoop board - I’m not sure yet, but I think both still use paper voting. Cooperatives-SW and TTLLP both use in-person voting. What’s the current thinking here? What’s best?

So, as everyone knows by now, the party which is a lot like our Conservatives won the US elections (instead of the other party which is a lot like our Conservatives). I’m particularly touched by Aq’s comment:-

The mood in America has been likened to the one here in 97 when we managed to kick the conservatives out for the first time in about 20 years, which amuses me. However, the fact that ours failed to live up to that optimism doesn t mean yours necessarily won t

Oh well, at least it was better than drifting further to the right (in both cases). I’ll wait and see whether it lives up to the optimism. As you may know, SPI is associated with the Open Voting Foundation. That doesn’t sit well with me - while paper voting is imperfect, it seems more verifiable and scalable than machine voting. I’ve been assured that OVF seeks to replace current election machines, rather than spread machine voting to new places and it looks like my area is not under immediate threat (ORG latest news), so I’m not working on it just now. Broadly, I agree with Simon Rumble on Voting machines: a solution searching for a problem?

So without even going into the serious problems with voting machines, it seems they don’t actually solve any actual problems, and I suspect cost a lot more to operate

I’m currently finding out more about standing for election to The Cooperative Group committee and ThePhoneCoop board - I’m not sure yet, but I think both still use paper voting. Cooperatives-SW and TTLLP both use in-person voting. What’s the current thinking here? What’s best?

Today is the first of the Library Open Source Webinars run by WiLS. It takes place in a few hours (2pm CST, which I think is 14:00:00-0600, or 20:00:00Z) and costs USD25 per session or USD100 for all six. Future sessions will cover Drupal and Evergreen - sadly not Koha, as far as I can see. I’m told that “standard browser, standard phone” is all that’s needed to attend live, but recordings are Windows Media Video (WMV) files, which I think isn’t great for an Open Source Webinar. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who attends, including whether it played nicely with your software.

Today is the first of the Library Open Source Webinars run by WiLS. It takes place in a few hours (2pm CST, which I think is 14:00:00-0600, or 20:00:00Z) and costs USD25 per session or USD100 for all six. Future sessions will cover Drupal and Evergreen - sadly not Koha, as far as I can see. I’m told that “standard browser, standard phone” is all that’s needed to attend live, but recordings are Windows Media Video (WMV) files, which I think isn’t great for an Open Source Webinar. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who attends, including whether it played nicely with your software.

I’ve flirted with it in the past and resisted it for a while, but you can now follow me on Identi.ca and Twitter if you are so inclined. Seems like I might have picked a good time to try this because TwiTip just soft-launched. There’s some overlap between my accounts, but they’re not identical because different third-party sites connect to each one. Both will get told when a new article appears on this website, but Twitter is likely to see more links to other sites and Identi.ca will get more status updates. Other than that, usage will be determined by popularity at events or with communities - or by suggestions here. How would you use them? At first glance, the two services are similar but different. Both sites seem to be “cooperative deserts” (not many cooperative members on them), both sites seem to be running on non-free software (I consider AGPL non-free until its big questions are resolved) and neither site seems to have an easy way to backup one’s data or participate without registration. Identi.ca seems to have some SEO-spammer problems, while Twitter’s interface has some silly needless javascript uses. Identi.ca supports OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) but I don’t understand that yet - it seems a terrible specification. It opens with references (but not web links) to three other things I’ve never heard of, then continues into a dictionary where terms like “listener” are redefined (ouch!) and doesn’t contain an examples section. New article announcements are done by a Wordpress plugin I’ll publish soon. Because of the above problems with OMB and that I can’t find whether Twitter supports it, the plugin uses the simpler status HTTP POST interface. Does anything other than Twitter and Identi.ca support that? I tried a few sites and got bored with them requiring me to apply for an API key before they’d tell me much.

I’ve flirted with it in the past and resisted it for a while, but you can now follow me on Identi.ca and Twitter if you are so inclined. Seems like I might have picked a good time to try this because TwiTip just soft-launched. There’s some overlap between my accounts, but they’re not identical because different third-party sites connect to each one. Both will get told when a new article appears on this website, but Twitter is likely to see more links to other sites and Identi.ca will get more status updates. Other than that, usage will be determined by popularity at events or with communities - or by suggestions here. How would you use them? At first glance, the two services are similar but different. Both sites seem to be “cooperative deserts” (not many cooperative members on them), both sites seem to be running on non-free software (I consider AGPL non-free until its big questions are resolved) and neither site seems to have an easy way to backup one’s data or participate without registration. Identi.ca seems to have some SEO-spammer problems, while Twitter’s interface has some silly needless javascript uses. Identi.ca supports OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) but I don’t understand that yet - it seems a terrible specification. It opens with references (but not web links) to three other things I’ve never heard of, then continues into a dictionary where terms like “listener” are redefined (ouch!) and doesn’t contain an examples section. New article announcements are done by a Wordpress plugin I’ll publish soon. Because of the above problems with OMB and that I can’t find whether Twitter supports it, the plugin uses the simpler status HTTP POST interface. Does anything other than Twitter and Identi.ca support that? I tried a few sites and got bored with them requiring me to apply for an API key before they’d tell me much.

I don't know what Web 3.0 will look like, but Web 4.0 will be built with structural markup and <blink> tags.

The Advertising Standards Agency provides an RDF Site Summary (RSS) feed of their decisions, which seems to be updated more-or-less weekly. It can be an interesting way to keep informed about which companies are making misleading claims and why. One of BT’s internet adverts just got banned for a whole range of reasons, including truthfulness, substantiation, failing to name clearly the services that form the basis of comparison and also failing to differences between services. “The ads must not appear again” I’ve not trusted BT’s claims for a while - they assured me many months ago that they’d stop junk-mailing us and they still haven’t. I’m glad I’m with ThePhoneCoop. On another note, I spotted ASA adjudications on FLAT and BLEW anti-windmill campaign ads recently. Now they really seem to be full of hot air. I can understand why the Severn tidal power projects are controversial, but has anyone ever seen “paths littered with dead and dying birds” around a windmill?

The Advertising Standards Agency provides an RDF Site Summary (RSS) feed of their decisions, which seems to be updated more-or-less weekly. It can be an interesting way to keep informed about which companies are making misleading claims and why. One of BT’s internet adverts just got banned for a whole range of reasons, including truthfulness, substantiation, failing to name clearly the services that form the basis of comparison and also failing to differences between services. “The ads must not appear again” I’ve not trusted BT’s claims for a while - they assured me many months ago that they’d stop junk-mailing us and they still haven’t. I’m glad I’m with ThePhoneCoop. On another note, I spotted ASA adjudications on FLAT and BLEW anti-windmill campaign ads recently. Now they really seem to be full of hot air. I can understand why the Severn tidal power projects are controversial, but has anyone ever seen “paths littered with dead and dying birds” around a windmill?

Today’s the last day for the Gov.UK Consultation on Forced ISP Snooping: Please Say NO. I didn’t get to LinuxExpo, partly because of Monday Machine-Mangling Madness but I saw LinuxExpo 2008 Robert Castelo from the Drupal point-of-view. I also didn’t get to Public Sector Online (report by Andrew Lewin with links to more) and I definitely didn’t travel to Toronto, so the report on the Free Software and Open Source Symposium from Randy Metcalfe is pretty welcome. I wrote about the Social Enterprise Photography Competition and Cooperatives South-West Trade Fair last Friday - the photography competition deadline has been extended to 7 November. So you’ve still time to capture a vision of a more progressive approach to business that values people and the planet as well as profit. Last Friday was Get Online Day but TTLLP didn’t do anything for it this year - I took one look and reached similar conclusions to Graham Jones: Get online…! Oh - you are…! Related to that: on Tuesday, I got really annoyed about how many branches of government (national, regional, sub-regional and local) are obsessed about the private sector and are paying even less attention to other types of businesses, includingbuying off-the-shelf software which doesn’t conform to their stated policies about accessibility and interoperability. (Sorry if you saw evidence of that outburst… yes, local councillors are pretty powerless and get as annoyed about incompetent government services as everyone else.) It seems I’m not the only one feeling that good cooperative businesses are being overlooked. The ICA have recently sent an open letter to the Governments of the G-8 reminding them that co-operative financial institutions are an alternative secure, stable and sustainable model of business owned and controlled by people. Finally, a bit of advance notice here: “The inaugural Creativity & Business International Network (c&binet) will take place at The Grove in Hertfordshire from 26 28 October 2009” - is this something that free software and free culture supporters should get involved with? (And why did they pick a name that includes an XML special character?)

Without emailing us in advance, UK.domains.coop just expired our software.coop domain on 29 October instead of 5 November. When I looked at the renewal option in the control panel, the fees have increased by about 30% since last year. I don’t remember being told that and it’s more than what was authorised at the last TTLLP members’ meeting. If I remember correctly, the old price for the dot-coop domain was already five times the price of our dot-UK - now it’s more like six or seven times. I’m sick of the service from UK.domains.coop. The services are owned and run by cooperatives, but it’s not one we can join, as far as I know. Their control panel is rented uncooperative software which doesn’t meet current accessibility standards - I have to reconfigure my browser each time I use it. The support has been a little slow and it’s apparently easy to configure a domain into a non-working setup that one can’t recover without help from the support staff. When I complained, it was suggested that we should work with them, but when I asked how, I never saw a reply. So, I’m transferring our cooperative domain to a non-cooperative registrar. The DotCooperation LLC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US coop federation and not a cooperative itself, so does it really matter? After working through a long list of registrars that claim to offer dot-coop domains and eliminating all those which only offer paper registrations (because I don’t want to wait for air-mail) or don’t appear to accept domain transfers, I was left with two and neither were cooperatives. I’ve picked one and only after ordering, I’m told it will take a week to transfer. Grrr. At least the support staff response was pretty quick. That means that these news pages are at a temporary URL for a while. Email to software.coop addresses and the main information pages are offline. If the registrar we’re using turns out to be any good and responsive to feedback, I’ll see if we can resell their services next year.

One of the things I wished for last month was a decent cooperative pay-as-you-go mobile phone service. About the same time, Ofcom started a social web consultation about mobile phone services. Now there’s an excellent presentation by Vivian Woodall, Chief Executive of The Phone Co-op that was given to FCS’ Comms Provider 08 event. Ofcom’s Mobile citizens, mobile consumers: the importance of mobile suggests the idea of re-regulating is “controversial”. I’ve left a comment there that asks why. It seems obvious to me that UK mobile phone service is currently a market for lemons - useful independent measurements are few and far between, there are no trial periods and it’s often expensive to change provider. Maybe it’s different in the big cities. Meanwhile, real complaints like An Orange-coloured hell, T-Mobile is the new Orange.. and Cancelling a Three mobile contract FAIL keep appearing with depressing frequency. Just how big does the FAIL need to be before Ofcom actually intervene?

One of the things I wished for last month was a decent cooperative pay-as-you-go mobile phone service. About the same time, Ofcom started a social web consultation about mobile phone services. Now there’s an excellent presentation by Vivian Woodall, Chief Executive of The Phone Co-op that was given to FCS’ Comms Provider 08 event. Ofcom’s Mobile citizens, mobile consumers: the importance of mobile suggests the idea of re-regulating is “controversial”. I’ve left a comment there that asks why. It seems obvious to me that UK mobile phone service is currently a market for lemons - useful independent measurements are few and far between, there are no trial periods and it’s often expensive to change provider. Maybe it’s different in the big cities. Meanwhile, real complaints like An Orange-coloured hell, T-Mobile is the new Orange.. and Cancelling a Three mobile contract FAIL keep appearing with depressing frequency. Just how big does the FAIL need to be before Ofcom actually intervene?

With all the effort being poured into Javascript lately, it's pretty evident that that's the way forward. However, there are still some neat things you can do with applets that you can't do with Javascript. For instance, I use the microemulator applet to let people play with a simulated phone on the Hecl web site. Unfortunately, the user experience hasn't that good. While playing around with the code for that site, Firefox crashed a number of times, and I've heard other browsers have trouble as well. No fun. So it is with some satisfaction that I found this: https://jdk6.dev.java.net/plugin2/ It's an updated Java plugin that seems to work much, much better than the old one. Unfortunately it doesn't appear as if it will be in the new Ubuntu, as it was released recently, but I'm quite happy to have something a bit more stable to develop with. You can download that version of the Java SDK or JRE here: http://download.java.net/jdk6/ It's good to see this effort, even if it may be a bit late.

Like all visitors to the Listening to the Social Entrepreneur conference, my pack included a leaflet from a university research centre. Today it popped up on the top of my in-tray while I was making a concerted effort to clear it. The leaflet is a description of the research centre, but it included a web address, so I visited that website. It contained essentially the same information and nothing else. What was the point of that? I already had their contact details in the attendee list. How much did these leaflets cost? In general, it’s a little disappointing when you get a “null pointer” from a private company, but it’s particularly annoying from a university. University mistakes like “technology transfer programmes” (that stop software becoming free software available to social enterprises) are justified by a need to get more money - but clearly this particular university has money to waste. How about others? If there was a way to subscribe to email or blog news of their research publications, I probably would have subscribed. Instead, I’ve just ranted here (without rewarding them with a link) and now I’m going to recycle the flier. I’ll probably have forgotten the three-letter acronym by next week. It’s simply bad marketing. It’s paper spam. Please, if you are putting things into conference handout packs, ask yourself why? What are you hoping to get out of it? How are you going to measure its success?

One of the main UK computer security websites (Get Safe Online, GSO, a public/private partnership) has recently changed to using a website for security alerts, instead of sending emails that contained a “secret” word. Of course, a non-SSL website is not really safer or easier to verify than the emails, so I asked them: why don’t you use OpenPGP or GPG, like debian’s excellent security advisories? The reply essentially boils down to “our target audience doesn’t use encryption software and we’re not going to educate them and other countries don’t either.” The encryption instructions on their site consists of an extremely vague explanation and links to a dozen or so other websites, along with insulting open source programs (which is disappointingly usual for GSO). The site is a little better than it was last year, but not much. I think it’s a terrible shame that the gov.uk-supported site is failing to encourage encryption software use. Do you think this stems from a fear of strong encryption making it harder for the public sector to snoop on us? So I guess this falls to the common/civil sector to promote personal security. How could we spread encryption software to the masses? GnuPG and as many mail client plugins as you can find? Icedove/Thunderbird and Enigmail?

One of the main UK computer security websites (Get Safe Online, GSO, a public/private partnership) has recently changed to using a website for security alerts, instead of sending emails that contained a “secret” word. Of course, a non-SSL website is not really safer or easier to verify than the emails, so I asked them: why don’t you use OpenPGP or GPG, like debian’s excellent security advisories? The reply essentially boils down to “our target audience doesn’t use encryption software and we’re not going to educate them and other countries don’t either.” The encryption instructions on their site consists of an extremely vague explanation and links to a dozen or so other websites, along with insulting open source programs (which is disappointingly usual for GSO). The site is a little better than it was last year, but not much. I think it’s a terrible shame that the gov.uk-supported site is failing to encourage encryption software use. Do you think this stems from a fear of strong encryption making it harder for the public sector to snoop on us? So I guess this falls to the common/civil sector to promote personal security. How could we spread encryption software to the masses? GnuPG and as many mail client plugins as you can find? Icedove/Thunderbird and Enigmail?