One of the reasons that I didn’t post much last week was that I was contacting some of my MEPs as part of the Telecom Packet Action in order to help defend cooperative software distribution and use. This is a bit longer than my usual posts and no software is announced below, but I’m posting it here in the hope that more people will take part in this campaign that affects every EU internet user. In short, some MEPs that I remember from the Software Patent campaign proposed amendments that would enable the unpopular three-strikes regime, where internet users could be disconnected and fined if they had three allegations of copyright infringement made (not necessarily proved AIUI) against them, and ISPs could be required to block legal peer-to-peer cooperative distribution systems like BitTorrent. ISPs would also have to distribute official advice about proper internet use and I remember how good that often is. Note that three-strikes wasn’t explicit in the amendments, but there did appear to be loopholes which could be used to allow it, such as only prohibiting technical feature requirements. For longer descriptions, see articles by La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net) and The Open Rights Group. The UK Independence Party MEPs replied quickly that they would vote against, mainly because of the source of the legislation. I don’t completely agree with that, but at least UKIP does what it says on the tin. Neil Parish MEP of the Conservatives sent me back a reply which referred to unknown numbering (H1, K1 and so on) and generally seemed like a mish-mash of replies that other people had received. I replied with questions about several aspects, including asking where his numbering came from, and I’ve not seen an answer yet. I’ll email him again in a few days because it’s been over a week. I was really annoyed by the reported complaints by Malcolm Harbour (Conservatives lead MEP on this issue) about how voters have reacted to these amendments, where he called it “scaremongering” amongst other things. No mongering was required - those amendments are damn scary. See comments from a media solicitor at the end of a BBC report:-

“The amendment will cause several problems, firstly, many broadband users routinely transfer large files which are encrypted. “Many of these are acting quite legitimately and in order to determine whether or not such large files are or are not the produce of illicit file sharing the ISP will have to carry out an unprecedented degree of analysis of its customers’ traffic. “Furthermore, computers are frequently shared - within offices, within homes, within educational institutions and inadvertently, where wrong-doers “piggy back” on an inadequately secured Wi-Fi connection. “All this raises the spectre of people losing internet access - for reasons which are no fault of their own.”

The main thing that these actions over the last few years have taught me is the broken state of European Union decision-making. I know I’m sometimes dissatisfied with problems in local and civil democracy, but the EU is a good idea whose democracy and accountability seems broken on a massive scale. There are just too many disconnects, as far as the ordinary voter can see. We put things in to elections and consultations and get bizarre law-making like this. If we act to correct the bizarre law-making, some MEPs start criticising us quite severely. And what kind of stupid representative system allows the representatives to repeatedly blame the voters but still be safely elected because of their high position on their party’s list? I’d love a simple, reformist constitution that’s simple enough for people to actually understand, approve in referendums and participate in the EU effectively. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, though.

Software in the Public Interest is a US tax-exempt not-for-profit organisation that supports a number of free software projects that I like - including debian, GNUstep and drupal - and it’s one of the most open and democratic free software organisations in the world. SPI’s next board meeting is today (Wednesday) at 1900 UTC on irc.oftc.net #spi and logs should appear here and on spi-general less than a day after. I’ve not seen a formal announcement yet, but I expect the agenda will appear here. (Update: the meeting has been postponed until after the election, but that wasn’t announced.) I’ve posted the log of the last board meeting and the log of the annual meeting to spi-general. I’m standing for election to the board for the second time. My platform contains four main proposals:-

1. Anonymise SPI votes - all votes are traceable at present
2. More SPI news - including getting the official announcements out on time
3. Consult members more - run a web panel, if members are interested
4. Report on SPI performance - at least some annual report

and free software developers who have joined SPI (at no cost) can vote for me online. If you’ve got any questions about my platform, please ask them here - or anywhere else that’s appropriate - and I’ll try to answer. I think it’s a much better platform because I learnt a lot from the last campaign, so I hope you’ll vote for me.

Koha 3.0.0-final is very close, delayed mainly by a few serials bugs and translation updates as far as I know, but the big news recently has been Venezuela s National Library evaluated, decided to deploy the Koha Integrated Library System ecorrado which was very good to see. Myself, I’m in a world of RFID-tag-related pain, which I’ll describe and publish code for as soon as it stops hurting, including perl modules like RFID::Reader::TRF7960::Serial and RFID::Reader::TRF7960::SSL. (Contact me if you want them before I get free time, please.) I also need to remember how to publish git trees to alioth collab-maint. Too many tasks, too little time.

I've spent four hours listening to muzak yesterday. Apparently, antitrust legislation prohibits T-Online from getting better access to T-Com's ticket system than their competitors. Of course that means "none at all". I do however, disagree with their corollary that it is the customer's duty to call T-Com and tell them what is wrong. On a Sunday evening. After a lightning strike. With a Windows update breaking PPPoE for ZoneAlarm users. Seriously, get your processes straight.

Dammit has learned to arrange files into a tree. This is awesome, because

• It needs to ignore "input" files that aren't really inputs, for example artefacts from builds with other tools
• Loops are bad, but calling the same tool at multiple stages during the compilation process might be necessary (so we won't cheat like Microsoft did in MSBuild and use a strict order of build tools)
• We really only need to look for the compiler once

Missing so far:

• Handling of implicit dependencies, i.e. header files
• Project-specific tools
• Actually running the tools

Thus, no new upload yet; example tree below the fold.

I suppose ISP happiness goes the other way.

Just read on Farewell LUGRadio? [theangryangel] and Ashes to ashes, dust to dust... Lugradio is at an end [sungate] that the most famous UK Free Software podcast is ending at the end of this year. I don't know the reasons yet, but it seems a shame. I've been listening again since they proved me wrong and sorted out the dumb licensing terms so it's clearly legal to cut the shows up and only copy the bits that interest me, and Season 5 seems more interesting than previous ones. Then again, I enjoyed Red Dwarf VIII, so what do I know? (but VI and VII did drag a lot) Maybe I will go to Lugradio Live 2008 in Wolverhampton on 19-20 July now I know when it is! (Why is the date only as a large slow graphic on the event page? D'oh! (Yeah I know I should have emailed them, but I had an unfun experience with the show, so I'd rather shout this in public. Wow. I guess I'm still unhappy about them regressing to school playground name-calling.)) There are some suggested alternatives on theangryangel, but most are more Ubuntu-centric (which wasn't a good thing about LR), non-Ogg and/or non-European, so it looks like I'll give LinuxOutlaws a try. Any other recommendations?

MJ Ray noticed that LugRadio is going to end soon and asks for alternatives. I’d recommend to give Linux Action Show a try. I’ve always preferred it over LugRadio. It is funny, informative and not quite as vulgar as LugRadio.

Decklin, hjkl has saved my butt several times when I was sitting at a thoroughly broken terminal. While I don't generally use it in daily life, it is good to have a fallback that works really everywhere. (Email? Who needs email?)

I already mentioned a few times in the blog that I’m working on a Debian package of the Conkeror web browser. And now, after a lot of fine-tuning (and I still further new ideas how to improve the package ;-) Conkeror is finally in the NEW queue and hopefully will hit unstable in a few days. (Update Thursday, 03-Jul-2008, 18:13 CEST: The package has been accepted by Jörg and should be included on most architectures in tonight’s updates.) Those who could hardly await it can fetch Conkeror .debs from http://noone.org/debian/. The conkeror package itself is a non-architecture specific package (but needs xulrunner-1.9 to be available), and its small C-written helper program spawn-process-helper is available as package conkeror-spawn-process-helper for i386, amd64, sparc, alpha, powerpc, kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64. There are no backported packages for Etch available, though, since I don’t know of anyone yet, who has successfully backported xulrunner-1.9 to Etch. Interestingly the interest in Conkeror seems to have risen in the Debian community independently of its Debian packaging. Luca Capello, who sponsored the upload of my Conkeror package, pointed me to two blog post on Planet Debian, written by people being fed up with Firefox 3 already and are looking for a more lean, but still Gecko based web browser: Decklin Foster is fed up with Firefox’ -eh- Iceweasel’s arrogance and MJ Ray is fed up with Firefox 3 and its SSL problems. Since my previously favourited Gecko based web browser Kazehakase never became really stable but instead became slow and leaking memory (and therefore not much better than Firefox 2), I can imagine that it’s no more an candidate for people seaking for a lean and fast web browser. Conkeror has some “strange” concepts of which the primary one is that it looks and feels like Emacs:

• The current location is shown in a status bar below the website, where Emacs usually shows buffer names. All input, even entering new URLs to go to, is done via the mini-buffer, an input line below the status bar.
• Instead of tabs it uses Emacs’ concept of buffers. So no tab bar clutter and though easy access to all currently open pages.
• It has no buttons, menu-bar or such. And except the status bar and mini-buffer, it uses the whole size of the window for the displayed web page. This is the main reason why I prefer Conkeror on the 7” EeePC: I don’t want to waste any pixels for buttons or menu bars and still have a fully functional web browser.
• It of course has Emacs alike keybindings (with a slight touch of Lynx). While this may seem awkward for the vi world (Hey, they have the vimperator^*, also in Debian since a few days!), as an Emacs user you just have to remember that you web browser now also expects to be treated like an Emacs. It just works:

  C-x C-c

  Exit Emacs -eh- Conkeror

  C-x C-f

  Open File -eh- web page in new buffer

  C-x C-b

  Change to some other tab -eh- buffer

  C-x C-v

  Replace web page in this buffer and use the current URL as start for entering the new one

  C-x 5 2

  Open new frame -eh- window

  C-x 5 0

  Close current frame -eh- window

  C-x k

  Close tab, -eh- kill buffer

  C-h i

  Documentation

  C-s

  Incremental search forward

  C-r

  Incremental search backward

  C-g

  Stop

  l

  Go back (Think info-mode)

  g

  Go to (Open web page in this buffer)

  (Hehe, I like the faces of vi users having read these keybindings and now wondering how to remember them. SCNR. Well, sometimes vi key bindings are a mystery to me, too. :-) There are of course many more and nearly all are the same as in Emacs, even the universal argument C-u and the M-x command-line are there. E.g. C-u g lets you open a web page in a new buffer, too.
• Conkeror also has very promising concept for following and copying links with the keyboard only. Opera is very inefficient here since you have to jump from link to link to get to the one you want. In Conkeror you just press f for following or c for copying links and then all links on the currently shown part of the page show a small number attached to it. Then you just enter the number (and additionally press enter if the number is ambigous) and the link is either opened or copied to the clipboard. A funny anecdote about how this concept grew over the time: Early versions of Conkeror (back in the days when it just was a Firefox externsion as vimperator) numbered all links on the page, not only the visible ones. On large pages with many links or buttons (e.g. my blog ;-), this took minutes to complete. The idea to just number the visible links is so simple and important – but someone first needed to have it. :-)

Footnotes *) I just noticed that there is now also muttator, making Thunderbird look and behave like vim (and probably also mutt), too. Wonder into which e-mail client the Emacs community will convert Thunderbird. GNUS? RMAIL? VM? Wanderslust? What will it be called? Wunderbird? Thunderslust? (SCNRE ;-)

Well, I was hoping to get Yet Another Blog Reorg done before posting this, but it just hasn't happened, so here are a few more thoughts on Firefox 3 on this ol' blog. In fact, I'll probably finish the FF3 series here before I switch over. I was in central London on Tuesday and suffered both the rudeness and the black snot (which no-one else I know seems to suffer) so maybe that's why I've been underachieving this week. I've had London lethargy. I had a report about online banking that doesn't work with FF3. NPBS will move into the hall of shame, sadly. I'm almost certain I warned them months ago that their online banking was doing Javascript stunts that aren't going to work forever. I emailed them and haven't heard back since. Back to the browser: I share the contempt for the Firefox 3 and SSL problems and I like the new URL bar too. However, I am finding the FF3 seems to use more CPU (and so power) than FF1.5 and there seems to be some frustrating delays in FF-clipboard communications, so I'm looking at other browsers. Conkeror looks interesting. Still Gecko (useful for work) but stripped down. I spotted another post about microformats, which I mentioned in my last post, about the BBC dropping support for microformats [John Resig] and I also noticed just how good SVG and Minimalist Markup looks in FF3 [Sam Ruby] - I'd love to try it, but my IE-using clients probably wouldn't understand and I hate making single-browser special editions.

This. (context)

I didn't spot this when I wrote my last post, but it seems there's a security alert for FF3 already - hackademix.net: Firefox 3 Untimely Security Advisory - but it also affects FF2 and probably my cautious Javascript settings are enough to stop it anyway, looking at that report. I've also been sent another update to the page on Online Banking with GNU/Linux, Firefox-based browsers or Free Software (first direct plus using ActiveX) - I wonder if any bankers will be noticeably slow to allow FF3 and will any of them cite this security flaw? I hope not - UK online banking security is hardly in a good place to throw stones. I was mildly surprised that the list was linked from Ashley Highfield's BBC blog on Testing Linux Ubuntu but I've no idea why he doubts the list's accuracy! It's as accurate as its contributors - most of whom I name - and I'm willing to put my name to it too. That's better than Wikipedia, which the BBC uses far too much IMO. Would he trust the list more if it was anonymously-edited on a public site? Anyway, I guess I should move that list to a more permanent location soon. Previous FF3 parts: Firefox 3, day 3: first impressions and 7 Reasons Why Firefox 3 Download Day Sucks

Finally, here's the looong overdue second post on the Open Source Census. Very shortly after my initial post on my experiences with the Open Source Census I got an e-mail from one of their engineers adressing the points I had made in my post. So here are a few additions to my first post:

• You don't have to use the giant JRE including implementation, there's also a much leaner Ruby implementation of the scanning tool. Tolimar tested it and found it to be functional but also pretty time consuming.
• Load-wise the scanner comes with a --throttle option that makes it pause every n scanned files, so that your system isn't knocked out completely.
• Different from what I said there is a --help parameter, but the JRE has to come up first, so it takes some time until it outputs anything.

Tolimar was also contacted by the developer, he explained to him how to exclude individual directories using the Ruby version (not sure if it's also possible in the Java version) and how reports can be submitted anonymously. So, the privacy protection issues can also be taken care of. I was very impressed by the quick and thorough reaction to both Tolimar's and my own post and hope this post will be of some help to the project and get them some more submissions. One last note: Meike is indeed a female name. So no, he won't post a response, but she will ;)

Previously, I wrote:

Seriously: the browser looks like a big improvement from Firefox 2, but there are so many niggles with this download day idea...

In reply to Open Sesame Did you download Firefox 3?, I answer "Yes". It was a major upgrade for me, requiring new versions of Cairo and GTK+2, and installation of DBus-GLib on my GoboLinux computer, which brought in new versions of Xorg and so required a recompile of my GNUstep desktop applications. Once that was done, Firefox compiled unattended. As noted by Adam Sampson in the comments on my last post, even after building from source, you still get all the obnoxious click-through EULA and when you type about:config into the address bar, you get a "no user-servicable parts" sort of notice, which really sucks. I notice that MozCorp don't call it "100% Open Source", preferring instead Firefox: 100% Organic Software (because we need another marketing campaign for free software, right?), so I expect I need to winkle out the restrictively-licensed parts again - GNUzilla, there's still demand for your good work! After day 3 with Firefox 3, what do I think of it? Well, it seems a lot faster and a lot less RAM-hungry, and I'm quite impressed that all of the fancier bits of Koha and Wordpress seem to be working nicely but while I'm not annoyed enough to switch browsers yet (unlike FF3 and Safari - DrBacchus' Journal), there are still a hell of a lot of niggles and interface bugs. Some of the problems may have been introduced in Firefox 2, but I didn't actually use that enough to notice. My day-to-day browsing for the last year or so has been on a customised Firefox 1.5. The FF3 user interface has some big steps backwards from FF1.5: in particular, I've lost the "force pages that try to open new windows into the same window" option (or whatever it was called... I can't find the FF1.5 manual online anymore); some keyboard shortcuts have changed - for no good reason that I can see (JavaScript has switched from Alt-E n Alt-S to Alt-E n Alt-J, for example); what on earth is the history drop down doing next to the "Go Forward" arrow?; and the button to close a tab is on each tab, so I need to be careful to miss it when trying to switch to a tab and my pointer makes a pointless detour to the top-right when I want to close a tab. It's not all bad on the interface. The new RSS feed and bookmark links in the location bar are much better than in previous versions. The bookmark tagging and auto-generated folders could be a great idea once I've used it for a while. I'm pretty annoyed that Firefox 3 seems to come with some spyware enabled as default. I usually have cookies either switched off or set to "ask me every time" so I was surprised to be offered a cookie from safebrowsing.google.com! I know it's for a noble goal, but what's this doing enabled without asking first? Untick the "tell me if the site I'm visiting is ..." options in Edit: Preferences: Security if you don't want details of your browsing to be sent to the USA. Another thing which really annoys me is that the Firefox support site requires javascript and seems unhappy with my cookie settings. Not cool. Other than that, the main problems with Firefox 3 are omissions rather than bugs. For example, Microformats [Alex Faaborg] support was one of the long-trumpeted new features in Firefox 3, but they're really not obviously included, as noted by others in posts like Firefox 3 is here - where's the microformats? And finally, searching mozilla.com for firefox returns 0 hits, which is a bit strange... are they ashamed of it?

1. It's every where on TV and in print, even in Esperanto, which doesn't even have an official translation - only a third-party add-on Esperanto language pack.
2. It was late even for the US and after most of Europe finished work AFAIK.
3. There's no official bittorrent.
4. There's no link to the source code from the main download page as far as I can tell. It may be mostly free software, but it feels like MozCorp don't want pesky users changing things.
5. It brings more changes for webmasters (which is another reason I code to standards whenever possible, but I bet some of the free software web applications we use will need upgrades).
6. It might be the "most stupid world record ever" (or at least useless) and comes just as some browsers move away from the Gecko engine.
7. ...and all this irritation came before I've even built and installed the damn thing!

Seriously: the browser looks like a big improvement from Firefox 2, but there are so many niggles with this download day idea...

LUG of Glastonbury meets at Tor Leisure in Glastonbury at 7pm tonight (Monday). It will be a general planning meeting, maybe with some GPG-key-signing and other tasks. If you want the LUG to show you something in particular, this will be a good event to attend. This week is BikeWeek 2008 and there's a free cyclists breakfast at the Victorian Cafe on the Weston-super-Mare seafront about 8am Wednesday morning. For events in other areas, stick a partial postcode into the BikeWeek event search. Someone from The Doon Of May was at Hacktionlab 2008 @ Highbury Farm this last weekend, as were Bristol Wireless, who were running the wifi. I've not seen an official announcement, but SPI's board meeting will be on Wednesday at 8pm UK time (1900 UTC), according to my last meeting report. I've heard through BBLUG that the notorious Shevek is co-organising an event called "An Adventure in Technology" at Trinity Community Arts in Bristol on 28 June 2008. It's a follow-up event to the 2003 Bristol Linux and will be an all-inclusive event where everybody is encouraged to bring something along, talk about it, swap ideas, and build things on site. It doesn't have to be Linux-based, but a lot of things will be. The event web site is http://www.techadventure.org/ and you should post there if you have an idea or want to run a session. There will also be a list for people who decide on the day that they want to give a talk.

Since right now I cannot afford the travel expenses to go to Argentina, it's highly unlikely that I can come to DebConf. :-(

All hail Joey's indifferent looking new sun god.