The first meeting of the new
Bristol and Bath Perl M[ou]ngers
is tonight (Tue 27th) at 7pm,
according to
this mailing list post.
Despite their
rules,
I've already been well-flamed by one member,
so it will be interesting to see what
sort of group it becomes.
Hopefully the flamers are nicer in real life.
Last Friday, I mentioned
Ofcom announcing that
Rural broadband households overtake urban for the first time
and wondered whether
the Ofcom definition of broadband
is as broken as
the Ofcom definition of digital television.
Of course it is.
Apprently, it ignores download speed,
alternative access points and lots of
other aspects. See
Rural broadband - lies, damn lies and statistics
(hey, don't blame the numbers - blame those
doing the interpretation!),
Lifetorque: Ofcom still out of touch on broadband
and
It's Broadband Jim - but not as we know it!
for some of the points and links to more.
Can we ever trust any of Ofcom's statistics?
For the first time in a while,
I've filed a
data protection complaint
with the
Information Commissioner's Office
about a company's bad behaviour.
Take a bow, Sky TV! Claiming that you can't
remove my details from your mailing lists
because I'm not one of your customers is
stupid beyond belief.
If I'm not one of your customers, never have
been and have never permitted you to have
my personal details, then you shouldn't
have them anyway and you definitely
shouldn't keep them after I've asked you to
stop.
foosel tagged me, whatever that means. Perhaps it’s the English
word for “Stöckchen” (German for “small stick”) of which I always
wondered how the English blogging part of the blogosphere is calling
that kind of coercing blog posts… ;-)
So these are the rules:
Three quick updates to items I've posted in
the past:-
Justin Rolfe has re-opened
his fishmonger's shop on Alexandra Parade Weston-super-Mare
less than six weeks after what
Avon Fire called a "lucky escape"
when his van crashed off Kewstoke toll road.
I'm glad I didn't try to go to an event in
Exeter yesterday
that I was invited to. I don't
remember seeing that restaurant, but
the BBC writes it only opened last September.
A religious bombing in Devon.
Whatever next?
Eurovision
is tomorrow night. I'm not going to write in
detail here this year (because I don't want
the pain of dealing with the planet-purgers
again) but I might try to guest blog
somewhere else and mention it at the end
of tomorrow's post.
Today is
Silver Surfer's Day 2008,
intended to give a taste of the internet to
some of the nearly 10 million over-50s who aren't yet online.
There's
an SSD event finder
on the site of organisers Digital Unite.
(Thanks to
SW ICT Champion
for the tip.)
I also spotted
Rural broadband households overtake urban for the first time
from Ofcom,
but I wonder whether
the Ofcom definition of broadband
is as broken as
the Ofcom definition of digital television.
I finally closed
my cooperative's
annual accounts for the year to 5 April 2008
yesterday.
We wrote off one project (not bad for a year)
and now we can start on the annual reports.
For day-to-day entries, we're still using my simple scheme/web app called
SQL-Journal
and I should make a new release
real soon now. I've added some features since 1.3 and there's a few more I want to add,
but I'm no accountant, so it will remain simple
and stupid, but good enough for me.
Bristol Wireless's accountant has written some comments on GNUcash
which is an interesting view: "not quite there yet" which could help finance software
developers.
Better searching is one thing I will add
to SQL-Journal some time,
but
it will probably never have features like
reporting (I either use an SQL-based
report package or export to a spreadsheet)
and I know it's no better at
handling VAT, mainly because TTLLP isn't
VAT-registered yet.
I also spotted
Finance software in Emdebian, by Neil Williams
recently. I wonder if the bursts of
accounting interest are connected to the
end of the financial year?
At the time of writing,
I've not seen an announcement (again), but
there's
an agenda
for an Software in the Public Interest
IRC meeting at 19:00 GMT tonight
(Wednesday 21st).
It doesn't include any reports, motions
or items for discussion.
This is particularly surprising because
Michael Schultheiss declared in the last
meeting that there would "definitely" be
a complete treasurer report before this
meeting
(see
20:07:48 in the meeting log http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2008-April/002571.html
I sent to spi-general after
last month's meeting).
But why are there no motions or items?
Are we that short of work to do?
I may not be at this meeting (library event
in Bristol instead) but I'll post a log to
spi-general later if I have one.
I'd not long written about
lunching at the other end of Kewstoke Toll Road
yesterday when I read
this news of another Toll Road crash.
I hope the three people carried from the
wreckage recover.
I fear the press will have another field day
about how dangerous the road is,
instead of primarily blaming whatever
caused the accident.
(The fishmonger crashed while
avoiding a loose dog, by the way.)
That road is not up to modern standards
and I don't believe it was designed for the
volume of traffic that's been using it since
they stopped collecting the toll,
but there is a very low speed limit (25mph)
and warning signs all over it.
Neither car left the road this time, as far
as I can tell from the reports.
I hope the press proves me wrong.
I met Irma and Bob from
Calyx
yesterday. They're fellow
Koha
service providers from
Sydney, Australia
who are over in Europe visiting various
people.
It was nice to see them (first time
I've met Bob) and have a bit of a
chat about where we're each going with Koha.
One interesting difference is that they have
several private-sector clients, while I
don't think
my cooperative
has yet done a private-sector Koha,
but there seemed to be more similarities
than differences, including adding more
robust project management and ticketing
as we deliver Koha 3 to people.
We went for lunch at
The Cliffs Tea Rooms
at the other end of
Kewstoke
Toll Road,
which has great views towards Wales,
but I forgot to take any pictures. Ooops.
Can a Panasonic EUR7615KTO remote control
for a NV-VP30 video player use its TV mode
to control a Goodmans 257NS TV?
I've tried every setting listed in the
instruction book and I still can't get it
to work.
Neither the book nor the stuff on Panasonic's
web site has a compatibility list.
Search engine results are full
of people selling replacement controls and
no compatibility lists.
I guess it doesn't work, but it's a bit
irritating not to know for sure.
Why doesn't anyone produce proper hardware
compatibility lists for these devices?
Video players are worse than Linux...
(tl;dr: if you have a few minutes, please add information here)
Joss,
the problem with the new package formats is that there is nothing that actually uses the additional information in a way that adds significant new functionality, so the net result of the change was that we throw away the information at a different layer in our software stack, and one of the interfaces got a lot more complicated in the process.
One possible application would be a "poor man's patch tracking" inside the BTS, perhaps with a new state "fixed in patch".
I can see two ways of implementing that:
There is an article on TechCrunch on Windows on the OLPC. This article started out as a comment below lots of comments that were missing the point, but eventually grew too large.
The entire discussion circles around the question whether it would be beneficial to give the users the same view and behaviour that is on 90% of machines worldwide, so they can start out prospective jobs with a minimum of training. Learning your way around the UI is only a significant part of training if that actual work you will do is trivial — so this argument basically boils down to "I don't expect the African kids to do anything but grunt work during their lifetime anyway, so we better start training them early", which is the wrong approach not only to education.
To make a bad car analogy, roads are usually made of several layers, from the foundation providing the stability up to the paint defining lanes. Operating systems are similarly layered, with a core that applications (cars) never touch directly, and several other layers on top of that that are not really required for basic functionality, but that add safety (process separation) or comfort (standard functions). The minimum standard of things is a "platform definition", which all car (or application) makers can expect — all roads have a minimum width and there are no dangerous spikes (if that is not true, you can get a steamroller or respectively format your harddisk).
Railways use the same kind of foundation (operating system), but the platform (heh) is quite different. You cannot drive a car on a railway, or a train on a road, just as you cannot run a Windows application on a Linux system or vice versa (there are special wagons you can place your car on, and special trucks with rails on them if you feel like it, but these are heavier and need more energy to pull).
Now in this discussion, people have been comparing Windows (the platform) to Linux (the operating system). That doesn't work.
On Linux, there are several platforms available, the most prominent being GNOME and KDE for the desktop and POSIX utilities on the command line, but there are lots of others as well. Part of most platform definitions is an user interface, which abstracts what is really happening to something comprehensible to the user, using analogies (a tachometer displays our speed as an angle usually, but other representations are possible).
The "desktop" idiom happened to be the first graphical UI some thirty years back, and was perpetuated into today's computers (just like the width of roads hasn't changed from the days of the Roman empire, where it was "two horses and then some"), however this doesn't mean it is the best choice available — it's just what we are used to.
If you look at the screen contents on the day traders' computers (lots of that on the TV right now thanks to the market crisis), you will notice the vast majority does not use overlapping windows or standardized "rising-edge" buttons to click on, but rather, they have a tightly-packed grid layout with high-contrast information displays that also color-code certain messages.
I think that is the most important point here: to achieve optimal results, the presentation idiom needs to be chosen in a task specific way.
With children as the target audience, we lose one of the key requirements behind the adoption of the windowed view: the need for side-by-side presentation of data from multiple unrelated sources (which is also a problem given the lack of screen space). With the introduction of ad-hoc mesh networking and collaborative applications, the "desktop" analogy begins to break down.
The project's mission also defines requirements on the platform. If we want to keep the requirement "users should be able to build and share their own stuff", then we want a framework where it is hard to make mistakes, especially those that can be spotted only after an interesting failure, and more importantly impossible to write code that makes unrelated components fail, because these components might be your way back out of the situation.
Windows has an excellent event model with fairly good isolation of components (to the point where a problem in an event handler can be handled by the event loop rather than terminating the program, so for example Internet Explorer can shut down broken plugins rather than crashing), but the detail knowledge required to really work with the API (how to build a message loop that also runs queued I/O completion handlers correctly) leads to a fairly steep learning curve, and would teach implementation details rather than concepts.
The normal "linuxy" approach of going low level whenever higher-level approaches fail is not the answer either as we want to truly empower people rather than just training them to be a cheap replacement for the tech support Indians (no offence), so it is vital that the "real" applications use the same framework that people implementing new things would use, and thus all the complexity that we want in our "official" applications needs to be taken care of by the platform, with all the safety features in place too.
So no existing platform provides what we want. — hence Sugar. And that is the problem for Windows advocates: Sugar replaces those bits that make Windows a platform and not just a kernel, so porting Sugar to Windows doesn't make sense from a technical point of view, since we already replaced the bits that we didn't have free software for before.
Other than that, the "Linux vs. Windows" kernel choice is secondary; in fact both kernels are very similar in design and function, the various advantages and disadvantages of either aren't that relevant really.
The only technical reason in favour of Linux is the virtual memory management — the Windows VMM behaves erratically in the absence of a swap device, but I believe that is not something that cannot be fixed.
The reason why I believe Linux is the better choice here is long-term support.
Since these devices will be used in basic education (which hasn't changed that much in the past years as 1 plus 1 still equals 2), there is hardly any need for radical changes after the initial rollout — why add instability when you don't have to? With Microsoft as a for-profit company, there needs to be a business model sustaining that behind it, and I believe it will be very hard to find one. "Subscription" falls down in that it is a long-term recurring expense, which governments tend to be pretty wary of.
The alternative is to upgrade several million computers' OS every few years. Lots of companies are skipping entire Windows releases because of the migration cost, and even with the "console bonus" (all hardware is the same) and bootloader support for software upgrades over a mesh network, this is still a massive endeavour. That each machine would have to reserve enough memory for the entire "upgrade pack" so it can transition "in one go" also makes this model unworkable.
To summarize, using Windows on the OLPC does not make sense at all. If you use just the kernel, you don't gain anything over Linux, and if you use the entire platform (and by extension, the UI), you add unnecessary complexity that is not only not required for the actual task, but also distracting. If you add restrictions and extensions to make it work, you invent a new platform, which is precisely what Sugar did.
The argument that it is important for pupils to use the same thing that the rest of the world is using to ease their entry into the workforce is bogus at best, and racist at worst.
Free software finally gets significant coverage on BBC TV's Click show
this week, but I think it's very much Linux rather than GNU/Linux and
free cost rather than freedom. They mentioned free security software
and even raised the possibility of trojans, but didn't mention how
free (as in freedom) software allows any random end-user to check or
have it checked.
Quite a missed opportunity! However, Click has a regular letters
section, so watch it (times below), email click@bbc.co.uk
and see if we can get the free software view across.
The letters section this week seemed to be flaming proprietary SaaS
social network site facebook for their pathetic default-permit
approach to security of user details. I really think there's a role
for something like
noserub
in free software social networking.
Click-UK
is shown on BBC News Channel Saturday 1130, Sunday
0430 and 1130, Monday 0030 and Sunday 0430 on BBC-1 (times BST)
Click-World
is shown Thursday 19:30 GMT, Repeated Friday 09:30
and 12:30 (Asia Pacific only), Saturdays 06:30, Mondays 15:30,
Tuesdays 01:30 (not Asia Pacific, Middle East or South Asia) and 07:30 GMT
Anyone else see this?
"Here are three examples of rules that I think it's time to abandon. These particular examples are all about email. 1/ Top Posting [...] 2/ HTML Email [...] 3/ Reply-To On Mailing Lists [...] So, yes, the barbarians are at the gate. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Good ideas have been crushed by the number of people who don't understand them. But there's no point in complaining about it. You just have to accept it and move on."-- Pointless Battles For Geeks, By Dave Cross Unsurprisingly, given the above links to my site, I disagree with Dave Cross's conclusion, but I do agree with two aspects: battling is generally pointless and using hard rules about these things is unnecessary. I have those pages on my website so that I can point to them when their broken emails aren't handled as expected. I use some aspects of them as scoring inputs in my mail filters. I don't use them as rules and I try not to complain about them too often. Nevertheless, I still believe sending properly-trimmed plain text emails from a list-friendly email client is clearly best practice, to be recommended when someone asks why their email bad habits are causing them problems.
I'm convinced by
The Argument for Posting Ahead [Network Blogging]
so why didn't I set it up for
my recent trip?
Well, a while ago, I had a bit of an email discussion with
Steve
about delayed posting features for
Chronicle
which I think ended with the addition of chronicle-spooler
to the released files.
I initially suggested ignoring a post when its Date
is in the future, like
Wordpress
does, but I think that wouldn't be backwards-compatible
and isn't as flexibile as it could be.
chronicle-spooler works by moving files from a spool dir
into a live dir. I'd forgotten how much it confuses me
when files on a "static" site start moving themselves
around. It means I have to merge before upload, which
isn't a big change, but still annoying.
So, I've added the following lines to chronicle to
skip entries with a Publish header in the future:-
--- chronicle-2.7/bin/chronicle.orig 2008-05-15 10:13:55.000000000 +0100
+++ chronicle-2.7/bin/chronicle 2008-05-15 10:13:43.000000000 +0100
@@ -607,7 +607,8 @@
# Read the entry and store all the data away as a
# hash element keyed upon the (unique) filename.
#
- $results $file = readBlogEntry($file);
+ my $result = readBlogEntry($file);
+ if ($result) $results $file = $result;
#
@@ -1479,7 +1480,7 @@
my $tags = ""; # entry tags.
my $body = ""; # entry body.
my $date = ""; # entry date
- my $publish = ""; # entry publish date - *ignored*
+ my $publish = ""; # entry publish date
open( ENTRY, "<", $filename ) or die "Failed to read $filename $!";
while ( my $line = <ENTRY> )
@@ -1527,6 +1528,14 @@
close(ENTRY);
+ # MJR - embargo stuff until its publish date.
+ # Steve recommends using chronicle-spooler,
+ # but I want uploaded files to stay where I put them,
+ # else I get my local copy confused.
+ if (($publish ne "") && (str2time($publish) > time()))
+ return 0;
+
+
#
# Determine the input format to use.
#
I think that's compatible with chronicle-spooler, too...
![[SNR Event Welcome Slide]](http://mjr.towers.org.uk/writing/reflections/attachments/snrevent.jpg "Photo")
Anyone seen this before?
Today, I went to an event about the
Sub-National Review Consultation
(as a substitute for someone else AIUI).
I'd not heard about this before, but if
you're in England and you've any interest
in our regional planning system (which I
think you should, if you have
your main home here or run a business here),
you have six weeks left to comment on the
UK Government's suggested changes.
As I understand it, it will move the
second-highest tier of planning control
from democratically-accountable
regional bodies
to the business-led
Regional Development Agencies, with some
oversight by MPs and the very- indirectly-accountable council leaders.
I've posted
more detail on Co-opNet.
When I asked about local involvement and cooperatives, I was directed towards Local Strategic Partnerships, but I'm pessimistic about how easy it will be to influence regional planning through those: a few weeks ago, I was at the launch of the
North Somerset Partnership
Sustainable Community Strategy for 2008-2026.
It's a 72-page A4 glossy book
which I've still not found time to read
properly. I think the size says something
about its sustainability.
I've posted
a little more detail on WsMForum.
I'll try to answer questions about
either of them on this blog or those forums...
I'm just back from a trip to Cuba. Sorry for the abrupt disconnect. I expected to have limited connectivity there, whereas I actually had none at all except for 23 minutes! I hope the other members of
the cooperative
and
the editorial team
stepped in suitably well. I'll check in with them now and then start on the emails, but I wanted to put this broadcast out first for those who are watching closely and wondering...
A large study in Europe concluded that it takes more gas and oil to produce a bottle of bio-fuel than it does to produce a bottle of gas. What does this mean? It means that Bio-Fuel is more damaging to the environment in the long run, and on top of that it is driving up the cost of basic food supplies. Millions and millions around the world in a number of countries are unable to afford the rising food costs for basic staples like Corn, and for what? If Bio-Fuel is not better for the environment, why are politicians and environmentalists getting behind this growing industry? I think it’s because it seems to be the “trendy” thing to do, and we all know what happens when the media promotes a new trend. We get tons of media coverage telling us why it’s a good thing, and hardly any coverage of the negative impacts. Already people from the Bio-Fuel industry are getting on television shouting out that there are many factors contributing to rising food prices, trying to deflect the fact that their destruction of food to fuel vehicles is the main culprit.Actually, I suspect the emphasis on biofuels in the USA and Europe has to do with the fact that it’s the only alternative to fossil-based motor fuels proven to be sustainable and scalable:
The success of FFFVs, together with the mandatory use of E25 blend of gasoline throughout the country, allowed Brazil to get more than 40% of its automobile fuels from sugar cane-based ethanol in 2007.I see no link to the European study in question, but previous studies have suffered from various faults; for example, the assumption that trucks transporting fuel cannot themselves shift to biofuels. I’m sure better analysis of the study is on its way. But that’s not the most interesting thing, to me. More interesting: my general impression that a lot of the climate-change hysteria is just that. If we hear what science seems to be telling us about the environment, and we think that something needs to be done, then we should do things that will actually work. One thing that really works is conservation: use less of the bad stuff we’re using. But we’ve done quite a bit on that front, only to hear that much, much more is required to make a difference. I’m not sure there’s much, much more benefit for us to realize in conservation, at least in the short term. So, to make a real difference, we have to make more radical changes. Can we change our motor fuel? Sure; starting with something that pollutes less, and that even absorbs some of that same pollutant in its production, sounds like a winner. JROBI, again:
It makes no sense whatsoever to create Bio-Fuel when there are much better options on the table - for instance Hydrogen vehicles. When was the last time you heard someone on the news talk about Hydrogen initiatives?I hear it every so often. But most talk, today, focuses on the very real problems with hydrogen as a motor fuel. There are many; just look at the discussions of hydrogen fuel tank technology for a sample. But one of the biggest problems is that of developing an infrastructure for delivering fuel to the customer. No one talks about the problems of setting up an ethanol infrastructure. We already have it. Brazil has demonstrated that the current gasoline infrastructure can easily be adapted to deliver ethanol instead, and that there is a viable migration plan for gradually moving people off fossil fuels. Now, this isn’t to say that the world of ethanol is hunky-dory. It’s arguable that, while ethanol may be sustainable, the corn-based system the USA has adopted isn’t. Some people are talking about sensible tweaks that may solve the food problems while continuing to support biofuels–removing our silly tariff on Brazilian ethanol, for example, or developing alternative feedstocks for ethanol production. The problem is that hysteria seems to be breeding hysteria. Global warming is so severe, we are told, that we need solutions, and we need them immediately. So we develop solutions we can use immediately. But no! These solutions cost; we need something else, and we need it immediately, and we need it cost-free. Practically, this kind of insistence on perfection–that we deploy solutions with no drawbacks, only benefits–has the effect of dampening our enthusiasm for environmental solutions. We tried, our leaders will tell us, but nothing was good enough, so we gave up. And so, rather than do something that helps, or even something that lays the foundation for helping, we continue our use of fossil fuels. Perhaps ethanol is the wrong solution. But if it is, we should resign ourselves to the inevitability of the future, as foretold by science, or fervently hope that the global warming deniers are right, because other solutions will arrive too late to do much good.
... does anyone know what would be the expected behaviour if I returned a "multipart/related" document from an HTTP request?
Next.