John writes about PDFs and the problem of embedded fonts that are missing due to restrictive licencing. Font designers usually distinguish between "embedding" and "using" a font, prohibiting the former in their licence agreement. The difference is that when a font is "used", all information about the text is lost, and only rendering instructions remain (usually a set of Bezier curves). PDF allows you to annotate a rendered page in various ways, among other things, it allows you to specify that a certain region should be interpreted as a specific text. For example, OCR tools working with PDF files start with a file containing just the image data, and add the textual information, so you end up with a file that looks like the scan, but has selectable text. While that is certainly not legal advice, so far it has been considered acceptable to ship a PDF file with pre-rendered text and an annotation that facilitates copy&paste (which you also need with embedded fonts to allow selections to see ligatures like " " as two distinct characters). These files may be slightly larger than they would be with an embedded font, but have the advantage of looking exactly the same everywhere and at the same time, being trivial to render as the rasterizer does not need to understand anything about text layout. tl;dr: if you have a document that people should be able to see exactly the way you intended it, please include the text curves if you may not embed the font directly, and provide selection hints.

I've learnt a lot about building MSI files during the last days. In a way, it is very similar to building Debian packages -- you hand some magic tool a directory with files and a directory with meta-information. The main difference is that MSI files cannot call arbitrary commands in their installation sequence, which serves an useful purpose: as long as they make do with the standard actions provided with the base installer, it is guaranteed that you can undo all changes, and you can get a full overview what the installation will do, without running any untrusted code. If the standard actions aren't enough (for example, they don't cover driver installation), you can ship a DLL that can be loaded into the installer. You lose a bit of the audit functionality there, but that is not a problem in practice as these plug-ins are signed separately from the package, so for every genuine problem, there is already a plug-in that you can simply "merge" to your package.

Teaching dammit to link against Boost proves to be rather tricky, because they already have a scheme for encoding ABI information into file names (in fact, multiple that can be selected at build time). It might make sense to allow for sites (not packages!) to provide scripts in a Turing complete language to allow scanning for other packages. I shall call that "legacy support".

I'm still alive, so it's past time to update the signature on my gpg key into next year. The key phrase in the handbook is:

"The expiration time is updated by deleting the old self-signature and adding a new self-signature."

but somehow I always have to look it up, so I thought I'd make a note of it here. It looks like debian-keyring should update now I did --send-key to it, but I guess I'll find out in a few weeks.

About gobolinux

I can suspend my laptop and it restarts happily enough in X, but playing video results in a strange green square. I've found that starting and killing another X server (like X :1, wait for the grey mesh and then zap it) fixes the problem and I can switch back to my original :0 X and play video again. I wonder if these notes on X suspend and video BIOS by Matthew Garrett explain it.

About debian

Why on earth did someone change the .changes format so swiftly and why does a change that breaks a common upload process (build in a VM, sign on a stable system) only warrant a -devel-announce paragraph under the headline Misc Development News (#6)? "Small news" - my foot!

My communications connection I'm going travelling this summer. I don't know what internet connection I'll have (if any) but I'm pretty sure I'll have fairly cheap SMS access from my phone. Maybe even MMS. So, I want to use one of the mobile micropublishers to try to avoid sending international SMSes to lots of people. Facebook doesn't look good - it gives a shortcode (which would cost me extra to use and I don't know whether it works while roaming), has no number for SMS that I found and it looks like O2 is the only UK carrier it knows - bizarre. LiveJournal has mobile access but the FAQ makes it look like it's only for paying users. If I was sure it was going to work, I might pay and support the GPL'd codebase. Jaiku is cost-free and gives an SMS number, but is joining the Goolag and I don't see how to download their Java applet. Twitter is cost-free, gives an SMS number and looks like it plays nice with Jabber (which is already on my phone), so that looks good but I found some complaints about whether SMSes get through. 20six is a German-based cost-free service which takes SMS and email (which is also on my phone), so that also looks good, but there are some old doubts about whether it will stay cost-free. Is there a service you'd recommend?

Commands that should not be used on a LUKS partition:

1. pvcreate

I am very excited to announce that Jonathan Roes has successfully applied to the Google Summer of Code 2008 and will be working on netconf over this summer. With his help, I am confident that netconf 1.0 in Debian lenny is no longer a dream. Jonathan is a soon-to-be computer science graduate from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and his application was (by far) the most convincing of the ten I received. He has several years of programming and Linux experience and it s quite obvious that he has understood the philosophy of netconf. I am looking forward to working with Jonathan! NP: Underworld: Second Toughest of the Infants

Tux likes this fish-like object. I finally got bluetooth file transfer working between my phone and laptop a little while ago. It wasn't particularly hard, although there were a couple of dead ends. The basic bluetooth layer is petty easy. Start dbus, start hcid, start passkey-agent if you've not paired the two. It seems to be a bit simpler to start the pairing from the phone. Then use sdptool browse to check the phone is seen clearly. After that, it got a bit complicated. obexftp worked well enough as far as it went, putting items onto the phone and getting files off the phone, but I couldn't work out how to get some items off the phone. They just didn't appear in the obexftp or obexfs listings. So I wondered if it night be easier to start the transfer from the phone. There's an obexftpd, but I didn't figure out how to send it files. I also tried to compile opd but I think it offer patching for modern gccs. (Anyone got these working?) What I did get to work was sobexsrv - just tell it a directory and it puts any files it's sent there. Works a treat. One other thing that has been really useful is anyremote. It's a command server for the GNU/Linux side and a Java client for the phone. The phone mostly picks from option menus or preprogrammed keys, but editable fields are also possible. You can run any commands that the server configuration allows, including starting file transfers. I think that's possible because remote control and object transfer are on different bluetooth channels, but I don't really understand it yet. I've improved the RSS reader to use xsltproc and added shell commands to it. Once I'm fairly sure it's reliable, I'll upload it near here. (Posted in part due to an ALUG thread which reminded me about this forgotten draft.)

Chronicle

My blog compiler received a bit of love recently, primarily because MJ Ray wanted to use it. As mentioned before I've added a simple spooling system, and the mercurial repository now contains a simple RSS importer.

Debian Work

In other news I've been working on various Debian packages, here is a brief summery:

bash-completion

After seeing a RFH bug I closed a few bash-completion bugs, and submitted patches for a couple more. I was intending to do more, but I'm still waiting for the package code to be uploaded to the the alioth project.

javascript work

I've updated the jquery package I uploaded to follow the new "Javascript standard" - in quotes only because it is both minimal and new. Once the alioth project has been configured I'll upload my sources.

Apache2

I've agreed to work on a couple of SSL-related bugs in the Apache 2.x package(s) - time disappeared but I hope to get that done this weekend. Initially that was because I was hoping I could trade a little love for getting a minor patch applied to mod_vhost_alias - instead I've now copied that module into libapache2-mod-vhost-bytemark and we'll maintain our own external module.

Hardware

I've been loaned a Nokia 770 which is very nice. Having used it with vim, ssh & etc I think that I'd rather have a device with a real keyboard. The Nokia 810 looks pretty ideal for me. I'm going to be asking around to see if I can get a donated/loaned device to play with for a while before I take the plunge and pay for one of my own.

I've got a couple more things on the go at the moment, but mostly being outdoors is more interesting to me than the alternative. Hence the downturn in writing and releasing security advisories. I'll pick things up more fully over the coming weeks I'm sure. ObQuote: Shaun of the Dead

Is this traffic or congestion? This is one of those Friday Afternoon Projects - it's been put off all through a busy week because it's unpaid, I'm not completely sure how to approach it and now my arms hurt like hell from travel jabs which are making it hard to concentrate! So I'm going to float it on here... I've been asked to brief a meeting next week about that group's current web site and its problems. I'm not linking it yet to avoid insulting/embarrassing them. The site looks OK, but doesn't rank well on search engines and doesn't allow much member participation. I need to explain why that's a bad thing and how the site's technical choices have led to that. I'm not directly pitching for TTLLP to get any work (because I'm a member of that group, it might be a conflict of interest and we're pretty busy anyway - even our own site needs work on some of the points I'm going to mention), but I don't want to be unhappy if we're asked to implement my recommendations. I've got a usual outline that I follow, but my presentation's time is limited, so I'd like to ask you: what about this is important and what isn't? If you give me useful feedback, I'll put you in the Acknowledgements with a backlink and I hope the briefing will be shared pretty widely over the next few months. The current plan is to start with a basic explanation of how search engines rank pages, as far as we can tell, referring to PageRank Explained Correctly with Examples, by Ian Rogers as well as the shorter official summaries from the dominant search sites at Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. Then I go through a quick evaluation of the site against the basics of validation, accessibility and robot-friendliness, followed by a couple of SEO-style checks of its current rankings and inbound links. Next is a bit different because I have access to some of their web access stats: I summarise what we know and suggest some other stats they've probably not considered and why they're useful, along the lines of Dave Briggs's measures of blog success. Finally, I suggest ways to improve the site. The top tip will be to take control of the site hosting and stop using the cheap and cheerful donated server that makes all links except the front page point to another domain. I'll probably suggest a mix of free and open source software tools to power it. If they don't want to move it all yet, I'll suggest running a second site for member participation, using tools like Wordpress, NoseRub and so on. What do you think? Plan for success, am I missing some tricks, or am I setting myself up for a lynching? Let me know with a comment or email, please.

Not done one of these round-ups for a while and I'm really pushed for time today, so here are some sites that I've written on:

1. Property of a Lady Wicca on House
2. Ross Burton: The End Of Homeopathy?
3. Enough with the dried yoghurt covered raisins Korerorero: Just random ranting and raving
4. How to host a free software advocacy event Free Software Magazine
5. Raw Output: AGPL
6. One for the Morning Glory: Facebook comments
7. Sam Liddicott GPL3 Questions and Implications
8. Drugs and an Election etbe
9. New Tropicana images
10. robmyers - Support BY-SA/SFDL Compatibility, Not BY-SA/FDL Compatibility
11. Internet Psychology: Teenagers do not need our help online - we need them to help us oldies by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist
12. Wanting Your Opinions about Blog Comments and City Attorneys : David Lee King
13. Zookoda - I Don't Recommend them Anymore
14. Solar Water Heating :: ShowBlog
15. Internet Psychology: Forget email - it's old hat by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist
16. Drake.org.uk: That's a wrap! Time to roll the end credits..
17. Internet Psychology: Internet criminals are going to have a field day by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist
18. A Cambridge Co-operator: Rebranded Stores
19. robmyers - Two Common Errors
20. Lucas Nussbaum's Blog Blog Archive Where is the NM bottleneck?
21. NM: FD is fixed - MadBlog

Another zero-day announcement of a Software in the Public Interest online meeting has been posted. The announcement mentions "one motion has been raised" but the agenda doesn't include any motions, so I'm not sure what. Also, the agenda lists "Debian logo licence" as up for discussion but I thought last month's meeting resolved that. I watch SPI fairly closely and I'm confused. How about the rest of you? SPI isn't alone in this: many software organisations seem to suffer from similar problems. For example, I ranted in passing about Free Software Manchester yesterday, who just posted the notes from their own zero-day meeting and I've suggested possible ways of reforming debian's currently-stalled New Maintainer process more than once. Are free software users particularly bad at the basics of running an interest society (like welcoming and expiring members, calling meetings, publishing routine communications, and so on), have I been spoiled by cooperatives with their friendly Member Services departments or secretariats, or what? Is this why so many free software orgs seem to include self-perpetuating leadership groups? Is this a serious problem if, as reported, Software Development is a Team Sport [etbe]? Are there fully-working free software mass participation groups out there? I feel a lot of these problems are caused by attempting to order our inherently entropy-filled world completely and insisting everything follows petty rules, such as refusing to answer a question because the "wrong" member asked it. The world will not become less random just because hackers try to impose arbitrary rules. Sometimes it's good to put down minimum standards (because calling zero-day meetings is a mostly-avoidable way of excluding some members) but it will always be a poor alternative to trying to do the best you can for others. How do we get past this? My pro-cooperation-and-better-business platform for SPI board went pretty badly and I've had some anti-cooperative flames back from someone starting another free software group this month, so I don't think I can fix these existing organisations any time soon. About 1 in 6 people in the UK are members of a cooperative, so even if that is reflected among hackers (and I think it's lower), all of them would not be enough to reform much. One of the most common memes in free software is "show us the code" and the few other free software cooperatives I've seen have mostly failed, with a few surviving but hitting a size limit. As a result, I'm currently negotiating the start of a new free software cooperative. So far, I'm really happy with how that's going. Many cooperators learn at the feet of large consumer cooperatives like the Cooperative Group who run training courses for new members about putting cooperative values and principles into practice, which we smaller groups couldn't run ourselves. As a result, most cooperators already know how to work well together. Should large software societies like SPI try commissioning similar courses?

I spend too much of my time trying to talk with people who don't want to discuss, yet somehow I won't stop. I keep hoping that things like suggesting good advice on meeting scheduling will avoid them repeating old mistakes. The most extreme life-and-death example is probably trying to help with Kewstoke Toll Road, where people still speed and someone crashed off again last night (although I don't know what caused last night's crash - could have been a simple accident). Of course, it's better to talk with people who have asked questions and want to hear the answer. I'm currently involved in several groups like that and it makes me much happier [4HWW]. I've even made a confidentiality agreement [Network Blogging article] about one group because I really like the organiser and want to help them, but I've yet to see changes happen because of it and that's probably about all I can write here, which does rather suck. But talking of changes that make me happy, I spotted that Bristol Wireless has now gone further than TTLLP by deciding to change people away from Microsoft Windows when they find it:-

"all Windows stuff must be gone from the premises [...] no longer help do callers favours with broken Windows machines, apart from fixing them properly and permanently by installing Debian"

at their March meeting. Well done, BW! After a request, I finally put four photos from Social Source South West (which was hosted by BW) online, which reminded me to subscribe to watfordgap's travels. Disappointingly, on my first read, it promotes the Suppliers Directory developed by Lasa. That directory is a big problem because it creates a silly barrier to entry which hinders new social enterprises and cooperatives. At a time where most non-profit software is unsustainable and needs to change, requiring three referees is a way to obstruct change. Also, persuading three people to support their work is no substitute for supplier evaluation. Any non-profits who want to lead their sector should approach ICT suppliers directly. The article also mentions Experts Online which is even more short-sighted about computing: "both PC and Mac" indeed! What about GNU/Linux, thin clients, and other changes which are already making a big difference to some non-profits...? But here I go again, talking to a brick wall. I expressed these concerns when that Directory started and it didn't do any good then, so I doubt they'll change it now, near the end of its life. So I'm going to move on. There are lots of people emailing who want to hear from me, so it's time to concentrate on talking with people who do want to listen. If you want to discuss this with me, visit my website for the comments form (click the title or look for a "view original post" link, depending what site you're reading).

My legs hurt. It hurts to sit. It hurts to stand. It hurts to walk. $DEITY knows what it will feel like to ride my bike. How did I do this? It wasn't some bizarre biking accident. I was laying cables under the floor between the two offices at the opposite corners of my building yesterday. I lifted three floorboards and four carpets and drilled one hole. Afterwards, I rebuilt some shelves. How did that hurt my legs??? Today is Blogger Appreciation Day [UNOFFICIAL] so I'd like to thank Steve for Chronicle which is now powering this blog instead of the old homebrew. Meanwhile, messages that came in while I was AFK included a strange one from Paul, Steve being elected as Debian Project Leader (well done!), 'Free Software in Ethics and Practice' - Richard Stallman, Thursday 1st May, Interview: How a hacker became a freedom fighter From New Scientist Print Edition, Understanding Design & Computers: Notes from an Introduction to OpenMoko, by Ole Tange for UKUUG Finally, in a cycling and cooperatives cross-over, this article on Hammond's crash also mentions the other two Brits, who ride for cooperative teams. I watched the race, but didn't see much of them.

There's a 10 Downing Street e-petition asking for the National Archive to use ODF and not Microsoft's OOXML as planned. Not sure if we can really stop gov.uk selling our heritage to Microsoft now, but it seems worth the effort to sign it.

After starting to write a comment on Buxy r ve tout haut: DPL election: low participation speculating about whether the slow turnout in the DPL voting is caused by the lack of contraversial candidates or the stupid retiming that will make DPL elections clash with Easter holidays more often, I did a quick grep of the past votes. 2008: no contraversial candidates, Easter during voting, turnout high 30s%? 2007: contraversial(s), Easter after voting, turnout 47% 2006: contraversial(s), Easter after voting, turnout 43% 2005: contraversial(s), Easter during voting, turnout 52% 2004: contraversial(s), Easter during voting, turnout 53% 2003: contraversial(s), Easter after voting, turnout 59% 2002: contraversial(s), Easter during voting, turnout 51% 2001: contraversial(s), Easter after voting, turnout unsure (between 33% and 90%!) 2000: dunno about contraversials, Easter after voting, turnout 62% 1999: dunno about contraversials, Easter after voting, turnout 59% Not sure what to make of that. What did I miss?

Limited Liability Partnerships are a relatively new company form here, but it has some interesting opportunities for cooperatives. I work for one (TTLLP) so I've gathered some useful links:- uniteddiversity LLP (some of those behind The Open Coop) Limited Liability Partnerships @ Co-opNet Chris Cook's web site appears to include contributions from 2amase's Bev Meldrum. At least I think it's Chris Cook's web site... 2amase LLP's web site forwards to http://www.thetoolfactory.com/Contact.htm which says they have a Plymouth office, but says nothing about their current status. They're listed on uk.coop and again Sticking LLP into the uk.coop search is amusing. Companies House - Formation and Names - GBLLP1 and Administration and Management - GBLLP2 The governing laws are Limited Liability Partnerships Act 2000 and BIM72505 - Partnership Act 1890 Any feedback you have on the above would be helpful. Anyway, hope that helps. Let me know how you get on with a comment, please, or if the new LLP needs a web site or hosting... ;-)

I'm currently part way through testing Chronicle and I'm probably going to change the address of my blog (with Redirects) as part of that. I don't much like having blog in the address and some research seems to agree with me. I've lived with this mistake for four years now, through various software upgrades, so I'll take the chance to change. But what should I change the path to? /writing/reflections/ /news/ /notes/ /articles/ or something else? Vote now by leaving a comment! Oh and about the debian project leader vote: reluctant candidates are good, teams are good, people who already have had high office are less good. Go vote on that too if you can.

• Virgin is testing the use of babassu oil and coconut oil blended with regular jet fuel in commercial flights [1]. They have flown with 20% bio-fuel and tests indicate that they could use up to 40%. This is a difficult problem to solve as most bio-fuels either have problems with vaporising at low pressures or becoming too viscous at low temperatures, it’s good to see some progress on this.

Interesting Rolling Stone article about the US government encouraging idiot “terrorists” [2].

Cory Doctorow predicts a poor future for hardware e-book readers [3]. For my personal use a laptop is better for reading. In most cases when I’m going to do some reading I’m likely to want to write notes or be in a situation where I need my laptop for other purposes. So a laptop plus an e-book reader would be more weight and more battery problems than having just a laptop.

On page 2 of this article about what might happen if the source code to Windows was released freely [4] I am quoted. One thing I should note is that I have nothing against OpenSolaris, it’s merely one large project for which I could inspect the source if I didn’t have legal advice to the contrary. The situation of OpenSolaris may have changed in recent times, but I have not felt the need to seek further legal advice as there seems no real benefit in viewing the source. There is no shortage of GPL source that I would like to read if I had the time…

Location Independent - a blog about working from no fixed address and how to live on the move [5]. Should be of interest to all the people who seem fascinated by my living in hotels for ~18 months.

Martin Luther King Jr’s letter from a Birmingham jail [6]. Inspirational and it is also relevant when considering the positions that churches take today on moral issues. I found the link from The Reid Report blog [7] which is an interesting analysis of US politics.

Scientific American has an article about high altitude destroying brain cells [8], apparently this can happen even when there is no noticable injury and it is permanent. It seems that it would be a good idea to try and locate conferences to minimise air travel by delegates and speakers…

• [1] http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/travel/coconut-jet-fuel-thats-nuts/2008/02/25/1203788223183.html


• [2] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18137343/the_fear_factory


• [3] http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/03/cory-doctorow-put-not-your-faith-in.html


• [4] http://www.itwire.com/content/view/17132/1090/1/0/


• [5] http://locationindependent.com/blog/


• [6] http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html


• [7] http://blog.reidreport.com/


• [8] http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=brain-cells-into-thin-air

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