Saturday 2 February 2008 was the annual meeting of the Phone Coop (agent link). I travelled to Chipping Norton for it and took a few abbreviated notes, which I've expanded slightly here. Ask questions if you want, but it's already fading in my memory:- Local Loop Unbundling workshop: 20 years of calls for it. 1999 ofcom announced 01 eu announced. 05 threat to breakup BT. 06 openreach split. By 2007-04 there were 2million unbundled. Distribution points and cabinets. Exchange may make even cheaper faster video. TPC LLU should launch this summer. Should take minutes to transfer. Equivalence problems - want evidence of when BT is preferred. Alarm lines: coop unable to take some. Broadband workshop: at year 2000 launch was a .5M service for GBP 40pcm. Now charge represents use. The coop has 4 ADSL specialists and it accounts for 15pc of income. Bought in three parts: tails are the links to the customers, bandwidth is then 155 or 622M fused 60m base plus extra. Home contention is 50:1, business is 20:1. Available in bundles. My.phone.coop offers a usage view with only a day's delay - might be a first for retail broadband. Ambassadors workshop: Harness cooperative difference. Customers can help to get more customers. Possibly give half our local adverts to our phone agency. Interaction with agent scheme unknown yet. Someone asked about running cinema ads. AGM: intros apologies evaluations mugs window stickers 1b 565m mins. Directors report record sales and growth. Profit again. Service progress: 2nd of 19 in Which surveys. Sven is new manager. Midcounties. Sustainability fund. Finances. Highest dividend. Sales mix changed kind rental growth. Costs down 200k. 9k postage saving. Record balance sheet. Recruiting membership manager and secretary. Currently 6735 members. Negotiating .5k sales acquisition - no info to members yet as commercially sensitive. Shortlisted for green business awards on 12 march. Questions: Mobiles? high volume only economic. What is cws? Cooperative Wholesale Society, part of the Cooperative Group. Member profile. Coop purchases. Diversity. Southern acquisitions? Regulator Dependent. Name. Biodiesel. Satisfaction, corp members, large corp custs. Miles travelled. Walking payments. Group promotion of AOL is annoying. Third party card discouraged? Member-account links. Larger affinity. Works bus. 1 against scrutineer. Directors spend on average 4 hours a week on the coop.

I've replaced the top banner on my personal site with a sunset panorama taken from the other end of Sand Bay. Yes, it may look green and grassy, but it is Sand Bay. I've added a shared bookmarks RSS to my site, generated from the first subfolder in my Bookmarks Toolbar Folder by a daft shell script. I've put an old paper online. Fighting in the shadows: moles and activists is about how to keep an open group, but minimising the effectiveness of moles:-

"It does not matter whether an activist is a mole or not, as long as they work well for you. The mole may be working against you in secret, but they would probably work against you anyway. To be an effective mole, they have to do some helpful work in order to avoid detection. They are a resource that we would not have access to if they weren't a mole."

Finally, I've attended a few events recently, so the next few posts will probably be mostly conference reports.

I've been thinking about building a file system that uses cryptography to lock out unauthorised processes. In essence, user programs would hold a set of keys, and the file system would ask them to sign their changes, or decrypt a block before interpreting its contents for the application. That would considerably raise the bar for successful attacks, as it is now necessary in order to write to a system directory that you subvert a process with appropriate privileges and make it do the work for you.

RAI Sport Sat (free-to-air 13e) have highlights of GP Costa degli Etruschi at 18:00-18:30 CET today (Saturday 9th). The CyclingNews start list (beware, results will appear higher up on that page) suggests it’s the first time for most of us to see some of the big names on TV this season, including a fairly strong Milram squad supporting Alessandro Petacchi, who’s looking for his fourth win in a row at this event.

Fun round-up of web calendars on BBC Click this weekend. Google, Kiko and 30boxes get mentions. I'm mainly using my new phone but reviewer Rob was quite scathing about phone calendars and didn't bother to say how well the different sites integrate with handhelds. Feedback by email was invited... Are there good interoperable web calendars? Any as free software? Talking of BBC being on a different calendar to everyone else, BBC belatedly announces that iPlayer-for-Mac will come at some point in 2008. Sadly, the DG is still repeating the "only for Sony TVs"-like single-platform explanation and still not mentioning a (DRM-free?) GNU/Linux service.

Another design decision for "dammit" is how to handle dependency loops between header files -- these may be intentional, but most often are not, and I'd like to find these because they often lead to confusing error messages.

• The "coward" method: don't think about this, just take the preprocessor's dependency list for granted. Easy to implement, but requires the toolchain handlers to support this explicitly.
• The "DIY" approach: hack a small dependency list generator. Less complexity in the build tool, but one additional compilation step.
• or something completely different?

Not being able to sleep sucks. It is now 6 AM, and if I wanted to get up as planned, I have less than two hours. Since I can't concentrate at all with that little sleep, I guess I will make it at least four hours. Still, tomorrow will suck, especially as I will be dealing with crypto code.

The Phone Coop (agent link) will hold its workshop and annual meeting on Saturday. If anyone is going and wants to car-share from the N.Somerset/Bristol area, let me know (new comments form follows this post). I can't quite afford a 5h train trip instead of a 2h car trip, but I'd quite like to reduce the damage. Also, we've just finished and sent the official reports for TTLLP yesterday. We've also various projects which I want to get finished, including the IPC::Open3 for Koha. If I'm a bit hard to reach this week, this might be why. We are still returning calls in batches in our breaks, though, so please please please leave a voicemail. Social Source South West is next Tuesday in Bristol. I'll be there. Will you?

The not-yet-so-mighty project build tool I'm writing (codenamed "dammit") just compiled itself for the first time (took 40 seconds :-P ). It is probably not that usable yet, as it lacks dependency checking and thus always recompiles everything -- fixing that is the plan for tonight. So far, all it does is compile everything it can find and recognise in a directory and link it to a program; the plan for the future is not to add too much to that, mainly new project types like libraries and new input languages.

As written earlier, I'm switching build system for one of my projects. In the end, I decided to roll my own. Yes, another build system out there. The general idea is to combine the strengths of automake and MSBuild, and take them to new extremes by not compromising where they have (that makes my build system a tad inflexible though). Automake's biggest strength is that it is descriptive, rather than imperative, and while it allows for rules to be entered directly to allow for some flexibility, this is usually the point where the Makefiles that are produced become unportable. But in general, the idea of having a tool deduce what exactly should be done to transform a set of input files into a set of output files is a good one, I think. From MSBuild, I stole the idea of making an explicit distinction between higher-level integration projects ("solutions" in their lingo) and actual build projects. Build projects only have one (main) output, which usually is a program or a library, and several auxiliary outputs (development files, translation templates, ...), while integration projects coordinate the build process (for example, if one of the build projects builds a tool, all projects using that need to be re-run if the tool is rebuilt, but only then. Automake's biggest downfall is stuff that is not explicitly supported. One of my projects uses IDL extensively, which leads to quite a lot of explicit rules supporting different ORBs. If I wanted to teach automake about that, I'd have to understand lots of perl code that emits code fragments that, when combined, will do the right thing. In a way, automake is a compiler, but based around the idea that since we start out from a Makefile compatible syntax, just adding things will magically work. Where it doesn't, special cases are invented, such as for libtool support, but stacking special cases is really difficult. MSBuild, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to project-to-project integration. There is no way to tell it "publish these include files under the such-and-such directory for use by other projects", rather, you are expected to have the project using them explicitly reference your project in the include directories. If a project uses includes that reference includes from yet another project, it gets worse. Milestone 1 is going to be when the main binary can build itself on Windows and Linux.

Nick Leeson: The financial storm is not over yet

Surreal to see his byline on an article the same day as a rogue trader comes to light... "Cutting interest rates has stemmed the flow for now, but 2008 will see higher energy costs, higher food costs and higher importing costs which will damage consumer confidence. Right now we can only look to Davos and hope that the global economic leaders can keep positive and stop the markets from spiralling further downwards"

SFinfo TV Schedule for Sunday

SFinfo is carrying some of the Davos meeting live again (where corporations tell governments how to direct their populations). Only interesting thing left in my opinion is the Climate Change forum on Sunday morning. Watch and see where our glorious overlords will be taking us.

How to block all Facebook application and message spam

Practical freedom from Matt Lee's Exploring Freedom.

Valuing Users by Allowing Comments : David Lee King

It makes sense - you know it does.

Internet Psychology: Podcasting? That's old-fashioned - video is the online future by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist

Maybe I just forgot the obvious, or maybe we haven't really seen what people can do with podcasting yet.

Gaba en San Pancho Blog Archive what things to check when buying an used car

Worst used car I ever saw had a split hose leaking petrol from the carb feed onto the engine block - switching that one off when I asked was the fastest I ever saw a car salesman move!

Modern Communicator: Imarco Activ-Media have been acquired

Personally, I find one of the benefits of working in cooperatives is that it's very difficult for us to be acquired and good collaboration is much more common than merging.

sab39 ... O noes, somebody I don't like did something I agree with!

I feel the point about the bozo bit is well-made. Is one of the few features of my weak memory a low probability that I keep the bozo bit set in the long term?

How You Can Fine-Tune Your Blogger Personality Perception

How do you repair a broken perception? Can you repair it, or is it time to delete the blog and start again at a new address? Can you start again, or does web.archive mean past mistakes will hurt you forever?

robmyers - My Ogg Player

I never succeeded in accessing anything besides basic file upload/removal on my YP-U2 and Samsung Support broke promises they made to me.

another blog is possible Give cyclists a break

"Those of you drive should read this article and change your behavior towards cyclists. You may not like cyclists in the road, but they have every right to be there."

At a recent meeting, someone suggested kitting a bus out with free software as a sort of mobile computing lab for the villages and that it had already been done in Lancashire. I had a bit of a search around found one in Bristol on another computer and and now I don't find it in the search engines again. Anyone know about either of these? Got links? Are they still going?

Just a quick post about the final cyclocross races: highlights from Hoogerheide are on RAI Sport Sat (free-to-air 13e) at 2255 CET tonight (Thu 24 Jan). Highlights of this weekend’s Treviso-Veneto races (26 and 27 Jan) should be on Eurosport (free-to-air at 19 east), 0900-1000 CET Mon 28 Jan. If you know of other broadcasters showing the race, please leave me a comment. Sven Nys has this pretty tied up, no?

Automake seems to support Microsoft's C++ compiler, "cl.exe" to some extent when building simple applications; what it doesn't handle yet are static libraries (dynamic ones are handled by libtool anyway). I wonder whether it would be easier to add the necessary scripting, or if I should write wrapper programs. Or if I should switch build system, again. The code itself is actually rather portable, except for some low-level functionality and some of the interface code to higher levels, which can talk to my code either via sockets (anywhere) or using COM (on Windows). So a good build system would work on many platforms, but allow conditional compilation of objects on some.

You may have seen the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) advising:-

"Schools and colleges should make pupils, teachers and parents aware of the range of free-to-use products (such as office productivity suites) that are available, and how to use them,"

in reports like http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205602879&cid=RSSfeed_TechWeb There's also a consultation on "Home Access to Technology" running until Wednesday 2 April at http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/consultations/conDetails.cfm?consultationId=1522 where you may like to suggest that free software is a good route forwards. (Thanks to Christopher Dawkins for informing ALUG.) Are there other related things we could be doing? (Comments form goes to fsfe-uk.)

It is a sunny day today. People are friendlier than usual. Life is good.

At casa Geier, there is a slightly broken Asus A3G laptop, formerly known as salmiakki. The symptom is that upon pressing the power button, the machine ponders for a few seconds, then decides to turn off again. Since these laptops come with CD playback function keys on the outside, I think this is the safety feature against accidentally powering on; it just turns off again when the lid is closed. Which makes me suspect that only the lid switch is broken. Trouble is, there is no switch. This thing uses black magic to find out if it's open. There are no wires going to the hinges, there is no magnet either, or anything else that looks like it could be used in this way. So dear lazyweb, I'm interested in any hints how this might work. Pure speculation is also fine.

The general idea on the 25th was to relax, watch some , and generally do not care too much about anything. Right, only after 13 episodes of ("Crest of the Stars") hunger set in, and it being late at night on a holiday, we scrounged the kitchen for things that might fit together. Idea 1: Let's make Spaghetti Alio e Olio. — Well, no Spaghetti in the house. So replace them with Farfalle. Idea 2: We could also add some onion. — Splendid. Idea 3: We could add sugar to the onion. — Yay, caramel. Unforeseen Circumstance 1: Whoops, not that much sugar. Idea 4: It being Christmas, and the food being awfully sweet now anyway, let's add apples and cinnamon. So, I present the ultimate Christmas dinner, featuring:

• as much garlic as you like
• an onion
• sugar
• an apple
• noodles

And it tasted quite good, actually. I shall remember to buy more food before the holidays next year though.