Next week is Enterprise Week in the UK and Thursday is Social Enterprise Day - what are you doing next week? Are you holding your own event, or going along to someone else's? What do you hope to get out of it?
The enterprise week web site is
http://www.enterpriseweek.org/
and
please leave comments here.
The plan for tomorrow includes possibly breaking my computer by soldering the JTAG connector onto the CPU board. Then there will be much debugging of mISDN drivers, and hopefully some rejoicing when I find out what makes the kernel hang on loading the layer 1 driver.
This will also be an excellent opportunity to clean up my desk to make space for the soldering iron, and to build another Internet router in case anything goes wrong.
I wasn't going to post again today, but
the launch of The Conservative Co-operative Movement
says something fundamental about the insanity
of UK politics. I'm just not sure *what*.
I've kicked off
a discussion and poll on Co-opNet about the CCM
to see what reaction it gets.
This follows
last year's problems with Mozilla packages.
FTP.mozilla.org now has a
(Not-?)Firefox 2.0.0.9 "compiled with branding, logos and talkback removed"
according to John O'Duinn's Soapbox
-
download non-automated en-US free-software builds.
Is this really free? What does it mean for
Debian's Iceweasel
and
GNU's Iceweasel
if so? I guess the GNU one will keep going,
to avoid the auto-installation of non-free
plugins, but it might allow more work to be
shared.
I wrote a lot of messages on Sunday,
trying to clear some things up and
start a few slow balls rolling
before various workshops, meetings
and training sessions this week.
Sadly, I botched at least three subject lines.
One was
the "Dear Blogger" post on this site
which was written to
someone who blogs, not Google's Blogger site.
Few people saw the second mistake,
so I'll not republish it here.
The third was trying to ask whether
debian t-shirts like the one I wear
are affected by
the Uzbek cotton problems which were in the news several times last week.
That was
on debian-project
so I got some personal abuse for the botched subject.
Debian lists are more funny than fun -
some people get less flak for mailing violent
threats than I do for a misjudged subject line...
Oh, and about the cotton-picking: it
appears the debian project doesn't know where
material for debian-branded clothing comes
from and some seem to argue strongly
that we should remain ignorant of it...
MJ,
each French NPO is free to establish its own regulation rules, which may
include a differential voting system if they want to. That should of course
respect the French law (for instance, no discrimination based on sex, religion or
any other genetic factor) but, as far as I know, nothing prevents deciding
that "personnes morales" (ie non physical people) have a higher or lower
vote than others.
However, this is certainly not common, but many NPO simply don't have non
physical members anyway (some don't authorize non physical people to be
members).
For those who care, Debian France (which is a NPO, but not regulated by 1901
law, but by the special NPO law for Alsace and Lorraine, inherited from the
1810-1918 years) admits physical and
"moral" members with an equal voting right. The only special case is a rule
that allows Debian developers to have a veto right on any decision of the
organisation. See that official regulation
rules
of Debian France for details (French only).
PS: Debian France is currently inactive, due to a longstanding dispute with
the French Tax collecting organisation (Direction des Imp ts) who
initially refused to consider us as a non profit organisation...because "we
sell an operating system" (doh!).
Dear Blogger,
Your CAPTCHA (word verification or whatever) doesn't test whether someone is spamming. It tests
whether someone has good eyesight, hearing, literacy, numeracy or browser-configuration, which
is correlated in one way (few spambots include captcha-crackers yet,
but there are some and they already have an 80% success rate IIRC) but
it is not strongly correlated for humans (are blind people more likely
to spam? I doubt it) and now some spammers are using porno-trojans to
get humans to crack the eyetests for them - see
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/spammers_using.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7067962.stm
I block spam by premoderating all comments (they're well over 95%
spam), but that does mean you need to check your site dashboard a lot
to avoid cooling discussions too much.
Other anti-spam tactics include OpenID, URL blacklists and so on - I
don't use them because I've not added support for them to my site yet.
I suspect Blogger.com users can't use them because Google hasn't added
support for them. They've bought captcha's false sense of security.
http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest#security
As for encouraging non-spam comments, I'll generally defer to this top 10 from
Darren Rowse:
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/10/12/10-techniques-to-get-more-comments-on-your-blog/
On my sites, I find that inviting questions doesn't make much
difference, asking questions has limited use because readers are
suffering from "question-fatigue" these days and I have difficulty appearing to
be humble or gracious (people often read it as sarcasm! Hopefully
that's just my audience), but the rest of the techniques seem to work
for me and I use them when I can (not all of the sites I write are
under my full control).
Please let me know if you see other successful ways to reduce spam or
encourage good comments.
Hope that helps,
MJR/slef
These questions came in as comments this
week, but I think they're worth a whole post.
Peter Swan asked:
"This may seem like a dumb question, but I have not seen anywhere the answer to it. Can a satellite dish be mounted in a loft space or must it be mounted outside?"There are few dumb questions. DIY dish info is still rather hard to find. You can install a dish behind a window and I've read about special tiles which allow satellite frequencies through on analoguesat's pages about hiding dishes but I don't know anyone using them. A more usual solution is either a hidden location such as a flat roof with baffle boards (dishes only need to see the Clarke belt, which is an elevation of about 20 degrees in England) or to use a non-dish antenna like the digiglobe or the LX2000 pipe. I think it's a really good idea to put the dish somewhere that you can fix it easily. Even the best dish seems to age eventually. I suspect some "professional" installers put the dishes at tops of walls to encourage repair call-outs. Marcus asked:
"Is it possible to receive British satellite television in other countries? I am living in Finland and I was considering purchasing a sky system from the UK and installing it over here. Would it work? Also would I be able to connect a sky set-top box to a different dish?"Yes, you can get British TV in other countries. Getting external TV like BBC World is easy, but BBC UK services are on Astra 2D, which is focused on the UK. Coverage maps are available on many sites and it looks like Finland isn't well-covered. You'd need a colossal dish. You can connect Sky boxes to other dishes. Sky dishes and Sky LNBs need to go together, sometimes called Skyware, but dishes and boxes are interchangeable. A Sky system will work in Finland, but will only receive services on the other beams like 2A and I doubt Sky will register you at a non-UK address (anyone know for sure?). Also, Sky boxes are horribly crippled for anything other than Sky services and hopefully BBC Freesat will make BBC UK services easier-to-use with standard boxes.
Added: Raiffeisen Banking (AT), US Bank (US), Moneydance.fi OFX - Thanks everyone!
I'm pondering adding more RAM to
my workstation. 128Mb is enough for most
of my work, but OpenOffice swaps a lot.
I couldn't remember what RAM is currently
in it (one stick or two?) so I was very
happy to find
dmidecode
in the comments on
as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge: Memory scanner for Linux.
dmidecode says I
have a free slot and
another 512Mb stick is surprisingly cheap.
Actually,
whole Ubuntu-ready-to-use computers are surprisingly cheap, according to lkcl.
I hope they don't contain
toxic e-waste.
I must be getting old. [Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho]
While bumbling about on a search engine,
I found slides from a talk I gave in 2001
and these 2005 consultation submissions to
the Department of Culture... about TV
and
the WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus
Here's some other stuff on other sites I wrote about since the last round-up of this sort:
in case my last post was not cynic enough yet:
"XUL is the Java of the new millenium"
"Neon Genesis Evangelion is bad for you if you want to maintain a positive view of the outside world."
NP: Carl Orff - Carmina Burana
I moved secondary DNS for one of my customers
to an
OpenVZ
virtual server on a completely different
network to their main server (which is a
very good idea).
The secondary DNS is
MyDNS
with a customised way of sync'ing from
the primary nameservers.
MyDNS has been wonderful when I've used it.
Using postgresql with a nice trigger to
auto-update the serial whenever the zone
is updated, it's reduced the most common
mistake my customers make when managing their
own DNS.
So, I was struggling to figure out why
MyDNS kept crashing with an out-of-memory error.
It seems that it was hitting two limits
in the virtual server
config:
dgramrcvbuf
and
Tcprcvbuf
limits.
Is there a smart way to figure out how big
to set these, apart from trial-and-error?
Added: PSK (AT)
Next.