In addition to the BBC and Eurosport coverage posted before, I’ve spotted the World Championships free-to-air on ZDF (some point between 12:47 and 18:00 CET tomorrow) and SWR (highlights today, but they seem to be the host broadcaster…) and SLO2 too. RAI3 also shows it in the programme guide, but didn’t seem to cover all of the time trial…

I'm checking available banking services for work. I'm looking mainly for features like accessible free-software-friendly internet banking, integrated VISA credit card and easy-to-access counter services and I have a preference for mutuals. I did a double-take when the email enquiry reply from Nationwide arrived. It started with the line

"-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----"

That's a first. Their key's on my preferred keyservers and everything. Wow. I can't find a page on their web site about this, but it looks intentional. Bank email security has been irritating me for some time. Very few of my customers use GnuPG yet, and even fewer of my providers. Well done Nationwide! (Update: 2007-09-28: 1 comment)

Dirk, actually it is suggested that there is a single space between the shebang and the path to the interpreter. It's not particularly important on Linux, but there are systems out there that use "#! /" as the magic value for scripts, thereby ensuring that the interpreter path is indeed absolute.

One problem caused by Europe for free software is database licensing, which isn't quite the same as copyright over databases. Someone has published a first draft of an open data licence to try to cover this. Is this useful for free software or not? Introduction Draft Discussion list I'm slightly concerned about the triple-whammy of database licensing, copyright licensing and a contract. I'm very happy to see the confusing CC-style anti-TPM wording made irrelevant by permitting parallel distribution. There's also an Open Data Factual Info Licence which puzzles me a bit because information is not covered by copyright, only the expression (the licence also seems to state this in point 2.4), so it seems a bit unnecessary. Please comment on the owner's site and/or here. I'll try to link the two in a few minutes.

Well, still in the planning stages... The general idea is to get a largish house in Denmark for one or two weeks, share the cost among ten people, and live a life of debauchery for one or two weeks, probably in the first or second week of January.

I'm pretty sure someone in one of my syndicators was looking for software to send emails in the future from anywhere, but I'm damned if I can find the message. At the time, I was using a homebrew system involving shell scripts and mailx, so I wasn't much help. I'll upload a proper release soon, but I'm happy to upload a second hack of maildelayline here. It requires recent bash, sed, at and a sendmail-like executable. I've deliberately kept it simple to try to make it easier to debug and I dislike needing to install too much for such a simple task. Make a temporary directory, edit the top of the script, then install it on a pipe mail alias (I'd keep the address secret and improbable, like RUbAHy8961: " /path/to/maildelayline" and then save the address in my address book) and send it an email. At the start of the email body, write a pseudo-header with the time, like

"X-Send-At: now + 7 hours"

and follow it with the To:, Cc:, Bcc: and any other headers. Some headers (like from, message-id and threading ones) are kept from the original message, but the Date and Received headers are among those removed. Don't put the X-Send-At in the email header unless you know what you're doing - usually, put it in the body. The X-Send-At field can be any time that your at program understands. If you confuse it, or forget to give it a time, then you should get a bounce message that says something like "garbled time" among other errors. maildelayline is similar to Leave A Message or FutureMe but it sends mail to anyone, autonomously on your own server, from emails instead of a web form. I think it will resend MIME attachments as long as the pseudo-header is in a plain text/plain part and not quoted-printable or base64 or something. It is named after delay lines, which I believe are mostly used in audio effects to repeat a sound after a time delay. Please leave a comment if you find this useful, or if you have an improvement.

Since the closure of SoFlow and adding myself to LinkedIn, I've been thinking a bit about Professional Associations and using Social Networks (SNs) for business. I've not worked out my answers, so this is a "dear lazyweb, what pieces of this jigsaw am I missing?" post. Much of the recent mainstream news has been about the legal problems of SNs - for example, see BBC: Web networkers 'at risk of fraud' (which was also in items on a recent Click show on BBC World and News24) and BBC: Facebook site faces fraud claim - or about how they could Save The World, like BBC: Social net offers new perspective I think there's a bigger problem which will stop SNs making a deep-change to online activity. Each time a SN like SoFlow closes, it wastes some resources of its members. I'm starting to side with other developers in being tired of seeing my input turn to bitrot, through buggy software or buggy business models. I'm not alone: see Gunnar Wolf: On social networks for example. A good idea seems to be on Slashdot: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up but how? Each SN seems to guard its dark corners as vital elements of its business model. Should we look to our Professional Associations to create new Open Social Networks (OSNs)? After all, SNs aren't the core money-makers for professional associations. But, the biggest problem with Professional Associations is picking a trustworthy one - one which will do what it says on the tin, instead of taking your subscription, then undermining you. Consider the British Computer Society and its OSSG License: how many of its members really wanted another software copyright licence? Fortunately, it was spotted - Volunteer brickbat thrower needed in London (Tuesday 24th 6pm) - and the Report from BCS OSSG meeting on a new FS license suggests the negative feedback was loud and clear, so hopefully we won't see that again. If I was a BCS member, I'd probably not renew after helping to fund that harmful activity. librarian.net: choosing your battles and choosing your professional associations talks a little about some library associations as a sort of case study which many will recognise as familiar, but there's an interesting comment from Blake there:

"I think there's an association out there for everyone."

Is there? What association is out there for liberal hackers and webmasters? I don't think I've found it yet. So, should we be looking at ourselves, rather than existing professional associations? Can we do Open Social Networks peer-to-peer in a meaningful way? Are we already doing it with blog feeds? How should we expand on that? Although I disagree with the conclusion that using another Social Network site with an uncertain business model is How to succeed with social networking, the article also mentions that

"social networking is in its infancy and that it will not really get underway until we have portable profiles and interconnectivity"

In other words, it's our revolution - let's steal it back. (Update: 2007-09-27: 1 comment)

The mighty Cyrus mail system can in theory deliver to subfolders of users' inboxes. In practise, it will only write to folders where the SASL user that the delivery process switches to has at least List and Post privilege -- with the exception of user mailboxes. Normally, this is the "unknown" user, i.e. the permissions need to be "anyone lp". Since that shows the existance of those mailboxes to all IMAP users and allows them to append mail, that's not a good idea. The approach I'm using on my systems is only slightly different. Cyrus "preauthenticates" local connections as the "postman" user, which means they can assume any identity they wish by using the AUTH parameter in the RCPT command. Most mailers don't do this, however, and the default is to fall back on "unknown". I've written a patch that does all deliveries as the authenticated user if nothing else was specified, which nicely reduces the problem to granting access to the "postman" user.

The UCI Road World Masters are showing on Eurosport and BBCi.
BBC have posted the BBCi schedule in a handy form. (Thanks BBC!) Most BBCi video channels are visible to most of Western Europe at 28 east (instead of the UK-centric beam that is used for BBC Two and the other national channels). Eurosport’s site still won’t give simple listings, so here’s their schedule for the free-to-air channel at 19 east as far as I can make out: Wed 26.09.2007 - ITT Women 16:00-17:30 CET Thu 27.09.2007 - ITT Men Under 23 11:30-12:30 CET, highlights? 12:30-14:00 CET, ITT Men 16:00-17:00 CET Fri 28.09.2007 - ITT Men 13:15-14:00 CET Sat 29.09.2007 - highlights? 09:00-12:45 CET, Men U23 16:15-18:00 CET Sun 30.09.2007 - Women 09:00-0930 CET, Men 10:30-14:00 CET, Men (highlights?) 16:00-17:30 CET Mon 01.10.2007 - highlights? 15:15-16:15 CET I think it will also be on RAI Tre at 13 east, but I don’t know if that will be free-to-air. Show times should appear here the day before broadcast. Which other free-to-air satellite broadcasters are showing this?

Progress on most fronts. Life is mostly good thus. Reading email only once a day also helps a lot in remaining sane. If it can be urgent, I have given you my phone number. It seems that Planet Debian has a new meme, namely unveilling replacements for the ion window manager. I'm late to the party as I'm using mine as the example code in the componentisation tutorial to introduce the concepts and language bindings one by one -- obviously I have to make that work with a few languages first. And at the same time, work for a living.

I have a separate VoIP account for "business" related things, and am now looking for a good (soft or hard) phone. Requirements are: it should work when I'm not logged in, and both my USB and Bluetooth hand/headsets should be supported, with switching between both in the middle of calls. Does that exist?

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 takes five hours to install. Most of that time is spent trying to figure out what actually needs to be installed; the actual deed is done in rather quick 45 minutes.

IDG World Expo announces:

"It is with regret that we must announce that LinuxWorld Conference & Expo London 2007 has been postponed until spring 2008."

Anyone interested in an UnConference? At least we shouldn't cancel that.

I was asked for a story on good or bad media sponsored online conversations. I'd not really had much to do with them until this summer. itv is the UK's biggest commercial broadcaster and it had rights to show the Tour de France here this year. Its coverage was pretty good, with daily highlights and live coverage at weekends, mostly on the itv4 satellite/DTT channel. The end of every show plugged their web homepage, which had a prominent link to their forums. I've been on a couple of cycling forums for a while, so I signed up and tried to help explain things that I knew. After a while, I noticed that when I answered a question properly, with links to other authoritative sites like the race teams' own sites, my message was silently removed. This happened a few times. Then I found out that the forum terms of use prohibit linking to any other web sites! This is a big problem, because itv's cycling pages are pretty limited. As a result, the forum was full of hearsay and it's hard to verify anything anyone posts. To cap it all, itv closed the forums for a weekend for an upgrade. Then a weekend became a week, which became a month, which became six weeks. When they finally reopened it, at least they sent me an email, so I tried to login. My login doesn't work and I can't view the forum as a guest any more. I've emailed their support address and had no reply. I don't know if this is a general problem - I can't contact other forum members because I don't have their details. I only saw them on the web forum and members couldn't link their homepages. So, it'll be a long time before I spend much time participating on any media-sponsored sites again, except in a casual throw-away way. Now most of my sports messages will be posted to Cycling Fans and BuzzinFootball like my local news posts go to the community-run WSM Forum. The trouble with media-sponsored forums is that they just don't have the interest in any particular community to want to sustain it. Somewhere, there's a bean-counter saying "so what if we kill this community? We started it from scratch and we'll just do it again." Any messages you post to those forums are usually gone, out of your control, lost to you. Is it worth posting to them? I think Andrew Savory is also spot-on about the problems with forums for technical communities in Bagel Belly Blog: How Open is your Open Source project? He certainly seems in fine form so far this week. I know not all forums are that bad. I'm on a couple of phpbb-powered ones which work well, with added XML feeds and so on. Are any "old media" companies brave enough to run a liberal phpbb? Are there other examples of particularly good or bad forums that you'd like to tell me about?

I am starting to wonder why every single bit of hardware that deals with wireless networks is utter crap. Really, I'd pay good money for an access point that doesn't crash when the firmware on the ipw2200 sends out a malformed packet while crashing because I used all the transmit buffers in the card. The zd1201 is no better, I've managed to have its firmware crash on me twice now, and unlike the ipw2200 which will at least admit that there has been a firmware error and reboot the card it just silently retries for an infinite time.

I just received the autumn 2007 edition of the Co-operative Group's membership magazine. It came with a cover letter that finally prompted me to answer the food ethical policy consultation The announcement was covered in the Guardian under the slightly inaccurate headline How green do you want your bananas? Co-op ballots members on ethical issues and in the Metro under the headline "Flight logo row" focusing on the criticism of the Tesco and M+S branding (which I think was a little unfair in some ways). Even so, it's good to see the Co-operative Group getting our message across and wrong-footing the BBC's attack dogs, described in Cambridge Co-operator: Ethical Policy. Last time on five live, our man got a bit mauled. Will this change make a difference, like it has to the Co-operative Bank? Can an ethical policy persuade you to change where you buy your food? (2007-09-19: 1 comment)

Stage 1 of the new koha installer uses MakeMaker and some silly tricks to try to install a CGI tree, as well as modules. You can often grab prepatches from mjr-installer if you really want the latest bits sooner. The biggest user-visible change with this installer (compared to 2.2) is that it's dumb. It's dumb in that it's trying to do the simplest thing that could possibly work and it's dumb in that it doesn't ask the installing user any questions. If you know you want to change things, you can tell it, but it doesn't ask you to confirm everything like the 2.2 installer did. Almost immediately, that was criticised on IRC. The first criticism was about a related feature that someone else removed earlier in 3.0, really. The second criticism was stalled by the realisation that if we really want an interface that "questions everything" every time, a wrapper script can ask for all the settings and instruct the dumb installer. I'm not sure whether asking users to confirm everything is a good move, for the sort of reasons in Havoc Pennington's 2002 essay under "The Question of Preferences" - each setting we encourage people to change makes it harder to debug installation problems. That's one of the biggest pains with 2.2 and I think we've started seeing the same happening in 3.0 already. It's not quite "no two installations are identical" but it's not far off. So, the main installer defaults everything to the best values that I can guess that will work within the constraints. It should work for most people and it should be easier for packagers to override. I'd still love to hear about how other Perl CGI scripts install, especially if they use MakeMaker for the basics, then use a CGI interface for the rest. Are you writing one?