For one UK bank, "innovation" has included funding long-term home loans mostly with short-term inter-bank loans. So, the increased costs of obtaining inter-bank loans during a credit crisis caused Northern Rock to obtain support from the central bank, the Bank of England. Once that became public knowledge, as it must, it started a predictable run on the bank, as described in Guardian Unlimited: Between Rock and a hard place - savers besiege bank. Savings are leaving at a rate of almost a billion pounds (1.6bn euro?) each day just now. In turn, that makes the bank's loans-to-savings ratio even more extreme, which then worries more savers and we're into a feedback loop, with queues growing out of the bank's doors, customer sit-ins [BBC West] and other unsettling side-effects. Northern Rock is a former member-owned building society which demutalised (converted to a shareholder-owned bank) in 1997. In just ten years, it has become committed to a business model which seems to scare many of its savers. Would it have done that if it was still controlled by its savers and borrowers? Is this exodus of savings going to be matched by loan customers moving away too? Will any of these customers return to the mutual and co-operative sector? It now seems sort of academic whether Northern Rock is on the list of online banks that work with free software, as commentators suggest it may be taken over soon. 2007-09-18 Update: the UK government has guaranteed all deposits in the dodgy bank. This is a bad thing, as explained on niq's soapbox: Race to the bottom.

As uclibc's removal from Debian has been requested already, it is really time to push forward with this package. The technical bits of the package haven't changed in ages, and could be said to be pretty solid (I use the package daily). The problem with this package in the Debian context is that the licencing is somewhat less than clear, as no one really cared about adding their name to the list of copyright holders. I can see a few different variants how to deal with this: Number one would be the "massive audit" approach. This is the first thing I'm going to try, simply hang out on IRC for a few days and try to find people who join me (on freenode's #uclibc, mostly). If that doesn't work out, there will be lobotomized uploads, where I start a "new" package and subsequently move the functionality back in, in whatever tempo I can manage, until I get back to "pristine upstream source".

Eurosport coverage of Vuelta a Espa a at 19 east continues with commentary in English (analogue only) and German. Scheduled times:-

Mon 17.09.2007

(no show, rest day)

Tue 18.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Wed 19.09.2007

09:00-09:30 and 16:00-17:30 CET

Thu 20.09.2007

15:00-15:45 and 15:45-17:30 CET

Fri 21.09.2007

16:15-17:30 CET

Sat 22.09.2007

16:00-17:45 CET

Sun 23.09.2007

17:15-18:00 CET

TVEi are broadcasting in Spanish at 13 and 19 east. Scheduled times:-

Mon 17.09.2007

(no show, rest day)

Tue 18.09.2007 to Sun 23.09.2007

16:40-18:00 CET

Enjoy the finale!

Just a quick reminder that the BBC’s only Tour of Britain highlights show is on BBC 2 at 12:30 today (Astra 2D at 28 east, the same satellite as Sky UK+IE, but no subscription required). Official listings say this is highlights of the final stage but hopefully it will cover the other stages too. Hopefully, live coverage will get better next year, either online as cyclingfans editor Pete predicts or on TV.

It seems al-quaeda.com got domaingrabbed (not linked for obvious reasons).

Satellite TV commented:

"Wow, all that seems pretty complex to me. The U.S is so much more simple, we just chose Dish Network or DirecTV or some kind of cable and call it a day. Then again I don't know if thats a bad or a good thing."

That's a bad thing. Look at the situation: In the US, there seems to be very little free-to-air (FTA) satellite TV for most of the country, except PBS and religious channels. The main US FTA FAQ answers "Should I drop cable/Dish/DirecTV and switch to FTA?" with "Probably not." I'd say "Probably yes" to similar questions in Europe, as long as you aren't dependent on one of the few incompatible pay-TV channels. Channels like MTV, Nick, TVEi and DW are all pay-TV in the US, but FTA in Europe. But if you're in the US, look on the bright side: Canada seems even more behind on this. In Europe, you can still call whatever satellite broadcaster (such as Canal Satellite, Premiere or even Sky) and get a system installed if you choose, but you can also install your own. That's what my FAQ is about: giving people in "the land of the free TV" some starting info on how to do that. Some broadcaster-supplied systems only really work well with one broadcaster's "approved" channels (Sky are particularly bad for that), are more expensive to upgrade than standard systems and don't give viewers the equipment to repair it when it breaks, which encourages them to keep paying the broadcaster's agents. Some of those agents do some pretty dishonest tricks when installing dishes, such as putting them far higher up than necessary, to discourage viewers from fixing it themselves and to advertise satellite TV to the neighbours. It's pretty easy to install a standard satellite system... if you can put up a wall bracket and tune in a video, you can probably do it. Alternatively, there are independent installers who will do it for you, who might seem like they charge more than the broadcaster's agents, but remember that a good one won't keep charging you every month or try to sell stuff to you forevermore!

I had an anonymous comment on the last post which claimed:-

"Theora support has low priority in free software projects because it's simply a bad codec. It has been marketed as "patent-free" but it's questionable how true that is. The patents over trivial functionality probably cover it too, and on the other hand the real "inventiveness" and validity of the more actively enforced patents covering better codecs is also questionable. The main reason Theora users are unlikely to be sued is that limiting free alternatives to such low-quality codecs already ensures they're not a competitive threat. If you want better free software encoding try FFmpeg or MEncoder with x264. The patent threats over that are more aggressive, but moving to Theora is not a good way to avoid them."

I'm not inclined to believe this for various reasons. In particular, I've seen good Theora results (higher quality for smaller file size than most), I've not heard of any credible patent threat to Theora and this claim was made anonymously (why?). Is anyone willing to support the above claims with their name? Alex Hudson commented:

"Tangentially related to your Ogg woes, the issue of software patents came up recently on the WhatWG discussions for a new HTML tag called 'video': http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-June/011981.html Whether or not Apple's excuse is reasonable (submarine patents made more unlikely by existing licensing pools? Not sure about that argument....), it does seem Ogg faces an uphill struggle when you'd think supporting it is effectively no cost."

(2007-09-17: 3 comments)

My personal email account was spammed by Jennifer Kirkham-Sandy (Phone 0800 6 121 151) of Total Language Solutions Limited, 3 The Courtyard, New North Road, Exeter EX4 4EP, Devon. Registered number (England and Wales) at the above address: 03933805. They seemed to be using a service called qwertywordmarketing. I've reported it to the hosting company, so we'll see what happens.

It's nice to get email from someone previously mentioned on my site. Mukti Mitchell emailed:

"The Southampton Boatshow programme made by Meridian ITV will include 4 minutes on the Low Carbon Lifestyle Tour and will be screened this week as follows: Sunday 16th September 1800 ITV4; Monday 17th September After Midnight (0100 Tuesday 18th) ITV4; Thursday 20th September 1930 ITV Meridian (ITV1 in South England) (ITV4 Is a national network channel available via your free digi box.) The programme includes footage filmed on board yacht Chance during the round Britain tour. I hope you enjoy the programme."

I'm thinking about setting up an ARM developer machine, with a twist: I want to have JTAG accessible remotely. Obviously, that is a bit of a security risk if applied to a normal machine, so I'd probably build some system allowing you to upload and run images.

Over in alt.anarchism rages a discussion on the "efficiency" of markets, mostly circling around the medical sector as an extreme example (lots of government interference). Since this is Usenet, we haven't found consensus on the definition of a free market yet. The definition I learned in school was that free markets are fully transparent, i.e. buyers and sellers both have the necessary knowledge to determine a product's quality and are aware of the other market participants. The proponents of anarcho-capitalism contend that a free market is one that is devoid of regulation. These definitions are pretty much opposites in highly specialised fields (such as medicine), as patients usually lack the expertise to recognise "quality", so market regulations are established to promote transparency and establish a free market. So, which definition were you taught? Update: corrected the name of the group.

I need to learn about posting plans. As was to be expected, this didn't work out the way I wanted to. Step one of my plan was rearranging everything so I could work without the laptop, which means moving the Pegasos back into my room. Since I still need it as a DSL router until I find a better solution, and there is no cable between the modem and my room, I thought about using the wireless network for that (the AP is right next to the modem). So I switched off VLAN mode everywhere (the AP cannot mix tagged and untagged traffic on one port, and the modem cannot do VLAN tagging either), and plugged a zd1201 USB network adapter into the Pegasos. Worked so far with an Ad-Hoc network, now let's make it talk to the AP. Fire up wpa_suppos^H^Hlicant, see the mess. After some googling I found out the problem: the zd1201 Linux driver does not support WPA. As my flatmate might need the network tonight and cables around the place are bad for moving in, I shall make it work in the most ugly way imaginable: with WEP. This means: if you drive by my place and crack one of the networks with WEP, you only risk a 50% chance of ending up in my honeypot. I wonder if I should write a shell script that occasionally "negotiates" a new key with the AP by setting it over SNMP.

Okay, apart from finishing the move from the laptop back to the Pegasos (I compiled d2x-xl yesterday, today is reserved for the more serious stuff), this evening will be dedicated to cooking and my other pet project, xcontrol. So, it will be risotto, wireless networks and autobuilders, in no particular order. In other news, I've been running an archive rebuild to find out which packages actually implement the build-arch and build-indep targets. Out of the first 70, I've counted 11. Since so many packages would be affected, a mass filing of wishlist bugs is probably not the way to go, so I guess I'll set up a web page with the results (after making my autobuilder more robust; it still gets too easily confused) and try to shame people into updating their packages.

Trying to post the movies for Tour of Britain stage 2: Taunton left me in a whole world of pain. I'd decided to take movies rather than stills because there were lots of photographers there with considerably better cameras than mine, and my blog is far more popular for TV coverage than for photos. My video camera is a four-year-old Nisis Pocket DV4 which appears as a usb-storage device and contains AVI files. Apparently, those AVI files contain Video as mjpeg, yuvj422p, 320x240, 9.04 fps(r) and Audio as pcm_s16le, 11025 Hz, mono, 176 kb/s. I wanted to post the movies as Ogg Theora for various reasons, including how well it seemed to work for debconf this year. I'm a total clubie at this video stuff, but I like freedom and I've seen what I want, so I know it's possible. First of all, I tried mplayer's mencoder. It seems that mplayer can play Ogg Theora, but mencoder can't encode it. Did I miss something? What's with that? So, I tried installing VLC because several people had recommended it to me in the past. It seemed to have an easier interface than mplayer and had a wizard for converting files. Unfortunately, it seemed to crash on some of the AVI files and other times hang. When I upgraded from 0.8.6 to 0.8.6c (which also meant a wxWindows upgrade, which surprised me for such a seemingly-small upgrade), it crashed out with a segfault rather than hanging. I couldn't get the command-line to work either. I tried ffmpeg, but damned if I can get that to produce a good theora (or is it libtheora?) file. Sometimes it works, but the output is much larger than I expected. It is very annoying that there are no releases, but at least there are snapshot tarballs available. I was trying export-2007-09-12 early this morning. Finally, I tried ffmpeg2theora and (after upgrading ffmpeg), the command

"ffmpeg2theora -aq-1 -v 0 -o outfile.ogg infile.avi"

produced useful results, which I've now uploaded. Thanks to BBLUG members for their comments. There seemed to be others who shared my confusion and frustration with video processing. Why is this still so hard? Is it, as one member suggested, the chilling effect of software patents and so on?

As mentioned yesterday, I went to watch the Tour of Britain for real in Taunton. It’s taken me a while to encode these (I’ll write about the technical details on another page soon), but here are the videos. They’re in the super-cool Ogg Theora format, in case that helps you update your media player with filters like these. (I probably should do some clever tricks to embed these videos in the page, but it’s taken me long enough to get this far, so please either download the files or drag-and-drop the links to your media player. If anyone can explain how to embed videos simply, please leave me a comment…) First of all, I went to Staplegrove Road, where I thought the peloton might slow slightly to get past a roundabout on their first pass through Taunton (Ogg, 514K) a bit after 11am, but they didn’t really. Then I got a brilliant position in the second row just by the finish line, which meant I didn’t see the big crash of the day until I saw the TV news in the evening, but I did see both the main sprints, for the stage win (Ogg 919K) and the yellow-jersey group (Ogg 382K). Finally, I went and watched the presentations - the yellow jersey (Ogg 1.3M) and the champagne spray (Ogg 643K) are shown here. The BBC has the broadcast rights to the tour of Britain and seem to be doing a terrible job: Live race news seems to be limited to a quick mention in the half-hourly sports bulletins on Radio Five (on satellite Astra 2D at 28 east to much of north-west Europe, or Medium Wave 909 and 693kHz). Each night, there’s a short (3 minutes?) summary report in the BBC1 TV news of that stage’s region, some time after 18:30 BST (so tonight in West Midlands, tomorrow Yorkshire and North Midlands, Friday North-west and Saturday Scotland, all Astra 2D). This is not shown on BBC News 24, as far as I’ve seen, not even in the Sportsday show. There will be one national highlights show on BBC 2 at 14:30 on Sunday (again, Astra 2D), the day after the race has finished. Official listings say this is highlights of the final stage but hopefully it will cover the other stages too. I feel they should take the rights away from the BBC and give ITV a chance. We had better coverage of this year’s Tour of Ireland (from itv4) than we have of the Tour of Britain - this is silly. For non-TV coverage details, including Twitter, see CyclingFans.com

My new flatmate just got his keys, and brought an entire box of that excellent Jasmine tea that I couldn't find in any of the "Asia shops" around here. Please imagine a picture of a cat with wide open eyes captioned "I is happy, and very awake" in this space.

Sadly, I have to return the laptop a friend loaned me for the past months (thanks again, dude), which means I'm going to use the mighty Pegasos for daily work again. This means I have to find a DSL router. My preference would be that this box also keeps the Debian mirror, so those Japanese NAS boxes running Debian seem ideal. So the plan for the next weeks shall be ordering one (the first real-world test for my language skills) and making it work.

With all the excitement of the Vuelta and the Tour of Britain (which I’m off to watch today), I’d missed that the Tour de Pologne also started on Sunday. TVP Polonia has coverage and broadcasts free-to-air to Europe at 19, 13 and 7 east. I think it may also be visible in Australia in a GlobeCast package (can you see it? Please tell me by leaving a comment.) Scheduled shows:-

Tue 11.09.2007 to Fri 14.09.2007

15:10-16:30 CET (live) and 20:00-20:05 CET (summary)

Sat 15.09.2007

13:25-15:05 CET (live, final stage) and 20:00-20:05 CET (summary)

I can’t actually watch this at 19 east except in perfect conditions at the moment because my dish is slightly mis-aligned. I don’t want to adjust it until after the Vuelta finishes, just in case I make a mistake and lose reception completely.

It's been a busy week for Koha development, really. Some of my thoughts:-

[Koha-devel] ANNOUNCE: New Installer in master git tree

I announced the new Koha installer. It's not finished (see under KNOWN BUGS), but people are starting to use it, so I thought I'd better announce it. I'll explain more soon.

[Koha] AG KohaLa

The Koha Free Association is about to hold its first General Assembly, so I reposted the announcement. Anyone know what foreign developers should do about it, if anything?

Taking the Open Road: University Libraries Explore Options

Interesting article in E-commerce Times which mentions Koha as one of the more specialist packages libraries are investigating. Good!

Slashdot Libraries Defend Open Access

Not koha, but funny: Legacy journal publishers don't like Open Access? I'm shocked. Or something. Some of the comments are hilarious. Others remind me why I don't read much /.