File downloads with TurboGears In TurboGears, I had to implement a file download method, but the file required access controls so it was put in a directory not exported by Apache. In #turbogears I've been pointed at: http://cherrypy.org/wiki/FileDownload and this is everything put together:

from cherrypy.lib.cptools import serveFile
# In cherrypy 3 it should be:
#from cherrypy.lib.static import serve_file
@expose()
def get(self, *args, **kw):
    """Access the file pointed by the given path"""
    pathname = check_auth_and_compute_pathname()
    return serveFile(pathname)

Then I needed to export some CSV:

@expose()
def getcsv(self, *args, **kw):
    """Get the data in CSV format"""
    rows = compute_data_rows()
    headers = compute_headers(rows)
    filename = compute_file_name()
    cherrypy.response.headers['Content-Type'] = "application/x-download"
    cherrypy.response.headers['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="'+filename+'"'
    csvdata = StringIO.StringIO()
    writer = csv.writer(csvdata)
    writer.writerow(headers)
    writer.writerows(rows)
    return csvdata.getvalue()

In my case it's not an issue as I can only compute the headers after I computed all the data, but I still have to find out how to serve the CSV file while I'm generating it, instead of storing it all into a big string and returning the big string.

Back in mid-2000, I set up my first Internet bank account. I have been using the same bank ever since. The whole notion of Internet banks has changed a lot since then, since virtually every bank offers varying degrees of online access these days. Lately I checked on banks to see if I was still using the best one. Here are my reviews of the two banks.

Internet Banks

Let's first talk about what makes a bank an "Internet bank" or "online bank". So many banks let you manage your account online now, that the distinction is blurry. But generally, I would say that unique features of Internet banks are:

• Significantly higher interest rates than traditional banks
• Ability to open an account online or by mail, and perform all banking functions without visiting the bank in person
• Free bill payment services
• Free self-initiated electronic transfers from your other bank accounts
• Immediate, real-time posting of transactions
• Your own bank never imposes a fee for using an ATM card at another bank's ATM
• Web access to account info, history, canceled check images, and statements
• Toll-free number for account basics (balance, transfer between your accounts at the bank, etc) over the phone
• Great telephone customer support
• An absence of outlandish fees

There are a few to highlight.

Real-time transaction posting is a great thing to have. If you go to the website and transfer money from your savings to your checking account, you can go to the ATM *now* and withdraw it, and when you get back to your desk, the ATM transaction shows up. There are none of these confusing "business day" rules with cutoff times that traditional banks seem to love. And none of this annoying "process all withdrawals first" business that large traditional banks (hello, Bank of America) love to do in order to screw with customers.

High interest rates. Don't even bother with an online bank if the savings interest rate is less than 3% (or checking less than 1%, in my opinion). It is almost impossible to find a traditional bank with these rates.

Note: if you're reading this after April, 2007, these guidelines may no longer apply due to interest rate changes.

Electronic transfers from other banks. Another great feature. A number of banks let you set up, and then initiate, electronic transfers to and from your accounts at other banks. This is usually free if you are using the feature to transfer money into your account, and with a flat per-transaction fee (usually about the same as a foreign ATM fee) for transferring money out.

Ability to do all business without visiting a branch. Not only should this be possible, but routine business (such as making deposits) should be easy to do without visiting a branch. You should be able to order new checks online.

Now let's look at the individual banks.

First Internet Bank of Indiana

FirstIB (they provide nationwide service, despite the name) is the bank I signed up with in 2000. I had found a bank in Dallas that I really liked, but when I moved to Indianapolis, I tried two and liked neither. They all seemed to have really poor interest rates, offer few useful services, and fees for so many conditions that it was hard to avoid them. (More on that in the traditional banks section below)

I looked at the online banking scene at the time, and wound up opening a checking and savings account with FirstIB. FirstIB started as an online-only bank, but recently acquired a bricks-and-mortar bank as well.

I found FirstIB's customer service at the time to be top-notch; I would dial their toll-free number, select *one* option from a menu, and a rep would answer *immediately*. (Take that, Bank of America, with your 45-minute hold times...) Since FirstIB was based in Indianapolis, I actually visited their offices a couple of times. They had a locked lobby. You picked up a phone, pressed 0, and went into the same queue that callers to the 800 number did, then just asked them to come to the lobby and transact your business. (They would not give out cash there, but could take new account paperwork and deposits and the like)

Their interest rates have consistently outperformed traditional banks, and they offer all the online banking amenities listed above. They did not offer online statements at first, but these days online statements are the norm (there is a fee if you want paper statements). Check ordering is accomplished using a linking with the Deluxe check printers. The web interface uses Digital Insight, and the ACH transfer interface uses CashEdge.

FirstIB will actually reimburse you, at the end of the month, for ATM fees that other banks charge you, up to $6/mo. They also provide an unlimited supply of free postage-paid deposit envelopes, and have a PDF of deposit slips that you can print out should you run out.

FirstIB's customer service has slipped in recent times. I know of some people that have been impacted by some errors that FirstIB has made (simply not processing paperwork that they should have processed). Wait times have gone up for the phone line, and a lot of the great "small bank" feel (where they actually knew their customers, and you might actually know the reps) is gone.

Presidential Bank, FSB

Presidential Bank is the bank I'm looking at now. I was initially drawn to them by their extraordinarly high interest rates (5.25% for savings!), but some other things have convinced me to use them.

Initially, I was suspicious. Presidential is a bricks-and-mortar operation that has been around for awhile, and was one of the very first Internet banks. Their website says that they started offering Internet accounts in 1995, and very much looks like it hasn't been updated since. (Thankfully, the account management interface is more modern). I almost thought the site was a fraud up front, a "too good to be true" deal with the high interest rates and bad-looking website. But after doing some research, realized that it is quite real.

Before setting up accounts with them, I had a few questions (such as whether or not transactions post in real time). Presidential has a simple email address for people that want to send in questions (unlike FirstIB's obvious queue system). I sent an email, and got a response an hour or two later, from a real person with a first and last name, and a personal e-mail address I could use to follow up. Nice. I also had occasion to talk to people on the phone. They were polite, speedy, and helpful.

So I set up my accounts with them. I activated the online access, bill payment, and money transfer features. All worked as expected. I did have a couple more occasions to call them after the account was set up (a more crucial test than the pre-account calls), and they remained helpful. Strangely, this bank, which seems to be a much larger operation than FirstIB, had a more small bank feel. Several times, as I started talking to a rep, he or she would say something like "Oh, I remember processing the setup paperwork on this account last week" or "I think I talked to you about this before?"

Customer service is one of those things you rarely need after the first month or so of an account. But with your bank, it is vital that the reps know what they are doing and are willing to help you when you call -- which Presidential is doing better than FirstIB these days.

Presidential does not rebate ATM fees like FirstIB does. They do provide a few deposit envelopes with your initial account setup packet, but they are not postage paid or unlimited. However, because Presidential's interest rates are so much better than FirstIB's, it doesn't take much in your account to more than balance out that difference. Plus, with so many retail stores offering "cash back" when you use an ATM or debit card, it isn't too bad to get cash for free with Presidential. (And, most employers offer direct deposit, so we rarely use deposit-by-mail) One other trick is to find some local bank and open a no-minimum free checking account with them. You can deposit checks there and withdraw cash from their ATM, and use Presidential's free incoming ACH to electronically transfer the funds to Presidential when you get too much in the local account. (Chances are that these local accounts will not pay any interest)

Presidential offers a few features FirstIB does not. First, they scan all your deposits (not just your canceled checks) and offer to let you view them online. Secondly, they automatically send you an email when they've received a bank-by-mail deposit (you can opt out of that, of course). Third, they let you view *all* of your old statements online (FirstIB only lets you view the last 6 months worth, though both have the complete history available in the web interface).

Like FirstIB, Presidential uses DigitalInsight for the web interface and CashEdge for the ACH feature.

Internet Bank Comparison Both banks offer two primary checking and two primary savings accounts. This table compares all four accounts.

Feature	Checking				Savings
	FirstIB		Presidential		FirstIB		Presidential
Account	Interest	Free	Internet Plus	Internet	Money Mkt	Reg	Premier	Internet
APY	1.26%	0%	4.50%	1.25%	3.90%	2.75%	5.25%	1.50-2.50%
Min Balance	$500	$0	$1000	$500	$4000	$1000	$0	$100
Min Method	Avg Daily		Daily		Avg Daily		Daily
Min to Open	$100	$25	$1500	$500	$100	$100	$5000	$100
Online Bill Pay	$0	$4.95/mo	$0	$5.95/mo (up to 10 payments)	Not available
ATM surchage rebate	$6	$0	$0		$0
Online Canceled Check Images	Free				N/A
Online Deposit Images	No		Free		No		Free
Email Deposit Notifications	No		Free		No		Free
Email Balance Alerts	Free
ACH policy	Free when initiated at other end; free for deposits when initiated at the bank's website; small fee for withdrawals when initiated at bank's website

Online options at traditional banks

As I mentioned, Presidential is a traditional bank that has offered Internet accounts for some time now. Some other traditional banks do that as well, but look carefully at them, especially if they're a big nationwide bank.

I looked at options from Bank of America, Citibank, HSBC USA, ETrade Bank, and some other large national banks. In general, these were just regular bank accounts with a web interface (HSBC and ETrade being somewhat of exceptions). Read the fine print and you'll find poor interest rates and traditional banking hassles (lack of immediacy in transactions, predatory posting practices, fees for just about everything).

Plus I can tell from personal experience that Bank of America customer service is downright awful. One example: they used to pressure me to open a credit card with them every time I visited a branch. I declined every time, and had to be forceful about it sometimes. Then one day, not long after a visit with a particularly annoying employee, I got a Bank of America credit card -- which I had specifically refused -- in the mail. Hmmmmmm.

They also, unlike any other bank I've ever used, charged a fee to receive wire transfers. Which they had not disclosed. Then, of course, they apply withdrawals before deposits, and caused an overdraft from the undisclosed fee, even though the wire transfer was a *deposit* that would have very easily covered it. That was the last straw for me. After nearly an hour on the phone with them, I got them to agree to reverse both the fee and the overdraft charge. THEN I said I wanted to close my account.

When traditional banks are better

There are a few situations where Internet banks don't work out so well:

Living paycheck to paycheck. If you are constantly running out of money, and it is vital that any deposits get posted *NOW*, you probably don't want an Internet bank (and wouldn't benefit from their higher interest anyway). When you mail in a check, it can take some time before you have access to the money; the postal service has to deliver it, and then most of your checks will be subject to the "non-local" availability policy and held for about a week (though interest will start to accrue immediately).

Not being able to meet minimum balances. Internet banks do tend to offer a variety of accounts, but if you aren't able to regularly maintain $500 to $1000 in your checking account or $2000 to $5000 in your savings, you will likely fall into a category with lower interest and fewer free benefits. These accounts may not have many benefits over traditional banks, and may in fact be worse in some ways. The interest rate gap won't make that much of a difference either. There are several online banks that offer savings accounts only, with high interest rates and low minimums, that you may want to investigate -- though you will have availability into your checking account measured in days, not seconds. Presidential's savings has no minimum, but requires $5000 to open. (They do have lower-interest savings accounts without that requirement) Watch out for FirstIB's accounts; you can open an account with less than the monthly minimum balance, and will run into fees unless you deposit enough to meet the minimums.

Do you know MSDNAA? That's a program from Microsoft offering their products to students at many universities. So not even this bullheaded users of this "free software" thingy have an excuse of not using their products when participating in different courses. In our case they even offer most of their stuff as ISO-Images. Shouldn't be a problem to install that in a virtual machine, get a good grade and be satisfied when finally deleting it again. Theoretically. Let's not talk about licenses here, or about the website, you need to log into, or wonder why it talks about customers and shopping... Let's just wonder, why you can't download an ISO-Image there. No, you can only download a download-program there... A windows executable! Ha! That's funny! It doesn't even run in wine :(

In one of his many well written and thought provoking essays (Ideas for Startups), Paul Graham has this to say:

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

While I agree with his main point that execution counts, his affermation bugs me a little bit because it clashes with my understanding of economics. To wit, that ideas are "Non-excludable goods". As the linked page says,

Non-excludable goods are defined in economics as goods or service whereby it is impossible to prevent an individual who does not pay for that thing from enjoying the benefits of it. Market allocation of such goods is not feasible.

How would a market for ideas work, in any case? How could you prevent someone from listening to a bunch of ideas and just walking away with the ones they like? Perhaps with lots of lawyering and monitoring schemes, something could be kludged together, but at that point, since the ideas alone most likely aren't worth that much compared to well executed ideas, putting together that market would probably be more trouble than it's worth. So Paul Graham is right, for practical purposes, but his economics don't seem correct to me.

At work, I’ve got two screens on my Sarge workstation “snitch”. Since I want to switch virtual desktops independently on both screens, I don’t have a Xinerama setup but a Dual Screen setup. So my left and right screen do have different $DISPLAY (“:0.0” and “:0.1”) set. This is neither a problem for FVWM nor xlock nor XScreenSaver. But it is a problem for nearly every modern web browser available which checks, if there’s already an instance of it running. So if you try to start a new instance of a web browser on the other screen, most graphical web browsers make more or less problems:

• Galeon 1.3 and Epiphany always opens new tabs or windows on the display where its first instance is running, i.e. ignores $DISPLAY completely except on the first call.
• Kazehakase (0.3.7) just opens a new tab in the running instance.
• Firefox 2.0 thinks it crashed and asks if it should restore tabs and windows. Haven’t tried any further.
• Opera 9.20 pops up a dialog, says, there seems already a copy of Opera running and asks if it should continue with startup. If you say yes, only the bookmarks of one of the two instances get saved, probably those of the one with the last added bookmark or the one which exited last.

The only graphical web browsers which simply just work on a Dual Screen setup are Konqueror, Links2 (called with the -g option for a GUI), Chimera 2, Amaya and of course Dillo. Unfortunately I’m neither a fan of KDE nor of Konqueror and I do want a web browser with CSS and tab support… And Amaya is, well, only a reference implementation… (Chimera 2 from Sarge btw. segfaulted on two of the four pages I tested it with. Seems to have problems with PNG images.) So my current setup is to have Kazehakase as my main work web browser (with all the local web applications I need) on the right screen while I have Opera on the left screen for surfing, looking up documentation, testing web pages and other things. BTW: I don’t use Gecko based browsers for surfing on that box at the moment, since there are some web pages (the spammer vandalised Kazehakase wiki for example, at least a few months ago) which manage to be rendered in such an ugly way by Gecko so that XFree86 with the binary Nvidia (at least the last five or six versions I tried) just crashes away — either at once or when you try to switch to a text console by pressing e.g. Ctrl-Alt-F1 while such a page is displayed.

If you want to test your SIP setup (e.g. using ekiga), VoIP-info.org has a list of services you can call for testing, e.g. echo services, test recordings and weather forecasts.

I have been living at home for the past few weeks, and as such have been reading the paper after breakfast. I can do this in Durham too, its just a bit more of a fight to get the paper. After a couple of weeks, I commented to my mother than the columnists seemed to be a bit dire. She pointed out that they all started well, and steadily when't downhill. One would assume that they just ran out of interesting things to say. I was looking at the Daily WTF today, now renamed to Worse than Failure, and I was reminded of this observation. When I found the site, I did look at the entries and go "WTF?", now I just look and go "meh". I'm guessing that its running out of spectacular material, and that each new posting pushes the boundary of what it takes to be a good posting, or in the case of the Daily WTF, a bad one. At the same time, the number of readers is getting bigger, so the numbers of comments are getting bigger, so there are more silly comments. Add in the bigger readership means more demand for material, and the site's operator starts accepting lesser quality stories and the comments go down hill. Slashdot is the worst example of this, with both dire stories and comments. OSNews has also fallen over this problem. All in all, this means that as a good blogger / news site, you have to accept the fact that you aren't going to post that often, and accept the fact that you aren't going to get lots of hits and have a steady readership. A few folk, such as Steve Yegge and Joel Spolsky, seem to do this. Of course, writing without readers means writing for yourself, which is the normal advice writers offer on how to get started. So the best way to start is the best way to continue, writing about stuff that interests you and not really caring about having readers.Oh, and incase you are wondering, I don't care about folks reading my blog, and sometimes wish they didn't. They tell me I'm wrong. They get me in the coffee shop and start arguing about stuff I wrote while drunk two weeks ago. anyway... Getting back to where I started, both newpaper columnists and sites going downhill doesn't really bother me. After a while, they slip into the crap threshold and I stop reading them. Its just sad that they slip away. PS: Edwin Brady tells the Daily WTF was always quite bad. Maybe its just me who takes ages to pick up on bad sites.

Thursday 26 April 2007 (7pm - 9pm), The Campus, Locking Castle, Weston-super-Mare. (Map) Topics to include: The Joint Local Transport Plan: How the forum may maintain pressure to implement cycling benefits in the plan? Appointment of new chair for the meetings Diversion of the Avon Cycleway onto the old NCN33 to Portishead New Local Rural Routes to be sign posted Date of next meeting: Thursday 28 June 2007 @7pm, The Campus - WSM Cycle Forum homepage

Open Usability has a poll for the next default KDE theme or so. Oxygene or so.However it lacks options... the first real question "which icon [...] showing the menu with all applications" is lacking the "None is appropriate" option.The first icon has some windows on it. I don't want to configure windows. The second has a package on it, package manager. Next is a diary/notebook and a text editor. Looking glasses, the KDE logo, a computer and a help icon. I mean, there is nothing at all looking like an "applications menu" in there.Other questions don't fit into the usability category too much - for example, there is a poll about the 'back' button in the web browser. And there are like three regular left pointing arrows and one which is a reload turned the other way. I'd pick the other three; any of them is fine. But I have to pick one...Sometimes options are just stupid (e.g. offering a phone icon for email), and sometimes none is convincing (the chat icons, I actually find the 'small human figure' icons quite appropriate, but there was no such icon offered).Speaking of icons - I'd really appreciate some new Debian artwork. Our web site is looking like it's from the 90s. If it werent for '2007' dates occurring on the first page, it would look like it hadn't been touched since then. Ubuntu and Fedora have really nice pages (layout wise, I'm not talking about the contents which I didn't look at). Gentoo is as miserable as ours. OpenSuSE doesn't do language negotiation and looks somewhat odd. Probably too 'wikiesque'. FreeBSD just got a facelift last year. The artwork looks like 2003 style to me, and that the page has a 'monospace fonts' feeling might even be intentional. I certainly don't want the Debian website to look like a "web 2.0 beta" application, but some modern 'serious' design would be nice to have.

Gustavo’s advice to poll the Ubuntu patch archive for useful changes doesn’t have to be restricted to Ubuntu - for a long time I’ve regularly trawled at least the Red Hat/Fedora and SuSE packages for useful changes. The utility of doing this does vary with the package (typically inversely with the volume of upstream code changes that distributions tend to carry about) but for the time it takes to at least check to see if there’s anything interesting I find that it’s worthwhile. Doing this is no substitute for getting patches submitted properly with good documentation and extraneous changes stripped out. Personally I have always been fortunate in the people working on my packages in Ubuntu - I’ve almost always found that the changes that are applicable to Debian have been sent to me already by the person making them. I’d go so far as to say that most of the substantial patches I’m given come from Ubuntu developers. In the one case this hadn’t happened the person making the change was surprised and apologized that they’d forgotten.

Scott Lamb commented:

"Measuring police on the absence of crime is even easier to game, with horrible consequences."

In more detail, Baruch wrote:

"The result of measuring absence of crime will be that reports of crime will be rejected if the cops will think that they won't be able to catch the criminals. You will have to seperate the group that takes the reports and the group that handles them to make it work and even then I'm not sure someone won't find a way to go around that with another trick."

Well, if you read any cycling online forum, you'll have seen some reports of police rejecting reports of 'too hard' crimes like harassing cyclists. I think I've had one report accepted in the last year, about a moped user riding along a cycle track near a playground where I had noted the number plate, and two pretty certainly discarded. So, police discarding or discouraging reports of no-obvious-solution crimes seems to be happening already. andy r wrote:

"Hi there, Don't talk to me about tragedy of targets... As a teacher the word 'target' fills me with both fear and laughter. Last year my year 6 class and I worked our butts off and achieved the highest set of grades for any school in North Somerset, thereby rescuing the school from a very sticky situation with Ofsted. Within days of these results being known the senior LEA advisor suggested to me that the targets had, perhaps, in hindsight been too low. My reply was curt and Anglo-Saxon. Hindsight! Looking out of her hind? The LEA love targets. If you hit them you have not pushed the kids enough. If you exceed them you should have pitched them higher. Woe betide anyone who fails to meet their targets (I will this year, different cohort and those % from last year have been INCREASED!)... My kids have targets (though they have so many that they actually fail to remember them all). Teachers have targets for the numbers of children who are 'supposed' to achieve certain grades but the idiots who set them frequently have only a rudimentary grasp of mathematics. In my current school there are 45 children in a year group, so each one represents a little over 2%. In schools with small classes (perhaps 10 per year in some rural schools) 1 child can equate to 10%. If he's sick on exam day or is just not bright enough, that's 10% gone. And with the government expecting 75-80% of children to achieve a level 4 in their KS2 SATS, it's all too easy to drop blow your 'targets' through illness alone. But here's an even worse tragedy of targets in primary schools... a couple of years ago I had to disapply 2 children from SATS, simply because they have profound special needs and could not take the tests. In addition, the school had an Autistim Unit (now called something PC, but I forget what) which that year had 4 children in year 6. Therefore we had 6 children who could not take the exams. We filled in the paper work but were horrified when the results came in to discover that these children (who all had official exemption on disability grounds) were counted as having taken the test, even though they couldn't. For 'statistical' purposes these kids were classified as having scored zero! Out of a cohort of 36 children, 6 were classified as not having done a thing! The department of education acknowledged that this didn't help our statistics, but stated that it was their policy. In a school with a lot of very deprived kids this 16% scoring zero, added to a significant quanitity of under-achievers was enough to push us down to the bottom 100 primary schools nationally. You can only imagine how damaging that was for the school's reputation - parents took kids out, we were slated in the local press and had to fight like mad to justify our continued existence... Targets... bah! Hey, talking of which. The Health Trust has recently done a survey of local primary school children's weights and heights. In our day this sort of thing was compulsory. Not any more. Parents had to 'opt in' to the survey... And guess what? The parents of the largest kids refused to take part - as did the ignorant b*strds, but that's another story. So the WAHT will now be collating a totally skewed data set. I'm just waiting for the press release highlighting our slim North Somerset children... And of course, someone will be complemented on achieving targets for reducing childhood obesity, whilst infact the problem has probably - as it were- grown. I used to like the way that 'on time targets' were displayed in Didcot railway station. There was a board in foyer which highilighed punctuality. The impressive looking bar chart had these words written on it: "% of trains on time, compared to last month." And the brightly coloured chart was always up around 95%, ish. I was always suprised that nobody commented on that. 0.95*0.95*0.95...... month on month those trains were getting less and less punctual! But nobody bothered to point this out because 95% looks impressive! On many occasions I took the time to read, and re-read, the wording of those graphs so I know with 100% confidence that this was what they quoted. We never had a month with more than 100% punctuality compared to the previous month. Shame. That's enough. I'm off to the dog house."

I asked if anyone had seen the Barclays PINsentry keypad before... Kris Marsh wrote that:

"it looks a lot like the way secureid cards work. In which case, it won't physically connect to your PC, would provide you with proper two factor (password + token) and would definitely be a Good Thing(tm). Not only then, would a phisher have to take your password, but they'd have to steal your actual card and PINsentry device to get access to your online account. Thus pushing the phishing emphasis elsewhere (different banks? phone scamming?). I guess time will tell if they manage to mess it up to make it only work on Windows somehow. :-)"

Adam Bower opined:

"The Barclays devices just look like a challenge response system. Someone I know has something similar for a bank account which when you login the website presents you with a 4 digit number. You then type that number into the pad and then enter a pin and it presents another number that you enter onto the webpage and the online banking lets you in (along with a username and password). I should imagine that these new devices won't make any difference to people running Linux."

Neil McGovern noted:

"It seems that they're external devices for generating OTPs from C+P cards, so won't affect compatability."

Roger Gammans commented:

"Barclay use GEM plus usb smart card readers with their business internet banking. IIRC, this requires windows and IE so that the activeX controls on the page can talk to the reader. Having said that one desciription of the new device I heard sounded like it was a standard alone device with a display. You put your card into it and push a button and then it produces a code number which you copy onto the web page. But I haven't seen one yet - and the media are good at getting the wrong end of the stick."

So, let's wait and see.

I have just updated my previous post about licenses and also explicitely licensed my blog. Previously I had used a Creative-Commons share-alike license for lecture notes to allow commercial use and had not specified what the license is for my blog apart from it being free for feeds (you may add it to a planet without seeking permission first).

Unfortunately the operators of a site named lemonup.com decided to mirror many of my blog posts with Google AdWords. The site provides no benefit to users that I can discover and merely takes away AdWords revenue from my site. It has no listed method of contacting the site owner so it seems that blogging about this and letting them read it on their own site is the only way of doing so. :-#

I'm happy for Technorati to mirror my site as they provide significant benefits to users and to me personally. I am also happy for planet installations that include my blog among others to have a Google advert on the page (in which case it's a Google advert for the entire planet not for my blog post).

Also at this time I permit sites to mirror extracts of my articles. So for example the porn blogs that post paragraphs of my posts about topics such as "meeting people" with links to my posts don't bother me. I'm sure that someone who is searching for porn will not be happy to get links to posts about Debian release parties etc - but that's their QA issue not a license issue. I am aware that in some jurisdictions I can not prevent people from using extracts of my posts - but I permit this even in jurisdictions where such use is not mandated by law.

Lemonup: you may post short extracts (10% or one paragraph) of my posts with links to the original posts, or you may mirror my posts with no advertising at all. If those options are not of interest to you then please remove all content I wrote from your site.

J rg, you can significantly reduce the number of commands to type by using some of the useful svk shortcuts. First, you can create the mirror and check it out with a simple one liner:


svk cp svn+ssh://joerg@svn.debian.org/svn/debconf-data/ /chekout/directory


It will ask you the base URI to mirror (in case you’d actually want to mirror svn+ssh://joerg@svn.debian.org/svn/, for example), and then the depot path for the mirror and the local svk copy. The checkout will then be available in /checkout/directory. Then, to get updates from svn:


svk up -sm


And you can also push your changes into svn with


svk push


Jazz pianist/composer extraordinaire Andrew Hill died yesterday. He was 75 years old. I love his music. I even gave a lecture on his music several years ago. I have a great regard for someone who follows his own logic, challenges the mainstream mode AND achieve artistic excellence. In many cases, so-called "avan-garde" are hard trying to do things different, but their results are not impressive aesthetically. Hill achieved both. And boy, he swang hard when he wanted. I'll miss him.

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Megan's back after spending most of the early part of today in Casualty following a minor head injury. (Did you see what I did there? Good job I'm not an apostrophe Nazi or I'd never have let myself abuse language in such a way!) Not a great day, but not as bad as it could have been.

Fonts are usually a problem when packaging games. Many games seem to pick up fonts from somewhere in the web, which licenses allow only free redistribution, but not modification. Some others don’t even allow commercial use. Some game developers don’t mind at all about this, some others just don’t pay much attention to licenses. In any case, if we want those games in Debian main, we must replace the fonts in them. The problem is then trying to find appropiate fonts for the replacement. As there’s no easy way to have a visual look at all the fonts in the archive, I’vd developed a tiny script to generate some web pages with images of all the TrueType fonts in Debian SID. Lots of thanksgo to Jacobo Tarrio, you’ve helped me a lot!

Two semi-related things. Firstly, I just got notice that North Somerset Council are going to let North Somerset Housing pointlessly tarmac over a square of grass near us. Planning application 07/P/0464/F claims to provide 3 additional car parking spaces, but it tarmacs 7m width of grass while marking 6m width of current tarmac as no-parking: a net addition of 1m! Not enough for even one additional car! Now they've made this officially-acceptable reasoning, I reckon it will feature in a planning application for building more houses on the village's green spaces. How about: you can build a new house as long as you mark an existing house as uninhabitable? Secondly, Clevedon residents are petitioning the Prime Minister to stop Tesco expansion as reported in the Mercury. Expanding the Tescopoly in Clevedon will harm what already looks to me like an endangered town centre. OK, it's not the PM's responsibility to stop one store expanding in one town, but it is his government's planning policies which are aiding and abetting the continued growth of unsustainable 'big box' stores. I can see Clevedon from my office window. I'd need binoculars to spot Morrisons, but I think Tesco is visible with the naked eye already from the top of Worlebury hill. Every Little Hurts but they just keep on rolling like Renard, not noticing the pain.

Rolandas commented:

"Do you know, that you can get free listings from broadcasting data services by going to http://www.bds.tv/ and registering as person? You need to pay money if you making money out of it."

No, I didn't know that. Thanks for the tip. It's hard to register with BDS because it isn't accessible - anyone know whether the listings are in a useful format? Still doesn't really change that the TV listings tax is unjust: why shouldn't we be able to publish remixes of this data that we already pay for?

Update: Francies commented:

"I also emailed Barclays regarding their non-listing of Linux and had the "128-bit encryption" where again Linux was not mentioned (have they even heard of it? A friend mentioned today that he has read that Barclays will be issuing chip and pin or card devices to all online banking users so could it be that these will be Windows only? If so the Linux community should complain in case all banks get the same idea."

I've also seen Barclays announce the chip-and-pin readers and a BBC report about them. Anyone seen these before? Comment form at the end of the page.