High-speed internet links are something that makes FOSS development much easier, but I m still having reliability problems with my ADSL. A fringe benefit of moving to a more open Linux-based router is that I can see what s going wrong in more detail. But now I have to gamble nearly two hundred pounds in order to get the service providers to continue trying to find the bug! Sorry for the length, but let me explain how bad broadband in rural England is just now Outside the big cities with their cable networks, Company A owns the lines, Company B provides the services and we buy those services from reseller Company C. Sometimes the same company is A and B or B and C, but never all three. Most of the companies who are B won t be C themselves - in other words, they don t sell retail, but they nearly always seem to have a main or preferred retail partner. Company A is nearly always OpenReach, part of BT Group, the telephone monopoly privatised back in the 1980s but still somehow keeping its landline monopoly. Why is that allowed? Company C has been The Phone Co-op for me for the last few years. Back in February, I changed how I bought my services, combining phone and broadband into one purchase. They d been two purchases mainly because I switched my ADSL from Pipex to the co-op at a different time to switching my line to them. As I understand it, this change had the side effect of changing Company B from OpenReach to Opal Telecom. Opal are the provider business behind TalkTalk, hardest to use Broadband ISP 2009. Since the change, I ve been suffering unexplained disconnections, especially in the early evenings and at weekends. I m pretty sure it s Opal s equipment to blame for two reasons:- Firstly, this wasn t happening until Opal became Company B, while Companies A and C are the same as before (when I had a stable but unspectacular 4Mbps connection). Secondly, since changing my router, I can see LCP TermReq being sent by Opal s PPP peers. Opal insist their equipment isn t sending TermReq messages. My Netgear router disagrees, but I can t seem to get anyone to take its pppd debug logs seriously. So, I ve complained to my supplier (Company C), they ve pretty straightforwardly passed it to Company B and I ve jumped through all the bloody silly hoops like using only wired connections to the router (yay, wires across the house), plugging the router into different phone sockets (yay, more wires across the house) and disconnecting everything from the phone sockets so Company A can run some voltage test (yay, uncontactability - just as well other software.coop workers can cover for me). Now the next step is for some phone engineer to call. For this to happen, I have to agree that I will pay GBP 164 if a fault is found on my phone network instead of theirs. If I don t, they will give up trying to find the fault. I don t really see why this is necessary: surely if there was a line fault, it would have shown itself on the old service? Also, the router says the line has no fault and the SNR and Attenuation are both fine but not great. Unlike most people, I ve already had my house phone network tested with professional equipment (yay for network engineers in the co-op trying to avoid the painful state of British broadband bugfixing), but I m still left betting hundreds of pounds on the phone engineers not pointing the finger at my network. What choice do I have? I ve read elsewhere about people giving up on ADSL and switching to mobile internet because then they have only one company to deal with. I can see some attraction in that, but I live in a village with poor mobile service and I suspect the forthcoming T-Mobile/Orange and T-Mobile/Three link-ups will soon make that less straightforward too. A confusopoly is probably more profitable to telephone companies. Do most people bet a couple of hundred pounds to get their broadband fixed? How many broadband faults get ignored at that point? Why don t the retail company Cs have access to enough Company B systems to lead the fault-finding instead of only being able to pass it on to people who seem to give replies that contradict the logs and won t talk directly to customers? Is fixing this A-B-C three-companies-pass-the-buck system a necessity for Digital Britain? Why isn t the government intervening to end the OpenReach monopoly outside the big cities?

Today I found out that some of my students refer to me as Enid, a name which has rarely been used to call my attention but now circulates almost daily to my students whenever I post a message on Blackboard. It was a little mortifying to find out as I don t identify much with Enid, though it has always tagged quietly along with my other names. BB, which we use for readings, our discussion forum,and email messages, spits out my legal (tax) name, which bears the full Enid Gabriella Coleman. Although I have tried, somewhat persistently, I have failed to change it to the E. Gabriella Coleman that I would rather use. While I find it hard to embrace Enid as I just don t feel like an Enid, at least yet (and may break it out when I write fiction or when I turn 65), I have always liked having the name Enid in so far as it pays homage to my Aunt Enid whose life ended far too early, soon before I was born and from all accounts, she was one stellar woman. My parents chose to tack it on for commemorative purposes, intending to call me Gabriella after some Italian cabaret singer my mother loved. The plan, however, was immediately foiled by my older sister who apparently blurted out something like Biella when she saw the scraggly rat-like baby (as my mom used to describe me) that was christened her younger sister. Biella, like Gabriella, also has Italian roots: it is a beautiful town in Italty and a less than beautiful but so-ugly-it-is-kinda-cute Italian Pug. Perhaps the lesson in all of this is to tell students about my name and finally ditch BB, which is the software equivalent to Soviet style communist housing, and move over to another platform.

Today I found out that some of my students refer to me as Enid, a name which has rarely been used to call my attention but now circulates almost daily to my students whenever I post a message on Blackboard. It was a little mortifying to find out as I don t identify much with Enid, though it has always tagged quietly along with my other names. BB, which we use for readings, our discussion forum,and email messages, spits out my legal (tax) name, which bears the full Enid Gabriella Coleman. Although I have tried, somewhat persistently, I have failed to change it to the E. Gabriella Coleman that I would rather use. While I find it hard to embrace Enid as I just don t feel like an Enid, at least yet (and may break it out when I write fiction or when I turn 65), I have always liked having the name Enid in so far as it pays homage to my Aunt Enid whose life ended far too early, soon before I was born and from all accounts, she was one stellar woman. My parents chose to tack it on for commemorative purposes, intending to call me Gabriella after some Italian cabaret singer my mother loved. The plan, however, was immediately foiled by my older sister who apparently blurted out something like Biella when she saw the scraggly rat-like baby (as my mom used to describe me) that was christened her younger sister. Biella, like Gabriella, also has Italian roots: it is a beautiful town in Italty and a less than beautiful but so-ugly-it-is-kinda-cute Italian Pug. Perhaps the lesson in all of this is to tell students about my name and finally ditch BB, which is the software equivalent to Soviet style communist housing, and move over to another platform.

A couple of months ago, I switched over to ThePhoneCoop s LLU package. The new service is good so far. The ADSL is blazingly fast (I wonder if it will remain so good) and the main drawbacks so far are a lack of reverse DNS (currently escalating that one up through tech support) and a slightly noisy dialling tone on the phone. I was initially switched to a dynamic IP address (which was a change I wasn t told about in advance), but got a static on request so we could restrict the VPNs a bit more. As usual, LUGgers were a source of help when it looked like going a bit wrong. Thanks to oddbloke for positive feedback about Buffalo routers (they work fine with OpenWRT, but not tried ADSL). Big thanks to Noodles for pointing out that the Buffalo router I linked wasn t an ADSL router, despite being listed as such, that the only ADSL chipset to have full open source support is the AR7 (but the wifi is dodgy) and that the Broadcom chipsets have 2.6 support but maybe with a binary blob. I m still not sure if a new router is necessary. The infernal Belkin seems to be working, but it s disconnecting and rebooting a lot more often. I seem to be on the TalkTalk/CPW network - anyone know of problems with Belkin routers? I ve not seen anything yet. Also, who else has unbundled and how was it for you?

Expand your perspectives in IP (if you are in NYC at least)

Expand your perspectives in IP (if you are in NYC at least)

If you are in the greater or lesser NYC area, there is a conference on IP and circulation that has a pretty nifty line-up as well as a international perspective. If you are in the Montreal area, IP reformer James Love will be giving a talk NGO efforts to reform the World Intellectual Property Organization and there is a semester long series (almost over) sponsored by the Columbia Society Fellows on IP with a fantastic line-up

Or for those who care about Twitter and Debian We've setup a Twitter account for the project to use on Twitter. Go follow it, go now!

twitter.com/debianproject Now, the interesting part about this is that any Debian developer with a GPG key on the Debian keyring can tweet to it. You basically only have to do something like this: $ echo "Squeeze is scheduled for Winter 2014" gpg clearsign lwp-request -m POST http://twitter.debian.net/post or, what it's the same, just send a clearsigned POST data to http://twitter.debian.net/post. If the data is signed by a Debian developer, it'll go through and post it. The Debian uid is appended on the tweet, as found on Debian's LDAP DB, so if joetheplumber@d.o is the one posting, it'll be posted with "(via joetheplumber)" on it. If you are more interested about this, you can go to twitter.debian.net where you will find deeper information and details about this service. I encourage you, Debian user and advocate, to start following the @debianproject account; and I encourage you, Debian developer, to communicate with our users and advocates by using and posting to this service. More news to follow soon. UPDATE: Support for Identi.ca has been added and now both Twitter and Identi.ca accounts are updated at once and sync'ed.

Often I happen to come with some pretty crazy ideas about anything in life. That s me. Some of them may work, that s why I adventure to share them with the world. Working with computers, software in particular, for almost 12 years have brought interesting views regarding life. For the past 3 years I ve progressively improved the human being am I, and also the improvement process. The other day I was heading to the uni and I ve just noted that some practices of my profession can also be applied to my personal improvement. So, here I m sharing some of them. Hope you find them useful.

1. Spot your bugs and kill em. While it s important to want to improve yourself. It s more relevant to the fact of real improvement that you spot your personal bugs . This is a crucial part of it all. Once you are aware of you personal bugs you ll be able to take action on them. So, when you do, just kill them and don t let stink until you are not able to manage it at all and all your code taints and breaks.
2. Let process run on the background. Life has a limitation, which is time. Time is a scarce resource. You must be aware of it, really. While we might want to do many different things life presents to us, is not really responsible to engage on all. However, we can hack this. Here technology is our ally. There are many different ways to be able to do some things in the background while on the foreground you focus on what really matters to you at the time.
3. Outsource services that are not key for you. Delegation and distributed architecture come to mind. Professions and specialization are an evolution of humanity. Please take advantage of it. You don t need to know or do everything. Karen Sthepenson s connectivism axiom is illustrative: I store my knowledge in my friends .
4. Focus on what matters. This is somehow like the unix tradition of doing one thing and doing it well. Identify what makes you unique, special and relevant on your ecosystem. What value you can offer to others, and work on that direction. Hard work pays.
5. Release early and release often. Once you have spot bugs and managed to fix them, release a new version of yourself!. Tell the world by showing an improved version of yourself. Make this incremental and iterative, just like a software development framework. For instance I currently run a 3.1 version of myself. Just released a point version last week :)

Welcome, Congress, to our generation s electric sun. Earlier, I had posted the Wikileaks link to these congressional reports with comments of my own but I thought I would pen down a few thoughts as I finally electronically leafed through some of them. These reports remind me a little bit of another set of reports that are publicly available, which are the Congressional Quarterly reports, which are an excellent resource for research. They are a bit dry but provide a wealth of information and perhaps more important, citations to law cases, journalist articles, and academic pieces (everything that journalistic pieces, in other words, do not do). It does 1/2 the research for you, as I like to think. The few reports I have scanned from the leaks remind me, in fact, of the CQ reports, in content, style and tone. And while I thought CQ reports published on a wide range of topics, these semi-private reports are far more extensive in terms of topics and far more specific as well:

CRS: Humane Treatment of Farm Animals: Overview and Issues, December 10, 2008
CRS: FDA s Authority to Ensure That Drugs Prescribed to Children Are Safe and Effective, December 2, 2008
CRS: African American Members of the United States Congress: 1870-2008, December 4, 2008
CRS: The Pigford Case: USDA Settlement of a Discrimination Suit by Black Farmers, January 13, 2009
CRS: Selected Legal and Policy Issues Related to Coalbed Methane Development, March 9, 2004

I look forward to hearing/learning more about how they are used (I can t imagine that each report is read by many) and why exactly they were hidden away as they don t seem to be the type of information that should be kept classified.

Welcome, Congress, to our generation s electric sun. Earlier, I had posted the Wikileaks link to these congressional reports with comments of my own but I thought I would pen down a few thoughts as I finally electronically leafed through some of them. These reports remind me a little bit of another set of reports that are publicly available, which are the Congressional Quarterly reports, which are an excellent resource for research. They are a bit dry but provide a wealth of information and perhaps more important, citations to law cases, journalist articles, and academic pieces (everything that journalistic pieces, in other words, do not do). It does 1/2 the research for you, as I like to think. The few reports I have scanned from the leaks remind me, in fact, of the CQ reports, in content, style and tone. And while I thought CQ reports published on a wide range of topics, these semi-private reports are far more extensive in terms of topics and far more specific as well:

CRS: Humane Treatment of Farm Animals: Overview and Issues, December 10, 2008
CRS: FDA s Authority to Ensure That Drugs Prescribed to Children Are Safe and Effective, December 2, 2008
CRS: African American Members of the United States Congress: 1870-2008, December 4, 2008
CRS: The Pigford Case: USDA Settlement of a Discrimination Suit by Black Farmers, January 13, 2009
CRS: Selected Legal and Policy Issues Related to Coalbed Methane Development, March 9, 2004

I look forward to hearing/learning more about how they are used (I can t imagine that each report is read by many) and why exactly they were hidden away as they don t seem to be the type of information that should be kept classified.

Yesterday I phoned into The Phone Co-op AGM 2009 and heard the reports, most of which you can read in the PDF annual report from the AGM website. There were also various questions from members, which I scribbled down as follows:-

What does ADSL mean?

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. Essentially, what we sell as broadband.

How many day-equivalents of training did part-time employees get on average? (I think this was the question, but I got a bit lost.)

Information not immediately available. ThePhoneCoop will research and reply later. The number of part-time employees is an asterisk footnote in the non-financial performance indicators.

Where are the Phone Co-op s investments?

Most of the share capital is for investment in TPC, but surpluses arise for various reasons and are invested outside. Current locations include 40k in long-term investments, including 10k in the Co-operative Group, 20k in Westmill wind farm, 5k in a hydro power project; 60k is in the ICOF share account, 1.4m in the Co-operative Group, [...I missed some. I was struggling to keep up. Some of this may be wrong anyway...] 486k in Midcounties Cooperative share account, 20k in Chelmsford Star; total of about 2.9m.

Is ICOF deciding recipients of the sustainability fund or The Phone Co-op?

The arrangement with ICOF is now ending for various reasons and now TPC will partner with Black Country Reinvestment Society. Don t want to manage the fund directly because it s not a core task for a phone company.

The increase in turnover is described as mainly to existing customers. Has there been an increase in the number of customers?

The Phone Co-op is recruiting 150-200pcm residential and 30 business customers, but losing a similar number. Have recruited new staff to try to improve this.

Is share account interest being cut in line with banking interest?

Just cut to 3%, but there has been a net inflow of investment. Current interest receipts from TPC cover it due to long-term investments, but they will mature, so the interest rate will be cut gradually to keep it sustainable.

Purchase from other cooperatives is 11% and falling. What is being done to increase it?

[I missed the answer to this.]

What is happening about getting a new office?

The Phone Co-op still has an option on a site in Chipping Norton, but no planning permission. An alternative commercial building which was being discussed with its owner was lost to housing (planning permission granted there!). There is a general lack of suitable sites available and things are happening cautiously in the current climate.

If we re trying to save paper, why did members receive two envelopes in the post for this AGM?

The report was sent from Calverts directly, to save time, postage, staff and report miles

Is the description of non-white in the performance indicators a problem for mixed white+non-white people?

Will look into this.

How many affinity schemes are there?

There are currently 300 and they are being reviewed for the best way to work better with them.

Are acquisitions likely?

Expect the credit crisis to being opportunities. There are benefits from more traffic and so on. TPC has been contacting potential suppliers and intermediaries asking after other providers in difficulties.

What is the deferred income shown in the financial statements?

Pre-billed broadband and similar products.

Is the investment in the Co-operative Group risky?

TCG holds around 4bn in assets under and is one of the longest continuously-traded companies in the UK.

Are ThePhoneCo-op s 0845 numbers advantageous to TPC or the caller?

Still yes for TPC, paying 1p/min at peak; probably not advantageous to caller these days.

There are 15% sales to cooperatives shown. What s the largest cooperative and what % of that is it?

Shown in the annual report. [The numbers in report work out to about 15% of all sales I think. So, nearly all sales to cooperatives are sales to Midcounties?]

All errors and omissions in the above are mine. I heard the allocation approved, then I had to leave before the special meeting and the presentations. If anyone has links to them or coverage, please leave me a comment. Other comments welcome, too.

Well, in line with the Do Not Drive from the local police (and one from Gloucestershire), I ll be phoning in to ThePhoneCoop AGM today and doing a bit of work from home. While preparing for the journey that never was, I realised that I ve mentioned some of these phone tools in articles like Connecting from the k608i with SSL, but not all of them. So, here s my favourite Java phone applications:-

1. MidpSSH: this is my main workhorse, as long as I have a stable data connection (even 3G seems to freak sometimes above 120mph). I ll be connected to a screen session in our server (TERM=linux) using lynx, irssi, mailx and other tools I learnt back at UEA;
2. MujMail: if I don t have a stable network connection, this seems a good way to download email from SSL in bursts for offline reading;
3. Mobile RSS Reader: downloads RSS in bursts for offline reading;
4. anyRemote: this is my main workhourse at home, replacing the above three applications. My phone doesn t do WiFi, so I use bluetooth to run shell commands on my workstation, read RSS feeds and email and view web pages. Combined with a video-sender, it also acts as a remote control when playing internet video feeds on the TV. At a push, it can control the workstation s full GUI, but that s a bit slow and awkward;
5. JabberMixClient: I m having a few problems controlling this in version 2, but 1.x uses the basic GUI and works mostly fine. I guess I ought to fix its bugs, but I m terrible at Java;
6. MicroCalc2: a cool lisp-driven spreadsheet, handy for sums you want to keep and it went GPL about two years ago;
7. ReadManiac: much better than the built-in browser for text files and went GPL about a year ago. If only I could work out how to sign it with my local TTLLP certificate authority and get rid of the security prompts;
8. MFRadio: useful when the built-in FM RDS radio can t find anything interesting. The interface is a bit clunky and it really racks up data transfer charges, but it seems worth keeping around.

All of those are free and open source software, mostly under the GNU GPL. The only thing I feel I m really missing now is a free and open source FTP client, for uploading photos to my preferred photo-sharing site. Any suggestions?

This is a continuation from part 1 but can be enjoyed on its own too, like a good red wine. It s a bit early for me for red wine, though.

May

• BBC TV: Click: Free=beer and facebook-flaming - my letter was never broadcast, as far as I know
• Fuel Price Bleating and Biking - one of the last non-work articles to appear before I split them off into their own page last summer.
• Told You So: Exhibitions and Spammer Registrars and Quick Question: opticaljungle.com = publicdomainregistry.com? - these were about similar topics and I may have new developments to report early in 2009.

June

• BBC website, TV and Technology - some background comments on the BBC as they try to figure out what to do with new media. Auntie is a bit clueless about new things.
• 7 Reasons Why Firefox 3 Download Day Sucks - the big news for web development was a new major version of the almost-free-software web browser. It s a big improvement on version 2, but still had some brown paper bag mistakes and the download day marketing idea put clueless news media (see previous item) before users. Continued in FF3 day 3: first impressions, FF3 day 6: security flaw and banks and FF3 day 10: security flaw 2, more banks, looking for a new browser.

July

• Standing for Election to SPI Board Again - my most popular page ever, by number of page views anyway. It was spammed to hell so often that comments are now switched off. I suspect the US Election had more to do the popularity of this article than my unsuccessful candidature for the Software in the Public Interest board.
• Batting Against Three Strikes through the Back Door - I m a member and ambassador for ThePhoneCoop and TTLLP are agents/resellers for them, so this misguided EU law-making was worth some of my time. Writing about it here got me a response from Neil Parish MEP that I don t think I would have got otherwise. It s a terrible shame he never sent a reply from Malcolm Harbour.
• LugRadio Live Event Review - a review of one of the most populist UK free software events by one of their most vociferous critics (back before they went all Creative Commons warm and fuzzy) was always going to be popular, which is partly why I wrote it, but not the whole reason: I m delighted that the event should return in the future. It s not perfect, but it s pretty damn fantastic. A tech conference crossed with a rocking gig by the strangest boyband ever, with a cheerleading racoon and some very cool people.
• Good News on the Koha 3.0.0-final Approach - another surprisingly popular marginal comment. I ve currently broken/desynched/something my local git tree. I m going to repair it by New Year and then start writing up more Koha explorations and sending patches upstream.

August

• SPI Meeting Announcement and Why People Don t Join SPI - I think this summary is still relevant today and I hope that I can help improve things in 2009.
• Is Yahoo Now Even Worse On Spam? All of the big unpaid webmails have problems, but Yahoo (and so BT Internet) are worse than most.

More to follow in a couple of days

It’ll be going out as a letter anyway, but broadband users who have usernames containing @phonecoop may like to read the announcement about changing uplink suppliers. There have been some other changes at The Phone Co-op which I’m asking about this evening. More on those later.

A few weeks ago, I was searching for ID3 (ID3v2) tags for The Complete Bootleg Woodstock 69 collection for a friend of mine. I was able to find them at FreeDB but:

• The Artist information was not always correct.
• All the music was marked as being of genre Rock.

So armed with Wikipedia's help, we created better tags on our own. In case you are interested, the tags are available for download here.

Each directory has a tags.txt file (which has also been split into individual TrackXX.tags files for all the tracks). The files are 'scripting' friendly.

PS: It seems the collection converted to mp3 (at a constant 128kbps bit rate) comes to 618MB. Very nice if you want to burn it to a single CD.

For tomorrow’s class we are going to be discussing piracy and we will do so with the help of Alan Toner one of the filmmakers behind Steal this Film. We will be reading some of his work (and this ethnographic look at the life of a p2p file sharer provides a refreshing look at what it actually looks like), as well as the work of Matt Mason among others. We will also be reading an oldie but goodie that I could not find easily online and given that it is a class on piracy, I thought I would honor the class (and the piece) engage in a little transgression. If find the piracy exhilarating, daunting, questionable, or reproachable, come to NYU Free Culture’s screening of Steal this Film part 2, this Sunday Nov 16th at 7 PM. Alan will also be there to field questions and kick off the debate. I am looking forward to the post-movie discussion. update: Here is a flyer with lots more information

For tomorrow’s class we are going to be discussing piracy and we will do so with the help of Alan Toner one of the filmmakers behind Steal this Film. We will be reading some of his work (and this ethnographic look at the life of a p2p file sharer provides a refreshing look at what it actually looks like), as well as the work of Matt Mason among others. We will also be reading an oldie but goodie that I could not find easily online and given that it is a class on piracy, I thought I would honor the class (and the piece) engage in a little transgression. If find the piracy exhilarating, daunting, questionable, or reproachable, come to NYU Free Culture’s screening of Steal this Film part 2, this Sunday Nov 16th at 7 PM. Alan will also be there to field questions and kick off the debate. I am looking forward to the post-movie discussion.

I have it on very good authority^* that our favorite Indian/Nepali restaurant, Himalayan Bistro, is coming to Roslindale (from West Roxbury), into the oft-turned-over location last assigned to NuVo, and Gusto before that. Perhaps the third “-o” restaurant will be a charm. Assuming they serve up the same superlative food and atmosphere as the West Roxbury location, I’m sure this one will be a keeper. (My only concern is that having the two restaurants so close to each other may result in self-competition.) ^*Authority = Himalayan Bistro delivery guy. You don’t get much more authoritative than that. In other Roslindale Restaurant news, we heard via RVMS recently that Robyn’s Bar and Grill has changed hands to the owners of the Halfway Cafe in Dedham, which could be a change for the better. Roslindale did not need another pizza/sports-bar, and still does not need one, although maybe that’s all the Robyn’s location will ever be. Even more recently, however, we heard an unconfirmed rumor from a neighbor that the sale fell through and Robyn’s is not changing owners. In other potentially disappointing news, the Roslindale Emac and Bolio’s has changed owners again, this time to a co-owner of the Blue Star Restaurant. I want to like Blue Star, but they can’t seem to get the most basic short-order cooking tasks right. A diner must, first and foremost, deliver greasy food fast, hot, and at the same time for the entire group. At worst, serve the kids first. It also helps for the food to be consistent. Blue Star in our experience (many visits) only occasionally satisfies the basic diner requirements, much less delivers any sort of creative urban-chic reinterpretation of the classic retro diner. (By contrast, Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown is our current Greater Boston favorite — it’s always a good sign when a greasy spoon also actively caters to vegans.) Which brings me to Emac and Bolio’s, which apparently will be renamed “Select Caf .” First, why give up the goodwill associated with the Emac’s trademark? Second, the initial signs of the change-over are not promising. A handwritten sign posted in the window announces that the cafe is under new management, and (1) no credit or debit cards will be accepted and (2) no Emac and Bolio’s gift certificates will be honored. I’d love to be proved wrong about this, but I’m pessimistic that this is going to be the Change We Need in Roslindale — namely, a top rate artisanale snobby espresso shop. We can only hope that Simon’s, Flatblack, Cafe Nation, Diesel, or another of their ilk will come occupy one of the vacant storefronts on the courtyard. That we have any vacancies at all in the square, much less several, is a crime against humanity. Technorati Tags: Roslindale, Restaurants