“This could be a feature deserving of the name, as long as the user is able to authorize the programs she wants to use, so she can run free software written and modified by herself or people she trusts. However, we are concerned that Microsoft and hardware manufacturers will implement these boot restrictions in a way that will prevent users from booting anything other than Windows.”

So please, read the full thing and consider signing it yourself. If you want to watch for further news on this topic, Matthew Garrett’s Journal seems to be the bomb.

Right, well, it’s another busy week this week, so it might be the weekend before I find time to blog again, but posts will be a bit more frequent next week: watch this space!

• Cyberunions which covers the tech/work crossover space and is appearing as Ogg near the start of most weeks. I reviewed an earlier episode and it’s kept on improving. It’s under CC-BY-NC-SA, so you can share it, but it isn’t free software (FOSS) itself. Thanks to John Atherton for the tip.
• The Command Line is more tech, but with a leaning towards activism too. This podcast is actually FOSS – sadly the only one of this round-up! It’s recently dropped to once a week on Sundays, which is a shame in one way, but suits me better. I don’t remember how I got started on this.
• More or Less: Behind the Stats is about numbers in the news. Maybe my love of statistics influences me, but I think this is brilliant, puncturing the pompous politicians who try to mislead (figures don’t lie, but liars do figure). Imagine the FactCheck Blog with its own show and a sense of humour. It’s just gone on a break, but there’s plenty of recent episodes to catch up on.
• Real Peloton is about pro cycling, by reporter-presenter Ned Boulting and journalist Matt Rendell. They probably should not be left alone to make podcasts, but it’s great that they do. They appear sporadically, depending on other work schedules of the presenters. The Banjo Cycles team including Matt Rendell won the IG Markets Hot Lap during the final stage of the Tour of Britain in London and the world championships are this week so maybe they’ll have something to say soon.
• Answer Me This appears on Thursdays (although it has just gone on a month’s break) and gives right-but-sideways answers to listener questions.

And now for number six, what are you listening to? Anything you’d recommend?

I’ve just seen a report of lost files in a dual-boot Windows 7 situation. One suggestion is that you shouldn’t suspend Windows, boot GNU, edit files on the Windows disks, shutdown GNU, then resume Windows.

I’ve not dual-booted for over a decade, but friends and clients do and they’re slowly moving to Windows 7 as it comes on new PCs. Is this a new twist on the old Windows-expects-one-user-at-a-time sharing problems, perhaps?

1. KohaCon11 is being planned for Thane, India. Registrations are open and I’m helping to admin the conference system (OCS). If you’d like to talk, submissions are also open now, although how we review and choose has yet to be decided (should be at the next volunteer meeting). If you’d like to sponsor the event, please register as a potential sponsor.
2. DebConf12′s location will be picked at an IRC meeting today (Tuesday). Bids from Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Managua, Nicaragua are on the web and you are invited to help choose between them.

Are there any other Free and Open Source Software community conferences you’d like to mention?

Even when I was recording audio only, the site left me with flash video (flv) files which contained both audio (mp3) and video streams. Step one was to remove the blank video and convert to mp3: ffmpeg -i videofile -acodec copy -vn part1.mp3

Mobile service isn’t great in rural Somerset around Weston-super-Mare, so some recordings were split into several parts. Step two is to combine them with cat part1.mp3 part2.mp3 >whole.mp3

That’s OK, but it leaves some painful squawking at the join, where the player hits the header information of part2. If you’re unlucky, it’ll crash some players. So step three is to remove it: ffmpeg -i whole.mp3 -acodec copy whole-clean.mp3. Often I transcode to ogg vorbis at the same time with ffmpeg -i whole.mp3 whole-clean.ogg but it depends what I’m doing with the recording.

Are there any other handy ffmpeg tricks I could use here?

I’ve got one big reason for using cat on the command-line: it’s far too easy to type gpg >encryptedfile when you mean gpg <encryptedfile and almost no systems have noclobber switched on by default any more, even on shells that support such an option. So you end up losing a valuable data file and having to recover it from backups – I’ve seen it happen too often.

Because the pipe symbol is nowhere near anything destructive, cat encryptedfile |gpg seems far less likely to end in tears, so I try not to criticise someone for doing that.

That doesn’t completely excuse using it in a script file, though, especially if it’s used lots.

Is there another way I’ve forgotten that would reduce the risk of a destructive typo in the redirection?

I’ve been irritated by my linphone SIP internet phone (Skype without lock-in, with standards) taking up my screen space for a while. I’ve been meaning to upgrade to one of the recent versions that includes the linphonecsh shell and write some client that only displays windows when it’s needed, but I’ve been writing programs for work so much that I’ve not even found time to write blog posts recently, much less fun code, so that’s not happened.

So I’m quite happy to find linphone.el for my GNU Emacs text editor and find it mostly works. I changed one line at the end to (define-key global-map [menu-bar tools linphone] '("Linphone" . linphone)) to put it on the tools menu, but other than that, it just worked. Well, the Mute doesn’t, but that’s probably my phone headset being a different ALSA device. I don’t care: I use the hardware mute button.

In previous times, I would have added the link to the venerable EmacsWiki too, but it has the evil bad wrong Google reCaptcha on the edit page to stop disabled users, so screw it. Google’s reCaptcha seems to be spreading again, obstructing more people when accessing more websites. Is there a reason for that? The re in reCaptcha stands for replace with real anti-spam, please!

Anyway, now I’m controlling phone calls from Emacs. Whatever next? Voice recognition, M-x doctor and a speech synth?

If you like Windows, you might want to skip this long paragraph: the N150 came with Microsoft Windows 7 Starter. When I realised what that was, I thought it was some sort of joke. It’s more like an advert for Windows than a proper operating system. They even removed the option to replace the branded backdrop image, which gives you an idea of the pettiness of that distribution. I read that Win7 Starter used to have a 3 simultaneous application limit but an update removed it because of the sheer volume of complaints and rumblings about court cases to get money back. Microsoft justify all the limits with the argument that it’s optimised for low-power netbooks, but the N150 goes like stink compared to my own (7-year-old) work laptop and how much power is saved by loading the Windows logo backdrop instead of a nice picture anyway?

What did that make me want to do? Well this:

But I’d read that Samsung view nuking Win7 Starter from orbit as voiding the warranty and I couldn’t see anything to confirm or reject that in the paperwork, so I made it dual-boot with Ubuntu netbook remix. If it ever has to go back to the shop, I’ll hide the boot menu. I had enough trouble installing it that I did contemplate get.debian.net with some of the Debian Eee PC things, but I wasn’t sure what I needed and I didn’t have that much time.

There were two big gotchas when installing:

1. When you switch between Ubuntu and Windows, it won’t boot the first time. Second and subsequent boots are fine, but the first one just reboots immediately. I suspect this would be the same for all GNU/Linux distributions.
2. I didn’t realise that the current ndisgtk (or the underlying ndiswrapper?) couldn’t use Win7 drivers. Once I downloaded some XP drivers, it worked. There are some native drivers for the rtl8192 but I didn’t have time to go compiling on it yet.

After figuring those out, Ubuntu seems to work fine. Better than the Windows.

I got particularly appreciative comments about the large clickable spaces on the launcher that netbook remix uses (which is what I’d expect from Fitts’s Law). Debian probably has a similar launcher, but I don’t know what it’s called yet. It looks like some Gnome window or file manager and I’m a GNUstep throwback.

Setting up the mobile phone for internet access was also a breeze. It’s a later model than my old k608i, so it supports PANU, so after the Bluetooth pairing, it appeared in the networking menu on the top panel bar and it just worked.

On Sunday, I cycled to Clevedon (7 miles away as the crow flies, but 12 by bike because of a missing river crossing). Pretty good weekend.

What I’ve done this year is to make a quick tally of platform points and campaign answers that I liked and disliked for each candidate, then total them up to get an order. If anyone gets a negative (more dislikes than likes), then I’ll rank them below NOTA.

Platforms: Margarita Manterola, Stefano Zacchiroli, Wouter Verhelst, Charles Plessy.

Some of the questions:

• Do you plan on taking on a “2IC” or a team? No – SZ, WV, CP, MM
• What do you think are valid goals to spend donated money on? How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors? What qualifies a “Debian Partner”? Spend on what we cannot receive by donation – CP. Partner is defined on website – CP. Spend on maintenance, development, contributions, use – MM. Spend on keeping the project running and emergency reserve – SZ. Partnership programs usually require an yearly subscription fee – SZ. No specific spending list – WV. No formal list of partners – WV
• How much time do you currently/would you devote to Debian? Couple of evenings per week and a couple of days per month – CP. A daily hour, more in future – MM. 1-2 hours/day + 2-4 hours/week – SZ. Varies – WV.
• infrastructure to finance Debian related projects? Why not use other infrastructure? – CP, MM. Don’t – SZ, WV.
• Please finish “In ten years I’d like Debian….”to still be thriving as the Universal OS – MM. to be *THE* renowned distribution in terms of freeness and democracy – SZ. to be mainstream – CP. to still be the distribution I consider to be the best one out there – WV
• Do you think current frequency/amount of heated discussions is acceptable for the Debian project? What would you do to reduce those? too agressive, use social pressure – MM. Acceptable? No. Normal? To some extent, yes. DPL must set a good example – SZ. Stricter policies – CP. No amount of ad-hominem attacks is acceptable, see platform – WV.
• Which project and external Debian-related communications media do you follow? and contribute to? lists, IRC, planet – MM, WV. lists, Planet – CP. lists, IRC, planet, DN, identi.ca – SZ.
• How, as DPL, you would (or even could) address the social issues around releasing? add manpower – MM. status reports – SZ. public disappoval of bad behaviour – WV. reshape the archive – CP
• should we try to coordinate our release process with Ubuntu’s? Yes – MM, SZ. Why not – WV. More info – CP
• Will you withdraw delegations of DD not behaving correctly? On recurrence – MM, CP. No(?) – SZ. No – WV.
• Is there any part of Debian that should be restricted to a small subset of developers? Yes – WV, CP, MM. No except security reasons – SZ.
• Personal mentoring? Good idea – MM. Recycle NM process – CP. Use teams – SZ. NM already is mentoring – WV.
• Standardization, large scale changes, innovations – valuable questions, but the responses are too complex to summarise here, sorry.
• How would you enforce Debian Community Guidelines? wouldn’t – SZ, MM, WV. No clear answer from CP.
• is planet.d.o a good thing? Not necessarily – WV. No clear answer from SZ, MM. No reply from CP.
• How do we face the challenge to do more every year? improve our way of working and get more people to help us do our jobs – MM. open Debian’s door wider – CP. have enough people to work on Debian – WV. use our communication media – SZ

Make of that what you will. It surprised me which way the scores came out, but there was one answer with such a massive problem (in my opinion) that I ranked its giver equal with the next candidate down anyway.

If you’re a debian developer (DD), have you voted yet?

Our co-op has avoided Paypal for a number of years for two reasons:

1. Paypal didn’t recognise UK company registration “numbers” that contain letters (like ours) for years after they first occurred, so we couldn’t register as a seller;
2. the terms and conditions are very unequal, there are shedloads of complaints like paypalsucks.com and I don’t believe they’re all fiction.

We’ve not boycotted it yet because there are two of our current suppliers who are very expensive for us to pay by international bank transfer, accept Paypal and don’t offer much alternative. I think I’ll go ask them again. At least one of them should be sympathetic to Xorg.