“KohaCon10 starts on October 25th in Wellington, New Zealand. We have an exciting line up of speakers on a range of topics related to Koha and [Free and] Open Source and Open Standards in libraries. See our programme for details.

KohaCon is an opportunity for the entire Koha community, librarians and developers alike, to come together, meet each other, swap ideas and learn something new.

The conference is split into 2 parts.

The community conference will be held over 3 days – 25-27th of October. This is not just a developer’s conference. There will be presentations from librarians and developers alike.

The second part of the conference is the Hackfest for Koha developers that will be held from 29th-31st of October.

For more information see our website

KohaCon10 is a free conference (that is right it will cost nothing for you to attend), but you still need to register to reserve your place.

Registrations from the international Koha community have been very strong. Over half of all available spaces are already taken.

If you have been holding off on the premise that you will have plenty of time to do this later, then please register now. Please do not rely on there being free spaces on the day.

Registration is quick and easy via the website.

We look forward to seeing you in Wellington!”

Our co-op will be represented there. Will you?

This reminds me of an interesting point made in the course I’m currently studying on Applying Our Co-operative Values and Principles. As well as our shared values and principles, each co-op should have a statement of its goals. For our co-op, that’s “to provide computer-related services…”. For the Co-operative Group, it’s currently “inspiring young people; tackling global poverty; and combatting climate change” – it’s a big co-op, so it has big goals.

But while goals are a shared commitment, your motivation for them is often a personal thing. Often it will be rooted in a negative, a dissatisfaction about how the world was before you started, then making that into an excitement about what you could do, the new possibilities that are opened up. I think you can see this a little in Jono’s motivation of “how excited they were at exploring their new system” and many of the comments there. They’re positives and often the silver lining around some cloud.

So, please, head over to Jono’s page and share your motivations. Then pop back to my site and tell me your goals (or how I’ve misinterpreted this ) in a comment.

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?

People have quickly pointed out that the library pub is quite small (a few hundred books) and couldn’t run without the support of the council library service (according to FranksCasket and msarahwickham), so it’s not an obvious cost-cutter. I guess the most endangered are the mobile libraries, as the books could be delivered on request by parcel or courier services without skilled staff. North Somerset has already consulted on cutting the number of stops (the results will be published by 06 Sep 2010) so that might be happen anyway.

The reply which made me smile the most was “Have a better plan: put a pub in the library” which, of course, the visionaries in Norwich have already done. Well, a cafe-bar in the same building as the Millennium Library, at least. Not quite Real Ale, but it’s a start.

Personally, I feel library IT should be in line for cuts before library branches (I really don’t enjoy using the local council library catalogue and the Windows-based PC kiosk control system feels like an expensive nasty experience to me), but it’s all connected. More flexible library IT like Koha, with its web-based user interfaces, common hardware and possibility of distributed cooperative support, could probably support microbranches better than some of the legacy systems.

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?

On 12 May 2009, the European Commission Recommended privacy and data protection in all RFID applications. That was followed by EU Mandate M436 for the European Standards Organisations (ESO) to develop standards to support that recommandation. Phase 1 started last March and has delivered a document RFID-DTR07044v006-draft (PDF). Phase 2 will build on that to produce formal standards for signage, privacy impact assessments and so on.

EDItEUR are replying to that draft on behalf of the library sector and have sent me their draft response RFID_LibrarySectorCommentsDTR-07044-1 as a PDF.

It’s worth opening those two side-by-side to read through. If you can help improve the combined response, please send feedback to the email address in the Library Sector PDF by 6 September. If you’d like to make your own response, you have until 15 September to reply to the ESO PDF using their template.

By the way, does the ESO PDF look jaggy to anyone else? It looks like ghostscript can’t anti-alias the text.

Of course, this has meant that other members of our co-op have been helping my clients more than usual, so haven’t written here either.

But now I’m back on schedule again, clearing the backlog and writing a few things here. I’ve quite a stack of things to write here. I’ll pace myself and I’ve some news to post first. This week is getting back into Koha again. It’s good to be back on track.

Co-operatives 2010

On Friday, I was at this event in Plymouth. The basics of it are pretty well covered by John Atherton’s blog post. I led one of open surgeries on use of Social Media, which I’m going to try to summarise and expand into an interactive briefing note on the website of our co-op. If you’ve hints and tips, or questions you feel I should cover, please leave me a comment here.

Other than that, I was trying to help support the event (as I’m one of the steering group for co-sponsors Co-operatives SW), so I was carrying some kit around and videoed the Question Time. That and some other clips should find their way online next week, along with some other thoughts triggered by the presentations. It was a pretty interesting and productive day, worth the ticket price in my opinion.

Happily, we launched the new Co-operatives SW website from a train at 9am Friday because of some unforeseen events and it seems to be working fairly smoothly. Please be gentle with it. I like the Members News section, but then I would, wouldn’t I?

IT Taxes

I just want to flag this one up as a special interest: the telephone tax is killed off before it starts. Yippee! But now we get to wait and see how “the government will support private investment” to get universal provision of fast broadband. I’ve no problem with tax relief for the video games industry being scrapped - why should any type of software get special treatment?

VAT up 2.5% to 20% from 4 January 2011

This seems bad for everyone. It’s a bit less bad for our co-op because we have some international suppliers, whose sales tax rates won’t change, but we buy a lot from the UK too and it hurts all our workers.

Personal Taxes

The basic income tax allowance rise of £1,000 is welcome, as is restoring the pension-earnings links. More widely, the freezes in various things, increase in Capital Gains Tax and drop in cider tax all seem broadly good ideas. The housing benefit £400 maximum is a bit mixed - how bad it is may depend how lenders react when borrowers get into difficulty.

Business Taxes

At a time when a VAT increase is called “unavoidable”, it stinks a bit to cut corporation tax, extend the 10% capital gains tax allowance and raise the employers’ National Insurance threshold. Of course, our co-op pays none of those, so it also hurts us by giving our competitors an advantage.

Business Incentives

George Osborne said he wants to tackle regional economic differences, but the big change in this budget is bad for all existing businesses outside London, the South-East and East: National Insurance exemptions for new businesses. Once again, existing co-ops take it in the neck from another government obsessed with capitalism and employment instead of businesses and work. Meanwhile, increasing the Enterprise Finance Guarantee props up debt-laden business and a new Growth Capital Fund encourages capitalist businesses, while both appear useless to good co-ops at first glance. I don’t mind being ignored, but could we please elect a government which doesn’t actively hinder co-ops? Where’s the fabled “commitment to fairness”? Promises around the Green Investment Bank and Green Deal sound good, but are in the future.

Council Tax

Council Tax will be frozen for a year. I wonder if that applies to parish councils, because our village planned a cut after a one-year project-based increase last year. The Budget Document has pretty much no detail.

So, how was it for you? Have I missed some friendly changes?

Even so, it wasn’t an easy decision to join. I still believe that RFID standards development would be better done in an open forum, but there doesn’t seem to be a perfect choice and I don’t think we can create one. BIC already has cross-sector support and seems much more open than the so-called “RFID Alliance”. Pragmatism was enough, this time, and so far BIC seems friendly and welcoming. I see that a larger service provider co-operative, OCLC (UK), is also a member, so hopefully that means it’s safe for co-ops.

I think most of the readers of this will be free software developers, koha users and/or members of other co-ops. So, I ask you, what do you think of this move? Leave me a comment on our blog – or email me if you prefer to keep it private.