Thunderbird 3 Introduces Reply-To List

2009-12-16 by mjr

I’ve kept a page of email clients that support mailing lists for a while and it’s been a bit disappointing that I couldn’t suggest Mozilla Thunderbird or its freer derivatives (IceDove?) as good clients. They work fine in most other ways and it’s nice having something good that we can suggest to users on MacOS and Windows, but there was a long-standing bug requesting support for the List-Post header.

In an email discussion on ALUG‘s main list, a couple of people mentioned that Thunderbird 3 was released last week with a working “reply to list” command. This is excellent news, removing the need for the Reply To List add-on.

I hope we’ll see it in IceDove soon. Fantastic work. I wish it was in the release notes so we’d spotted it sooner. Now there is even less excuse for MUNGing the Reply-To header, even on lists where Windows users are present.

Posted in Education, Training and Information | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Do you think Directgov Delivers?

2009-12-15 by mjr

Directgov is the Government’s official website for the general public. As both a member of the public and a parish councillor, I use it fairly often to look things up. Sometimes it’s surprisingly good, but much of the time, it’s a frustrating page-hunt and leaves me going around in circles, or directs me off to irrelevant pages on other ukgov websites.

Consumer Focus has done a bit of testing and produced a discussion paper posted as a blog which they’re inviting people to comment on, to sign up for possible workshops and to keep in touch with their campaign for improvement. Open source service improvement?

I think both software.coop and thephone.coop might have something to contribute, as member-led communications co-ops, so I’ll see how I can promote it to them.

I’ll also be watching with interest and see if I can find some lessons to be learned for the NSomersetLINk trying to get involved with local health and social information services.

Posted in Cooperatives, SPI | Comments Off on Do you think Directgov Delivers?

Funding Networking, Coops and SocEnt

2009-12-04 by mjr

As an aside to yesterday’s Another Network Begins note, I should mention that one of the challenges of running any inter-business project is paying for it. It surprises some people that many great cooperative projects are running on very small budgets, whereas it looks like some “Social Enterprise” groups are awash with cash.

How can this be, when it still looks like cooperatives are stronger financially than social enterprises? A written answer in Parliament on Monday suggests one possible reason: Co-operatives UK and The Plunkett Foundation together get £164k of Cabinet Office funding, while the Social Enterprise Coalition alone gets £488k and there are other SocEnt groups on the pay list.

Once again, I’m surprised by the way the Labour and Co-operative government is behaving, like I was on the way the real help initiatives exclude cooperative partnerships, while being open to both private sector employers and social enterprises. I’m all in favour of intervening in markets, but this doesn’t feel like it’s making things fairer.

Three strikes, funding social enterprise in preference to cooperatives – would a Conservative or Liberal Democrat government really be worse?

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On The Road, #online09 and #koha

2009-12-03 by mjr

It was great to meet the newest member of our co-op yesterday and discuss a new ethical business referral network, but I’ve barely spent any time back at home and I’m heading out again, partly to visit online09 and IMS, partly to collect some things from the co-op’s founder and also to do whatever else I can do in London in the time available.

I was unable to attend yesterday’s #koha IRC general meeting because of the terrible state of mobile internet coverage in rural Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, where I was at the time. Apologies for not sending apologies beforehand, but I thought it would work. Mobile internet is so frustratingly patchy outside the big cities. It works, but not reliably when I’m moving fast, which seems like part of the point of “mobile”.

Once again, I’m surprised that the U2Com free wifi network still has only one London hotspot. It makes finding wifi in Bristol and Somerset so much easier (as well as attracting me to Bath Ales) and there was even a node in Manchester yesterday. Is there another free wifi network in London that I don’t know about? The Londonist Free Wifi map doesn’t show if they’re in networks.

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As One Association Closes, Another Network Begins

2009-12-02 by mjr

The Association For Free Software (AFFS) seems to have been finally wound up last week. So long, AFFS was Richard Smedley’s view of it. I actually left four years ago (when I wrote State of the AFFS – site currently moving) but I was still a signatory for the bank, so I helped wind that up.

So as one door closes, another opens. Today I’m off to meet our co-op’s newest member and also to see if we can reinvigorate the Principle Six business network. I’ll post more about that in a few days, but if you’ve any ideas about how Free and Open Source Software can help, I’d love to read it in the blog comments.

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Top 10 Crimes of Developer Engagement: a common problem?

2009-11-30 by mjr

savs seemed to agonise about posting it but I think his Top 10 crimes of Developer Engagement is spot on even if it might not be as amusing as Aral Balkan’s similar message.

I think it applies to my recent RFID development work too: the public information is fluffy and you have to hunt or reverse-engineer most of the technical info, the supplier websites are painful and there’s almost no interaction.

In the past, I’d been factoring in something between 50 and 100% extra time when our co-op needed to coordinate with unknown non-co-ops. With RFID hardware work, it was well over 300% when I last calculated it and that’s even though there was one pretty helpful RFID supplier. This sort of nonsense is painful, slows development massively, could kill useful technologies at birth and re-emphasises my commitment to use Open Standards as much as reasonable.

Have other people got similar horror stories to share? Can we get savs’s Top 10 Crimes under the noses of some high-profile people?

Posted in GNU/Linux, Koha | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dump the Disconnect Law!

2009-11-27 by mjr

After all the U-turns by politicians, I got confused about how Three Strikes is developing. I think the current status is Mandelson trying to sneak it through as a Statutory Instrument and protect some of the most protectionist foreign interests ever seen. I’ve written to my MP to express my disagreement.

Andrew Heaney of TalkTalk has submitted a petition “to abolish the proposed law that will see alleged illegal filesharers disconnected from their broadband connections, without a fair trial”. It’s not worded brilliantly, but it covers the vital point – without a fair trial – so I think it’s still worth signing here. Thanks to Glyn Wintle for the updates on fsfe-uk.

Meanwhile, unaccountable copyright collections agent PPL have picked the ideal moment to start harassing local community events. Please give generously: EMI only earned £298,000,000 last year.

If you’ve a bit more time, you could send a Message To Mandelson at ORG. I might not agree with ORG’s structure, but they do make some cool protest sites. (Javascript required to view, as far as I can tell.)

Even more flamboyantly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling on people to phone up and Stop the Pirate-Finder General!

Posted in ThePhoneCoop | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Who wikis Who in British Librarianship

2009-11-26 by mjr

It’s great to discover this experimental wikified version of W. A. Munford’s Who was Who in British Librarianship 1800-1985 (1987). As a statistician who has strayed into serving libraries, I don’t know many of the famous names and a lot of the online materials are from the US. This looks like a useful guide (and CC-BY-SA-3.0 which is OK, although the current site has an unfriendly Choice of Law and Forum) and I hope that any UK-based Librarians who read my site will take a look and see if they can help it.

Posted in Koha | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

US Defense or Sirsi-Dynix – which is more credible?

2009-11-23 by mjr

Most librarians probably already know this, but maybe the programmers don’t yet.

A SirsiDynix Corp lobby paper against Open Source technologies escaped onto the internet. SirsiDynix is a competitor of our co-op with products that compete with Koha. They’re also interesting because Sirsi bought another competitor (Dynix), essentially stopped its product line (something near impossible with Free and Open Source Software like Koha) to replace it with its own and has ended up a messy lawsuit with Queens Borough Public Library as a consequence of that – all as I understand it.

Late last month, someone leaked SirsiDynix’s criticism of Free and Open Source Software which is missing references for key evidence and described on WikiLeaks as containing “possible libel per se against certain competitors”. The comments and links at thesecretmirror and code4lib wiki seem interesting dissections.

I feel that this document is taking advantage of an opportunity presented by the biggest promoters of FOSS library management systems not speaking about freedom. As you can see from some comments on thesecretmirror, it’s all about freedom. reflections » Missing the point: It’s time to talk about software freedom develops that point a bit more and gives a few links back to other statements of freedom which I’d not seen before.

Anyway, one of the points in the leaked document was that the US Department of Defense (DoD) restricts use of FOSS. Unluckily for SirsiDynix, on 16 October, a memo was published by the DoD CIO saying Defense: Open source software is more secure than commercial code. There’s some analysis by David Wheeler discussed on LWN.

Anyway, who would you believe about FOSS? An under-fire legacy private software competitor, or the Department of Defense? I don’t like either that much, but there’s not really a contest. DoD are willing to bet lives on it.

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ssh with unstable and mobile clients

2009-11-21 by mjr

Revisiting two old ssh points:-

  1. Smart Tricks with ssh mentioned ServerAliveInterval 3600 and the page I referenced for it mentions ClientAliveInterval on the server-side. Is there any reason not to use that?
  2. ssh security mentioned sslh to put ssh on port 443, but it seems Top J2ME MIDP Application MidpSSH can’t connect to ssh on other ports. The instructions in the manual about port numbers don’t work for me if I put in 443. I get java.lang.SecurityException. Anyone know why?
Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments