Software Cooperative News

Weeks ago, I was at a TravelWatchSW meeting in Taunton for Cooperatives-SW. The Chair’s theme for the meeting was “the journey was going so well, but is there trouble ahead?” contemplating cuts due to the debt crisis and possible change of government. Lots of good people were present, so it was quite an illuminating meeting.

First, we listened to Dr Gabriel Scally, Director of Public Health for the South West NHS, as he spoke on fat, exercise and transport… He’s a keen cyclist, so I asked for suggestions of how to get better parking at health centres and hospitals. Sadly, he had no easy answer. One tip: Primary Care Trusts control most money, so they’re probably the best ones to persuade.

The second keynote address was First Great Western’s Projects and Planning Director Matthew Golton. He spoke about railway development, unsurprisingly. Rail is vital for co-operatives in the South West, as it’s a greener way to travel the 250 miles length of this peninsula and avoids our poor congested roads.

The big news is that class 150s (Sprinters) will replace the Exeter area 142s (Pacers/Railbuses) and there will be grade-seperated junctions at Reading by 2016 to reduce congestion between the various routes that converge at that point. There’s bad news on the Intercity Express Programme and HST2 being delayed until after the election, but the original High Speed Train fleet should continue as reliably as ever.

After lunch, there were a series of “Just a minute” comments on topics including: west country commuter services, staffing, Taunton nhs parking, axminster peak times, a TransWilts meeting.

Finally before the reports and forum came the third and final keynote from Mike Lambden, head of corporate affairs for National Express Group. He outlined their plans including longer coaches, but asked for better coach stations. One strange mistake had been increasing the leg room on some coaches so much that they got complaints from shorter passengers that they couldn’t reach the footrest any more – oops!

The forum was a scary discussion of rail under-provision planned in our region. Even if we only continue to grow rail use at the last decade’s rates, overcrowding will increase.

The forum ended with applause for all the hard work done by TWSW and the next meetings will be 9 October 2010 in Taunton, 5 March 2011, 1 October 2011.

You may have noticed that the UK votes in a General Election tomorrow. It looks like the closest for at least 18 years and maybe more. Happily, all the major parties are saying nice things about cooperatives, but I wonder how much of that will translate into policies that are practical for co-ops like mine.

Our national body Cooperatives UK has gathered the commitments from 18 manifestos and summarised them in a PDF. The first 7 pages deal with the five biggest English parties.

One striking thing is how many gaps there are in the Labour, LibDem and UKIP policies, while it’s not really clear to me that the Conservatives or LibDems really understand cooperatives. The Conservatives seem to suggest council-controlled co-ops (which wouldn’t normally be co-ops if they lack autonomy), while the LibDems mention employee trusts more often than worker co-ops.

I’m sulking at Labour after several recent schemes that subsidised private competitors and excluded worker co-ops – and I don’t believe Labour can win in Weston-super-Mare. That would leave the Greens, who probably can’t win but do seem to get it, except that there’s no Green candidate where I live because he stood aside and recommended the LibDems (as I understand it). Drat.

So, only a few hours to go before the start of the ballot and I’m still an undecided voter.

Today is the Day Against DRM, working against Digital Restrictions Management or Technological Protection Measures (TPM). I’ve two tips to help with our public disservice British Broadcasting Corporation which has consistently failed to act in the public interest and reject DRM:

1. If you want to link to a BBC radio show like Global Business, you can often get mp3 and avoid Flash-forcing DRM-wannabe iPlayer (and cool toys like get_iplayer) by using BBC Mobile’s Podcasts Index.
2. Satellite TV broadcasts can be captured as MP2 by MythTV or even 50-quid black box home entertainment devices. The DRM-free file can be played back on a computer with mplayer -demuxer +mpegts filename.dvr or re-encoded for other devices with mencoder.

What DRM-avoiding tips would you give?

That was a pretty good weekend. I set up someone’s new Samsung N150 netbook with Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

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.

I’ve been AWOL for most of the debian project leader election campaigns this year, but I still want to vote, so I’ve been dredging the emails on the last day. Maybe someone still has to vote and reads this, or maybe it’ll help someone to interpret the result.

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?