FOSS Screencast Tools?

2009-08-07 by mjr

As I wrote yesterday, the Koha IRC meeting started discussing tutorials for new contributors. I’d really like to avoid expecting people to use non-free software to learn about contributing to free software. Too many so-called webinars are not webinars. I want to be part of something better.

So far, it’s been suggested that we could use screen as a multi-user tool [indexdata] and Krut Computer Recorder to make a screencast of it. I’ve used screen, but I’ve not used krut – it has an ubuntu download, so it looks promising at first glance.

What else would you recommend? What have you used that didn’t work? Would you be interested in the tutorials? Have you seen good tutorials covering FOSS participation, git and coding standards which we could adapt?

Posted in Koha | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Koha IRC Meeting August 2009

2009-08-06 by mjr

Quite a good turnout for the Koha general IRC meeting yesterday. I think the headlines are:

  • 3.2 enters a soft feature freeze for end of 2009-09-06;
  • UTF-8 problems and circulation bugs are blockers or criticals for 3.2;
  • user testing of 3.0.4 needed, Release date is unknown but hoped for before mid-September;
  • development of new contributor tutorials and social networks.

The software.coop has big work to do on two of those, and one other project which I want to do, so I’ll stop writing and get back to coding.

Surprisingly, I think the recent Support for Koha thread didn’t get mentioned directly at all.

Posted in Koha | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Great British Broadband Speed Lie

2009-07-29 by mjr

I don’t think it will be a surprise to anyone, but Ananova reports: No-one getting top broadband speeds based on the Ofcom/SamKnows/GfK research.

In the village where I live, our “up to 8Mbps” service is stable at about 4. As I mentioned previously, it will go faster, but it will break. Our end of the village is the “good” end. I’ve had reports that the other end of the village struggles to 384kbps. A point-to-point wifi link from the good end would be faster than the copper cables! This situation is incredible.

In general, things are slightly better for cable users – if you buy a 10Mbps service, you may well get 8. The result that really surprised me is “ISPs using ADSL1 who invest in network capacity are able to deliver speeds as good as ADSL2+ operators”. What does that means for where the bottleneck actually is and for all the expense of ADSL2+ equipment for both operators and consumers?

Disclosure: software.coop is an agent for ThePhoneCoop, including ADSL services.

Posted in ThePhoneCoop | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

SPI Voting

2009-07-28 by mjr

Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is currently electing to fill two vacant seats on its board. The dates aren’t shown on the vote pages, but on the email: voting closes at 2009-07-28 23:59:59 UTC (UK residents note: UTC not BST). In other words, if you’re an SPI member, vote now!

Here are my comments on the candidates, for what it’s worth:

  • Michael Schultheiss – his platform is very much about current skills more than future plans, but I suspect the accounting skills are enough to get elected to the current SPI;
  • Greg Sabino Mullane – yes! A reformer whose platform includes some things I want to see from SPI. A few points suggest he’s not fully aware of the current situation, but that’ll be fixed easily;
  • Jonathan McDowell – I’m glad he’s standing, but I’m disappointed by the timid “continue the good work” platform.

So, who would you like to see elected? Who do you think will get elected? What differences do you think we’ll see?

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Amazon Kindle Un-selling Books

2009-07-27 by mjr

I’ve been reading ebooks for years, since I had a Palm IIIe. It’s probably approaching ten years, looking at the sale date of the IIIe. Now I read them on my mobile phone (see app 7).

One common thread all the way through has been my scepticism of locked ebooks. I won’t buy paper books that require a secret decoder ring and I won’t buy locked ebooks. For all the (deserved?) criticism he’s been getting this month for a bizarre personal appearance, Richard Stallman’s 1997 Right to Read essay was an inspiring illustration of where that road leads.

For years, I’ve been told I was worrying about something that would never happen. No locked ebook vendor would ever be stupid enough to delete books that their customers had bought. Well it happened: Amazon unsold some Orwell books that they hadn’t really got permission to sell in the first place. I feel this is the tip of the iceberg, though. DRM and Rogue Employees | etbe – Russell Coker highlights just one more of the possible problems. Amazon has lost their unselling virginity now. If they’re not punished, they’ll do it again and again and again.

Have you bought locked ebooks? What do you think of the Amazon Un-selling Scandal? Has it changed your view at all?

Posted in Koha | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Tribute to Richard Rothwell

2009-07-24 by mjr

Some of you may remember Richard Rothwell from the AFFS conference at Handsworth a few years ago, or maybe through his work with M6-IT.

He sadly died on Friday 17th July. There is a tribute website set up for him:

“Adored son, brother, husband, father, and friend, Richard decided that he no longer wished to be here, for reasons known only to himself. All those who loved and cared about him are struggling to understand and make sense of what happened. For us the world is a sadder and lonelier place without him, and the rest of the world has lost one of its brightest stars. He will remain in our thoughts and hearts forever.”

I had heard about this in private, but the first public confirmation I read was the memorial from Richard Smedley.

I’ve not enjoyed this week so far. How’s it been for everyone else?

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

exim4 acl_whitelist_local_deny change causes some blacklisting

2009-07-17 by mjr

[Photo of Comms Mast]
This was simpler…

We test some anti-spam tools on the TTLLP mailserver. Some of those include exim ACLs that do various checks and tricks. Since the upgrade to debian 5.0, some of our incoming email had been delayed. The first problem is summarised by this NEWS entry:-

“exim4 (4.67-6) unstable; urgency=low

acl_whitelist_local_deny was renamed to acl_local_deny_exceptions
to avoid confusion. This means changes to ACLs, file names in
/etc/exim4/conf.d/acl and the exception list file names themselves.

This was my mistake. I was so preoccupied with the DEBCONFsomethingDEBCONF change during the upgrade that I overlooked this ACL rename-without-transition-or-warning. Apologies to anyone who had email delayed by that – it only resulted in a 4xx deferral and we’ll probably get it soon. Some email got through anyway.

That said, I’m a bit puzzled as to why test-exceptions is any less confusing a name than whitelist-test and I think the confusion from the renaming is worse.

The other thing that is slightly puzzling is that our my_hosts list stopped working. I’ve not found anything relevant to that one in the docs yet.

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

Consumers, Boycotts and Cooperatives

2009-07-15 by mjr

A couple of days ago, daniel stone: boycott insanity compared Boycott Novell to “people on the street shouting at the sky about the government.”

Previously, I’ve explained here why I think Boycotts are consumers doing judo on corporations and it’s still on the Boycott Novell About page. I people who boycott companies to those who just complain about them while so-called-engage with them.

Hopefully, daniel stone is just unhappy with the IRC spew (which I’ve also criticised in the past) but that’s not clear to me. That IRC spew doesn’t seem much worse than stuff I’ve seen in other projects’ channels – the main difference with BoycottNovell is that they seem to publish all of it to a blog, which really doesn’t seem smart.

On a related boycotts/consumers note, Ed Mayo, previously of New Economics Foundation and Consumer Focus, has been named as the new Chief Executive of Co-operatives UK. TTLLP is a CUK member and even though I’m sceptical after Digital Britain, at least Ed Mayo’s blog is running on free and open source software. Let’s see what happens.

Posted in Cooperatives, GNU/Linux, Wordpress and Blogs | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A DG834GUK Joins My ADSL-2+ Adventure

2009-07-14 by mjr

As I mentioned previously, I switched over to LLU and ADSL-2+ in February. Since then, I’ve suffered unstable network connections (which has been a pain, to put it mildly) and I’ve been working with ThePhoneCoop’s engineers to try to solve it.

The infernal Belkin was replaced by a modem that The Phone Co-op supplied and they’ve been gradually stepping down the DSL line speed to see if stability improves. According to the router, nothing has been changing though. It’s still been connecting at nearly 7Mbps on a line that used to do only 4.5Mbps on the bundled service, even when it was told to run at a fixed 2Mbps.

The infernal Belkin was still being used as a router and it finally gave up the ghost last week, so I replaced it with a shiny new Netgear DG834GUKv4. As well as being mostly GPL software (notably except the damned Broadcom DSL driver), it gives far more diagnostics. The telling one is that the Signal-to-Noise Ratio was hovering around 6dB. I looked it up on the Kitz information site and my fairly long line (3km-ish) probably isn’t suited to such a low target SNR. I also found a few twitter comments about SNR which reinforced my view. The standard Netgear software doesn’t offer any way to change the target myself: I asked their support service to check and they said it wasn’t offered on “Home” products.

Looking for other solutions to similar problems, I found ADSL: Significance of SNR and attenuation which pointed at The Jesus-firmware for your ADSL modem. One notable benefit of the DGTeam software is that it allows some tweaking of the SNR, as well as having later DSL drivers. I’d like to use OpenWRT, but I’ve not found time to understand the installation and configuration yet, not whether it can work the DSL. I should probably try it on one of the non-DSL wifi routers here first.

After loading the new software and changing the settings, the modem connects at 4.7Mbps with a SNR of around 11 dB. So far, I’ve had one disconnection. I’ll keep the settings under review and see if I can improve things further, then let The Phone Coop’s engineers know what I’ve done.

Posted in ThePhoneCoop | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Mobile Phone Directory: In Public Between Non-Consenting Adults and Children

2009-07-13 by mjr

[Photo of Phone]
My communications connection

According to the BBC, a mobile phone directory enquiry service launches today. If you’ve ever had a marketing call to your mobile, your number is probably on this database. It’s very difficult to remember to ask every company that you give your mobile number not to sell it to other people.

The company that’s thought up this cunning plan to make money is Connectivity. The report says that you can remove yourself from Connectivity’s service by visiting the website, but as I write this, the site says:

“The 118 800 service for mobile phone connections is currently unavailable – from this website and by phone – whilst we undertake major developments to our ‘Beta Service’ to improve the experience for our customers”

So what now? Email contact@118800.co.uk or can someone go doorstep them at Merlin House, Brunel Road, Theale, Berks?

Posted in ThePhoneCoop | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments