FS-4400 Satellite PVR

2009-01-15 by mjr

You may remember that I’m quite a satellite TV fan, having installed it in 2004 and compiled a FAQ. Over the holidays, I replaced my 4-year-old Digiquest receiver (terrible website) with a FortecStar FS-4400 PVR from Maplin.

I’d love to build a MythTV but how am I ever going to build such a small, quiet receiver for anything like that price? The FS-4400’s decoder gives a dribblingly clear picture and (one firmware upgrade later) the recorder works flawlessly. I can even watch other channels on the same transponder while recording. It has a couple of small niggles (the file manager that appears every damn power-on, the pidgin English on-screen displays and it’s too easy to activate the motor), but it seems pretty good value on the whole.

Now I’ve a dilemma. I put a 4Gb USB stick into it, just to see how I got on with the recording. I like it, but 4Gb is enough for only 2 or 3 hours and I don’t want to get into swapping sticks around like video casettes. I still don’t know what’s where on half my tapes.

I’ve seen a few places report things like Solid State Drives Getting Ready to Take Over (by Jaymi Heimbuch) with much larger capacity just around the corner, but the best rate I found today is around 1 Gb/pound for SSDs up to about 32Gb, compared to nearly 10 Gb/pound for USB-powered hard disks from around 300Gb. On the flip side, SSDs are silent and I don’t know how noisy or power-hungry the HDDs are. How would you play this?

By the way, if you care about UK TV, BERR.gov.uk is consulting about reducing Sky’s control of itv – what’s to consult about? Sky’s doing all they can through the courts to drag their feet, but we need to put the independent back into independent television! Tell them by Friday 23 January 2009, please.

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OCLC Library Data-grab Policy Countdown

2009-01-13 by mjr

There’s now about a month until the privatisation of library data described in Libraries, Cooperatives, OCLC and TTLLP happens.

There’s now a Thingology Blog series on Why libraries must reject the OCLC Policy, with a list of four actions at the end of the first part (three if you’re not in New York on Friday).

Please defend cooperation by reasserting member control of OCLC, or if that fails, please support the Open Library initiatives. Even if you’re not involved with a library, ask your public and association librarians to support these campaigns.

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For Debian Developers who watch discussions about possible GRs

2009-01-07 by mjr

I believe that most debian developers ignore discussions of possible general resolutions like the current one, until/unless they look like reaching the required number of seconds to trigger a vote.

It’s hard to prove that a group is ignoring something, but disproof is simple: please could all DDs who watch pre-proposal discussions of possible GRs please email mjr-possiblegr at debian.org. I’ll count with from -f possiblegr.mbox | wc -l in a week or so, after filtering out any emails from non-DDs.

Feel free to ask other debian developers to email if they watch reasonably likely places (planet, non-technical lists, …) for pre-proposal discussions of possible GRs. Please don’t spam debian-devel or announce lists about it, unless you’re expecting future possible GRs to be sent there. I’d welcome a quick comment if you post it anywhere.

If you can see a way to prove that a group is ignoring something, let me know. I realise that failing to disprove this isn’t the same as proving the opposite, but I think it would still be useful.

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Copyrighting the Future consultation ends this month

2009-01-06 by mjr

The Copyrighting the Future: Keeping ahead of the game consultation finishes in a month’s time (6 February). They actually called it that – “copyrighting the future” – can you believe it?

In case you haven’t seen it yet, this is the consultation that ignores the Gowers review findings and tries to start it all over again. Please respond and try to avoid term extension, DRM/TPM and other similar landmines. Any comments you can leave me to help us all would be very much appreciated!

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journals.aol.com closure botched

2009-01-05 by mjr

America OnLine (AOL) killed their blogging service – actually, all their Hometown sites – last September and I only just noticed.

AOL didn’t kill it cleanly. They could have offered 301 Moved Permanently redirects to users’ new hosting (good – maybe no interruption to users), returning a 404 Not Found with an explanation (OK – software like RSS readers would detect the serious problem) or even simply taking the hostname offline (bad, but better than what they did). Instead, AOL 301-redirected everyone to a page on their own journal (which hasn’t closed down) to “sincerely apologize for any inconvenience”. It wouldn’t have been so much inconvenience if it had been closed down cleanly.

I was only reading one journal there (Pripensulo) which I can’t find anywhere else, but I’m surprised by the incompetent webmastering. AOL’s webmasters run managing massive (if bland) websites, after all, and if they’re smart enough to do a 301 redirect to their apology, then they’re smart enough to do a useful redirect or a 404 Not Found. Why didn’t they? Don’t they care about their users? Are they trying to take SEO points from all their users and give them to People Connection?

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New Years Resolution: Avoid These Bad Ideas?

2009-01-02 by mjr

I’m not a big new year resolution maker (new year is just a side-effect of a calendaring system), but if you are, I suggest the following resolutions to avoid three bad ideas:

  1. Change your passwords and do not set it to the ship number for the Starship Enterprise, or any other of The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time – if you’re a sysadmin, make sure you are comparing user passwords against these sort of lists;
  2. Fight against cinema-style ratings for web-sites and the “campaign against free speech [because of] a wider public interest” which that implies;
  3. (Debian developers) Vote against the proposal for “future GRs would need 30 other [DDs, not people – the proposal is wrong] to support” because “There seems little rationale to support it. The more I’ve looked, the more places I’ve not found evidence for such a large seconding requirement and I know a few anecdotes about raising numbers too high and accidentally killing an organisation…”

Happy New Year!

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Looking Back: 2008 Part 3

2008-12-29 by mjr

This is the final part of my review of popular articles on my news websites during 2008. It follows part 1 and part 2, but it can be enjoyed on its own, like an nice ripe cheese. Unlike one friend, I do not like cheese for breakfast.

September
  • Are Your Free Software T-Shirts Ethical? This question got a lot of views, but no answers yet. Again, those statistics surprised me.
  • Away From Keyboard was a listing of events I attended in early September, with some links to summaries in the article and the comments. (I can’t find my Bristol Knowledge Unconference report just now. Did I post it to another site?)
October
  • The Trouble With Big Webmail built on my past comments about Yahoo and broadens them to Hotmail/Live and GoogleMail. I’m still convinced those sites remain popular because they are good at marketing, rather than being good at email. In fact, they’re so bad at email, almost no-one should use them.
  • Pulling One File From a Plesk Backup – It seems I wasn’t the only person not to know about that.
  • Nestle Boycott 20th Anniversary seems to be the only time I wrote about boycotts this year, surprisingly (I know I’m pretty militant and direct-action-y), but what more deserving target?
November
  • Which Social Bookmarking? was by far the most popular article in November and it also got lots of helpful comments. I posted my review and choices (such as they are) a few days ago.
December
  • Bristol Alternative Christmas Quiz. Everyone loves a good seasonal quiz, it seems. I didn’t get to it (arrrrrrrrrgh busy!) but I hope it went well for BWCC.
  • Smart Tricks with ssh was only the second meme-like post to make the “most popular” list this year.
  • and it’s still a bit early to evaluate articles from late December! I may add a few to this list later.

Happy New Year 2009, in case I don’t see you before then!

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Looking Back: 2008 Part 2

2008-12-27 by mjr

This is a continuation from part 1 but can be enjoyed on its own too, like a good red wine. It’s a bit early for me for red wine, though.

May
June
July
  • Standing for Election to SPI Board Again – my most popular page ever, by number of page views anyway. It was spammed to hell so often that comments are now switched off. I suspect the US Election had more to do the popularity of this article than my unsuccessful candidature for the Software in the Public Interest board.
  • Batting Against Three Strikes through the Back Door – I’m a member and ambassador for ThePhoneCoop and TTLLP are agents/resellers for them, so this misguided EU law-making was worth some of my time. Writing about it here got me a response from Neil Parish MEP that I don’t think I would have got otherwise. It’s a terrible shame he never sent a reply from Malcolm Harbour.
  • LugRadio Live Event Review – a review of one of the most populist UK free software events by one of their most vociferous critics (back before they went all Creative Commons warm and fuzzy) was always going to be popular, which is partly why I wrote it, but not the whole reason: I’m delighted that the event should return in the future. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn fantastic. “A tech conference crossed with a rocking gig by the strangest boyband ever, with a cheerleading racoon and some very cool people.”
  • Good News on the Koha 3.0.0-final Approach – another surprisingly popular marginal comment. I’ve currently broken/desynched/something my local git tree. I’m going to repair it by New Year and then start writing up more Koha explorations and sending patches upstream.
August

More to follow in a couple of days…

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Looking Back: 2008 Part 1

2008-12-25 by mjr

Over the next few days, I’m looking at the most popular articles from this site and my previous news website during 2008. I’ll be doing it in three parts.

Popularity is measured by page views from local access logs, but some articles were actually more popular in the months after they were first posted, so it’s not completely accurate, but let’s be forgiving over the holidays, OK?

January

I must have been writing rubbish because nothing got that popular at the start of the year, but some of my older pages continued to be popular throughout 2008:-

February
  • SPI Meeting Wed 27 Feb 1900Z irc.oftc.net/#spi – I think this started my regular meeting announcements, which has been a surprisingly popular series and has expanded into a whole category of SPI articles here.
  • The Myth Of Deregulation – this was meant to be a marginal rant. Its popularity (and the subsequent comments – some of which were unpublishable or their authors requested removal) surprised me and so I started writing more about social enterprise, cooperatives-sw member businesses and how they interact with GNU/Linux software and web development.
March
April
  • UK mobile micropublishing choices? – for the trip that motivated that article, I used twitter, but I’m actually updating identi.ca over XMPP from my mobile now.
  • Better Free Software Organisations? – I’ve read the Yunus book mentioned in the comments on the Advogato repost of this article and I’ve a review which will appear on this site later. It includes a bit of a flaming of the simplistic and IMO factually-incorrect dismissal of cooperative businesses, so I wonder if it will get a few responses from Yunus-fans.
  • Explaining web site improvements: what’s important to you? It seems that April was a good time for asking questions: this is a third popular question-based article. The website discussed has now been approved and ordered from TTLLP, but the work is not yet scheduled.

That’s the first few months of 2008 done. I’ll post the next few months in a couple of days. Hope you’re enjoying the holidays if you’re having them. I’m sure I am 😉

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Representing Developers

2008-12-24 by mjr

Open and voluntary membership is a point of principle for me, so I see SPI’s membership structure as a big plus. As I wrote back in August:

In my opinion, a key difference of Software in the Public Interest is that it is managed by free software developers in a more-or-less democratic fashion. Even though I’ve failed in two elections, I still think it’s better than the alternatives.

One of the other major free software organisations has moved in the right direction this month, with the announcement that FSFE adds Fellowship representation to General Assembly. It’s not perfect – I still disagree with fellowship being conditional on payment instead of effort – but I think getting democratic representation in FSF Europe is a big step forwards for free software developers. If only FSF.org would do that too.

One challenge of representation is that members have a responsibility to oversee the organisation. That’s a bit difficult if the board adds reports and resolutions to the agenda at the last minute, which happened at the December 2008 meeting. Ian Jackson has asked the board to “arrange that all the appropriate notifications are sent” and I ask other SPI members (contributing or non-contributing – both seem to be fine for this) to second it.

Finally, happy Christmas or whatever other festival you’re celebrating (if any).

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