What was in my Nutsack? (from Lug Radio Live)

2008-07-24 by mjr


The notorious nutsack (cc-by-2.0)

The conference pack for LugRadioLive was called a “nutsack” for some reason (anyone know why?). It seems like a pretty good pack, as far as these things go.

First of all, it’s a durable paper bag, so much greener than plastic. It contained:

  • the event programme/schedule
  • a LUGRADIO LIVE badge which I only discovered when I tipped the bag out,
  • a key-shaped yahoo keyring – I don’t know what it’s meant to symbolise and I already have one far-too-big novelty keyring – seems like a total waste of metal
  • UKUUG t-shirt with amusing slogan on the back and a membership application form – tempting, especially since AFFS seems to be idling since I quit and ORG is a self-perpetuator AFAICT
  • flier for PyCon UK 12-14 Sep 2008 Birmingham
  • subscription form for the £50/year Linux Magazine
  • flier for LinuxPro Magazine’s conference streaming which says “no special software is required”. Well, users actually have a choice of Java, MPlayer, Real, WindowsMediaPlayer or anything else which can view an Ogg Theora stream, which is pretty good, but not quite “no special software”. ffplay seemed unhappy in my first tests, with errors like “[vorbis @ 0xb7dbc430]Not a Vorbis I audio packet.
    [theora @ 0xb7dbc430]Warning, unsupported keyframe coding type?!
    [theora @ 0xb7dbc430]Header packet passed to frame decoder, skipping” which I’ll follow up RSN, unless any kind soul knows how to fix that.
  • a bytemark pen – always handy to advertise a decent hosting company at people in business meetings, but I don’t think it’s refillable, so that’s not going to last long,
  • a fun goodbye postcard from Birmingham Perl Mongers to LugRadio – it’s actually a digital photo print, which seems a really good idea that I’ve not seen done before
  • CDs of ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition (oh well) and openSUSE 11.0 (oh dear)

All in all, smarter than your average conference pack… or am I just thinking that because it looks a bit like a picnic?

Posted in Education, Training and Information, GNU/Linux, Web Development | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments

LugRadio Live Event Review, Part Web2.0

2008-07-23 by mjr


LUGRadioLive 2008 by sheilaellen (cc-by-2.0)

One aspect I didn’t mention in the LugRadio Live Event Review was how old-fashioned it seemed in some ways.

I guess I’ve got used to seeing conferences experimenting with various web2.0 toys like live-blogging, feedback walls and so on, or the excellent live video streaming of DebConfs, but it was a bit of a surprise to find myself the only person in the audience who connected to the IRC channel from the event.

One possible reason for that was that the wireless network was a bit difficult, or at least that was what I was told. I felt quite smug with my 3G smartphone IRC client (which I’ll blog about later) until Rufus Pollock mentioned the 800+ patents involved in 3G. Damn – I guess I hate freedom.

In one way, I guess it’s appropriate if the network wasn’t up to the task. Broken networks were a regular feature of early ALUG meetings, as the end of this email hints.

Web2.0 was there a little bit. There was a facebook page (which I accidentally spammed while travelling to the event), flickr:lugradiolive and a twitter link of #lugradiolive – but how does that work? There’s no user called lugradiolive and you can’t have usernames containing # Update: twitter:#lugradiolive (thanks to Dave Briggs for the explanation in a comment).

Anyway, seeing as there will be another LUG Radio Live, maybe we can arrange something more interactive but free-software-friendly for 2009?

More reviews I’ve read: davee: Lugradio-in’ makes me feel good…, Peter Cannon: The party’s over for LugRadio Live and No’: Lugradio Undead – but why aren’t more people writing about this event? There seemed to be enough there. Or are they out there but I’m just not seeing them?

Posted in Drupal, Education, Training and Information, GNU/Linux, Koha, Web Development | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

System Problems Come In Threes Too

2008-07-22 by mjr

There’s an old saying that bad luck comes in threes. Today, I am doing unexpected work because:-

  1. one webserver was reinstalled instead of the upgrade I was expecting,
  2. another webserver was cracked and defaced (combination of two known security problems that we didn’t fix quickly enough, but that’s the server owner’s call really), and
  3. my internet connection keeps going offline for about 20 seconds at a time, which is just enough to stall ssh and VoIP, but not enough to debug.

Hopefully that’s it for today because there are other tasks I want to do. If I’m a bit slow to reply, now you know why! Sorry to anyone who was expecting me to do something else today – I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Posted in GNU/Linux, Koha, OSCommerce, Web Development | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

LugRadio Live Event Review

2008-07-22 by mjr


LUGRadioLive 2008 by sheilaellen (cc-by-2.0)

This weekend, I learnt lots of things while at LugRadio Live in Wolverhampton. One thing was the surprising delay between posting something on this site and it actually appearing in the feed on my mobile phone. Another is that I can’t post to my new blog hosting from my mobile phone, which I’ll debug Real Soon Now. So, this is a bit later than when I first wrote it and it’s now one post instead of seven or so…

Thanks to some unexplained delay travelling through Birmingham, I walked into LugRadio Live during the Introduction. The venue was generally pretty good, but the stage obstructed the entrance the acoustics in the atrium only seemed to work for the four gents. No idea what they said: I got past the stage into the audience and it finished almost immediately.

For the first talk session, I went to see Rufus Pollock of Open Knowledge Foundation introduce a plan for the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network. Seems like a good idea. I’ve tons of questions, but I can’t quite get them into words, I don’t know when I’ll have time for this and I’m not sure they really matter anyway. I think I’ll mention CKAN to some librarians anyway and see what they make of it.

I expected Emma Jane Hogbin‘s “Form an orderly queue, ladies” to start an argument with the usual chix silliness but I was pleasantly surprised by how reasonable the advice was. In fact, the speaker also criticised the “chix” movements, although it appeared she participates in some women-only clubs, so not a 100% win for equality there. Sadly, much of the talk has been overshadowed in my mind by the memory of a giant furry racoon walking in unexpectedly, so I’ll probably grab the video of the LRL-USA version sometime soon.

James Hooker‘s talk titled “Taming the dragons — entrepreneurship and VCs” launched venturex as described on his own site already (along with more talk descriptions). It was an interesting demo, but it requires hackers to sell some votes in their companies to Venture Capitalists, which I believe is a bad thing for free software developers to do. We need to look more at a form of social entrepreneurism.</soapbox> I tried to ask a question, but the terrible atrium acoustics did funny things with my not-so-good hearing and I lost my way somewhat.

At the end of that talk, I got chatting to an interesting web developer from Leicester who also forsook The Gong-a-Thong Lightbulb Talk Extravaganza and headed up to the Lightning Stage for Robert Collins and the Bzr talk. As well as some glimpses of how it’s changed since forking from tla, it was interesting to see a real (imperfect) demo and a non-Emacs version control GUI. The web interface for casual users to submit patches sounded very interesting and I also learned that some people pronounce “svn” like “Sven”. Most things that Robert thought were benefits sounded like drawbacks to me, so I’ll stay with git for now.

Steve Lamb‘s Green IT talk was the last presentation I saw. This talk really disappointed me because it seemed to be skewed towards the corporate governance nonsense instead of seeing Green IT as a vital pragmatic step, mentioning points I’d seen put more clearly elsewhere, as well as advertising Vista virtualisation and some panoramic webcam from Microsoft (who employ him) that doesn’t work with any free software, according to a deserved verbal shoe-ing in the Q+A. Only thing I remember that seems useful: charging from USB is more efficient than using wallwarts. Is that right?

Finally, the main event: LugRadio Live and Unleashed. It opened with the shock announcement that LRL will continue into 2009, as announced elsewhere already. The rest of the madness will presumably appear online shortly and I don’t remember it well enough to do it justice…

A tech conference crossed with a rocking gig by the strangest boyband ever, with a cheerleading racoon and some very cool people. I’ll try to be at LRL 2009. Will you be there? Were you at LRL this last weekend?

Posted in Education, Training and Information, GNU/Linux, Koha, Web Development | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Lug! Radio! Live! 2008!

2008-07-19 by mjr

All being well, as this post appears, I’m on my bike on the first leg of my journey to LugRadiO Live UK 2008 in Wolverhampton, blasting my way past WordCampUK who daftly picked the same day. However, I plan to post a report from LRL, while Dave Briggs will post from WordCUK.

Now, shall I heckle Open Knowledge, Community-Community-Community or Beard?

Posted in Education, Training and Information, GNU/Linux, Web Development, Wordpress and Blogs | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Batting Against Three Strikes through the Back Door

2008-07-17 by mjr

One of the reasons that I didn’t post much last week was that I was contacting some of my MEPs as part of the Telecom Packet Action in order to help defend cooperative software distribution and use. This is a bit longer than my usual posts and no software is announced below, but I’m posting it here in the hope that more people will take part in this campaign that affects every EU internet user.

In short, some MEPs that I remember from the Software Patent campaign proposed amendments that would enable the unpopular three-strikes regime, where internet users could be disconnected and fined if they had three allegations of copyright infringement made (not necessarily proved AIUI) against them, and ISPs could be required to block legal peer-to-peer cooperative distribution systems like BitTorrent. ISPs would also have to distribute official advice about proper internet use and I remember how good that often is. Note that three-strikes wasn’t explicit in the amendments, but there did appear to be loopholes which could be used to allow it, such as only prohibiting technical feature requirements. For longer descriptions, see articles by La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net) and The Open Rights Group.

The UK Independence Party MEPs replied quickly that they would vote against, mainly because of the source of the legislation. I don’t completely agree with that, but at least UKIP does what it says on the tin.

Neil Parish MEP of the Conservatives sent me back a reply which referred to unknown numbering (H1, K1 and so on) and generally seemed like a mish-mash of replies that other people had received. I replied with questions about several aspects, including asking where his numbering came from, and I’ve not seen an answer yet. I’ll email him again in a few days because it’s been over a week.

I was really annoyed by the reported complaints by Malcolm Harbour (Conservatives lead MEP on this issue) about how voters have reacted to these amendments, where he called it “scaremongering” amongst other things. No mongering was required – those amendments are damn scary. See comments from a media solicitor at the end of a BBC report:-

“The amendment will cause several problems, firstly, many broadband users routinely transfer large files which are encrypted.

“Many of these are acting quite legitimately and in order to determine whether or not such large files are or are not the produce of illicit file sharing the ISP will have to carry out an unprecedented degree of analysis of its customers’ traffic. “Furthermore, computers are frequently shared – within offices, within homes, within educational institutions and inadvertently, where wrong-doers “piggy back” on an inadequately secured Wi-Fi connection.

“All this raises the spectre of people losing internet access – for reasons which are no fault of their own.”

The main thing that these actions over the last few years have taught me is the broken state of European Union decision-making. I know I’m sometimes dissatisfied with problems in local and civil democracy, but the EU is a good idea whose democracy and accountability seems broken on a massive scale. There are just too many disconnects, as far as the ordinary voter can see. We put things in to elections and consultations and get bizarre law-making like this. If we act to correct the bizarre law-making, some MEPs start criticising us quite severely.

And what kind of stupid representative system allows the representatives to repeatedly blame the voters but still be safely elected because of their high position on their party’s list? I’d love a simple, reformist constitution that’s simple enough for people to actually understand, approve in referendums and participate in the EU effectively. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, though.

Posted in GNU/Linux, ThePhoneCoop, Web Development | Tagged | 3 Comments

Standing for Election to SPI Board Again

2008-07-16 by mjr

Software in the Public Interest is a US tax-exempt not-for-profit organisation that supports a number of free software projects that I like – including debian, GNUstep and drupal – and it’s one of the most open and democratic free software organisations in the world.

SPI’s next board meeting is today (Wednesday) at 1900 UTC on irc.oftc.net #spi and logs should appear here and on spi-general less than a day after. I’ve not seen a formal announcement yet, but I expect the agenda will appear here. (Update: the meeting has been postponed until after the election, but that wasn’t announced.) I’ve posted the log of the last board meeting and the log of the annual meeting to spi-general.

I’m standing for election to the board for the second time. My platform contains four main proposals:-

  1. Anonymise SPI votes – all votes are traceable at present
  2. More SPI news – including getting the official announcements out on time
  3. Consult members more – run a web panel, if members are interested
  4. Report on SPI performance – at least some annual report

and free software developers who have joined SPI (at no cost) can vote for me online.

If you’ve got any questions about my platform, please ask them here – or anywhere else that’s appropriate – and I’ll try to answer. I think it’s a much better platform because I learnt a lot from the last campaign, so I hope you’ll vote for me.

Posted in Drupal, GNU/Linux, SPI | Tagged | 3 Comments

Good News on the Koha 3.0.0-final Approach

2008-07-15 by mjr

Koha 3.0.0-final is very close, delayed mainly by a few serials bugs and translation updates as far as I know, but the big news recently has been Venezuela’s National Library evaluated, decided to deploy the Koha Integrated Library System — ecorrado which was very good to see.

Myself, I’m in a world of RFID-tag-related pain, which I’ll describe and publish code for as soon as it stops hurting, including perl modules like RFID::Reader::TRF7960::Serial and RFID::Reader::TRF7960::SSL. (Contact me if you want them before I get free time, please.)

I also need to remember how to publish git trees to alioth collab-maint. Too many tasks, too little time.

Posted in Koha | Tagged | 1 Comment

Welcome to Software Cooperative News

2008-07-07 by mjr

I’ve moved to new, sponsored blog hosting which will also republish some articles from other sites that I write on. I’m doing quite a bit of WordPress-based work now, so it makes sense for me to use it too.

I’ll be reconfiguring my other sites to point to this one over the next few days. The actual content of the posts won’t be changing much – no pay-for-post here – but it should open up a few more options.

Just to give some sort of continuity, here are links to archives of my previous main blogs: April-July 2008, 2005-April 2008.

If you’ve got any questions about the changes, please ask them in a comment… Also, if you spot any outrageously bad sponsors on the site, let me know – I’ve blocked one category already.

Posted in Web Development, Wordpress and Blogs | 2 Comments