Planet Birmingham

Ekiga VoIP client on Windows

2008-05-22T12:13:54+00:00

I have used Ekiga quite a bit. It is one of the main free software voice over IP clients. It is often installed by default on many GNOME-based systems such as many free software distributions, and it is also available on Solaris.

It also now has a Windows port, so I thought I would try it out. Giving any remaining Windows-using relatives Ekiga means they can chat to you online without you having to install proprietary phone clients that do strange things on your network.

To start with, you need a SIP username, I got a free SIP username from Ekiga's online-registration, but you can get one from any SIP provider, or you can be your own provider by running your own SIP server such as Asterisk.

To start with, lets just use Ekiga's free usernames.

So once you have a SIP username, we want to download Ekiga. the Windows binary is available from Ekiga's Windows-Users page.

Download the exe and click on it. This will bring up a little box asking you for your language. My first language, English, was the default so I went with that.

Next comes the Ekiga Setup Wizard:

Press next twice and you get this:

Press finish. I did this on Windows XP, which brought up a warning me that Ekiga is attempting to connect the Internet. Being a program to chat over the Internet, I pressed "Unblock":

Next is the First Time Configuration Assistant.

It will ask you for your SIP username and password (i.e. the username we created at the beginning of this article), and it will try to detect your microphone, speakers and webcam (if you have one).

Press "Forward" a lot and read through each of the screens. when you are done it will summarise your choices:

Press "Apply" if you are happy, or press "Back" to change them.

So now hopefully you are done with all the hard work. You should see the main Ekiga interface like this:

The first icon on the right allows you to open a text chat with the person you are talking to.

So far, I only really use Ekiga to call my friends over the Internet, I have never phoned a landline, therefore I turned the numberpad off, you can do this by clicking the second item on the left, or by going to the "View" menu, and choosing "View Mode" then "Videophone".

Typing usernames into the address bar is a bit dull, so pressing the third icon on the left of the interface brings up the address book. If you add your friends to the address book then you can click on them rather than having to remember their SIP username.

Ekiga has many more features, but you can easily discover most of them yourself.

Now you probably want to test it. Put sip:500@ekiga.net in the address bar and press enter. This will call the Ekiga 500 echo service. It is a robot who will echo back whatever you tell it, this way you can tell whether your connection, microphone and speakers are working properly.

Happy chatting!

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

List files recursively by modified time

2008-05-21T23:28:37+00:00

Often when using my computer, I will have a "project", by this I mean a directory containing an arbitrary number of files and directories. This could be a software project, or a website, or an essay, or whatever.

So when going back to a project, I might want a quick overview of what has been going on. This is what my filehistory.py script is for. It recursively orders your project files by last modified date.

The unique feature is that it mixes them all together as one stream. There is of course a tradeoff, the larger the number of files, the longer it takes, however it is quite fine for projects of up to several thousand files.

There are a few command line arguments:

By default, the output is just the filepaths, if you use -v then it outputs timestamps as well.
By default, it will output warnings if it finds permission errors or malformed symlinks in your project. If you want to suppress these messages, use -q.
By default, it will output all the files within your project. If you want to specify the number of lines then use -n followed by the number. So -n 20 will output the most recently edited files.

If you followed my post about making a scripts-directory, then you can just make the Python file executable and drop the Python file into it.

It really comes into its own when you pipe it to other tools. For example, to copy the last 20 modified files to a USB stick mounted at /media/disk :

filehistory.py -q -n 20 | xargs -I x cp x /media/disk/

So feel free to check out my filehistory script. As you know I use Linux, but I think this particular script should work on Windows/Mac as well.

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

Open Source @ Construction Company

2008-05-21T16:01:00+00:00

Over the past few weeks I’ve been helping my Uncle out by setting up a few computers for him. He wanted a laptop to take out ‘on-site’ - and a Desktop for a new employee.

Unfortunately, the ASUS eee901 is not yet available, and the 7″ series is slightly too small for his perceived ‘on-site’ usage, so he ended up getting a Toshiba Laptop and HP Desktop - both running Windows Vista (against my advice).

So, three weeks on, he’s not happy with Vista at all. Having already spent a fair bit of cash on the two machines, he was little disappointed that some ‘core software’ (his term) was still not installed. The new “Live Mail” application was also far too complicated compared to his Outlook Express - the change in UI wasn’t welcome.

So, I installed Mozilla Thunderbird onto both computers, and OpenOffice.org. I do have to admit to setting the default file-format to Windows 97/XP/2003 formats though (.doc, .xls and .ppt). I’d like to not do this, but for simplicities sake when dealing with clients - it was the easier option.

Aside from running the proprietary accounts software “Foundation Evolution” - I’ve got the company running on a very open-’saucy’ setup. The best thing about it has been the change in attitude towards the software since originally buying the PCs. After initially thinking that my enthusiasm for the ASUS eee was due to the Linux OS on it - it seems likely that when the 9″ series come out, that will be an addition to the “Construction Computing Team”.

The best new was though that I received a call this morning asking me how to install OpenOffice.org on all of the computers and get rid of MS Office & install Thunderbird on all the machines. With the old setup, there would have been a training overhead in having to run different versions of the same software on all four PCs - however, with the Open Source Setup, all the computers, despite being purchased at different times, can run the same software - giving the users the opportunity to use the computers to help run the business, rather than having to work out how to use that particular version of the program.

Smile

RIP Bicycle (Ridgeback Supernova)

2008-05-20T16:52:13+00:00

Hopefully nothing else is going to die on me this week, but yesterday my bicycle suffered a fatal injury. I knew the frame was cracked in one place, and was about to take it to A&E (bike shop) but it beat me to it.

See : here for the gory pictures

When I did take it to the bike shop this morning, I discovered it had another crack in the seat stem... so in total - 3 defects on one frame. Nice.

Free Software - Who benefits?

2008-05-20T14:51:40+00:00

I’ve been thinking alot recently about the power of free software and how it could be put to better use to innovate in companies. At the moment, most of it is used to replace old proprietary blobs around offices, and has very much the same components as the old system - only cheaper.

However, with free software there are many more benefits that just being cheaper than paying for a legacy software license for things like file storage and printer servers. There are many cases when I look at small/medium sized companies and see how their entire business model could benefit from adopting an Open Source system as the backbone to what their business does.

In the past, IT has been a tool which allows businesses to go about their business - only recently has it actually become the business of businesses. It’s a shame though, because as more and more businesses sell services based on free software - in essence it becomes standard customised solutions at a slight discount to the client, and without licensing overheads for the vendor.

What I’d like to see is the promotion of open source and open standards, and the ability for as much software to work in tandem with other stuff. There’s a heck of a lot of quality free software out there that companies should be able to utilise. Rather than simply provide free software on a plate, efforts should be made to educate the users on what exactly they are getting. How extensible the packages are and how to utilise them to their greatest benefit.

I don’t know how other people feel, but setting up a new company legally incurs some costs - and when you add MS licenses to the mix, for just a single PC, it can double the cost. I’ve recently set up a business who’d just bought a couple of new PCs. They both came with Vista (laptop and Desktop). I’ve been runnning purely Open Source Software on those two PCs for the company (aside from Vista) - and they’re very happy with all the software, it does exactly what they need. The next step is for me to speed them up, by switching them over to ubuntu. I can see this happening within the next six months. However, I’ll also leave 1 Windows XP machine intact, so they can use it for remote-desktop connection for running some legacy software.

Neat!

Time to learn GPG

2008-05-20T11:44:10+00:00

I think it’s about time that people became aware of the advantages of the GnuPrivacyGuard.

Why?

According the to BBC the government are considering keeping a database of every phone call made and every email sent. Now, it’s already possible to do this with your current email communications - and very few people bother to encrypt their mail to make sure that only the recipient can read it.

Email passes over a network in plain text - thereby anything sent in a email is easy to ’sniff’ out and read. With gpg - you encrypt the mail with a password - then the only person that can read the mail is the person that knows that password.. the recipient of the email.

It’s a clever system, so here’s a link to Red Hat Magazine’s article on GPG.

For a Windows-based solution, try WinGPG.

If we can’t change the system, then we at least need to protect ourselves from it.

Stop Tracking Me!

2008-05-20T11:23:40+00:00

I’ve just read an article on The Register which detailed a system that Shopping Centres are now using to track people’s movements around a shopping centre using their Mobile Phone. When a phone registers with a network, it gets a TMSI address (a bit like a dynamic IP address) - and this PATH software is able to locate a handset to within a couple of metres - good enough to track which shop punters are going into.

Even though the makers say that each individual TMSI is refreshed at each phone reset - with more and more people leaving their phones on for sustained periods - it’s not particularly outrageous to say that if I worked out my own TMSI, then the data is no longer anonymous.

Anyway - that’s a little beside the point. When I walk into a shopping centre, there are plenty of CCTV cameras. I believe the mandate for putting them there is for my protection, rather than tracking my consumer habits. Imagine some ‘hoody’ walking into a shopping centre, stealing something - then getting his phone confiscated by Police to work out the TMSI to see where the ‘hoody’ has been for the last few hours. It’s technically possible with this new system.

With the advance of technology, there are loads of completely un-sexy but massively important questions that need to be answered. At the moment the government and authorities are simply seeing £’s. There’s technology being put together and used that infringes far more on our civil liberties than someone owning a copy of a terrorism handbook.

So, let’s get un-sexy and start discussing what we want from technology. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

BBC Click! Online - Build a PC using Free Software

2008-05-19T17:22:49+00:00

BBC Click! Online - Watch the Show

Ok, so they ‘bend’ RMS’s definition of ‘free’ software in some places - but it’s still a fantastic 25 minute program for John Doe.

Enjoy!

Noise, Chaos, Freedom, Knowledge and Progress

2008-05-19T11:46:06+00:00

Take a look at this, then read the blog.

Chaos

In a recent conversation, I was discussing how the internet has given anyone the ability to broadcast their ideas/message. On the whole, I saw it as a good thing. The ‘blogosphere’ is full of interesting articles and opinions on things that interest me. I directly work in the software industry, therefore the majority of posts are relevant. Those related to software itself; development and ethics - but also the ability for non-tech minded people to produce and utilise software/internet to get their message across.

Whilst for academic level writings there is an argument that information should be ‘peer-reviewed’ before being published - with the internet there is very rarely self-critical analysis before something gets published. I know I rarely read through a post more that once after it has been typed. So what effect does that have on information?

Many, if not all of the lecturers that I knew at University were adamant that searching for information on the internet was a bad idea. Groups on facebook like “I’m going to Wikipedia my degree” probably didn’t help with their perception of the value of the internet. We were forced into using Library and Archive information that could be accredited to ‘respectable’ institutions.

Whilst this may make it easier for the lecturers to qualify the references when looking through the bibliography, it massively undermines the value of the internet. There’s so much noise out there that I think it can provide an inspiration. We’re all from massively different backgrounds with so many differences and similarities that there’s a mine of experience to tap. It’s often the case that academics sometimes have to look outside their ‘circle’ of expertise in order to answer certain questions. Fermat’s last theorem was only solved through incorporating what was seen as a completely unrelated method into the solution. This is where the magic on the internet can really have tangible effects.

As educated lay people, many of us read into obscure subjects at a very shallow level. For example, whilst never being capable of solving Fermat’s last theorem myself, it was interesting to read Simon Singh’s book on the topic. I hold a degree in Psychology and Business; yet work in the realms of Free/Libre Open Source Software. They’re hardly what one would call a ’standard’ set of experiences. Yet there’s so many more dimensions to my personal experiences. The power of them relies in linking them.

Thinkers and do-ers.

It’s about time now that I realised that I’m not going to solve World Hunger, or attain World Peace and disarmament and make the world a better place. I’m not likely to come up with an idea that’ll make the happen. I’m also not going to create a search algorithm to match that of Google - or achieve something major on the internet in a sector that hasn’t even been conceived yet. However, I have the power to link people - to make people talk and bring ideas together. I have the ability to make friends with people and get them talking. I have the ability to critically evaluate other people’s ideas and make them better.

So then, you may not hear of “Andy Loughran” as some genius that has just released a new software package, or solved massive social issues. But I’ll carry on doing my little bit and hoping that lady luck finds me in the right place sometime in the future.

Epiphany and Webkit 2008

2008-05-18T21:50:24+00:00

Last summer, at GUADEC here in Birmingham, the cool young dudes first integrated Webkit as an experimental toolkit for the Epiphany web browser. Now they are working to make WebKit as the main backend for Epiphany. It is a very small team indeed, but their aim is to finish the migration by GNOME 2.26 in March 2009; if we are lucky they may have finished by GNOME 2.24 this September. The old branch with the Mozilla gecko back end is very stable and will be released as 2.24 if the Webkit migration is not finished.

This is exciting for a number of reasons, firstly we will have a fast and light, GNOME integrated browser. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, if Webkit becomes a default GNOME library then the same browser toolkit is available in KDE desktops, GNOME desktops and Apple OS X desktops, allowing a new generation of rich client web mashup applications.

I tried Epiphany with the Webkit backend last year, it was pretty raw then. The centre of the window worked as a web browser, but it ignored the toolbars and buttons at the top of the application. So how is it 10 months later?

Pretty good I say. Of course, it is still early days, and they need a lot of help removing the old unneeded code and binding the interface to Webkit. If you know C and want to get in to an interesting open source project, this might be a good project to join as they are basically restarting a lot of it.

My adventure installing Epiphany

I wish I had a spare Gentoo machine that I could use for this, but they are all busy with important things. On Gentoo they have made ebuilds for it in the overlays that take the latest version down.

So I used a spare Ubuntu machine, I started by getting rid of anything to do with WebKit or epiphany that has been installed via Ubuntu, at time of writing these are all too old.

Then I checked out all the development versions I need:

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/libsoup/trunk libsoup
svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/epiphany/trunk epiphany
svn co http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk webkit

The last took a while as it checks out the complete source tree for every platform, I didn't actually need a lot of this, so another time, if time or badwidth is a concern then I might want to try to work out a more specific checkout command.

Then while that is running, I got the other required dependencies.

sudo apt-get install libicu-dev libxslt1-dev libsqlite3-dev libjpeg62-dev \
libpng12-dev gperf bison libcurl4-gnutls-dev flex gtk-doc-tools

Then I went into the libsoup directory and compiled it:

cd libsoup
./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

Then webkit had finished downloading by the time libsoup is done. So I went into the Webkit directory and tried to compile it with this:

cd ../webkit
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local --enable-svg-experimental --with-font-backend=pango \
--with-http-backend=soup
make
sudo make install

This didn't work, so (after make distclean), I googled and tried the method used by guy called Peter Upfold. This uses QT's qmake to build WebKit-gtk, bit of a contradiction, but it works at least:

export PREFIX=/usr/local
./WebKitTools/Scripts/build-webkit --qmakearg=WEBKIT_INC_DIR=$PREFIX/include/WebKit \
--qmakearg=WEBKIT_LIB_DIR=$PREFIX/lib --gtk --qmake=qmake-qt4
cd WebKitBuild/Release/
sudo make install

Then I waited a while again.

Next update the shared library cache:

sudo ldconfig

Then I did epiphany, this was pretty quick,

cd ../epiphany
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

Then epiphany worked like a charm.

Acid2 Test, no problem:

In the Acid3 Test, Firefox 3 only scored 71. What about Epiphany, well still no problem:

Anyhow, should be interesting what they come up with in the first Epiphany WebKit release.

Please do Digg or StumbleUpon this article,

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

RIP Cassie

2008-05-18T18:53:29+00:00

Yesterday (17th of May 2008), Cassie (the dog) died. She signed off peacefully on a campsite near Bromyard (Herefordshire) after a sudden unknown illness that started in the morning. She was subsequently buried under a blooming damsen tree on my mother's farm.

She'll be best remembered for her ability to :

bite unsuspecting individuals (Alex) and family members (Emily),
producing some horrible smells,
obediance,
loyalty
and a night time trouble making streak (bin emptying and weeing on the fridge/freezer!)

RIP Cassie - aged 11, possibly 12.

Poem

2008-05-17T22:31:38+00:00

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

David Herbert Lawrence

An Introduction to ReStructuredText

2008-05-17T16:03:11+00:00

Writing text

There are many ways to markup plain text. There is SGML and its off-shoot HTML. Later came XML, a replacement for SGML, a general-purpose way of making markup languages, one of which is XHTML, which is what you are using to view this page now.

There is also LaTeX, which is a markup used for typesetting in various contexts, especially in academic fields where complex mathematical equations are used.

With all these formats, the marked up document is plain text, and then rendered into its final form, that form may be paper, or it may be a browser window. The downside to these formats is that the marked up plain text document is ugly - full of random angle brackets and letters and words entered into the text that you are trying to read. While after using HTML for a decade I can more or less block it out, the plain text form is far less readable because of the markup.

Enter reStructuredText

reStructuredText is a markup language that does things differently. It uses more natural looking markup with a focus on readability so reStructuredText can be easily read and shared in its plain text form. You can then automatically processes the document into XML (called Docutils XML), and from there it can go into XHTML, LaTeX, OpenDocument, Docbook, or any other format that you can get to from XML. So readable, yet maps to XML in a well thought out way.

If you are going to abbreviate reStructuredText, then use 'rst', don't use 'rest' because that gets confusing with Representational State Transfer, a completely different thing altogether.

I have jumped in the deep-end and I am using reStructuredText to write my posts in this new version of the site, and it is an optional markup format for people leaving their opinions in the discussion/comments section (you don't need to use it to leave a comment).

While I have just got into it, reStructuredText has been around for several years, and has been most prominently used for creating Python documentation, however, it is a general purpose and extensible markup language that can be used in many different contexts.

Some people use it to create text for the web or for standalone documents. It can also be used wherever you might have made a one-off markup format, such as on a web forum, wiki or comments section.

reStructuredText everywhere

The reference implementation of a reStructuredText parser is called Docutils which is written in Python (but this can be used from many languages). Docutils is very easy to use in your application to process reStructuredText.

If you do not have docutils on your system already then it is available from all Linux/BSD package managers. For Windows, follow the installation-instructions.

There are also third-party parsers in Perl, Java, Haskell and probably more that I have not heard of. There are also plugins for text editors and plugins for lots of web frameworks, content management systems and web log software.

As explained in the last post, Django comes with reStructuredText support (bindings to docutils) out of the box. Lastly, there are also lots of cute reStructuredText website generators that allow you generate a website from a set of reStructuredText files. For example, Michael's rest2web, Sphinx,which is used to create the new Python 2.6/Python 3000 documentation, and Damien Baty's Soho.

Very quick reStructuredText (permalink to markup)

Okay, enough blab, lets get into it. There is very comprehensive set of markup available, but I will just cover a few basic ones that are always useful.

There is no need for paragraph tags or linebreak tags; to make a paragraph, you just make a paragraph, to break a line you just break a line.

To mark something with emphasis (i.e. italic), you use a star around the word or pharse: *emphasised text* becomes emphasised text.

Two stars are for strong emphasis (i.e. bold). Like so:

Hyperlinks

To make a hyperlink, you just start the text with http:// . So http://commandline.org.uk/ becomes: http://commandline.org.uk/

If you want to do a named hyperlink, then you need two parts. First, you put an underscore after the name, for example Zeth_ will become Zeth

Then you need a target to go with that name. You specify the target with two dots, a space and an underscore:

.. _Zeth: http://commandline.org.uk/

The line with the target can go anywhere in the document. For example, some people put the target line straight after the paragraph that has the name in. However, in a long document, it is often tidier to put all the targets at the end.

Lists

To make an unordered list (i.e. a bullet list), just start the line with a star, plus or hyphen, for example:

* Green eggs
* Ham

Becomes:

Green eggs
Ham

For a numerated list, just start the line with the number and a dot, for example:

1. Green eggs
2. Ham

Becomes:

Green eggs
Ham

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. By default, the core of reStructuredText is broadly feature equivalent to HTML. However, reStructuredText is very flexible and allows you to go beyond that core, as we shall look at next.

Directives

To markup a piece of more advanced functionality, you use a 'directive'. Directives are where reStructuredText shines over similar markup languages. Directives are extensions to the main markup, some directives are included by default (analogous to a standard library), others can be added by yourself or from getting them from the web or wherever. I will give an example of a standard directive, then an example of a third-party directive.

A directive has four parts. First you have some markup declaring the directive itself (two dots), second comes the directive name, third is some markup that says here is the content (two colons), lastly there is the content.

Two dots, the name, two colons, the content.

.. name :: content

So to display an image, you use the image directive.

You write two dots, a space, the word "image", two colons and then the URL:

.. image:: \http://commandline.org.uk/images/whokilledtux.png

Becomes:

To share source code, firstly you start with the source code directive, this is two dots, the directive name (source code), followed by two dots; secondly, we have the name of the language the source code is in. Then we leave a blank line, then we write the source code indented (preferably with four spaces ;-)

So for example:

.. sourcecode:: python

    import os
    for i in os.uname():
        print i

Will become:

import os
for i in os.uname():
    print i

Here is the list of supported languages on this site.

There you go, if you made it this far then you can use ReStructuredText, give it a go! You can start by leaving a comment in ReStructuredText format!

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

Back to Linux

2008-05-17T14:32:01+00:00

Those who know me usually know me as an advocate of the Mac. Now, with a site named Danux, a great defender of open source and formally freelancing as a sys admin/developer this might seem somewhat strange. I had good reasons, which I'm sure I've listed to anyone who has challenged me over this. To me Linux always required too much effort for day to day computing. On a server I wouldn't consider anything but Debian, but when all I want to do is watch a movie, listen to music, chat or just use my computer the mac suited my needs much better. I've never adopted morals to my computing, they are simply a tool and I want the most technically able to tool for whatever job it is I'm doing.

But now I have changed, what I want from my computer cannot be provided by a mac any more. The little problems have set in, the primary one being that whatever any one says, OS X cannot imitate a Linux development environment. I've had to start compiling an awful lot of programs, for example, apache 2, PHP and a few python modules just to get them to behave exactly how they would on the live servers. I've tried setting up a Linux install using parallels but the networking options provide a lot to be desired. These are all the exact reasons why I left Linux in the first place, too much administration required for me to carry out simple user tasks.

And wow! A lot has changed while I've been away. Last time I tried Linux I had to adjust my settings just to stop nautilus opening every folder in a new window, dual-displays were but myth which I'd heard about, but never seen (working properly anyway...) and I was plagued by random bugs and errors every-time my distro decided to update. Wireless!? erk, wireless was just awful!

But the other day, at the end of my tether on how hard it was to work efficiently I tried Linux again. This time round I've jumped straight in with Ubuntu. I tried it with KDE 4.0 first, thinking that may solve many of my frustrations which were essentially with Gnome back then. No good, broken, buggy and too different to anything I've used before, sorry! Gnome however did work, very well in fact. With about 3 clicks of the mouse I had my monitors on dual display (thanks to Adam J Forster for helping with the setup), my Apache, Python, Django, and Postgres were configured and working within a matter of minutes and best of all, everything just worked. Media codecs were easy to find, I didn't have to compile any drivers and maybe we're just still in our honey-moon period, but I can't actually find one fault or thing that has annoyed me.

The system has come on so much in the last couple of years, thanks to many great people making and improving the features they want, then sharing it with the rest of the world. A true testament that open-source development does work, even on a desktop.

So what about my Mac? Of course I still use it at home most of the time. But my main PC, which has been sat building up dust since I got the mac is now humming away again under the desk as a development machine, storage server and general tinkering with box. But for the record, this post is still being written from the mac. I'll be interested to see where I choose to write my next bit of code from though...

I actively encourage anyone who may also have left Linux with the same frustrations as me return to it once more, even if its only to see just how much great work has gone into it. Maybe then a few more myths can be dispelled at least.

A simple tale of SQL Injection .....

2008-05-16T21:24:16+00:00

Today, I was giving a one-on-one PHP training course covering databases (we were trying to get mssql to work with PHP on Windows, but various factors seemed to conspire against us - possibly permissions related, as it seemed to refuse to allow us to select from a table that fricking well did exist.). Anyway, the amusing story was.....

I have a habit of "probing" most web sites to see whether they're vulnerable to SQL injection - normally inserting a simple single quote into a URL will show one way or another. Unfortunately, for the delegate, he hadn't come across SQL Injection, but had written a website for his local village, in .asp.....

Cue login as "admin" with a password of "' OR '' = '".

Suffice to say, we then had a good laugh at the classic XKCD strip about poor Robert and he now knows how someone hacked into the site a few months ago.

ReStructuredText in Django

2008-05-16T15:41:44+00:00

dbr left a comment on this site:

I concur with the other two comments - this is one of the nicer blog'y site layouts I've seen. The comment system is also actually pleasant to use, unlike every single other one I've (not)-used \o/

—dbr (May 16, 2008)

Thanks for the compliment. I have talked before about my philosophy towards forms:

I do not make want to make it like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade just to make a comment: roll under a flying saw, spell something in Hebrew and then take a flying leap into the abyss. Furthermore moderation of spam is my problem, not yours.

—Zeth on comment-spam (3 July 2007)

dbr continues:

One slight bug, you need to enter two backslashes to make it visible.

—dbr (May 16, 2008)

That is not a bug that is a feature! That is the escaping mechanism of ReStructuredText (as well as Python and lots of other languages). The comments form does not allow HTML but it allows ReStructuredText, as I explain below.

Ryan also left a comment:

For your blog post model, what did you do for entering posts? Do you still use the default admin interface, or did you make your own views for posting and whatnot? I haven't looked into it much, but does Django automatically include much in the way of wysiwyg text editors for text fields?

—Ryan (May 15, 2008)

Answering your questions in reverse order:

Wysiwyg text editors

There is no default Django WYSIWYG text field, but some people use Javascript components such as TinyMCE which slots in nicely (instructions).

Default admin interface vs own views

I have the admin interface as one way to enter posts, but I also made a simple command-line tool for entering posts, I also made some scripts for importing all my old posts from Pyblosxom.

I did create one admin view, I overrode the 'delete comment' view to create a button that adds the IP addresses of deleted spam comments to a block list.

At some point I will make a 'Preview' view and button. At the moment I can save posts as drafts but not view drafts in the site template before it goes live.

What did you do for entering posts?

I write a new post in a real text editor such as Emacs or gedit in ReStructuredText format, which I can then either paste into the admin interface, or use my little script to squirt them into Django.

Markup in Django

'contrib' forms the 'standard library' of Django. One of these packages is called "markup". It provides filters for three markup languages: ReStructured Text, Markdown and Textile.

I chose to use ReStructured Text because using that to write my new posts because I like the format and getting confident with ReStructured Text will be useful in lots of other contexts also.

To use it in Django, just add django.contrib.markup to the INSTALLED_APPS list in settings.py. In a template, you can load it and use it like this:

{% load markup %}
{{ comment.comment|restructuredtext }}

In the next post I will explain how to write in ReStructured Text,

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

OLPC - Is advocacy a profitable business model?

2008-05-16T12:22:11+00:00

Having just read Rory Cellan-Jones article on the BBC News Website about the OLPC choosing to use the Windows XP operating system, I felt it sensible to put forward the reasons why I think it may/may not be a bad thing, and who’s going to benefit from the deal.

Education versus Training

Unfortunately, I think the UK IT Education System passed under this bridge so far up river, that it would require getting out of the river, and a hard trek upstream to ever get back to fixing the problem. Since 1997 (the year I started secondary school, and the year the Labour government came into power), there has been a worrying trend toward using the education system as a training system. I enjoyed my first couple of years IT lessons - we played with things like Logo - and used some very simple database software (key-plus?) to understand the power of databases. We also used MS Excel to enter data into spreadsheets, and learn some basic formulae - as well as being told how to write the same formulae on the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet software I had at home.

The difference that occurred in Year 9 (when RM ‘upgraded’ the IT suite at school) - was that we were now using MS Office. Sure, we’d had Word and Excel on the PCs before, and I guess the financial costs of upgrading to Office rather than having the two separately are minimal, especially once you take into account the “educational discount” that schools are entitled to from Microsoft.

This meant that everything we did was MS based. The simple database has gone, we were using MS Access. In essence, IT lessons involved being trained in how to use basic productivity tools for our future office careers; which, in my opinion, is not something that the Education System should pay for. I’d prefer to see people have an understanding of the difference between the ‘web’ and ‘email’; the difference between what a Spreadsheet can accomplish in comparison with a Database; and hopefully a way for people to be taught on looking after their data, online and offline.
Advocacy as a Business Model

I recently watched a lecture given by Nicolas Negroponte in 1984. In it he discussed his ideas for the future of Computer Interfaces. It was an interesting talk, as he spoke about experiments he was doing in some African Countries on UI design. However, he also noted that he’d done a dry-run of these experiments in New York previous to heading out to the African Continent.

In the school in New York, there was a child of around 14. He didn’t know how to read and was seen as needing Special Needs treatment. However, he was simply left to fend for himself in the IT rooms. One of the days, a local council worker came to visit the school, and happened to notice this child in the library, so asked him what he was doing. He showed him what he’d created on the screen using the ‘LOGO’ program. The council visitor was suitably impressed, and asked him if he could do a little variation on his work. Rather than simply say ‘no - I don’t know how,’ the child reached for the manual, worked out how to do it - and did it - clearly pleasing the visitor.

The visitor then went to the Principle’s Office (his reason for attending the school in the first place) and happened to mention the child. The principle was certain that the visitor was the victim of some kind of ’set-up,’ therefore took the visitor down himself to see the child demo his abilities. Lo and behold the child was able to do a further variation on his work by looking through the manual.

When asked why the child could read the manual, yet could not read the books provided to him in class, his answer was akin to the following: “What the teachers give me in class is boring, and I don’t get anything out of it. However, when I’m on the computer and working, I can see the results of my efforts straight away and get rewarded for them.”

OLPC - Sugar UI

The Sugar UI for the OLPC project, for me, was a symbol of the ‘LOGO’ program for this child. Someone that the teachers has written off as a massive underachiever had been able to produce ingenuity and learning independently - given the resources to do it. Encouragement wasn’t necessary, as the learning process is something organic to the human mind.

The Sugar UI isn’t about being Free and Open Source (thus cheap) - it’s about so much more than that. However, it’s also not the be-all and end-all of the OLPC project. There are thousands of Open Source applications that can run on top of Windows XP that the OLPC users will be able to access. It will also open up their opportunities for developing for FLOSS software on Windows Desktops - and thus be able to access the Windows Market in developed countries.

Why did OLPC do the deal?

For those of you that have been following OLPC, you’ll know that the ‘Intel Classmate’ has played some underhand tactics in order to get their processor on the OLPC - and then pulled out once they’d hijacked the relationships that OLPC had with important African leaders. There’s so much corruption in Africa, that XP was probably an (unofficial/off the record) requirement. Sometimes you’ve got to get in bed with the bad guys to help the small guys.

Where does this leave OLPC in the future?

OLPC ‘Ltd.’ will always be the pioneers to the concept of OLPC. The aim is a noble one, yet in what is essentially a commercial market - pure advocacy fell to the power of multi-national marketing. However, it has opened up a new market in the developed countries too - of Ultra Mobile Personal Computers - many of which run Free / Open Source Software. This can only be a good thing in the long run, with more and more people using FLOSS and seeing the benefits. Coupled with the coming-of-age of Ubuntu, and the fantastic marketing effort that’s coming with that, Nicolas Negroponte can be confident that where his company may have compromised - his idea is still being pushed by those supporting him.

Using Exclude Files in rsync - watch those spaces!

2008-05-15T09:02:34+00:00

Summary

When using filter or exclude files ensure each entry has no spaces at the end of it or it will not match correctly e.g.

- Music/ - downloads/

and not

- Music/[space] - downloads/[space]

Use two -v options on the command line to get output about what was skipped or included and why.

Use the -n option to simulate what rsync will do without actually copying any files.

Detail

I’ve recently started using rsync to copy files to an online backup server (rsync.net - the name is co-incidental).

Initially I started by using exclude options on the command line for the big directories that I didn’t want uploaded, things like my Music files etc. The command line ended up something like:-

rsync -n -v -a -z --exclude=Music/ --exclude=downloads/ --exclude=".*" --exclude=macky/ --exclude=XBMC/ -r /home/simon/ blah@rsync.net:blahblah

I decided it would make more sense to use an exclude file or filter file rather than an ever expanding command line so the I changed the command to be

rsync -v -a -z --filter='merge /home/simon/rsync_exclude' /home/simon/ blah@rsync.net:blahblah

I then created the file /home/simon/rsync_exclude by cutting and pasting from the old command line and editing the file to put one entry per line with the - sign in front to indicate it should not be included:-

- downloads/ - Music/ - macky/ - XBMC/ - ktorrent/ - /.*

However when I ran the rsync command with the filter file it started to copy up all my Music etc. after much fiddling and use of the very helpful -n option to just simulate what happening and -v -v to show what was being selected I discovered the problem.

In spliting the lines in my exclude file I had left a space at the end of each line and rsync was doing a literal match and so looking for something that matched “Music/[space]” and not finding anything.

So make sure any filter or exclude files don’t have any spaces at the end of the line.

The -n option for rsync is very useful it just simulates what rsync would do if you ran it for real. Also if you run rsync with -v -v ( yes two -v options ) you get detailed output about what is skipped etc.

rsync -n -v -v blah blah building file list … [sender] hiding directory .Skype because of pattern /.* [sender] hiding directory .kchmviewer because of pattern /.* [sender] hiding directory .gnupg because of pattern /.* [sender] hiding file .gtk-bookmarks because of pattern /.* [sender] hiding file .profile because of pattern /.* [sender] hiding file .dmrc because of pattern /.* …….

15th May - Panic Buy Carrots!!!

2008-05-14T23:39:14+00:00

It’s a little bit funny. On facebook a couple of months ago, Freya Valentine started this group. It’s not the most exciting of ideas, but has generated a bit of a cult following. It’s been mentioned on Sky & the BBC’s Steve Wright Show.

I’d be interested to hear on how the Panic buying is getting along, therefore suggested setting up a twit-feed to monitor it - however, twitter has been down for the last couple of hours.

Just goes to show that a de-centralised system is needed. A free, open source, de-centralised mechanism for twittering.

Oh well, I’ll just have to remain ignorant, and enjoy my carrot soup.

Swap out your ssh keys

2008-05-14T10:14:58+00:00

Debian and Ubuntu are not random enough

There is has been a bug in random number generator on Debian (from Etch onwards) or Ubuntu (Feisty onwards). You should already have a security update for the number generator. If you have not yet accepted the update then do so.

The Debian and Ubuntu distributions have even made the warning pop up on user's screens. Just apply the update, see below, and replace your keys and you are done.

If you are on an operating system that has apt-get then you probably want to look at what is going on. If you are on Gentoo or another distribution then for now you can just smile quietly to yourself.

Bugs in the number generator are bad mojo because there are less combinations, depending on the severity of the bug, it makes a brute-force attack go from almost completely impossible, to either still very improbable down to theoretically possible [update: or in the Debian case, quite possible if certain things are known about the target system ].

SSH is often the first point of entry to a Linux machine (but not the last line of defense) so bugs here are particularly prominent.

However, lets not have a panic attack about it. There are a dozen ways to get into someone's machine. In proprietary software land, they probably would have just ignored this kind of theoretical exploit to keep their marketing team happy. For a proprietary software company, still existing in five years time is a higher priority than a theoretical brute-force attack using hardware of the future. Free/Open Source Software forces good security, your dirty laundry is washed in public. Today's theoretically possible attacks are tomorrow's malware. If we ignore all these things then we end up with an operating system akin to Windows.

If you are on Debian or Ubuntu, the security updates means that any new keys will be to the desired level of randomness, but your existing ones need to be ditched. The update manager does not do this for you in case you are then left unable to log into remote systems.

Swapping out your SSH keys

Cleaning this up is easy. Run:

sudo ssh-vulnkey -a

This outputs a line for each SSH key on your system:

Not blacklisted: 2048 <key fingerprint> <filename>
Not blacklisted: 1024 <key fingerprint> <filename>
COMPROMISED: 2048 <key fingerprint> <filename>
COMPROMISED: 2048 <key fingerprint> <filename>
Not blacklisted: 2048 <key fingerprint> <filename>

So the ones that came from Gentoo or another Linux distribution are okay as far as we know. The two Ubuntu ones we must delete or archive somewhere else. To delete the keys use rm.

Now we might like to generate replacements, so we can still use SSH as before:

ssh-keygen

So to make this simpler, one of the lines was: COMPROMISED: 2048 49:37:38:f4:86:28:ac:b1:7e:a6:df:bd:1d:a4:da:81 /home/warrior/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

That is the public key of the local machine. So we get rid of it:

rm /home/warrior/.ssh/id_rsa rm /home/warrior/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Now we want a new one:

$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/warrior/.ssh/id_rsa):

The brackets mean that is the default, so I press enter.

Next it finds an existing key (the private half of the existing keypair);

/home/warrior/.ssh/id_rsa already exists.
Overwrite (y/n)?

We want to overwrite it so we say we yes.

Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/warrior/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/warrior/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

Now we are done.

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

obstler

2008-05-14T01:08:20+00:00

I’ve not long got back from colo’ing the new server, obstler. Tonight was the only night I could do it before next week, and Graham very kindly offered to give me a lift from home at 6pm, aiming to be there by 8pm.

I left dayjob early and rushed home but unfortunately Graham got held up in bad traffic coming across London and it was more like 7pm when he got to me. The M25 anticlockwise was pretty clear though so despite my mere presence breaking the satnav and making the indicator relay go into overdrive (*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click* …. *click*click*click* … *click*click*click*click* ………… *click*click*click*click* ……………. *click*click*!), we made good time and arrived at about 8.30pm.

As it happened, Andy Millar who was also colo’ing his server today had had some technical difficulties and so things were running late anyway. In fact we had some time to wait around while that was finished off. It turns out that his HP power supply was drawing 1.1A, which went down to less than half that when replaced with a Sea Sonic one. I shall have to investigate that for myself, as it looks like it would save me about £20/month per server!

obstler was pretty quick to colo, then we headed off to some Chinese restaurant near Canary Wharf Pier. As usual I became totally disoriented by the twisty turns around that place.

I couldn’t remember exactly when my last direct train from Waterloo was, but thought it might be 23:50. It was actually 23:58 so I made it with plenty of time, got home about 00:45.

A good night’s work; won’t be able to finish configuring obstler or doing much of anything useful with it for a couple of days, but really glad it’s finally in.

Thanks again to Graham for giving me a lift with the server!

Inspiring, or soul-destroying?

2008-05-13T17:15:13+00:00

I recently was introduced to www.ted.com, a site which hosts a number of inspirational talks given at the TED conference each year.

TED has been happening for a few years now, and is touted as a chance for some of the greatest minds to get together and share something unique - their ideas.

I’m quite a fan of lay-science, and getting to know more about stuff that’s really advanced. We all have very different backgrounds and skill-sets - and I think it’s the ability to appreciate these differences that makes things really special. When I look at the wonderful invention of the StrandBeest by Theo Jansen, I can’t help but feel inspired.

It’s fantastic to see how people’s minds tick, and this site is likely to provide me with hours of distraction in the future. The phrase ’standing on the shoulders of giants’ is something that can be overused. However, in sharing these ideas, we’re given access to a wealth of information. It’s precisely for these reasons that I advocate the use of Free/Libre Open Source Software. Enjoy the site.

Opt-out organ donation

2008-05-13T12:30:11+00:00

Jake, absolutely! But there are far too many people with illogical ideas about the sanctity of corpses to stand for it, I fear. As Niven suggested, will we see this first applied to prisoners, and then the death penalty for jaywalking?

New RSS feed, please update now!

2008-05-13T00:12:17+00:00

If you have signed up to my site's RSS feed, please update to http://commandline.org.uk/feeds/full/ as soon as possible. Then you will be sure not to miss any of my exciting adventures.

This main feed should work the same as the old one, however, I have provided a number of extra feed options. if that is your bag.

Update: I am hoping all the old feeds should do something now.

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

How not to program WSGI

2008-05-12T22:54:48+00:00

or how not to serve robots.txt with PyBlosxom

So as you may have noticed, I moved this site from PyBlosxom to Django, which depending on your perspective is a fabulous thing to do or is tantamount to treason on the high seas. I will explain more about that later.

Old links to the site should, in the main, still work hopefully as I have done some regular expressions jujitsu which should hopefully send everyone to where they were supposed to be going.

However, some posts and comments will have their formatting up the creek. So I want the old version of the site to be available (at archive.commandline.org.uk) for a while longer.

Because the archived version is deprecated and on the way out, I do not want the search engines to index it. Therefore I needed to make a robots.txt file for that subdomain excluding them from indexing it.

The last version of this site, like many dynamic sites, is composed of a number of layers, part of which was a lot of my own nonsense code doing various things. Ignoring that, when a request for a packet came in it would go to WSGI which would then pass the request on to PyBlosxom which was at the bottom of it all doing the hard work.

To deploy it properly, one would normally put Apache at the front as well, but I never got around to that. In theory this is a bad thing to do. But in practice it worked really well without the huge and complicated server that is Apache in the mix. It actually ran fine for a year without stopping, and blazing fast too; if it also confused a few comment spam bots then all the merrier.

So I tried putting Apache into the mix so I could use a Location directive to direct /robots.txt to somewhere with the robots.txt file, but no joy, this would have required doing a lot of what I never got around to before.

So I then looked into how the test server was deploying the site, thinking that I could do some kind of smart regular expressions type matching like in Django or Pylons. But nope.

Hack for the win

So the next step down is PyBlosxom, so I looked out of chance in Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py and saw the following:

def __call__(self, env, start_response):
    """
    Runs the WSGI app.
    """
    # ensure that PATH_INFO exists. a few plugins break if this is
    # missing.
    if "PATH_INFO" not in env:
        env["PATH_INFO"] = ""

    p = PyBlosxom(self.config, env)
    p.run()

    pyresponse = p.getResponse()
    start_response(pyresponse.status, list(pyresponse.headers.items()))
    pyresponse.seek(0)
    return [pyresponse.read()]

Bingo! As soon as I saw it, I just somehow, on auto pilot, typed in the following lines before the line p = PyBlosxom(self.config, env):

if env["PATH_INFO"] == "/robots.txt":
    start_response('200 OK', [('Content-type','text/plain')])
    return ["""User-agent: * \nDisallow: /"""]

And unbelievably it worked. What I had subconsciously done was to see that we have some kind of string referred to by env["PATH_INFO"]. Then further on we have an object called start_response which is being passed a status and some headers. Then we are returning the response.

I was kidding around more than anything so I just replaced everything I didn't know about with reasonable looking constants (you will know these well if you have ever done Python CGI programming).

I am sure there are millions of far better ways to serve robots.txt with PyBlosxom. But this hack works for me until I no longer need the old site anymore.

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

Give Linux a chance

2008-05-12T11:00:00+00:00

Mughlai and Jalfrezi are better than gruel

A few hundred years ago, the great mass of the British poor ate gruel, while the middle class ate bland over-boiled vegetables. However, as a naval people, the British went out around the world with their empire, and brought food and foreign chefs back with them. Now British people can and do eat food originating from the whole world. Not just the rich, normal working class people will regularly eat curry, Cantonese food, kebabs and so on that would not have been imaginable before.

If I tried to explain this to a 14th Century peasant eating his gruel, then he probably would just ignore me, having no idea what I am talking about. At best he might look at me strangely, and then go back to his life of gruel.

Windows is the gruel of the digital world. There are certain people that understand this fact and have moved on to greater and better things, however most people take what they are given and swallow it as best they can.

What is an operating system?

If you don't know what a computer program is, think about cooking. In cooking you have tools, such as an oven and a blender and you have ingredients such as vegetables and meat. The recipe allows you to use the tools to take your food (ingredients) and turn them into to other types of food (meals).

In computers, you have tools (called hardware) such as a DVD player, a screen, a keyboard, a hard drive and so on. The computer program is the mathematical recipe that allows you to take your data (text, pictures, videos, etc) and then do various things with it. So for example, you might use a computer program that takes a song from the hard-drive and then plays it out of the speakers.

An operating system is a set of computer programs that makes your computer hardware do the basic things (put text on the screen, play sound, and so on). You might then run other programs to do more advanced things. It is like your recipe book.

People who are in to cooking will try out lots of recipe books, and in doing so, they do not starve because they have bought a different recipe book, indeed the opposite happens, they cook so much that they do not have time to eat it all themselves so have to give food to their family and neighbours.

By changing recipe book, they don't suddenly become unable to cook, they in fact get better as they move on to better and more advanced recipe books.

If you turn on you computer and see Windows, then Windows is your current 'operating system'. If you have only ever used Windows, don't you think it is time to give up the gruel and try a new recipe book?

I think so, and if you think this way then you have come to the right place!

About Windows

Windows started on home computers and was commonly used for playing computer games. Though some shifty business deals in the 1980s and 1990s, Windows became pre-installed on the PC and so became the main operating system used by non-technical users.

However, there a lot of people that think that this situation is not good for humanity and we need to progress past it.

Why? Well lets look at some of the reasons.

Firstly, Windows does not promote a competitive industry. Only Microsoft can sell Windows, only Microsoft can really provide complete support for Windows. Mainstream PC shops may only stock Windows PCs.

So you have one company earning billions of their monopoly, with these excess profits, Microsoft can then give campaign contributions to politicians to make sure they don't make the industry competitive or hold Microsoft to account when they break the law.

Weak, bribed, politicians allow Microsoft to use the educational system as a giant marketing tool, indoctrinating a new generation to become helpless and passive recipients of Microsoft's, and only Microsoft's, products.

Secondly, each version of Windows is developed in secret, and then launched with billions of dollars worth of marketing to make you believe the magic; however like all magic, it is no replacement for public peer review. Microsoft don't like public peer review because they know that when compared fairly to other operating systems, Windows always loses.

The fact that there is no public peer review, and no effective competitive pressures, means that Windows is not very well engineered. When the main architecture of DOS and Windows was created in the 80s, it was already 20 years behind the state of computer science; and it has not really changed that much since.

This 'closed-off from the world in my own cave' approach to software engineering means that Windows is plagued with security problems, it uses computer resources inefficiently, wasting electricity and requiring unnecessary replacement of perfectly fine computers that could have lasted another five to ten years.

Fourthly, a software mono-culture, like a biological monoculture, is not very healthy. If a future Windows virus wipes out all of the world's Windows PCs, then 90% of the computer using population are offline, without their data and without access to government services, Internet commerce and digital information. Businesses would collapse and the western world would be plunged into a digital dark age.

Fourthly, because what Windows is doing is a secret; if you use Windows, then you are not in control of your computer, Microsoft is. Windows reports back lots of data to the USA which is then made available to whomever Microsoft wants to share it with. While most of us are not interesting to the US security agencies; Microsoft can sell your private information to anyone.

In short, Windows leaves your backdoor open to Microsoft, but even if you trust Microsoft, the US government, and all companies that Microsoft might sell your information too; the fact there are built-in backdoors means that anyone, criminals, terrorists, anyone, can potentially walk through Microsoft's backdoor to access your private data or install viruses or tracking software on your PC.

There is another way...

...Indeed there are lots of them! The opposite to Windows slavery is software freedom. And with freedom comes lots of choices, and choices are good! If you have spent a lifetime eating gruel then you might resent choice, but then remember the intolerant character in Dr Seuss' classic "Green Eggs and Ham", who resists and resists trying out new things for unjustified reasons.

The operating system I currently use is GNU/Linux (commonly just called Linux), which started out in Universities and parts were contributed by thousands of volunteers over the world wide web; others soon joined in, such as small and large companies, charities and even the American military.

Unlike Windows, any company or individual can share, sell, give away or provide services for GNU/Linux, anyone can change it, and there is complete public peer review. There are no hidden traps and you are in control of your own computer.

Also the way Linux executes programs is based on a completely different architecture. There is no concept of an untrusted, unknown program having access to everything. The problems that plague Windows, viruses, spywhere, malware and worms, do not exist in the Linux world. They have never existed and will never exist, because the architecture of the system is not designed that way.

So as I said before, anyone can give out Linux, so lots of people do (remember: choice is good) most versions are free and you can legally share them with your friends and neighbours without having to ask anyone.

Give it a go!

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

Rest in Peace Guido

2008-05-12T07:40:02+00:00

What a surreal experience.

This morning, I logged into Google Webmaster tools to check what people have been searching for when accessing my blog. One item stood out more than others.

Guido Sohne facebook

Guido Sohne has only been mentioned in my blog once, on an article he wrote entitled “Things have gone too far.” I guess in some ways this article is part of what inspires me to work with ‘free software.’

Guido’s philosophy re: free software

After clicking on the link on google to see whereabouts I came in the rankings, I was shocked to see that Guido has unfortunately passed away, 6 days ago aged only 34.

Rest in Peace Guido.

Obituary of a friend.

LRF Bromsgrove 10k race - I came 26th :-) (Run Dof Run! 2)

2008-05-11T20:31:51+00:00

This year, again I entered the Bromsgrove LRF charity fun run, and despite the horrible temperature, managed to finish 26th with a time of 44 minutes and a few seconds.

Last year, I did it in nearly the same time - although it was somewhat cooler and I hadn't been off-colour for the preceeding week.

Home grown mushrooms

2008-05-11T14:36:45+00:00

I've been growing veggies out in the garden, that much is known. I've also been trying my hand at growing mushrooms. I love mushrooms as a food, but I'd always kept my distance from any knowledge of how they're grown, for fear of grossing myself out a little too much to enjoy them on my plate. But, a few weeks ago, me and my Dad found some easy-as-you-like mushroom growing kits in a DIY shop in Denbigh. The kit consisted of a polystyrene box, filled with some straw-like stuff and a bag of compost. The instructions indicated to store the compost and straw at separate temperatures for a couple of weeks, then to cover the straw with the compost, lift the lid and leave in a cool place. Mushrooms were promised after another couple of weeks. Indeed, three crops of mushrooms are promised.

Well, after following the instructions diligently, it seems my first crop is here!

I had some for dinner last night, and they tasted really good. It really did mess with my mind a little, eating something which has been growing in amongst some mouldy compost in my under-the-stairs cupboard, but I guess this is me getting in touch with where mushrooms come from. Not everything's as glamorous as apples and blossom.

Richard Stallman comes to the UK

2008-05-10T09:31:11+00:00

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of doing something I'd wanted to do for quite a long time; see Richard Stallman speak. Stallman, for those not in the know (RMS for those who are) is the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project, and writer of the original General Public Licence (GPL). The lovely recursively acronymous GNU's Not Unix has arguably been the biggest contributing factor to the widespread availability of free software as it is today. Again, for those unfamiliar with GNU, it's probably safe to say that it's most of what you'd usually end up calling Linux. (I'll probably blog about the name thing later...)

Stallman, an American, doesn't get to these shores very often, so the chance to see him speak in Manchester was one not to be missed. I travelled up in the car with Dan and Zeth. Pete Ashton and Jez Higgins also went up from Brum.

I've actually been holding off posting anything about the talk, since I wanted to mull over my thoughts about it, rather than merely contribute to the flurry of "i haz seen rms omg" posts which litter the internet ;-)

I'm not quite sure when I first heard of Richard Stallman, but it was probably rather soon after I started using GNU/Linux in 1998 (PC Plus coverdisk of SuSE 5.2). Having had some rather lefty teenage years (not to say that I've grown out of it), the idea that software could be driven socially rather than by capital excited me quite a bit. As I read more, the philosophy of software being knowledge to be shared, rather than a shrink-wrapped product, seemed to be rather more obvious than I'd been led to believe by the aisles at PC World. Articles claiming that Stallman was as much a philosopher as a programmer encouraged me to look at my computer in a different way. My commitment, it seemed, had begun to develop.

So, I guess I had some rather pre-conceived ideas about what I expected Stallman to be like in real life. Sure, he's a kind of geek-monk as a person, but his speeches? This guy had inspired a movement, right?

He was actually every bit as inspiring as I had hoped; and every bit the geek-monk. The talk (the video of which is available via OneBigTorrent here) roamed all over the current state of play with free software, DRM and asserting the right to control your own computing. I won't recount the details - that's what the video is for - but the evening did give some perspective and crystalisation to a subject area which I believe I know pretty well. And it was nice to be among friends.

At the end of the almost two hour lecture, Stallman took plenty of time for questions. This was really good I think, though the guy really has to learn to let questioners finish what they're saying before jumping in with an answer. I guess this is due to his enthusiasm for the subject, even after 25 years of being evangelist-in-chief of the free software movement.

One thought provoking topic which did come up in a couple of questions was that of whether sofware is unique in its position of being able to be "freed" in this manner. Could the same principles be applied to harware, or to pharmaceuticals? The questioners almost seemed to be begging him to lead a charge from his barracks in software into the world in general, with copyleft principles becoming all-pervasive in advancing the tide of social over capital in all areas of life.

But Stallman was decidedly cautious about this, and mostly argued that software was unique in its suitability for liberation, due to the programmable nature of computers. The basic example discussed was that if you demand certain freedoms for your computer, why not for your microwave too? Stallman's argument, weak in my view, was that since computers are programmable and microwaves aren't, then the principles just don't apply to microwaves. On the one hand, I can't help but be reminded of Stan's fight for the right to have babies in Monty Python's Life of Brian, even though it was be a physical impossibility, but I really can't see that this is what's happening here. Stallman's argument to me boils down to "if you can, you should have the right to", which I think is both wrong and dangerous if applied generally. There are things which you can and both should and shouldn't have the right to do (think walk to the shop vs murder) and things which you can't physically do (yet) but likewise should and shouldn't have the right to (think swim to the bottom of the ocean vs build a nuclear bomb out of potatoes). This approach is clearly nonsensical.

The OpenMoko project is just one example of how the pricincples of free software are being transferred to hardware, and the free culture movement is borrowing heavily from free sofware too. I can't help thinking that Stallman is trying to stop himself from biting off more than he can chew with this self-imposed restriction to software-only freedom. After all, it's a big enough task in itself.

So, all in all, it was a very inspriring, thought-provoking and satisfying evening. I'd encourage anyone - free software convert or not - to take the opportunity to see Stallman if they get the chance.