Software Cooperative News

Digital Britain Report: first glance
Possible new word: attendocracy?
Heatwave!
qpsmtpd Improved Things
SPI June 2009 and WsM BikeWeek Breakfast
BikeWeek 2009
Timeclock Functions in my .emacs
Elect MEPs for Freedom Now
SPI May 2009
Enterprise Hubs, Societies, Newsletter and AGM

Updates seen at the co-operative for Software (This description last updated 2009-07-01T07:12:17Z)

Warning: may contain unconsidered opinions and stuff I've just plain not thought through properly.

Digital Britain Report: first glance

The Digital Britain Report was published on 16 June 2009. I only got time to look at it quickly recently because this is one of the co-op AGM seasons.

At first glance, it misses the mark. It doesn’t do anything to unlock Digital Britain and make us a more sharing and social place. From failing to open the 3G mobile networks to the Phone Co-op and other operators completely (they describe it as already being “highly competitive” - haven’t they visited a South West “notspot”?), through the unnecessary increase in protection for Star Wars’s foreign owners, right down to the continued support for Adobe on the report download site instead of third-sector-produced pdfreaders.org, it looks like the report won’t stop us being “Digital Divide Britain”.

I also have my suspicions about the effect of the “DAB-only from the end of 2015″ decision on our community radio companies, but I’ve not been active in that sector for years and there’s a further consultation about that.

Ultimately, “the Government believes piracy of intellectual propert for profit is theft and will be pursued as such through the criminal law” is the killer phrase in this report. The concept of being allowed to file-share without payment doesn’t even appear in the same section. I’ve been warning about these “New Enclosure” attempts for years: I didn’t expect the Digital Britain report to be such a leap towards them.

I think many of these problems could have been avoided if digital production cooperatives had been included in the preparation of this report in any significant way. I feel it has been captured by the private sector and a few trading funds, to the detriment of the nation. Shouldn’t we expect better from a Labour and Co-operative government?

What did you think of the report? What else am I missing? Seen any good reviews of it for free software fans or cooperators?

Posted/permalink: 2009-07-01T07:12:17Z

Possible new word: attendocracy?

I think I’ve just made up another new word (to go alongside my pet hate lawyerbomb):

attendocracy: a whole society run mainly by meeting attendees. Usually, the meetings are basically non-discriminatory (all members may attend) and attendance is itself enough to give one power, but those not at the meeting are positively ignored (no postal ballots or elections). Choice of location, price and time of meetings is key to power in an attendocratic society.

Did this word exist? Is there another existing word for this idea? Is it the same as meetingocracy? Is there a better word for it?

I’m broadly in favour of do-ocracy (even when it doesn’t work out as I want), so I think I’ve been handling attendocracies badly. Are they worth the time?

Posted/permalink: 2009-06-29T13:49:36Z

Heatwave!

Well, what passes for a heat wave in England: “an average threshold temperature is 30 °C by day and 15 °C overnight” according to the Met Office: Heat-Health Watch.

So, I’ll be following HOWTO not melt - keeping cool at midsummer again. Anyone got any new tips or tricks for 2009?

Finally, one of TTLLP’s full-timers is away this week, so enquiries may get saved and answered in batches. If it’s urgent, please put “urgent” in the subject line of an email.

Posted/permalink: 2009-06-29T13:26:55Z

qpsmtpd Improved Things

As you may remember from past problems with joe-jobs, TTLLP still has a few (maybe only one left?) qmail servers rattling around. The comments on spam-filtering suggested a few possibilities for easing matters.

As I wrote I would, I gave spamdyke a go. Maybe the out-of-the-box configuration isn’t right for me and maybe I didn’t configure it correctly, but it only cut a bit of load down and didn’t really work for me. MagicSpam seemed like a bad idea, partly because I want to slowly move people out of Plesk, not tie them into it and I hate surrendering autonomy to black boxes.

So, I installed qpsmtpd, as suggested by the legendary Steve Kemp. I found this guide to Installing qpsmtpd on SuSE 10.0 with Plesk 8.0 helpful (even though I wasn’t installing on SuSE or Plesk) and got plugins » auth » auth_imap from the qpsmtpd wiki to get SMTP AUTH working again.

The main lines of defence on the Exim servers remain a fun mix of IP-based throttling formulae and greylisting. The Postfix ones only really use greylisting, as far as I can remember. Those servers are much older than the qmail-using one, but still seem to cope.

Have you had to step-up your anti-spam systems recently? Is qmail that much worse, or is that soon-to-be-replaced 2-year-old server simply inadequate now?

Posted/permalink: 2009-06-19T14:35:13Z

SPI June 2009 and WsM BikeWeek Breakfast

The monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 17 June) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted and there are indeed minutes to approve, a financial report, and nothing else.

By the way, can anyone tell me how to get a copy of the bylaws of an Ohio corporation? It doesn’t seem to be on the state business website and the corporation doesn’t publish them. Am I stuck?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the FREE breakfast for cyclists 8.00am-9.30am at The Victorian Cafe (Near the pier on Weston-super-Mare seafront). Weather is quite a bit better this year, so hopefully turn-out will be better.

Posted/permalink: 2009-06-17T07:22:32Z

BikeWeek 2009

Bike and Co-op

It’s biiiiiiikeweeeeek!</noddy>

Once again, I’m supporting BikeWeek. I generally use a bike as the first leg of my work journeys, although my company doesn’t have a “Green Travel Plan” yet. It’s mainly the time taken writing such things which has stopped it. I think we’re in favour of such ideas. Has anyone got a plan we can just adopt?

There are events all over the country. Sadly, yet again, I can’t take advantage of the local offer of free entry to Tyntesfield if you turn up on a bike because I’ll be off to the Co-operative Group regional AGM.

Two ideas which I’m seeing in lots of areas are Commuter Challenges like JamBustingJune (which TTLLP is signed up to) and lots of bike shops supporting the event, such as Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Newcastle, Manchester and Leeds.

What are you doing for Bike Week? Watching some races on TV? Taking part in local events?

Posted/permalink: 2009-06-13T07:28:52Z

Timeclock Functions in my .emacs

I’ve a ton of stuff that I want to write up, but the business busy-ness I mentioned in Elect MEPs for Freedom Now continues unabated. I’ve a good business reason for publishing these Emacs snippets, so here we go…

I nearly always have Emacs running. Although I don’t use it as my editor, it always has several useful files and utilities running. It tends to be one of the first applications I install on my workstations because it can also deputise for some more specialised tools. Among the useful utilities, I’ve been using timeclock for over a year and have grown some helper functions in my .emacs. Here’s a short tour. First of all, turn timeclock on and give myself an easy way to count with interval minutes:-

   (require 'timeclock)
   (defun timeclock-interval (i) (list (floor (/ (- (timeclock-time-to-seconds (cadr i)) (timeclock-time-to-seconds (car i))) 60)) (caddr i)))
   (defun timeclock-intervals (i) (map 'list 'timeclock-interval i))

Next, I want to summarise days according to how long I worked on what:-

   (defun timeclock-today (&optional daysago) (timeclock-intervals (cddr (nth (or daysago 0) (timeclock-day-alist)))))

(defun timeclock-total-today (time-projs &optional result)
  (if (equal (car time-projs) nil)
      result
    (let ((tp (sort time-projs (lambda (a b) (string-lessp (cadr b) (cadr a))))))
      (if (equal (cadar tp) (cadadr tp))
	  (timeclock-total-today
	   (cons
	    (list (+ (caar tp) (caadr tp)) (cadar tp))
	    (cddr tp))
	   result)
	(timeclock-total-today (cdr tp) (cons (car tp) result))))))

(defun timeclock-today-interactive ()
  (interactive)
  (princ
   (apply '+
	  (map 'list 'car
	       (princ (timeclock-total-today (timeclock-today)))))))

Then I want to total up a number of days and break it down by projects:-

   (defun timeclock-print-total (i) (princ (car i)) (princ " ") (princ (cadr i)) (newline))

   (defun timeclock-project-totals (&optional log-data)
     (map 'list
	  (lambda (i) (list (apply '+ (map 'list 'car (timeclock-intervals (cdr i)))) (car i)))
	  (timeclock-project-alist (or log-data (timeclock-log-data)))))

   (defun timeclock-print-totals (&optional data) (map 'list 'timeclock-print-total (or data (timeclock-project-totals (timeclock-log-data)))))

I think a running count in the modeline is helpful:-

(defun timeclock-update-modeline ()
  (interactive)
  (setq timeclock-mode-string
	(propertize
	 (format
	  "%s %.0fm "
	  (caddr timeclock-last-event)
	  (/ (timeclock-last-period) 60)))))

(timeclock-modeline-display)

And finally, c-X c-T shortcuts to control the timeclock quickly. There’s no sense using timeclock if you spend too much time on doing the monitoring, is there?

   (define-key ctl-x-map "ti" 'timeclock-in)
   (define-key ctl-x-map "to" 'timeclock-out)
   (define-key ctl-x-map "tc" 'timeclock-change)
   (define-key ctl-x-map "tr" 'timeclock-reread-log)
   (define-key ctl-x-map "tl" 'timeclock-visit-timelog)
   (define-key ctl-x-map "ty" 'timeclock-today-interactive)

Comments and enhancements welcomed!

Posted/permalink: 2009-06-08T11:34:14Z

Elect MEPs for Freedom Now

Hi! I’ve been away, but as you might have seen from identi.ca, I’m back but busy.

You may remember from posts such as Reject the Term Extension Directive and Improved Telecom Package Passed by EuroParl that MEPs can influence FOSS laws in many ways, because a lot of our copyright and patent laws are international now. Last time around, I compiled euroVote: copyright and patents but I’ve not had time this year. Thankfully, others have summarised them.

Mote Prime: Technology: Letter to MEPs on Software Patents Legislation summarises positions on the old swpat chestnut. European Parliament elections, the Green Party and free stuff By tom introduces the Green position. VOTE 2009: Spot the difference – Lib Dem “shocked and angered” special: The Bristol Blogger shows me getting annoyed with the LibDems.

If you’re in the UK, you can look up your MEPs on the ORG EU Elections Site which looks pretty accurate to me.

Anywhere in Europe, you can try to find some MEPs on the Free Software Pact country listing.

Posted/permalink: 2009-06-04T16:03:28Z

SPI May 2009

The monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 20 May) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted and there are indeed minutes to approve, a financial report, and a report on official correspondence related to DebConf10.

For the 27th meeting in succession (feels like it anyway), I may be without a stable network connection during the meeting because I’ll be at another event, raising the FOSS banner for TTLLP while speakers tell everyone to proprietarise everything (based on the preview essays). Even so, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

In other news, the Koha foundation is still going through its birth pangs. I’ve suggested associating with SPI in the meantime, so the project could manage assets better, but it’s just not happening. I feel partly it’s due to misconceptions about SPI and its activities, but there also seems to be some blind faith in private companies. I heard a quote about the current UK Parliament crisis which seems relevant to the situation: “He is behaving as if he is just running this gentlemen’s club. What we need to do is ask people to be involved.”

Posted/permalink: 2009-05-20T09:00:32Z

Enterprise Hubs, Societies, Newsletter and AGM

Cooperatives-SW (which I’m currently helping to direct) has been approved for Co-operative Enterprise Hub funding for 2009. Well done to Viv and the rest of the hard-working team who have been doing miracles for co-ops in this region with relatively little funding for so long now. (But if you’ve got a pot of money to donate, let me know, please.)

Industrial and Provident Societies are the traditional form for registering UK Co-operatives, but there are a number of things in its 1960s law which aren’t reflected in general company law (which was mostly updated since the mid-1980s). For starters, IPSes are registered with the FSA, whose website isn’t as good as Companies-House WebCHeck for Limited companies. Cooperatives-UK are pressing for the law to be modernised.

C-UK sent us a status update (which I can’t find on their website yet) this week. Amongst other things, they’re seeking to introduce provisions to allow online registration and filing for IPSes. I’ve asked them to take the opportunity to press for similar provisions for LLP Co-ops, or directing Companies House to act on any such existing provisions. At the moment, it seems unfair that LLPs are excluded from online filing, so paying double for routine administrative filings and relying on the increasingly dysfunctional Royal Mail.

Finally, the next Cooperatives-SW print/PDF newsletter should be out next week. Hope to see lots of you at the AGM in Plymouth on 23 June!

Posted/permalink: 2009-05-08T07:20:26Z

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