MJR's slef-reflections

My legs hurt.

It hurts to sit. It hurts to stand. It hurts to walk. $DEITY knows what it will feel like to ride my bike.

How did I do this? It wasn't some bizarre biking accident. I was laying cables under the floor between the two offices at the opposite corners of my building yesterday. I lifted three floorboards and four carpets and drilled one hole. Afterwards, I rebuilt some shelves. How did that hurt my legs???

Today is Blogger Appreciation Day [UNOFFICIAL] so I'd like to thank Steve for Chronicle which is now powering this blog instead of the old homebrew.

Meanwhile, messages that came in while I was AFK included a strange one from Paul, Steve being elected as Debian Project Leader (well done!), 'Free Software in Ethics and Practice' - Richard Stallman, Thursday 1st May, Interview: How a hacker became a freedom fighter From New Scientist Print Edition, Understanding Design & Computers: Notes from an Introduction to OpenMoko, by Ole Tange for UKUUG

Finally, in a cycling and cooperatives cross-over, this article on Hammond's crash also mentions the other two Brits, who ride for cooperative teams. I watched the race, but didn't see much of them.

I spend too much of my time trying to talk with people who don't want to discuss, yet somehow I won't stop.

I keep hoping that things like suggesting good advice on meeting scheduling will avoid them repeating old mistakes. The most extreme life-and-death example is probably trying to help with Kewstoke Toll Road, where people still speed and someone crashed off again last night (although I don't know what caused last night's crash - could have been a simple accident).

Of course, it's better to talk with people who have asked questions and want to hear the answer. I'm currently involved in several groups like that and it makes me much happier [4HWW]. I've even made a confidentiality agreement [Network Blogging article] about one group because I really like the organiser and want to help them, but I've yet to see changes happen because of it and that's probably about all I can write here, which does rather suck.

But talking of changes that make me happy, I spotted that Bristol Wireless has now gone further than TTLLP by deciding to change people away from Microsoft Windows when they find it:-

"all Windows stuff must be gone from the premises [...] no longer help do callers favours with broken Windows machines, apart from fixing them properly and permanently by installing Debian"

at their March meeting. Well done, BW!

After a request, I finally put four photos from Social Source South West (which was hosted by BW) online, which reminded me to subscribe to watfordgap's travels. Disappointingly, on my first read, it promotes the Suppliers Directory developed by Lasa. That directory is a big problem because it creates a silly barrier to entry which hinders new social enterprises and cooperatives. At a time where most non-profit software is unsustainable and needs to change, requiring three referees is a way to obstruct change. Also, persuading three people to support their work is no substitute for supplier evaluation.

Any non-profits who want to lead their sector should approach ICT suppliers directly. The article also mentions Experts Online which is even more short-sighted about computing: "both PC and Mac" indeed! What about GNU/Linux, thin clients, and other changes which are already making a big difference to some non-profits...?

But here I go again, talking to a brick wall.

I expressed these concerns when that Directory started and it didn't do any good then, so I doubt they'll change it now, near the end of its life.

So I'm going to move on. There are lots of people emailing who want to hear from me, so it's time to concentrate on talking with people who do want to listen. If you want to discuss this with me, visit my website for the comments form (click the title or look for a "view original post" link, depending what site you're reading).

Another zero-day announcement of a Software in the Public Interest online meeting has been posted. The announcement mentions "one motion has been raised" but the agenda doesn't include any motions, so I'm not sure what. Also, the agenda lists "Debian logo licence" as up for discussion but I thought last month's meeting resolved that. I watch SPI fairly closely and I'm confused. How about the rest of you?

SPI isn't alone in this: many software organisations seem to suffer from similar problems. For example, I ranted in passing about Free Software Manchester yesterday, who just posted the notes from their own zero-day meeting and I've suggested possible ways of reforming debian's currently-stalled New Maintainer process more than once.

Are free software users particularly bad at the basics of running an interest society (like welcoming and expiring members, calling meetings, publishing routine communications, and so on), have I been spoiled by cooperatives with their friendly Member Services departments or secretariats, or what? Is this why so many free software orgs seem to include self-perpetuating leadership groups? Is this a serious problem if, as reported, Software Development is a Team Sport [etbe]? Are there fully-working free software mass participation groups out there?

I feel a lot of these problems are caused by attempting to order our inherently entropy-filled world completely and insisting everything follows petty rules, such as refusing to answer a question because the "wrong" member asked it. The world will not become less random just because hackers try to impose arbitrary rules. Sometimes it's good to put down minimum standards (because calling zero-day meetings is a mostly-avoidable way of excluding some members) but it will always be a poor alternative to trying to do the best you can for others.

How do we get past this? My pro-cooperation-and-better-business platform for SPI board went pretty badly and I've had some anti-cooperative flames back from someone starting another free software group this month, so I don't think I can fix these existing organisations any time soon. About 1 in 6 people in the UK are members of a cooperative, so even if that is reflected among hackers (and I think it's lower), all of them would not be enough to reform much.

One of the most common memes in free software is "show us the code" and the few other free software cooperatives I've seen have mostly failed, with a few surviving but hitting a size limit. As a result, I'm currently negotiating the start of a new free software cooperative. So far, I'm really happy with how that's going. Many cooperators learn at the feet of large consumer cooperatives like the Cooperative Group who run training courses for new members about putting cooperative values and principles into practice, which we smaller groups couldn't run ourselves. As a result, most cooperators already know how to work well together. Should large software societies like SPI try commissioning similar courses?

Not done one of these round-ups for a while and I'm really pushed for time today, so here are some sites that I've written on:

1. Property of a Lady » Wicca on House
2. Ross Burton: The End Of Homeopathy?
3. » Enough with the dried yoghurt covered raisins Korerorero: Just random ranting and raving
4. How to host a free software advocacy event | Free Software Magazine
5. Raw Output: AGPL
6. One for the Morning Glory: Facebook comments
7. Sam Liddicott » GPL3 Questions and Implications
8. Drugs and an Election | etbe
9. New Tropicana images «
10. robmyers - Support BY-SA/SFDL Compatibility, Not BY-SA/FDL Compatibility
11. Internet Psychology: Teenagers do not need our help online - we need them to help us oldies by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist
12. Wanting Your Opinions about Blog Comments and City Attorneys : David Lee King
13. Zookoda - I Don't Recommend them Anymore
14. Solar Water Heating :: ShowBlog
15. Internet Psychology: Forget email - it's old hat by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist
16. Drake.org.uk: That's a wrap! Time to roll the end credits..
17. Internet Psychology: Internet criminals are going to have a field day by Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist
18. A Cambridge Co-operator: Rebranded Stores
19. robmyers - Two Common Errors
20. Lucas Nussbaum's Blog » Blog Archive » Where is the NM bottleneck?
21. NM: FD is fixed - MadBlog

Tux likes this fish-like object.

I finally got bluetooth file transfer working between my phone and laptop a little while ago. It wasn't particularly hard, although there were a couple of dead ends.

The basic bluetooth layer is petty easy. Start dbus, start hcid, start passkey-agent if you've not paired the two. It seems to be a bit simpler to start the pairing from the phone. Then use sdptool browse to check the phone is seen clearly.

After that, it got a bit complicated. obexftp worked well enough as far as it went, putting items onto the phone and getting files off the phone, but I couldn't work out how to get some items off the phone. They just didn't appear in the obexftp or obexfs listings. So I wondered if it night be easier to start the transfer from the phone.

There's an obexftpd, but I didn't figure out how to send it files. I also tried to compile opd but I think it offer patching for modern gccs. (Anyone got these working?)

What I did get to work was sobexsrv - just tell it a directory and it puts any files it's sent there. Works a treat.

One other thing that has been really useful is anyremote. It's a command server for the GNU/Linux side and a Java client for the phone. The phone mostly picks from option menus or preprogrammed keys, but editable fields are also possible. You can run any commands that the server configuration allows, including starting file transfers. I think that's possible because remote control and object transfer are on different bluetooth channels, but I don't really understand it yet.

I've improved the RSS reader to use xsltproc and added shell commands to it. Once I'm fairly sure it's reliable, I'll upload it near here.

(Posted in part due to an ALUG thread which reminded me about this forgotten draft.)

About gobolinux

I can suspend my laptop and it restarts happily enough in X, but playing video results in a strange green square. I've found that starting and killing another X server (like X :1, wait for the grey mesh and then zap it) fixes the problem and I can switch back to my original :0 X and play video again. I wonder if these notes on X suspend and video BIOS by Matthew Garrett explain it.

About debian

Why on earth did someone change the .changes format so swiftly and why does a change that breaks a common upload process (build in a VM, sign on a stable system) only warrant a -devel-announce paragraph under the headline Misc Development News (#6)? "Small news" - my foot!

I'm still alive, so it's past time to update the signature on my gpg key into next year. The key phrase in the handbook is:

"The expiration time is updated by deleting the old self-signature and adding a new self-signature."

but somehow I always have to look it up, so I thought I'd make a note of it here.

It looks like debian-keyring should update now I did --send-key to it, but I guess I'll find out in a few weeks.

At the time of writing, I've not seen an announcement (again), but there's an agenda for an Software in the Public Interest IRC meeting at 19:00 GMT tonight (Wednesday 21st).

It doesn't include any reports, motions or items for discussion. This is particularly surprising because Michael Schultheiss declared in the last meeting that there would "definitely" be a complete treasurer report before this meeting (see 20:07:48 in the meeting log http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2008-April/002571.html I sent to spi-general after last month's meeting).

But why are there no motions or items? Are we that short of work to do?

I may not be at this meeting (library event in Bristol instead) but I'll post a log to spi-general later if I have one.