Planet ALUG

Steve Engledow (stilvoid): Primes

steve@offend.me.uk (Steve Engledow) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:40:55 +0000

And I'm not talking numbers.

Optimus Prime

The original and best. While I don't think the new movies are too bad, when I think of Optimus Prime, I think of the original cartoon series :)

I was just thinking that the voice of Prime in the new movies was a very, very good approximation of the voice used in the cartoon series and a quick search tells me that they are actually the same guy! Well I never.

Optimist Prime

A few years back, while I was on your with my old band, there was one morning around the middle of the tour where we'd hit a few snags and it seems like things might fall apart. We were travelling with another band and between us, we seemed to have split in to two camps: those who were depressed, angry, and convinced that all was doomed to failure; and those who were aware that we were already having the best time of our lives and any snag was just that, a minor inconvenience.

I was in the latter camp and between those merry few of us, we decided that what we needed was an Optimist Prime to help us defeat the evil forces of Negatron and his Depressedicons.

Optometrist Prime

For some reason, this popped into my head this morning and I decided to compile a list of Primes. Mostly so I could share the wonder of the above Optimist Prime :)

I suppose Optometrist Prime would just look after the other Primes' optical sensors.

Optional Prime

Not required

Opportunist Prime

This Prime would've just taken Megatron down while he was incapacitated rather than agreeing to that stupid duel.

Apologist Prime

Ok, I think I'm beginning to run out of Primes.

Additional Primes welcome.

Andrew Savory: Government CloudStore

Andrew — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:17:17 +0000

The Government launched their G-Cloud CloudStore for Cloud procurement of Cloud services on Sunday. The outlook is … cloudy. I applaud the increase in transparency that could be derived from listing vendors in a single searchable public online catalogue. But I have concerns about the implementation.

The CloudStore is apparently built upon Windows Azure, the cloud platform from Microsoft. It was built by Microsoft partner Solidsoft. The price tag? Free, according to Chris Chant, Program Director of Government G-Cloud, speaking on twitter earlier:

We should certainly welcome cost savings if an SME provides the government with a useful new web resource for free. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Consider:

Is it entirely bespoke, or is it using existing components or an existing CMS?
Is the government getting the source code for the application so that anyone can update and maintain it?
Are they now locked in to license fees for the software, or is there a lengthy maintenance contract which will potentially cost the taxpayer far more than the initial website?
What is the commercial value to Microsoft and Solidsoft that can be derived from prominent placement and links from a government website?

The last point is perhaps most apposite. How many other government websites carry commercial advertising? None that I could find, from a quick survey. And yet, there it is, bottom-right of every single page, animated logos proclaiming it is delivered by Solidsoft and powered by Azure:

For the conspiracy theorists, does the design of the catalogue feel vaguely familiar?

Isn’t it a little … I dunno … Windows 8?

I think it’s interesting that we’re seeing government service roll-outs measured in weeks rather than months (at least in delivery time – the government app store itself has been kicking around for a long time, and one report claimed it was trialled two years ago). I think greater transparency around suppliers is a positive move.

I think the government needs to take care not to ignore other equally important factors (such as avoiding lock-in and preventing free advertising) in their enthusiasm for delivery.

Andrew Savory: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-18

Andrew — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:15:00 +0000

@SeekTom are you using rvm? makes installing ruby much easier … #
@virginmedia you'd have to ask your call centre that. Called 150 and they said "oh, sorry, can it be Monday now?". Very polite, but useless. #
@kwik_fit I need to get my car booked in for service & MOT early this year. Haven't received the usual annual offers mail from you
Help! #
@asymco @quora slight mistake in your response: LiMo was never open sourced. Tizen was; both were derivatives of Samsung Linux Platform. #
"you need to install the Akamai NetSession Interface, a download manager". Why, @BlackBerryDev, why must you hate your developers?! #
Or, "Click here to download using your browser."*
* at 60kB/s. Go make lotsa tea, cos we cheaped out on bandwidth.
Why @BlackBerryDev, why? #
@tcurdt they're the ones doing interesting open source https://t.co/VYHlb2Nf
& giving devices to devs http://t.co/4OFxxo5R
cc @BlackBerryDev #
Message to future me: did this work out well? Join me in finding out → http://t.co/UneG1XbR #
Feeling the love today. Sports gear arrived from Amazon badly damaged; gas engineer no-show; no @flyingflowers delivery http://t.co/cXqZU4jV #
@BlackBerryDev fair enough, but what % of downloaders find a download mgr useful vs. annoying? Might be worth switching the options around…? #
@jamesparton HMS Belfast is quite fun. Climbing Monument is fun (but expect wobbly legs after). Both those vetted by my teenage nephew. #
@SeekTom speak to @9600 or @psd, they are the gurus of hardware and electronics, and can probably HTTP 303 to an arduino bod. Also, #OSHUG #
@fooishbar well, we've had a LOT of practice. We ought to be good at waiting for delayed trains by now … practically a national sport. #
@BlackPlastic East: Krüger http://t.co/PQHsZjb2 City: The Breakfast Club http://t.co/khtgIcDy Kensington(ish) Mirabell http://t.co/vqJbq6lW #
Engineer is rewiring everything to stop rogue boiler from heating apartment to ~ surface of sun.
Wish he could add nest http://t.co/qIKmyvtV #
Scary video of bus deliberately hitting cyclist: http://t.co/MtVdnX5I
But driver only gets 8.5 months for attempted manslaughter?! #
Vitality bean curry. Yum. #fb http://t.co/EE9GsMIl #
Why is the Messages beta not distributed through the App Store?
And why does it require a reboot? #
@Codepope do I get bonus points for first 50k? #48803 #
Window Maker is alive again? I used to live in that in 1999. Next you'll be telling me Enlightenment is back to finish off my 486. Oh, wait… #
Brilliant! Sentimental #Tizen SDK installer: http://t.co/dkw417ge
Check out the first screenshot …
(via https://t.co/qmjYIBIM) #
It's an essential ingredient, honest. #fb http://t.co/ciyNmx7p #
@trech1fr67 @malminhas strangely no sentiment for the LiMo SDK. Perhaps I missed the powerpoint about it? #
@ribot oh no, not a rouge developer! You must be red-faced with anger!
(when you find the rogue, I suggest you torture them with make-up) #

Steve Engledow (stilvoid): Hokey Cokey

steve@offend.me.uk (Steve Engledow) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:03:28 +0000

Morning has b0rked

The last couple of weeks have seen a fairly insane number of hours of work out of me due to a combination of a project with tight deadlines (aren't they all?) and the advent of me driving my wife to work in the mornings. She's at the point now of not being particularly mobile (oh, by the way, we're spawning) so I'm getting up at 6:30 daily to get her to work for 7. This means that I'm generally either working from home by 7:15 or in the office just before 8. That should mean that I'm done before 5 but it doesn't quite seem to work that way when other people are involved ;)

Anyway, due to the ease of working with Node.js and Django, I've at least achieved a lot :)

I ended up building quite a neat (and yes, I actually mean this in the sense of tidy and organised - not just "cool") web server engine as part of the project. It's quite similar to the one I made for this site but with some pretty nifty refinements. If I can persuade the powers that be, I might see if I can split it out a little more and open-source it. We'll see :)

One snag I've hit along the way is that OAuth appears not to be applicable to multipart post requests. I'm hoping someone will correct me on that and just tell me that I've been doing it wrong but I don't think so. That single thing broke my entire afternoon today.

The problem comes from my need to upload a large file or two to an authenticated web service. When the files were small, a basic querystring formatted post body was sufficient but when I tried larger files, that clearly wasn't going to work so I stuck it all into a multipart request and then... BOOM oauth is unhappy. It seems to be the signature generation code that makes certain assumptions about what the request will look like when it's generating the sig.

Like I said, I hope I'm wrong and that there's a nice, simple way to do file uploads via OAuth!

The Eagle has exploded

I'm not sure if I mentioned it before and I really can't be bothered to look, but Eagle Mode is fantastic! Basically it's a zooming file manager but with some other things thrown in. I'd actually like to see the file manager part separated out from the rest of the project as it's so amazingly useful. It'll need to be a bit shinier before the Mac fanboys and Ubuntu users will go for it though ;)

The basic idea is that, whatever you're looking at, you can zoom in on it. If you're looking at a folder, you'll see it as a box with boxes for each of the files and sub-folders within it. You can zoom in on one of those (with the scroll-wheel for example) and, if it's a folder, see what's inside it and if it's a file (and this is the really awesome part), see its contents. Eagle Mode has handlers for most common types of files so you can, for example, very easily preview the contents of an entire folder of photos just by zooming in on the folder.

This quick and easy access to things and their contents makes it a very powerful file manager. It's stupidly easy to move files around and easily see the effect you're having on the way your file system is organised. I'd been putting off the task of reorganising my home folder on my desktop machine for years. It's a machine that's gone through several hardware changes, several operating systems, and a number of changes of heart about where I store things.

I reorganised all of it in about twenty minutes in Eagle Mode :)

I want it to have a web browser and for the internet to work like that. But it doesn't.

So I made this zooming version of my site :D It probably doesn't work in anything but chrom(e|ium) and I'm unlikely to work on it further. Essentially, you get an overview of this website. As you click on part of it, you zoom in. To zoom out, use the right mouse button.

MJ Ray: Food Co-ops in Bristol

mjr — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:01:25 +0000

Last week I went along to the food co-ops networking event at the Southville Centre in Bristol. It was a useful event and very inspiring and informative to meet people from so many other co-ops, as well as attend some useful workshops: the two I went to were Good meetings and communication and Starting and developing a food co-op, while there were also ones on funding and Simply Legal available.

There was some time for networking, as well as a relaxed end to the day which let me catch up with a few more people. I would have preferred a little more time for the workshops and a little less on case studies (every food co-op is different and I don’t think any of the featured ones were quite what I was looking for), but that’s a very minor thing and didn’t really reduce the usefulness of the whole day.

Our co-op is a tech worker co-op and not a food co-op, so I didn’t know that much about how to start one before the event. Now I’ve got a much better idea of what I need to do when I eventually move back out to what may be a co-op desert in King’s Lynn.

Are you a member of a food co-op or buying group? If so, what would you say about it? Were you involved in its start-up?

Jonathan McDowell: On arranging meetings

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:44:31 +0000

I've been spending a lot more time recently in meetings. Mostly things I should actually be at. And in general if it's something I think is reasonable I'll try to be there. In an effort to help with this I actually keep my work calendar up to date. Given that I'm running Linux on my laptop and the corporate standard is Exchange this requires a little bit of effort on my part (the Thunderbird Provider for Microsoft Exchange and Android support for talking to Exchange are helpful with this).

Sometimes it seems like I shouldn't bother. I spent this week at a conference, and marked my calendar to indicate I was out of the office. I think I had at least 3 meeting requests, all for things that would actually have been appropriate for me to go to. Last week I managed to be booked for 7 hours of meetings from 7am until noon. That included a 30 minute window where I was triple booked.

The thing is, I'm really not that busy in terms of meetings - you can usually find a spot when I'm free on any given day unless I'm actually not in the office. If you bother to check my calendar, that is.

Another problem I have is the times people like to book meetings at. Booking a technical meeting at 9am isn't going to get me at my best. Equally doing so at 5pm is likely to have me clock watching to make sure I don't miss my bus and/or train. Also I seem to work with far too many people who don't eat lunch and book hour long meetings at midday or 1pm.

I understand sometimes that's the only time you can get everyone into a room together, but at least bloody ask and explain the need rather than just sending out a meeting invite.

Finally, book meetings of a realistic length. There are some people who invite me to things and cause me to add another 30 minutes on the end, because I know it always overruns.

It's not all bad. I have a VP who always runs a meeting to time, and never seems to call one for spurious reasons. I've also worked with a program manager who will organize the meeting so that if you're only there for one point on the agenda that'll get dealt with near the beginning so it doesn't take up more of your time that it needs to. Funnily enough I'm much more likely to go to things both of these people arrange.

Disclaimer: In the unlikely event anyone I work with who invites me to meetings is reading this, I might be talking about you, but everything I mention has been done by more than one person, so I'm not thinking about anyone in particular for each point.

Andrew Savory: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-11

Andrew — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:15:00 +0000

Wise words from @stskeeps #fosdem talk. Work together on commodity layer. Why do mobile companies find this so hard? http://t.co/FySWTU51 #
Agreed with @stskeeps but thought mention of Mer project undermined the message a little. See also: http://t.co/f3V85EvU #fosdem #
@malminhas a lot of openwashing coming from rasterman. Cheeky to say #tizen more open than android. Neither are open development. #fosdem #
Awesome response. Will there be an e17 release? "We do rolling releases. 'svn checkout …'" – rasterman #fosdem #
@twtomcat @rkallensee I have a table booked at an Italian nearby for 7.30pm with one spare place if you're quick! #
@ramcq good idea – sadly I only just got your tweet. Curse roaming data charges! #
@directhex #fosdem WiFi is rubbish cos it only works on campus, and not the rest of Brussels #
@ramcq you, sir, are awesome I'm around til this afternoon but carrying a heavy suitcase so parked at the back of cross desktop room. #
Fix @directhex's jinxed #fosdem WiFi with: echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf #
@ndw it's not looking good: http://t.co/QqWJOIDy #
Demanding people only use FLOSS does not render you smart. Diversity, tolerance, & choice. #FOSDEM #youaredoingitwrong #apple #openminds #
"You get what you pay for" is a sucky rule. Especially Sunday night, trying to get stuff done. http://t.co/ro7WJcXc #fb http://t.co/2a80BvcO #
BlackBerry WebWorks: Based on today's upcoming Hackathon I'm investigating WebWorks (not WebWo… http://t.co/GHGuBRyp #
BlackBerry Hackathon (@ Rosarium Amsterdam w/ @twtomcat) http://t.co/nByGx0KW #
#bbdev Playbook 2.0 browser has best score out of any tablet. Come a long way since the poor browsing experience on early BlackBerry. #
Alice: Lightweight independent CSS Engine; open source project; entirely JS: http://t.co/2RMXQdCl
bbUI.js: Blackberry native l&f #BBDevCon #
Fair response to my SDK critique: it's a religion change; code completion etc less important than tooling the way web devs work. #BBDevCon #
Creating a BlackBerry WebWorks app: Some notes on building my first WebWorks app. I figured the… http://t.co/yRv2Cx3K #
@SeekTom Some serious network connectivity trouble this morning which put a small dent into proceedings, but going well now! #
And the bar is open. Bring on the bitterballen! (@ BlackBerry DevCon Europe at the Amsterdam RAI Convention Centre) http://t.co/SJa7Dkvy #
@jashaj here til Wednesday so hopefully! #
How dumb does hotel WiFi have to be, that you have to click "I agree" to T&C every few hours from the same sodding MAC address? Asshats. #
It seems any hashtag is immediately subject to extensive jokes when in Amsterdam. Thank goodness twitter wasn't a thing when I lived here. #
How can you tell when there's a geek conference on? Room service are all out of the pepperoni pizzas, but have plenty of salad. #BBDevCon #
BlackBerry DevCon printable schedule is blank. Is this a hint? #BBDevCon http://t.co/ErmaB8Tm #
AFAICT, #bbdevcon starts at 13:30 on Tuesday. Is the Session Scheduler buggered or do RIM endorse lazy mornings? https://t.co/fxFeiPaB #
#bbdevcon "Master Agenda" has a "general session" from 10:30-12:00 … http://t.co/mPfx0K5k No sign of welcome keynote or opening session. #
Ok, so #bbdevcon attendees: "general session" 10:30 Tuesday 7th is actually the opening keynote.
//cc @BlackBerryDev @BBEMEABusiness #
My PlayBook "2.0 beta" says it's running version 1.0.8.6067 – which looks like current, not beta. Anyone else seeing the same? #BBDevCon #
Got your new #PlayBook but not got the 2.0 beta software? Go here to register for beta access: https://t.co/9OV0kUSU #BBDevCon #
Impressed that OTA updates are done on a per-device basis. 2.0 beta pushed out to my #PlayBook upon request. No tethering. #PostPC #BBDevCon #
Ready for #bbdevcon opening keynote to kick off. http://t.co/e8n8sqgu #
OMG LOLS my OTA update tweet was just on the big screen at #BBDevCon #
@twtomcat "OS 2.0 beta does not contain end user features such as: email, calendar contacts, video store, etc." #BBDevCon #
Ripple: Here's my experience using the Ripple emulator for BlackBerry WebWorks. There's a bunch… http://t.co/q9wFi27d #
No matter how often I delete eclipse from my Mac, somehow it always seems to come crawling back.
Calculating requirements and dependencies. #
Which is worse for installing #Kindle #webOS http://t.co/utr7gDLQ or #playbook http://t.co/hzPwa1MI ?
#Amazon please release legit apps! #
#Novotel checkout plan:
"Please agree to the T&C before I return my keycard"
"Please agree to the T&C before I pay my bill" #wifi #asshats #
Congratulations to "Global Energy Ltd" for ignoring the TPS. Almost as good as http://t.co/O14NOAj3 which cost me roaming fees for the spam. #
Current status: dying of man flu. Or possibly conference lurgy (not sure which is worse). Please send drugs and alcohol. #fb #
Sometimes only an evil ugly bash script hack will do: https://t.co/G3Ac0XiP
Easier than breaking directory perms to make Apache behave. #
@thommay not really up for chmod'ing bunch of directories into openness just to please httpd. Prefer fuglyscript. Now sat on naughty step #
@thommay heh true. beer hell yes – once I'm no longer sick. will shout! #
@fooishbar @thommay definitely – some time late next week might work? you may bring roast spuds with you #
How to Open Source Your Technology:
1: latch on to Linux Foundation and dump a selection of code in a read-only git repo
2: …
3: profit! #
So last night's drive to Norwich was fun. It was pretty much this all the way: http://t.co/oODsrsGr #snow #fb #
There's nothing more awesome than an xml config file where a list of possible attribute values isn't provided. What do we do, guess?! #
Big thumbs-up for Linacre Locksmiths, who just fixed sticking locks on both exterior doors of my place. http://t.co/LvUqsBml #fb #
Clearly running multiple consultations on the use of OSS in Govt is far better than JFDI.
Did I miss the consultations on proprietary sw? #
@scottbw uk gov has been talking about this sort of thing since at least 2002.
A decade.

10. fscking. years.

http://t.co/SBDWBltd #
Awesome. Command-line util says "-v turns on verbose messages". What it really means is "-v turns on invalid command line parameters" error. #
Sweet: TubeStatus for #PlayBook using #WebWorks worked first time on device! Now, polish. #bbdevcon //cc @BlackBerryDev http://t.co/AIur2XJG #
@rocketjohn incoming! #
That would be very cold out there then. #fb http://t.co/RI76opEC #
The irony of all these big companies dumping lock-in platform A for lock-in platform B has not escaped me. Open, collaborate, commoditise? #
@spugamola @bookmeister everyone I've shown the PlayBook to has been pleasantly surprised. But it desperately needs more big brand name apps #
@virginmedia utter #fail New router delivery scheduled 1 month ago for yesterday. "Sorry, can it be Monday now?" No. Cancel cancel cancel. #
Who's the least incompetent option for Norwich broadband these days? suggestions, @norfolkquino @rocketjohn @paulrussell? #virginmedia #fail #

MJ Ray: Comments with OpenID

mjr — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:08:10 +0000

Readers who look at our blog itself (rather than one of the lovely sites that reprint our articles) may have noticed that you can now comment in either the usual WordPress way (Name/Email/Link) or by logging in with a social media profile from one of a large range of providers, including WordPress, Livejournal, Yahoo, Google and many more.

This uses the broadly-cooperative openID system. If you run a website that accepts reader contributions, you should allow comments with openid because it helps people to use their existing social media membership without you having to surrender any control to facebook, twitter, or anyone else (unless you choose to). You also don’t have to ask your readers to weaken their security settings like with disqus (which requires javascript and third-party cookies).

The comment form on our site is powered by the openid plugin, together with our co-op’s version of the comments-with-openid plugin which can be downloaded from our site. Please download them if you’d find them useful for your WordPress site. (I’d love to adopt the official comments-with-openid at wordpress.org because the previous maintainer doesn’t answer – anyone know how to do that? I’m surprised it’s not in the FAQ.)

Do you use some other platform? What tools have let you add openid logins to it? For example, Drupal has some openID support in its core distribution: what else is out there?

MJ Ray: SPI Feb 2012

mjr — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:47:32 +0000

Software in the Public Interest, the mass-membership association that supports some great Free and Open Source Software projects, will hold a public board of directors meeting today, Thursday 9th February 2012 at 21:00 UTC. The day and time of SPI meetings has changed recently, so maybe different people can get to them now.

They’re held online, on irc.spi-inc.org (the OFTC network). The agenda for the meeting is open and available at http://www.spi-inc.org/meetings/agendas/2012/2012-02-09/ and there’s been a bit of discussion of back office support on the SPI email list.

I’ll link to a meeting summary from the comments in this blog post after it happens.

Andrew Savory: Ripple

Andrew — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:02:28 +0000

Here’s my experience using the Ripple emulator for BlackBerry WebWorks.

There’s a bunch of awesome BlackBerry developers at the hackathon, but I’m determined to work this out without them walking me through it. After all, developers don’t normally have the opportunity to ask directly for help. And this way I get to discover all the dark corners of the BlackBerry developer experience.

Again, Ripple comes as a non-native installer. This time, the installation goes into /Applications/Research in Motion/ – I would prefer to have everything in /Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/ so everything is in one consistent place. Or, since Ripple is an emulator for more than just WebWorks, just leave it in /Applications but drop the “Research in Motion” folder. And tidy up the app so the resources are all inside the app bundle. Basically, follow Mac best practice.

Launching the Ripple emulator application the first time results in a prompt in the middle of the screen, asking what platform you want to emulate:

Selecting “WebWorks” results in a a huge emulator window with the device running off the bottom of the screen – this on my Macbook Pro running at 1680×1050. Are mobile screens really so big?

In discussion with some folks at the hackathon, it turns out the Windows version of Ripple has the option to scale the UI, but not in the Mac version.

I’ve got my packaged app from the previous exploration of creating a WebWorks app, but there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to load it into the emulator.

Reading “Packaging your app with the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK” tells me about the different formats of files I discovered when creating my own app:

.cod file for wireless distribution or distribution from a web page
.alx file for distribution using BlackBerry Desktop Manager
.jad file for distribution from a web page
.cso file for application signing
.csl file for application signing

Apparently there’s also a .bar file for a BlackBerry tablet. I can’t help but feel I’d like a single fat package for all eventualities.

There’s instructions on running your application on a smartphone simulator, but the simulator is a VM and does not appear to be the Ripple emulator.

Reading Packaging your app in Ripple, you can package from within the emulator. You have to click the tiny wrench icon in the top-right corner of the emulator window. This should be much more prominent if this is a common task.

Unfortunately, clicking on the wrench prompts me for lots of configuration: SDK path, Project Root, archive name … all as text fields, and not file/folder pickers. There’s also no support for tab-completion of paths in the fields, so you’ll have to enter them long-hand:

Given RIM only recently acquired Ripple, I’ll cut them some slack. But I’d like to see for example a wrapper script that launches Ripple with all the correct configurations for SDK, project, etc.

The settings for smartphones are on the packaging page.

I’m guessing that my settings should be:

SDK Path: /Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.3.0.9
Project Root: /Users/savs/Downloads/blackberry-WebWorks-Samples-0a5693e/UIExamples
Archive Name: UIExamples
Output Folder: /tmp/Ripple

Trying with these settings, I got the familiar config.xml not found error:

Tweaking the settings,

SDK Path: /Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.3.0.9
Project Root: /Users/savs/Downloads/blackberry-WebWorks-Samples-0a5693e/ProjectRoot
Archive Name: UIExamples
Output Folder: /tmp/Ripple

That worked:

I ended up with UIExamples.zip inside /tmp/Ripple, and an “OTAInstall” folder and a “StandardInstall” folder.

The OTAInstall folder contains UIExamples .cod files, split into ten separate packages:

Apparently this is for backwards-compatibility reasons, with only packages of ~60k or less being allowed for an OTA install. This means that, when you deploy to a phone, you get to watch 10 different packages being installed before your app is ready for testing. Ouch.

Now I’ve build the packages, it’s not clear how to actually use the built application. The “Package and Launch” menu option is greyed-out.

Looking at the settings screen again, at the bottom beside Simulator it says “No simulators found “.

During the hackathon, the network failed. This results in some fairly unhelpful problems with Ripple, where you’ll see a blank loading screen for a long time followed by an error message:

This all went away when the network came back.

Reading the docs suggests another way to view your app in Ripple is to stick it on a web server and point Ripple at that. If you’ve got a local server, the benefit is a much quicker development cycle, without having to go through the packaging process first. Indeed, this did work and allowed me to see my app:

The downside on a Mac is that you can’t easily symlink your content from the web root to your development location (at least, not without making a ton of parent directories more widely accessible). See Creating a symbolic link in Sites directory on StackOverflow for more details.

Anyway, success of sorts: I got my app packaged, and I got to view the development files via HTTP.

Next up: signing.

MJ Ray: Stop ACTA Marches Map

mjr — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:11:21 +0000

Further to last week’s blog post that mentioned this Saturday’s (11 Feb) London Stop ACTA march, there’s a map of anti-ACTA marches on Google’s website (thanks to Martin Houston for the link).

There’s also been a new Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement factsheet from European Digital RIghts (EDRI), as apparently there are a lot of misconceptions about ACTA. I don’t feel that has been helped by some spectacular misdirection from the European Commission in its latest “10 Myths” paper (linked from the EDRI factsheet) which is almost as interesting for what it doesn’t mention (like sneaking ACTA through the parliament fisheries committee), what it misunderstands (like the near-uselessness of a non-commercial exemption to Free and Open Source Software or Creative Commons users), and the way it fails to rebut the final point that ACTA was done this way to avoid the oversight of the World Trade Organisation! I mean, if they can’t even get it past the usually very pro-enforcement WTO, surely that should tell you something?

If you can, would you please go along and join your nearest march? Recent marchers seem to have been wearing stylised Guy Fawkes masks, but how would that be viewed in London?

Andrew Savory: Creating a BlackBerry WebWorks app

Andrew — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:06:46 +0000

Some notes on building my first WebWorks app.

I figured the quickest way to get an app up and running would be to take the examples from BlackBerry.

Working from https://github.com/blackberry/WebWorks-Samples/tree/master/UIExamples I first did a git clone, but then reading the documentation I downloaded a zip of the UI examples instead.

The documentation talks about downloading a zip, unarchiving it, shuffling things around, and rearchiving it. The first problem I came across (on a Mac) doing this was Apple’s resource forks screwing up the zip:

Invalid application archive: resource name is not valid(__MACOSX/UIExamples/._bbmBubbles.htm

Next up, another packaging problem: despite following the documentation (or so I thought), I could not get bbwp to build my package:

Invalid application archive – failed to find config.xml

It turns out I was doing it wrong – the config.xml needs to be at the same level as the containing folder (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4433092/package-my-first-blackberry-widget-xml-file-not-found). A tweak to the layout and then:

zip -r UIExamples.zip UIExamples config.xml

That fixed the packaging problem (both with missing files and with Mac resource forks). The next error I got was “Spinner not found”:

There’s quite a few extra steps you need to go through to add the UI Spinner extension, which can be summed up as:

download the SpinnerControl zip
extract the zip
create the /Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.3.0.9/ext/blackberry.ui.Spinner directory
copy the library.xml file into that directory
copy the blackberry-WebWorks-Community-APIs-4d7c20a/Smartphone/SpinnerControl/src/blackberry folder into the ext/blackberry.ui.Spinner directory.

Phew. The packaging will then work:

BlackBerry WebWorks application packaging complete

I think there’s some optimisation that could be done on this process. In general the WebWorks development seems to involve a lot of copying files here and there.

One thing that wasn’t clear was where the output package went. I was running

./bbwp /Users/savs/Downloads/blackberry-WebWorks-Samples-0a5693e/UIExamples.zip

… but although it declared success, I could find no output. So don’t do this. It turns out you need to add -o (picked up from Lukasz‘ excellent presentation on differences between Enyo and WebWorks):

./bbwp /Users/savs/Downloads/blackberry-WebWorks-Samples-0a5693e/UIExamples.zip -o /tmp/

This gives two folders, OTAInstall and StandardInstall, which contain a bunch of files with .cod, .jad, .cso, .csl, .alx extensions. No idea what these are – I guess I’ll find out as I continue to explore.

Now I’ve got a packaged app, what do I do now? Next up: time to try out the emulator.

Update: turns out I’m not quite right about the folder structure and location of config.xml – although it worked, when you deploy it on a phone it fails. Instead you have the config file at the same location as your resources, and do the zipping of the contents of the project, rather than the project folder:

zip -r UIExamples.zip *

And then package:

./bbwp /Users/savs/Downloads/blackberry-WebWorks-Samples-0a5693e/ProjectRoot/UIExamples/UIExamples.zip -o /tmp/bbwp/

… and it works on the phone as well.

Andrew Savory: BlackBerry WebWorks

Andrew — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:26:08 +0000

Based on today’s upcoming Hackathon I’m investigating WebWorks (not WebWorks (with annoying voice popup!) or WebWorks). These are rough, quick notes in the spirit of “publish early and often”.

So far I’ve downloaded Ripple (the emulator), the smartphone and tablet SDK. Initial reaction: it would be better if there was one download that comprised all three components. You don’t, for example, download a separate iPhone and iPad SDK, or Pre and Touchpad SDK. But bonus points for having Mac OS X installers at all – last time I looked at RIM/BlackBerry development, it was Windows-only. Unshackling from the Windows ecosystem is a good plan for any mobile platform.

On the corner of the WebWorks SDK download page you’ll note the ribbon “Fork me on GitHub”, which takes you to blackberry.github.com which includes for example BlackBerry WebWorks – I’m impressed. This looks like open development, with actual commits and merges taking place in public. So RIM should be recognised for doing this – it’s a step that so many mobile platforms have not yet made.

Another thought – since everything is branded BlackBerry, isn’t it time RIM renamed? Research In Motion is a cool name, RIM not so much, and everyone just says “BlackBerry” anyway.

Let’s dig in to the Smartphone SDK:

The installer is an app which is an installer. I always prefer Mac software to use the native Apple install app – the tooling to create these is extremely good, and a non-native InstallAnywhere installer just looks poor. It also helps prevent some of the unfortunate user experience errors that are present in RIM’s installer. Also, InstallAnywhere is just not pretty:

The first area for improvement I noticed was the Install location. The installer suggests it will be put in a root folder called ‘/Research in Motion‘ which would be just horrible. In reality, it sort-of does the right thing and installs to ‘/Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.3.0.9‘ if you accept the defaults. I don’t like version numbers in folder names – a workaround if they must have this would be to add a symlink ‘Current’ pointing to ’2.3.0.9′, which allows for less fragile scripting.

The SDK is 20mb, which is very light compared to others – but let’s not forget this is only for smartphones, and only for web apps.

During installation I got an overwrite error message, despite never having installed WebWorks before:

This is the kind of ugly hiccup you can mitigate by using a platform-native installer. I told it to overwrite, and the installation seemed to complete successfully:

There doesn’t seem to be any sort of GUI with this SDK – in fact I’d go so far as to say it’s less of an SDK and more of a packaging tool, allowing you to bundle your web apps into a format to drop on a phone.

Next up: my first-run experience of producing a sample app.

Andrew Savory: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-04

Andrew — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:15:00 +0000

Achievement unlocked: completed Halo. Only 11 years late. http://t.co/n4ULECu9 #
And now… http://t.co/kKiOK0Gw #
I can understand Kindle books costing as much as paperbacks (ish), but costing more than paperbacks? Madness.
5.99 vs 7.49, so not just VAT. #
@twtomcat @rkallensee definitely – i'll be there! #
@monkchips @geekygirldawn @monkigras wait, what?!
I skipped #monkigras 'cos of #FOSDEM and now you're telling me I coulda done both?! #
@monkigras @monkchips @geekygirldawn nah, missed it
http://t.co/d3GEFlqQ say I should never stop reading twitter. Now on naughty step. #
I'm off to #FOSDEM this weekend, then BlackBerry #WebWorks hackathon next Monday: http://t.co/xLqZH0kt #webos and then http://t.co/XKSRuuJ5 #
@fooishbar you doing #FOSDEM then? See you there! #
Predictive Text, part 2: Not even a month after my predictions for the year, and the first of t… http://t.co/N6wfSNpc #
Heh, #Starcraft ported to #Tizen running in the emulator: http://t.co/hvZADqqS #
Off to Brussels for FOSDEM (@ Eurostar Departure Lounge w/ 2 others) http://t.co/Sipvr2DQ #
Upstairs bar. Annual FOSDEM beer ritual. This probably cost me a fortune in roaming charges to post. Down periscope. http://t.co/ot3QcgYQ #
Brussels Grand Place with snow http://t.co/Iptxd4RL #
Patisserie in Brussels. Yum. http://t.co/shLchdVb #
Rather awesomely, Delirium has free public wifi. Why does my hotel feel the need to charge? #FOSDEM http://t.co/rdimdXJV #
@therealpadams your presence is demanded upstairs in delirium with @malminhas! #fosdem #catchingupwithawesomepeople #
@lordmauve @malminhas I am excited! #
@andrewjskatz @therealpadams Eurostar this morning is the quickest way, failing that then get on the train first thing tomorrow! #FOSDEM #
@andrewjskatz @therealpadams Monday is next week. This weekend includes #FOSDEM legal track. & beer. & awesome people. & special bonus: snow #
@twtomcat it's warm and toasty in Delirium. Come join us! #FOSDEM #
@twtomcat well the bar may be empty at that time #
I'm at Fosdem w/ 51 others http://t.co/BVQZVhkr #
Cold and frosty Brussels on the way to #fosdem this morning. #fb http://t.co/dX6tufX4 #
Excellent #tizen talk by @geekygirldawn – tough crowd, lots of sceptical people given maemo/meego history. Pragmatic responses from Dawn. #
@stskeeps' talk on "beyond traditional mobile linux": no truly open project to prevent fragmentation. Silly disagreements eg packaging. Yes! #

MJ Ray: Two Campaigns, One Spot

mjr — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:08:24 +0000

Sometimes two campaigns that I care about a lot pick the same day to hold an awareness-raising drive. It happened again on Tuesday.

The one I took part in was advertising the Stop ACTA London Protest on Sat 11 Feb. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (#ACTA) is a plurilateral international agreement on enforcement of so-called “intellectual property rights” – copyrights, trademarks and so on. It’ll have major implications for freedom of expression, access to culture and privacy. It will also harm international trade and stifle cooperation. (More background at EDRI or a fairly large AJE page – thanks to Occupy Bristol for the AJE link.)

So the one I didn’t support at the time was the Move Your Money UK launch day. That’s a great idea too, suggesting that if we, the 99%, are actually unhappy with the big banks and their titled leaders, we should move as much as possible out of those banks and into financial institutions that we control. As you might expect for someone whose first memory of mutuals is a trust account at the local building society, I support that too. I still have building society accounts, as well as banking with the co-op bank and recently joining my local credit union. I’ve moved my money. Why don’t you?

I didn’t try to support both campaigns simultaneously on social networks because I thought it would reduce the number of people who saw my message. I backed the ACTA protest because a lot of my networks were already discussing Move Your Money and I thought Stop ACTA would benefit more. Was that the right decision? Who can tell? What would you have done?

Andrew Savory: Predictive Text, part 2

Andrew — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:54:30 +0000

Not even a month after my predictions for the year, and the first of them has failed. I said:

No IPO for Facebook: This could go either way. My bet is it will be very late 2012 or early 2013

They said:

Facebook unveils $5bn stock market flotation plans

Hrmph. Thanks Zuckerberg, you impatient hasty prediction-killer!

Andrew Savory: Backlight

Andrew — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 01:12:08 +0000

If you use a computer for any amount of time, you may find some backlighting for your computer screen is beneficial.

I couldn’t find any medical research that says one way or another whether it’s a good thing or not, though I did find one article which states “one of the recommended tips for reducing computer eye strain is to control the screen glare caused by both indoor and outdoor lighting” (Reduce eye fatigue by backlighting your monitor).

I thought I’d give it a try. Via hackaday I read about the awesome Ikea Dioder light strips; the white 4-piece strips are now £19.99, reduced from £40, which makes them a bit of a bargain. So I snapped some up on a recent trip to Ikea, and so far I’m impressed.

Here’s my laptop screen with and without the backlight. I stuck the backlight to the edge of the desk behind the laptop:

And here’s my monitor with the backlight:

And here’s the LED strips stuck on the back of the monitor:

The LEDs are low power. They don’t get warm, and come with fairly long cables. You can either run them serially or have them on individual spurs from the main plug.

So far I’m preferring them to normal halogen or tungsten desk lights. The light is whiter, which is somehow more pleasant. And my eyes definitely feel happier when I’m working at night.

Andrew Savory: Juice

Andrew — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:40:43 +0000

This week has been a mini detox, with copious juices. Here’s the recipes for a couple of them, from Sainsbury’s magazine. These make enough for one glass. Throw the ingredients in a juicer, or apparently you can put them in a liquidiser with 300ml water and then strain well.

Apple and Carrot Detox Speeder

¼ white cabbage
3-4 carrots
1 small apple
5cm root ginger, peeled

Super-charged Spring Cleaner

2 carrots
1 beetroot, peeled
5cm root ginger, peeled
1 apple
3 broccoli florets
Juice of ½ lemon

Alternatively you can just chuck a handful of whatever sounds good into the juicer. This morning’s was an arbitrary amount of carrots and apple, with a chunk of ginger for extra kick.

Enjoy!

MJ Ray: Phones, Privacy and Co-ops

mjr — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:26:25 +0000

And now a slightly longer than usual rant: The problem with the o2 network disclosing mobile browsers’ phone numbers that I repeated 2 days ago (and it appeared on our co-op website) snowballed yesterday to the point that it was on the short bulletins from ITN, BBC, IRN… and probably many more. And then o2 fixed it. Good!

The reply claims that it’s only since 10th January which is rather at odds with other claims that it has been happening since at least March 2010 in some situations.

I started buying from o2 in December. I was using Three, but their network where I stay in Norfolk isn’t reliable and you can’t just buy a device in a shop for The Phone Co-op. The dongle from o2 is a recent Huawei USB device that just worked in debian and was fairly easy for me to get working in Ubuntu. There’s space in it for a memory card, so maybe I could boot from it… but that’s an idea for later.

The o2 deal is OK but not great, and the included wifi is nowhere near as good as it looked: when it says it includes “BT Openzone” that doesn’t include any of the “BT Openzone-H” hotspots that are much more common. You’re only allowed to register one device for wifi, so no using your phone, tablet and laptop at different times!

I can’t believe it’s legal to advertise that as “unlimited wifi”, but o2 is still a better offer than access to “BT Openzone-H” hotspots at £39/month (yes, that’s the price for wifi-only…).

Ultimately, I think the problem is that there’s a rubbish choice of mobile (wifi or 3G) internet access providers in the UK. It’s a completely and utterly failed market, so you need to use Virtual Private Networks and similar tricks to protect yourself from the dysfunctional networks. My VPN meant my mobile number was safe: how about yours?

As luck would have it, I had already proposed a resolution about protecting customer privacy to The Phone Co-op (affiliate link) for our AGM on Saturday 4 February (if you’re a member, let me know). We were trying to find a compromise wording and I don’t think this little o2 scandal has hurt my proposal at all!

At least the phone co-op’s mobile service is based on Orange’s network, which wasn’t affected. How does your network perform? There’s an Internet Service Provider evilness test which might tell you.

Andrew Savory: Tethered to o2

Andrew — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:10:09 +0000

I’m on a train tomorrow, and thought it was a good opportunity to use my phone as a wifi hotspot.

This works flawlessly with the Samsung Wave 3 (though the GUI to turn it on is a bit suboptimal). It turns out it’s not so simple with the iPhone – because the network operators appear to have “upgraded” the experience for iPhone users.

On an iPhone you turn on Personal Hotspot by going to Settings, then General, then Network. You get a straightforward-looking button “Set Up Personal Hotspot”, like so:

Unfortunately, when I click on it, I get a prompt to visit my network operator’s website, at http://www.o2.co.uk/iphonehelp/modem:

Fortunately there’s a button “Go to Website”. Unfortunately, when you click on it, this is what you get:

That small text says “File not found“.

I opened the website in my desktop browser, and it redirects to http://service.o2.co.uk/IQ/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.EXE?New,Kb=Companion,question=ref(User):str(Mobile),T=guruCase,VARSET_COBJID=11820,Problem=Obj(11820) (that’s a nice URL). The page is basically a collection of FAQs, but rather surprisingly the first FAQ is not “How do I set up tethering?”:

While I was on that page, I got prompted to use o2′s online support chat, which seemed like a shortcut to solve the problem. I was connected to Guru Hayley, and encouraged to ask her anything. Turns out anything does not mean “how do I set up tethering?”:

“Our system isn’t working” is the new “my dog ate my homework”.

Ok, so reading through the FAQs a bit more it looks like I need an “Internet Tethering bolt-on”. According to the “My tariff & Bolt Ons” page on o2′s website, I already have “iPhone Web Bolt On (Unlimited data access in the UK on your iPhone)” and “Unlimited Wifi for iPhone SIMO (Unlimited Wi-Fi access on your iPhone at over 7,500 Wi-Fi hotspots from The Cloud or BT Openzone in the UK)“. Leaving aside whether it should be “Wifi” or “Wi-Fi” (doesn’t matter but at least be consistent), neither of these sound like “iPhone Internet Tethering”, so let’s have a look at the other bolt ons I can add to my account:

None of those sound like “iPhone Internet Tethering” either.

So if I want internet tethering on my iPhone it looks like I need to email o2 and wait 24 hours, or call them up at 5p a minute (probably to be told to call back when their system is working).

Or I could just stick my SIM back in the Samsung Wave 3 when I need tethering, and skip the “Bolt-On”. Which option seems easier, cheaper, and more likely to work in the time available – and less offensive to a customer who’s just wasted 30 minutes on what should be a perfectly simple task?

Perhaps I’ll just read a book on the train tomorrow…

Andrew Savory: Out for delivery?

Andrew — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:06:29 +0000

It feels like my Amazon order has been in transit for ages. It was dispatched over 40 years ago and I’m still waiting …

Jonathan McDowell: I want you to see my storage automagically

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:57:40 +0000

For my day job I build storage systems. A lot of what I do at present involves caring a lot about how different OSes deal with things like new LUNs being presented from a SCSI target, or errors along a subset of the available paths to a device.

It will come as no surprise to you to discover that they all suck (for values of all equal to Linux, Solaris, Windows and VMWare). New LUNs are particularly annoying. I'm in the situation that creation and removal of a LUN is exceptionally easy.

Hmmm. Maybe I need to back up here a bit first. SCSI has the concept of a target (think, device, eg hard drive). Each target can present multiple logical units. Each of these is assigned a number - a Logical Unit Number. Most devices (a hard drive, or a CDROM drive) will present a single LUN. A storage array will tend to present multiple LUNs; one for each volume that is exported to the host. At the host level each LUN really just looks like a separate device (for Linux /dev/sda and /dev/sdb may well be separate LUNs on the same array, rather than 2 separate arrays/hard drives, for example. At the block device level you don't care about the difference usually).

Anyway. For various reasons I end up adding and removing LUNs quite often. And there are ways for the array to indicate that this has happened to the host (the UNIT ATTENTION/REPORT LUNS DATA CHANGED check condition seems to be favoured these days, as a complete Fibre Channel LIP can be disruptive). What I'd like to happen in that case is the host to pick up the check condition and drop and/or add the devices that have changed. Instead everything wants a manual rescan. rescan-scsi-bus tends to be simplest for Linux. Windows wants a manual refresh in Disk Administrator. VMWare a "Rescan HBAs" from vSphere. Solaris a "devfsadm -C" and possibly a "cfgadm -al" first. And all of these can be temperamental about picking up the changes.

We've done a lot about hotplug for the desktop user experience, without doing the same level for the server experience. I appreciate that there are situations that you don't want your server to reconfigure things without being told to, but the current situation can be detrimental (for example Linux multipathing will hold a device open even after it's disappeared and is returning an "INVALID LUN" response; it would be much better if it could cleanly close that device and wait for it to return). Storage is capable of being much more than just a single block device these days, and it's a shame that nothing seems to deal fully with that fact.

(Yes, yes, I should write and submit patches, but I appreciate that there's not always a simple answer, nor necessarily an answer that works for all situations automatically. Plus, y'know, not enough hours in the day and I hope you all appreciate I've taken a break from watching BSG to write this.)

Jonathan McDowell: Totally divorced

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 22:12:11 +0000

I got divorced earlier this month; the decree absolute arrived in the post last weekend. I'm hoping this isn't news to anyone who knows me well, and I only really mention it here as an endpoint given that I blogged about the wedding itself.

Andrew Savory: Media and storage of the future

Andrew — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:11:40 +0000

I just lost a hard disk. No big deal.

My somewhat complicated home media setup is this: I have a Samsung TV plugged in to a first generation AppleTV. The AppleTV is connected to the network via wired ethernet to an Apple AirPort Extreme base station / router. Hanging off the USB port of the Airport Extreme is several terabytes of storage courtesy of a Drobo containing a bunch of cheap(ish) OEM hard drives.

The AppleTV has been upgraded with a Broadcom Crystal HD chip in the internal PC Card slot – which normally has a wifi card in it. I figured it was worth sacrificing wifi, since with the size of HD video you really want to be using a fast wired network anyway. In order to make use of the HD chip, I have XBMC installed on the AppleTV.

So I sat down this evening to watch a film over dinner. I switched the TV over to the AppleTV, fired up XBMC, and navigated to the files on my Drobo – except they weren’t there. For some reason, the AppleTV wasn’t seeing the Drobo. I pulled the face plate off the Drobo to find out what was going on, and noticed it was in standby mode – unmounted by the Airport Extreme. No wonder the AppleTV couldn’t see it!

I restarted the Airport Extreme, but when it came back up and woke up the Drobo, I had the ominous flashing red light beside one of the drives. The light that means “drive failure”.

At this point in the story, there would normally be panic at the thought of lost data. What actually happened was a swift trip to Amazon, a quick calculation of cost per megabyte followed by ordering a new OEM drive to replace the failed one. It should be here on Monday, but meanwhile I can still access all my data.

It’s not always smooth sailing – see Drobo good, bad, ugly and Drobo updates. But when talking to a friend the other day who was still nursing individual external USB drives, I realised that on the whole the Drobo has been well-behaved and fits into the “it just works” category of technology that is so rare these days. It’s been online for almost two and a half years, and I’ve only had to mess with it on three occasions until now: installation, adding capacity, and replacing the first blown disk.

So I’d thoroughly recommend a Drobo instead of an external USB drive, and for a home media centre solution it works really well with the AppleTV (and associated hacks) as well.

Andrew Savory: Statistics

Andrew — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:17:27 +0000

Borrowing from Alex King’s Simple SQL Queries for Blog Stats, here’s some stats on this blog.

The first post “It’s alive!” was made on 31st May 2003, some nine years ago.
There have been 1,572 posts.
On average, there are around 160 posts a year.
Most posts are comfortably over 1000 characters long.
The average post is about 170 words long; the longest is currently FOSDEM 2011: Saturday, and the shortest is This week’s addiction (whatever happened to…)
There’s been an inexorable move toward fewer, longer posts in the last few years.
These stats don’t include this post. I’ll leave that madness to xkcd.

Meta meta…

Here’s some useful queries for getting blog stats from a WordPress database.

Get first and last post:

select min(post_date) as start, max(post_date) as end from wp_posts;
+---------------------+---------------------+
| start               | end                 |
+---------------------+---------------------+
| 2003-05-31 10:35:11 | 2012-01-13 18:14:58 |
+---------------------+---------------------+

Get number of posts:

select count(*) from `wp_posts` WHERE post_status='publish';
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|     1572 |
+----------+

Get number of posts per year:

select YEAR(post_date), count(*) from `wp_posts` WHERE post_status='publish' GROUP BY YEAR(post_date);
+-----------------+----------+
| YEAR(post_date) | count(*) |
+-----------------+----------+
|            2003 |      154 |
|            2004 |      329 |
|            2005 |      501 |
|            2006 |      225 |
|            2007 |      176 |
|            2008 |       75 |
|            2009 |       17 |
|            2010 |       19 |
|            2011 |       70 |
|            2012 |        6 |
+-----------------+----------+

Get average number of posts per year:

drop table if exists average_posts;
create temporary table if not exists average_posts
select YEAR(post_date) as Year, count(*) as Count from `wp_posts` WHERE post_status='publish' GROUP BY YEAR(post_date);
select avg(Count) from average_posts;
+------------+
| avg(Count) |
+------------+
|   157.2000 |
+------------+

Get average length of posts (in characters) per year:

SELECT YEAR(post_date), AVG(LENGTH(post_content)) FROM `wp_posts` WHERE post_status='publish' GROUP BY YEAR(post_date);
+-----------------+---------------------------+
| YEAR(post_date) | AVG(LENGTH(post_content)) |
+-----------------+---------------------------+
|            2003 |                 1260.8182 |
|            2004 |                 1174.0729 |
|            2005 |                 1062.4770 |
|            2006 |                 1003.2622 |
|            2007 |                 1473.9489 |
|            2008 |                 1862.2267 |
|            2009 |                 3575.2941 |
|            2010 |                 3447.3158 |
|            2011 |                 6024.9000 |
|            2012 |                 8707.6667 |
+-----------------+---------------------------+

Get average word count of posts per year:

drop table if exists word_counts;
create temporary table if not exists word_counts
SELECT `ID`, `post_date`,
SUM( LENGTH(`post_content`) - LENGTH(REPLACE(`post_content`, ' ', ''))+1) AS 'Wordcount'
FROM `wp_posts`
WHERE `post_status`='publish'
GROUP BY `ID`
ORDER BY `post_date` DESC;
SELECT YEAR(post_date), AVG(Wordcount) FROM `word_counts` GROUP BY YEAR(post_date);
+-----------------+----------------+
| YEAR(post_date) | AVG(Wordcount) |
+-----------------+----------------+
|            2003 |       148.3052 |
|            2004 |       147.6809 |
|            2005 |       112.4611 |
|            2006 |       105.3289 |
|            2007 |       161.6875 |
|            2008 |       218.9600 |
|            2009 |       451.3529 |
|            2010 |       450.3158 |
|            2011 |       673.8714 |
|            2012 |      1017.6667 |
+-----------------+----------------+

MJ Ray: The New UK Co-op Bill: In Praise Of Diversity

mjr — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:00:19 +0000

I’ve given my reaction to yesterday’s announcement by the prime minister in my blog on the Co-operatives UK website. If you want to comment and can’t do so there, comments can be left on this article too.

Brett Parker (iDunno): StarTech IP KVM - SV1107IPEXT

Brett Parker (iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:20:51 +0000

So, at work we have a little single port IP KVM, it is a StarTech SV1107IPEXT - it's not a "bad" bit of kit, if you're completely configured for using it in the way they expect... When you're not, then it throws a NullPointerException when you try to connect with it's Java applet.

This morning (mostly because the monitor and keyboard I had been using for building stuff on my desk has gone missing) I decided I'd try again with the device, it's not on our default office network range, mostly because it might not always be in the office, so I quickly added an ip alias using ip addr add 192.168.0.59/24 dev wlan0 on my laptop to bring up a route to it. Navigated to the page and asked it to fire up the Java applet. Straight off, a NullPointerException happens - hmm. So looked at what was being logged by the JVM - it was trying to run ifconfig (no, really, the java applet ran ifconfig... with no path...) which, on my debian laptop, is not in the default path... so I went and make a quick wrapper in ~/bin for it... right - now it can run that... still a NPE, hmm. So look a little closer, it's looking for the MAC address assigned to the IP that you're coming from... no, really! WTF! So I went and hacked my little ifconfig wrapper to rewrite the address for wlan0 to be what the KVM expected it to be, low and behold, I can now run the java client (hoorah!).

Why the heck are they doing that though - that's just plain insane! On the plus side, I now have a work around, on the minus side, egad that's ugly!

MJ Ray: SOPA: Lash Out is better than Black Out

mjr — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:21:58 +0000

Once again, lawmakers are considering a stupid protectionist measure and this time it’s the US, so it has some effects outside the US too.

Once again, some websites have taken themselves offline and caused great inconvenience to their supporters.

This is really annoying. Protesting about threats to take websites offline by taking websites offline is as stupid as protesting against a ban on kissing by not kissing. It just demonstrates that you can do without your websites/kisses if you must.

I feel it’s much better to use websites to distribute information and call people to action, like this epetition for UK citizens and residents, or by asking your associations and suppliers to oppose these measures and their supporters.

Wikipedia is probably a bit to blame. Although it called its action a blackout, it wasn’t one and there were still many ways to access its information. In fact, if you use NoScript, the banner didn’t even display and there’s only a line on the front page to say anything is happening.

The one that really annoyed me was identi.ca, which even turned off its API so clients just started spewing errors everywhere (I returned to my desk to a stack of retry questions). That stopped some of my websites from distributing a link to the anti-SOPA epetition because they read from my identi.ca stream – how much other anti-SOPA activism was hindered?

I’ve been told that Evan held a vote, but I didn’t see it, so I didn’t vote and I don’t know the turnout or anything. How many people voted for the blackout because they use other sites like twitter more anyway?

Banners: yes; Blackouts: no.

Brett Parker (iDunno): Mira Grant - Newsflesh Trilogy

Brett Parker (iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:20:50 +0000

OK - so I read, a couple years back, the first book in the Newsflesh Trilogy by Mira Grant, before getting my Kindle - it was fantastic, and I wanted more, ... so, diligently I waited and then after getting my Kindle, I spotted that the second in the series was available for pre-order (yay!), so noting when it was due out, I made sure that a couple of days before the release of Deadline, I could read Feed again - having already owned it in paperback, I also diligently bought it a second time for the Kindle (knowing that I would be reading something else just before starting the voyage through Feed and then Deadline, and travelling with lots of paperbacks in my bag was just getting annoying...).

In a few months time, the final part of the Newsflesh Trilogy comes out - and I await it with baited breath. I also note, that, currently it is only available for pre-orders in paperback - NOOOOOO! So, with that in mind, can everyone please go to the Amazon page for the paperback and click on the magic link that says you want to read it on the Kindle!

Also, if someone can work out why the novellas are only available in audiobook format, and somehow makes them available in a nice printed format (well, kindle), that would be great!

(One day I'll get round to re-enabling comments on here... one day... yes, one day!)

Andrew Savory: FOSDEM 2011: Sunday

Andrew — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:14:58 +0000

In advance of FOSDEM 2012, I’m publishing previous years’ notes. Here’s 2011 day two: Sunday.

Barebox

Reason for attending this talk: to understand more of the technical details behind fast boot of Linux devices, which will be an important factor in the success of mobile linux.

The subtitle of this talk was “Booting Linux Fast and Fancy”, and the speaker focussed first on how to make linux boot quickly and then provided tips for making the boot look good. There were approximately 100 people present for this early morning session.

Why worry about boot? The evolution of phones to include linux means boot user experience becomes more important. Industrial devices don’t look like computers and shouldn’t boot slowly. Automotive devices have fast-boot requirements – they must be answering CAN messages in less than 200ms after power-on.

History of the project:

2007 – barebox project – forked from u-boot as a technology study under ‘u-boot-v2′ name.
2009 – first release, renamed barebox, hosted on own infrastructure
2011 – 24 releases to date, timed releases 1 per month + maintenance releases on demand.
commit history – missed it! slide went by too quick.

The project supports a range of CPU architectures – arm (at91, ep93, i.MX, netX, nomadik, omap, s3c24xx), m68k, ppc, sandbox, x86 bios based, etc.

It supports:

build: kconfig, kbuild
boot media: linux16, nand, ubi, sd
data: dfu, kermit, z/y/zmodem, tftp
gfx: framebuffer, splash screen
filesystem: cd, ls, cp, saveenv/loadenv, mount, partitions
tools: crc, edit, gpio, unizo
user interaction: login, menu (for simple text-based menus)
drivers: i2c, mfd, flash, serial, spi, usb host+device
modules: insmod, lsmod
memory: meminfo, memtest, md, mw
network: ipv4, dhcp, netconsole, tftp, rarp, ping, nfs, dns

Configuration done just by assigning variables e.g. eth0=172.0.0.3.

Booting linux fast:

power controller releases reset line: optimize hardware (electronics)
ROM bootloader starts running: select cpus optimized for fastboot eg mx25
fetch boot blok from nand/sd: done by firmware, usually can’t be tuned
execute first boot code: first place can do something in sw
initialize hardware: only what’s necessary, tune clocks & timings
fetch linux kernel from nand/sd: async read and decompression tricks eg prepare kernel image in blocks of certain size, while decompressing block, instruct device to send next block.
execute linux
extract compressed image: depending on hw, use uncompressed image or zImage
kernel boots, initialize hardware: minimized kernel, all tricks from elinux.org wiki
/sbin/init: depending on use case, use initramfs or real rootfs (slower)

Example: 336ms from bootloader to init on freescale mx35, 532mhz. On beagleboard this is usually 800ms.

Booting linux fancy:

initialise hardware: backlight off load splash show splash backlight on (to avoid flicker)
kernel boots, initializes hardware: make sure framebuffer has fixed address between bootloader and kernel – no re-init! (stops splash disappearing)linux driver looks at what is initialized, and doesn’t reinitialize.
sbin/init: cross fading with overlay

Fast, but not the 200ms limit for automotive.

BTCS: Boot Time Critical Services (originally inspired by freescale, now implmented with mainline focus).

Idea: set aside some memory, register a poller in barebox, make sure memory is handed over to linux, poller ends up as a normal interupt service routine in linux.Interupt service routine runs during bootloader. compromise – can’t use much infrastructure from isr. possible to run commercial stacks for ECU.

CAN is ready after about < 100ms. Downside: it is a bare metal stack.

Key takeaways: it is possible with attention to detail to create extremely fast booting devices. This would be of significant value in a mobile linux stack.

Linaro

Reason for attending this talk: Linaro could form an important base for a mobile linux platform.

Approximately 300 people attended this talk. The speaker began by outlining the rationale for Linaro’s creation: ARM-embedded is too hard, and there are 4 key problems:

under-investment in the open source that makes up linux platform
distribution fragmentation: different tools/versions, different graphics and multimedia plumbing, kernel forking and versions
SoC fragmentation, different SoC vendors with different approaches eg kernel, power management, graphics and multimedia
not enough optimization, features in processors not being used

How is Linaro fixing this? engineering, engineering, engineering!

In the above graph:

blue: Canonical
red: ARM
yellow: codesource?
green: IBM
pink: TI

They recrutied engineers from all member companies and hiring their own people to work on Linaro.

Linaro engineering : working groups, taking opensource upstream and improving, releasing own branches with new features (will go upstream but maybe not there yet)

landing teams only area with privacy (future products/hardware)

platform engineering: mix all together. important to have reference images prove it works and test/validate work of other groups.

two types of cycle:

6 months design – implement – deliver features
subprojects on monthly releases

10.11 technical highlights

took member bsps and wrote summary of what was wrong
combination of distributions and SoCs .
release hardware packs as set of enablement files
at end of cycle toolchain widely adopted

lessons learned

too high level, goals too abstract
ramping up engineers to 90 was time-consuming

2011 plans: build of linaro-enhanced key distributions on member SoCs

android
ubuntu
chrome os
meego

Building a test and validation framework for member SoC hardware.

Qt tales from embedded trenches

Approx 200 attending. Speakers are kde developers – kdepim, plasma, libgcal, gallium,…

kinetic scrolling – as made famous in 2007 by iphone. but prior art discussed in 1982 bill buxton two-handed input in HCI, canola 2007

Qt flickable 2008 “oh my god QML’s so wonderful!” in fact a really really neat way to do things. You can do it in C++ but use QML, it’s easier.

implementations;

ariya’s flickable 2008
toyflick 2009
plasma scrollwidget 2009
imtk imtkkinecticlistview 2010
qml flickable 2010

Meego UI without libmeegotouch? issues with libmeegotouch – can’t run on symbian (uses GTK), so cheat

pure blood qt runs everywhere – nokia n580, n97, n900.

Andrew Savory: FOSDEM 2011: Saturday

Andrew — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:52:21 +0000

In advance of FOSDEM 2012, I’m publishing previous years’ notes. Here’s 2011 day one: Saturday.

FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting, an annual free event hosted in Brussels and entirely organised and run by volunteers. Typically around 5-6000 developers attend. The event is run over a weekend, with a networking beer event the Friday beforehand. This year around 1500 people showed up for the beer, according to the estimates of the security staff.

The event comprises a number of keynotes and multiple parallel tracks of volunteer talks. 2011′s main tracks were:

System
Web Browsing
Languages
Web Frameworks
Cloud
Office
Lightning talks
Developer Rooms – BSD, Cross Distribution, Cross Desktop, Data Analytics, Embedded, Free Java, GNU, Jabber and XMPP, Mono, Mozilla, MySQL and friends, Security and hardware crypto, World of GNUStep, Accessibility, Configuration and Systems Management, LibreOffice, Virtualisation, Open Source Telephony, Perl, PostgreSQL.

Some thoughts from the event overall:

Attendance
- Attendance once again seemed higher than previous years, with a broad mix of attendees in terms of age, profession, geography, language.
- Many businesses as well as projects now count FOSDEM as a “must attend” event.
“Android is a bucket of arse” / “has anyone noticed the only Android talk is about setting it free?” / “Google’s Android is not the perfect embedded OS”
- The general mood amongst delegates is that Android is an appalling technical implementation, and very few seemed interested in developing for the platform. This was in stark contrast to the level of interest in Linaro and MeeGo.
WebOS has problems too
- Even though Palm WebOS is widely admired by the community, apparently HP has spent the last year since acquisition dealing with licence compliance issues.
Consolidation
- Previous years have seen rooms devoted to specific distributions and specific desktop software. This year all the distributions were in one room and the theme was typically how to work together and on cross-distribution packaging initiatives. All the desktops shared talks on important cross-desktop key components.
Device fashion
- Despite being superseded in the marketplace, the Nokia N900 was still an extremely popular device at FOSDEM. Second most common device sighted was the G1, followed by a range of Android and iPhone models.
- Some delegates had a range of tablet devices, but these were still very few compared to laptops and netbooks. The most common laptops were Apple Macbooks and Macbook Pros, many of which were running linux.
Trends
- There is an increased interest in the embedded end of the market with more talks and also large crowds around the embedded/beagleboard stands.
- Firefox and HTML5 seemed significantly more popular this year, and there continues to be notably few talks about WebKit/Chrome.
- Last year’s buzzword NoSQL has been superseded this year by “big data”.

Some of the talks attended:

Lightning Talk: Is the UK Government backing free software?

Two reasons for attending this talk: firstly, it’s a useful barometer for the acceptance level of open source in general and the progress of open source in large organisations. Secondly, I’ve worked with Sirius on rolling out infrastructure, so it’s good to keep tabs on what else they are doing.

There were about 200 people in the auditorium for the lightning talks. This talk started by pointing out that despite many open source policies and statements of support, the government has never implemented open source to any great degree. The last Labour government were very pro-business, typically favouring large multinationals, and so vendor lock-in through proprietary formats prevented any real adoption of open source.

The civil service typically work with and are supplied by large system integrators who historically have not been open source friendly.

The new administration is taking a top-down approach to driving change and wider adoption of open source. Examples of this include an SME Summit at the Treasury on 11th February 2011, and an Open Source supplier forum on 21st February 2011 where all open source suppliers will be present.

In addition, Bristol City Council are conducting research using a large system integrator paired with a small open source company (Sirius), and Cardiff council are running a series of workshops amongst key stakeholders, facilitated by Sirius, to explore options for using open source.

I wanted to get into the Firefox talks next, but the room was full (standing room only, no-one else allowed in for health and safety reasons).

How to be a good downstream

Reason for attending this talk: I’ve seen first-hand the very real economic and technical problems with the way large mobile platforms relate to upstream projects, in that code is often forked and patched and rarely contributed back, providing both an economic burden of maintenance and technical difficulties in backporting bug fixes and enhancements. It was hoped that by attending this talk key remediation strategies might be identified.

There were about 50 people in this talk. This talk was given by noted Debian developer Thomas Weber, and was subtitled “How to make both your and upstream’s life easier”. It was a follow-up to last year’s talk “How to be a good upstream”.

Key points that need to be remembered:

Communication

when you make some specific changes, discuss with upstream what changes were made and why
being pro-active is key

Empathy

Different people/projects have different goals and constraints
Remember that upstream is busy too
if you forward bugs, include all necessary information in the bug report – don’t force upstream to use your bug tracking system
do not propose unscalable solutions eg. “upstream can subscribe to my distribution’s bug tracking system” : Debian alone has 120+ derivatives

Packaging (initially and ongoing)

Introduce yourself – so upstream knows about the package and has a point of contact
Keep in contact with upstream and ensure they understand that you are packaging for a distribution
Take a look at upstreams bug tracking system before your own release
If you leave or stop packaging inform upstream!

Example: xdebug 2.0 bug fixed in 2.1 Aug 2009; first stable was june 2010, in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS it’s still not fixed.

Cooperative work

Forward patches (ideally before applying them)
Be present on upstream’s communication channels
Intercept the questions of the users of your distribution (you know the details of your distribution far better than upstream). This generates good karma.

Key takeaways: mobile platforms don’t always do this. They should all consider identifying their upstream projects, identify all their modifications made against upstream, do an audit of their releases against upstream bug trackers, and introduce their maintainers to all the upstream projects.

Swimming upstream

There were about 75 people in this talk. This talk started with a quick survey of the audience: the audience were geographically well-distributed, some had travelled 1000+ miles to attend. 80% of the audience don’t speak english as their first language, and no-one in room has been using linux for less than 2 years – most have been using it for more than 10 years.

Jared asked “does innovation happen in a conference room?”, and then proceeded with an analogy of why salmon swim upstream and why contributors should push their code upstream. He used another analogy of how multiple streams form a river to describe how “code starts out as 1 or 2 people working together then it forms a larger community”.

What is a community? It is the relationship of people with shared goals and common interests. With a software community: what is the difference between people working on same piece of software and a software community? A software community is a table – where people with different backgrounds, experiences, goals can come together and have healthy discussions. Sometimes they talk more about the process of the table itself!

What is a distribution? It is a bundling of software. When Fedora started, they didn’t want to push upstream – but this approach didn’t work as it became impossible to maintain the platform. Fedora now push upstream aggressively to carry as few custom patches as possible.

Upstream -> Fedora -> Redhat Enterprise Linux

“people take pride in working with open source, contributing to something bigger than themselves”

Key takeaways: Fedora, a relatively large and well-supported open source linux distribution, were unable to handle the burden of maintaining the platform without pushing upstream. Mobile platforms should learn from this experience and understand that it is not possible for them alone to support a forked platform.

Downstream Packaging collaboration

This talk suffered from poor audio, starting too early whilst people were still arriving, and people were talking over the introduction.

The speaker started off with the premise that packaging an open source project is easy, but modifying it (patching) to fit the distribution’s requirements is hard due to the maintenance burden incurred by patches.

The obvious answer is to get the patches upstream as soon as possible, but this is not always possible as some open source projects have missing maintainers or are unresponsive to distribution contributions.

A workaround is for distributions to work together to form a new upstream, but maintaining a new upstream is hard.

One suggestion was to create canonical-package-name-maintainers@distros.freedesktop.org and then subscribe the email address to per distribution package VCS commit mails.

Question: how many examples of upstream abandonment? Several key ones: X11R3, X11R4, lesstif, nedit. Most niche packages, but still with a significant number of users.

The second part of the talk focussed on patch sharing:

store all downstream patches at same place
give write access to maintainers
read to everybody
let maintainers collaborate

Advantages: differences are more obvious, one patch can be used for multiple versions.

Whenever someone creates a new patch:

push into common repo
all maintainers will know shortly
know whether it is distro-specific
know what it does
know when it get upstreamed
know about fixes
can incorporate it
can help cleaning it up
can help pushing it upstream

cf. openembedded:

one repo with recipes and patches for software
everyone works together (even on packaging)
only differences are marked

patch conventions – easily parseable metadata:

upstream package name and version
maintainer (for patch)
strip level (-p prefer)
list of bugs
description
status (quick hack, send to upstream, upstreamed)
distributions included in

Start with debian patch policy. Other key links:

Bdale Garbee summed it up best: “if you maintain a piece of software for a particular distribution and you don’t know the maintainers from other distributions, you are failing”.

Key takeaways for mobile linux platforms: maybe they should be a patch farm against an existing distribution, rather than a platform in their own right. They could sponsor work toward a common patch store, by helping developers get together to talk about it and plan it. This would help them by mitigating their maintenance burden.

E17

Samsung have a high level of investment in Enlightenment technologies, having hired the principle developer. This talk is therefore critical to understanding the core graphics in Samsung’s Linux platform. There were around 100 people in the room for this talk.

e16 was released in 1997, and e17 has been in development for over a decade. Embedded devices are the main target and e17 has been rewritten from scratch based on e16 experience.

Enlightenment is a lightweight desktop environment based around EFL – Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. Enlightenment takes care of the current layout. All features or gadgets on the desktop are a module – so you can unload them. An e17 desktop consists of a set of modules loaded – a profile. A default basic profile is defined for different use cases. e17 is totally modular so you can load only what you want to use.

e17 supports themes. With edje everything can be themed. There’s only one file to download for the whole theme.

e17 has full compositing support.

e17 is opengl and opengl-es compliant. If the platform has bad graphics drivers it can switch to software engine.

e17 supports textures from pixmaps and indirect rendering.

e17 works on desktop and embedded.

The gui: there is a basic toolkit, there is no complete toolkit, just basic widgets (button, list, scroller…) and some tools to make life easier for coders (for example dbus bridge). You use ecore and evas to create windows. You use edje to create a new widget.

The future: Release. Maintain compatibility.

In e18 the plan is to integrate a complete toolkit for widgets.

Questions from the audience:

Do you have a release date?
- “no”
what is the footprint?
- Around 40mb? 30mb? (the second e17 talk stated around 24mb)

The Enlightenment stand at FOSDEM also had e17 running on a range of devices including what looked like an HTC phone and a Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Key takeaways: there is a fair amount of developer interest in e17, but despite a very long development cycle it still seems relatively incomplete. However, the minimal footprint, embedded target and eye candy focus might provide a more consistent user experience closer to iPhone than it is possible to provide using GTK or Android graphics.

Open Sourcing Java

This talk was given by former Sun Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps. It was very well attended with approximately 200 people in the room and a long queue of people unable to get in.

Governance

Sun nearly broke opensolaris with heavy governance. They learnt from that lesson and with OpenJDK they took action first, open sourcing the platform and then wrote the governance after the fact. Another key lesson is that setting up an open source foundation does not fix anything – it is important to make the open source platform work first.

All community members matter

it’s a mistake to assume a competitor can’t help
there are approximately zero people who show up just to break things
the rules you make to control those zero people break things worse than the zero people do

Real relationships help and heal

written communications only support existing relationships
second languages affect understanding (easy to believe you mean what you say – but you only use the words you know) (saying “I’m not a native English speaker” is a great way to excuse almost anything else you say)
old hurts can be cured by positive healing (have breakfast lunch and dinner with people you don’t agree with)

training reptiles takes time (corporations are reptiles)

corporations don’t exist, people do (you can’t trust a corporation)
confronting corporate problems rarely works (no point going to MS and telling them patents are evil)
solutions need to layer and build over time – create habits not traps (gradually change the environment)

Open source isn’t about licenses or code – it’s about a certain set of liberties. Software freedom has to be the guiding principle in what you do.

Software Business Value is the first derivative of Software Freedom

Ability to share code -> grows user base
Ability to study code -> developers not needing training
Ability to modify code -> ecosystem of companies
Adopting posture of freedom is not delivering freedom

Pragmatic compromise to achieve larger goal can be acceptable

contributor agreement
assembly exception to allow mixed licensing

Licenses are constitutions for communities

licenses normally bilateral agreements
open source licenses are multilateral circle around the community that defines the boundary.

The fact that java wasn’t open sourced in 2003 and packaged in a usable fashion on linux meant it lost a huge amount of momentum.

Why was apache license not chosen? BSD/Apache/GPL were all considered. Apache patent grants and lack of contribute-back would have removed commercial incentives to collaborate. BSD/MIT don’t convey patent grants in any concrete way, so could have been an option.

Bdale commented that it’s a balancing act that GPL represents between conveying rights and ensuring everoyone plays openly.

The most important thing Sun ever did to get Java adopted was not licensing under GPL but sending Tom to debconf to make debian packages. This made the JDK a second class citizen and not a third class citizen.

Key takeaways: companies must work together across commercial boundaries. Foundations / holding organisations should lighten up on governance and focus on software freedom and deriving value from building the platform. Making the platform usable is critical to widespread adoption.

Simon’s slides: Lessons I learned liberating Java

Andrew Savory: Getting started with Tizen

Andrew — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:58:30 +0000

The Tizen source and SDK were unleashed yesterday, and I’ve just had a first glance. The documentation is a bit all over the place, so here’s some notes on getting up and running. For more information on what’s going on with Tizen, read my blog post on Tizen and on platform community.

The platform build page at https://source.tizen.org/platform_sbs_install.html states Tizen requires Ubuntu 10.04 or higher. The SDK page at https://developer.tizen.org/sdk.html caps Ubuntu at version 11.04, as does https://developer.tizen.org/sdk_install.html. In reality, the SDK installed on 11.10 without any problems.

Installing the SDK

The SDK page says “To install the SDK you will need to have root privileges” but does not use sudo to run the installer. You will be prompted for the root password during the install.

The following steps worked for me:

Install Virtualbox.
Install Ubuntu 11.04 (or risk 11.10)

apt-get install git

Install Sun Java 6: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/10/things-to-tweak-after-installing-ubuntu.html

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin

Get the SDK working by running through: https://developer.tizen.org/sdk.html. Install the Tizen SDK prerequisites. Because Tizen loves you, they kindly put commas between package names so you can’t copy-paste them. Here’s the list all ready to go:

sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm binutils-multiarch debhelper fakeroot realpath libsdl-gfx1.2-4 gettext procps xsltproc libdbus-1-3 liblua5.1-0 libexif12 libcurl3

Download and install the SDK:

wget https://developer.tizen.org/download/tizen_sdk.bin

chmod +x tizen_sdk.bin

./tizen_sdk.bin

The installer will exit (“Installing ….. OK”, “Done”) before the GUI installer has completed. Don’t worry about it.
Go through the install process. Note the SDK needs 1.2GB to install. The installer is only 4.6mb, so expect some downloading.
First time around, my installation failed with the following error:

(Un)Installation failed

Cannot connect to server. Please check your network status or use command line option ‘-proxy <address>:<port>’ for using proxy.

It’s recommended to uninstall all and install again.

The install is wanting to talk to http://112.106.1.254/tizensdkpackages/InstallManager/Linux/ and http://112.106.1.254/tizensdkpackages/current/linux-packages/ but those both work fine.

The second time around it worked (and good grief, the tizen download server is fast … or not very busy. I got 1.52MB/s).

Some random notes about the SDK:

the open source license is alphabetical, so the first thing you’ll see on the list of software components is ‘Android Open Source Project(ADT DDMS, adb)’.
The SDK license is actually a Samsung SDK license: TIZEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT KIT (“SDK”) LICENSE AGREEMENT [...] A LEGAL AGREEMENT BETWEEN YOU AND SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD. (“SAMSUNG”).
The Open Source SDK components are at http://developer.tizen.org/download/tizenopensdk.tar.gz but that basically consists of valgrind, qemu, the emulator kernel and oprofile.

Installing Scratchbox Build System (SBS)

This works pretty much as advertised – though note that the first step 1 (installing package dependencies) conflates two separate lines, and should read:

sudo apt-get update

followed by:

sudo apt-get install dpkg-dev pkg-config uuid-dev cpp gcc gcc-multilib libarchive-dev liblzo2-dev zlib1g-dev libxml2-dev automake autoconf realpath

Or you could just do:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install dpkg-dev pkg-config uuid-dev cpp gcc gcc-multilib libarchive-dev liblzo2-dev zlib1g-dev libxml2-dev automake autoconf realpath

There’s IP addresses hard-coded all over the place: in the SDK install, in the SBS documentation, in the SBS install script, and in the SBS utilities themselves, for example:

# The server with all required APT repositories

_APT_SERVER="${SBS_APT_SERVER:-112.106.1.254}"

This is extremely brittle, and I expect there to be breakages. It’s pretty poor practice and I would have preferred that the ‘source.tizen.org’ CNAME was used more consistently. That IP belongs to Samsung, by the way.

Where there is a domain name configured, it’s www.tizendev.org, which does not resolve to a public machine:

./install-sbs SBS install script

git version: 08ecba2

last commit: Date:   Wed Jan 11 16:39:11 2012 +0900

For help see: http://www.tizendev.org

Note that you’ll end up with SBS stuff in ${HOME}/sbs-install and ${HOME}/sbs, which may or may not annoy you.

As per the instructions, ~/sbs-install/bin/sbs -A i386 -c will give you a working i386 Scratchbox target. It’s great to see at the end of the first run:

sbs: All done. Build environment was successfully setup at /home/savs/sbs

Progress!

On the whole, kudos to Samsung (and Intel, and Tizen) for getting the code out there. And especially for having a reproducible build system with clear instructions. This is a huge leap forward for Tizen, and a critical first step.

Andrew Savory: FOSDEM 2010

Andrew — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:58:59 +0000

Although I’ve been a regular at FOSDEM for a few years now, I’ve been rather poor in ensuring my notes got onto this blog. In advance of FOSDEM 2012, I’m publishing previous years’ notes. Here’s 2010.

The Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is an annual free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. It’s a two day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software and to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. The event takes place in Brussels and has been running since 2000. In recent years attendance has been in the region of 4000, and in 2010 the attendance was closer to 6000. The event is hosted by the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

During 2010′s event there were 294 talks organized across 10 tracks (including Keynotes, Security, Scalability, Monitoring, Database, Javascript) and 22 subject-specific rooms (including Distributions, Embedded, Mozilla, GNOME, Openmoko, X.org).

I presented two LiMo talks: “LiMo Platform and Mobile Linux” and “Mobile distributions and upstream challenges“. I also attended a good number of talks, which – due to my employer at the time – mostly had a strong mobile and embedded focus. Some of the highlights included:

Embedded software development best practices (Adrien Ampelas)

Adrien gave a complete end-to-end guide on how to do embedded platform development. He covered everything from source control, to build mechanisms and quality, to code review and distribution. The talk identified many issues that open mobile platforms do not address.

One slide in particular that appealed to me on build processes applies equally well to any software development environment: how long does it take a developer to get up and running?

FreeSmartphone.org and D-Bus (Michael Lauer, OpenMoko)

OpenMoko was hardware and software combined in a single device. The device is now dead, the software lives on. FreeSmartPhone.org (FSO) is the community software platform that has developed out of the ashes of OpenMoko.

What is FSO intended to be? A collaboration platform, a bottom-up stack, and a reference implementation. The heavy focus is on working software in real hardware with constant innovation/improvement on top. The goal is to close the middleware gap. ie. “middleware for mobile phones”. It is deliberately not positioned as a standards effort like LiMo Foundation/LiPs.

There’s heavy reuse of pre-existing components both within community source and old OpenMoko (eg. phone stack). D-Bus facilitates good architecture because it permits separation of business logic from UI. Lightweight, language independent UI independent, P2P and P2M IPC process communication enabler. D-Bus architecture involves a system bus and per user session bus. Methods and signals handle P2P and P2M. Get/Set for fast operations, list/retrieve for slow operations.

> “mdbus -s” to enumerated system bus services
> “mdbus -s org.freesmartphone.ogsmd” to talk to SIM app toolkit

One D-Bus interface can expose multiple objects.

> “cli-framework” gives you a Python command line to D-Bus operation on FSO

Using it everything you can do programmatically with D-Bus can be done interactively which is very cool for demos.

Python D-Bus support: “One small step for programming, one giant leap for middleware”. FSO has control logic all written in Python for faster development time. BUT Python is slow! Also, an interesting comment: people are afraid of using scripting languages in embedded devices. FSO2 has been entirely rewritten in Vala – a high level language that can be compiled to generate C. FSO2 has libmsmcomm (Qualcomm MSM) and libgsm0710 modem (from OpenMoko). The OpenMoko team are looking in 2010 to port FSO2 to OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner, Palm Pre, and HTC Dream.

FSO2 initiative is very interesting – they’re focussing on how to build a mobile Linux platform not as a bunch of disconnected static APIs but as a living system of methods and signals mediated via IPC. The “APIs” are entirely exposed through D-Bus and developers interact with system components/services through D-Bus.

SHR (Thomas Zimmerman)

Stable Hybrid Release (SHR) is the Reference UI for FSO1/2. It’s gradually going to phase over to FSO2 (Cornucopia) in 2010. You build an SHR-based image with a single makefile. There are a set of user side daemons:

phoneuid: UI daemon which caches views for performance
libphone-ui-shr: main UI library providing dialler, contacts, messages

It’s based on X.Org Xserver 1.7.4, E17 Illume (Enlightenment).

An FSO-SHR Conference was planned for 2010.

hackable:1 (David Wagner)

hackable:1 is a Debian distribution for ‘hackable’ devices. It works by maintaining patchsets and building debian packages by downloading vanilla upstream, applying patches, and compiling for specified target. The focus is on providing a stable and easy to use development environment. It provides a much cleaner way of maintaining downstream changes. It provides a basic platform including simple UI. It’s supported by a Parisian openmoko reseller and ISP.

Tracker and SPARQL (Rob Taylor, CodeThink)

Tracker is an RDF semantic store. ie. a “nosql” approach to data storage – even though today it has an sqlite backend. Metadata is associated with a file through tags which can then be queried to present data in interesting ways. Rob demoed a clutter-based applet that was sorting/sifting photos and twitter feeds. It was written in 200 lines of js and backed by a tracker database being queried using SPARQL. See labs.codethink.co.uk.

Previously: FOSDEM ’08, FOSDEM 2010, FOSDEM 2011.

Wayne Stallwood (DrJeep): Minimal Arduino Circuit

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:47:40 +0000

I thought as a template this might be handy for somone out there.It's pretty much the minimum circuit you need to run up an Arduino project from a bare board, i.e. not using your Arduino board but just a ATMega chip with the Arduino bootloader.The power and GND rails on the right of the chip can be safely omitted if you don't need the ADC. D1 can also be omitted if you are sure you aren't going to connect the supply round the wrong way. The Serial programming header can be omitted if you don't want to program the chip in situ. LM7805 is comfortable supplying a small Arduino project at a supply voltage of 6.2 to 12V. However if your total consumption approaches 100mA then you need to fit a heatsink, limit the incoming voltage to about 8 or 9V or update the design to use a more efficient switching regulator. I'd recommend the later because linear regulators aren't cool. If your project is to be battery powered then I would move to switching regulators as a matter of course. Here is the PDF (arduinocore.pdf) Here is the gEDA source file (arduinocore.sch) (this version has a hand build ATmega component so works with just a standard component library) Use it as a template for your project. Sorry Windows users gEDA is fully available for Linux and Mac but only experimental builds exist for Windows.

Andrew Savory: Predictive Text

Andrew — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:22:28 +0000

Cringely has a bunch of predictions for 2012. They all feel wrong, for one reason or another. Let’s run through them.

A new CEO for Apple: No.

Amazon and Bezos supplant Apple and Jobs: No. Shareholders don’t understand Amazon and will keep punishing the stock in the same way they punish Apple stock. “Selling stuff cheap” is not sexy enough. No-one gets excited about Primark. Amazon will take 3-4 years at least to see the advantage of Kindle Fire strategy. And Bezos is not the man to build a rapport with media industries, he’ll continue to just try to route around them – which will take much longer. So long term: yes. Next year? No. Don’t get me wrong – I think Amazon is one of the best companies on the planet. But I don’t think many others realise it.

Intel buys Qualcomm: No. Hubris. If Intel can, they will try to get there by throwing marginally less cash than the purchase price of Qualcomm at dumb initiatives like Tizen. And they aren’t hurting enough – yet.

Motorola buys Tivo: No. Tivo is dead anyway. Googorola hubris will say they can build the new TV experience better than Tivo, Apple, or anyone else. Expect another year of Google TV failures.

No IPO for Facebook: This could go either way. My bet is it will be very late 2012 or early 2013; those new investors that came in last year are going to be anxious to see a big return in a 1-2 year time frame. They won’t be happy to wait. And Facebook are sailing very close to the wind on all-out privacy invasion, and need to IPO before this becomes a mainstream PR issue.

Thompson’s no Yahoo: Well duh. This is not a prediction. Nokia Windows phones are going to bomb. And it will probably rain this week. Any other dumb non-predictions we can make while we wait for Yahoo to quietly die?

New Microsoft CEO: I’d bet against it, as the real damage to shareholders hasn’t happened yet. Office and Windows remain safe strongholds in the medium term; acquisitions like Skype allow the perception of progress (and actually are a pretty smart move if you can no longer innovate). Most shareholders simply don’t understand the form factor bloodbath that iOS is wreaking, and are therefore content to see Windows Phone bumble along. Microsoft always gets it right on the third iteration … Mango is only the second (never mind the 6 versions of Windows Mobile before it).

See also Gruber’s claim chowder of Cringely on Adobe.

Let’s put my money where my mouth is. Here’s five predictions you can judge me on:

No Apple television set and no iPad 3.
Google TV will be another failure. And Google+ will continue to be a failure.
No new WebOS hardware.
No Euro collapse (sneaking in a non-tech one).
This year will be ‘boring’ (at least in tech) in comparison to last year’s apocalyptic nature (Elop, Leo, Jobs, etc), even counting Nokia off-loading the smartphone division to Microsoft and little Nokia resurrecting mobile linux.

And you? Where do you place your bets?

Andrew Savory: Humax PVRs

Andrew — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:02:26 +0000

I have a rather lovely Humax PVR9300T, a digital video recorder that I bought a year or so back. Or, it was lovely, I should say. Just before Christmas, the box started to freeze. Rebooting it didn’t make a difference; it would play television for a minute or two before freezing again.

I figured this was all part of the failing IT saga (Macbook, Kindle, now PVR). But no.

It turns out that I’ve been using the Humax PVR all wrong. The firmware on the device hadn’t been updated since January 13 2010, and the old firmware is buggy. I had auto-update turned on, but apparently the automatic over-the-air firmware updates only run when the PVR is in standby mode, and I’ve never bothered to put it in standby.

So, if you have a Humax PVR, you need to:

Check that you have the latest firmware (UPTTF1.00.26 from 7 July 2011, at time of writing)
If not, ensure that automatic updates are enabled
Make sure you put the device into standby mode when you are not using it, so that it can update.
Alternatively, force a manual update when the OTA firmware is being broadcast.

And then, happy TV watching and recording!

I hadn’t realised that these devices can do over-the-air updates, but I guess it’s a logical extension to the switch to digital. It’s quite cool to see the device pulling down an update without having to plug in a serial or network cable. At the same time, I’m a little disappointed that I don’t get to hook my laptop up to the PVR to flash the firmware and play geek. Maybe next time.

Of course, if I were to buy a new PVR today, I’d be getting the Humax HDR-FOX T2 HD 1080p 500GB Recorder with Freeview HD which is all shiny and has HD in the name and so is clearly better. Guess I’ll have to ‘accidentally’ put a few thousand extra volts through my newly-fixed 9300

Andrew Savory: Google ♥ Mozilla

Andrew — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 13:51:20 +0000

Gruber considers the relationship between Mozilla and Google really weird. MG Siegler suggests that it’s in part due to a bidding war, and in part because of anti-trust concerns based on a tweet from David Ulevitch. I’m sure both those hypotheses are true, but let me suggest another idea: Google needsFirefox – for at least two reasons, and probably a whole lot more.

Firefox legitimises Chrome. Firefox Sync has been around in one form or another since 2007, and before there was a Google feature called Google Browser Sync. The idea is that some central server stores synchronisation data so that all your browser instances have the same bookmarks, preferences, passwords, and so on. The Mozilla implementation stores the data on Mozilla’s servers, and comes with strong promises of data protection, using encryption to stop even Mozilla from accessing the information. A similar set of features have been creeping into Chrome: bookmark syncing in January 2010, followed quickly by preferences in May, form data in September, and passwords the following year. All this data is synced with your existing Google account. There’s a subtle difference between storing your data on the servers of a non-profit foundation that talks about the safety of that data, and storing your data on the servers of a for-profit corporation that has the stated goalof indexing all the world’s information. Everybody loves Mozilla, everybody loves Firefox. They are the great white knights of the internet. They slayed the evil Internet Explorer; they stand for freedom and open standards and other good stuff. If storing your data in Firefox is okay, it’s a natural assumption and logical step to store your data in Chrome. Legitimacy by association. Firefox leads with the feature, and Chrome follows through. Google wins by getting hold of previously “dark data”: bookmarks, form fields, passwords and preferences that were previously locked away on users’ computers.

Firefox inspires Chrome. Someone said the other day in a meeting that “Google has all the money in the world, and all the PhDs in the world”. Whilst that’s not entirely true, it’s a good enough approximation. But even with all the money and all the brains, you can’t guarantee you’ll have all the ideas. If necessity is the mother of invention, then competition is the mother of innovation. The leapfrogging that goes on in browser development between Chrome and Firefox is proof of that. It’s arguably fantastic value for Google to pay Mozilla to act as an outsourced browser think tank. And of course Mozilla do so much more than just build a browser. Take a look at the list of Mozilla projects, the Mozilla community map, driving forward web standards, protecting an open internet. Many of Mozilla’s activities directly support Google. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Sure, Google could probably hire the Mozilla teams to do the same for Google, but why bother if Mozilla are already doing it cheaper and/or better than it could be done at Google?

So maybe rather than thinking “that’s really weird” or “they’re overpaying” or “it’s a dodge to avoid Government intervention”, we should be thinking “great job, Mozilla” and “hey, that’s great news for the open web and browser innovation”.

Update 16:31GMT: A similar story has hit Slashdot. Peter Kasting’s argument is that Google use Chrome (and Firefox) for the betterment of the web, which I buy in addition to the ideas above. Mozilla is a partner in this. A better web equals more people for Google to sell to advertisers, and more search revenue for Mozilla to use to advance the web even further.

Andrew Savory: Books 5

Andrew — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:26:25 +0000

In the last four months there should have been plenty of opportunity to read books, right? Well, not so much. Herein my most recent literary conquests.

World War Z by Max Brooks. This is the book that had Brad Pitt up in Glasgow filming with a bunch of zombies. I’m not sure what the film will be like, but I thought the book was absolutely brilliant. It’s written as a series of interviews with survivors of the zombie outbreak, a useful device that lets the author hop about through multiple viewpoints. The “factual” presentation style makes it feel more real. If you haven’t read it and you love a bit of walking dead action, go get it right now.
Immune (The Rho Agenda : Book Two) by Richard Phillips. As I wrote about the first book in the series, “do expect an enjoyable tale”. This one was a bit more sluggish, but still an entertaining read.
Engineman by Eric Brown. Utterly brilliant.
The Scar by China Mieville. So good. The bizarre and strange world of Bas Lag that China Mieville has created provides a great backdrop for wonderful stories. I loved Perdido Street Station, and although The Scar is not a sequel, it’s set in the same universe and felt familiar.
Iron Council by China Mieville. Again, not a sequel, but still wonderful. Almost steampunk (but in a good way).
Broken by Karin Slaughter. This was on offer at Amazon so I picked it up for the awesome price of £0. It’s now £3.49 and I would probably recommend it at that price. I’m not a big crime reader, but I enjoyed this one. It had sufficient twists and turns to keep me turning the pages, and moved at a good pace.
The Phoenix Conspiracy by Richard L Sanders. Some of the writing was a bit wobbly, especially early on, but this is a fast-paced sci-fi romp that proved to be quite entertaining. It’s currently free at Amazon, normal price £2.09, so go grab it!
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald. If you’ve ever been to Istanbul, there’s a good chance you’ll love this book right off the bat. If you like your scifi in a hot and grimy and all too plausible near future, you’ll love this book. The kindle formatting is basically rubbish, and this can make it hard to follow: switches in narrative are not immediately obvious. But stick with it (or get the paperback) because it’s a fantastic story.

Previously: books, books 2, books 3, books 4.

Wayne Stallwood (DrJeep): Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:18:44 +0000

Can I just say that after watching Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder on Ch4 I am disgusted with the Councillor who didn't visit, the “Mental Health Expert” who walked away and reported Richard Wallace for fire safety, the Vicar who sat on the fence and the neighbours who first extended the long arm of the law rather than the hand of community. However I am touched by the humanity of one Landscape Gardener who looked at the ill and damaged man rather than eyesore in the garden and hence made more progress than anyone else in over 30 years of one man's suffering. Bravo to that man and everyone he managed to turn around to provide positive help at the end.

Andrew Savory: Macbook Pro SSD saga, part three

Andrew — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:11:02 +0000

So previously my Macbook Pro stopped booting and got stuck at the grey boot screen. Then after a week at Apple for repair, they called me to tell me the SSD was stopping the Macbook Pro from booting.

Yesterday I ordered a new Crucial M4 256GB SSD, which Crucial claim to be compatible with my laptop. I also collected my laptop from Apple. This afternoon the new drive arrived (thank you Amazon Prime), so I set about removing the old dubious SSD and replacing it with the new one.

It didn’t go well.

Firstly, the old SSD. It was an OWC 115GB SSD with mount kit. It replaces the optical drive, which means I can have all the benefits of fast boot from SSD, coupled with copious storage from the factory-installed 500gb hard drive. The downside of this approach is Apple don’t provide the service themselves, so it has to be a DIY upgrade.

Unfortunately, it looks like the SSD has failed completely. Plugging it into an SATA docking station had no result. It didn’t show up in the device list, so it’s effectively a chunk of dead plastic. Luckily, this chunk of dead plastic decided to dodo within the warranty: it was only bought last April.

On to the new SSD. Unfortunately, this SSD arrived with a rattle. You can’t make this stuff up. This solid state drive has bits that make noises when you shake it. The PCB that’s mounted inside the plastic case was a loose fit, so with the slightest nudge you can hear it moving around. Holding the SSD by the SATA connector as well as the case stopped the rattle. The drive itself was fine (I used it to confirm the SATA docking station was working and the other SSD was dead), but given my luck I decided it was safest to return it.

Back to the Mac. With no usable SSD, I put the Superdrive back in it for the time being, and powered it on.

Except it wouldn’t turn on.

The battery showed it had a nearly full charge, but just to be sure I plugged the power in. The laptop immediately came to life, showed the boot screen, and then started booting from my old hard drive. So far so good. Unfortunately, when it got to the login screen, it quickly became clear that the keyboard was not working. No input was detected, and the caps lock light failed to light up. So I selected shut down, let the laptop power off, and then tried powering it on again.

Except it wouldn’t turn on.

Plugged in, unplugged, nothing works. It appears to be dead. Not resting. Not stunned. Not pining for the fjords.

I guess I’ll take the laptop back to Apple after Christmas, and see what they can do. Given the keyboard was the first sign of trouble and Apple say they tested with a new logic board, my suspicion is something went awry when they put the old board back in (especially as the Superdrive/SSD shenanigans I performed were nowhere near the keyboard controller). I can’t see anything obvious like a loose connector, so perhaps the logic board blew in all the excitement.

Meanwhile, at least my old laptop continues to work, for now.

Sigh.

Andrew Savory: UX fail

Andrew — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:02:51 +0000

At the Sainsburys filling station yesterday, I opted to pay at the pump. I inserted my debit card at the prompt, and heard an audible clunk as it was read. I typed in my PIN, and after a few seconds heard another audible clunk which I assumed meant it was done, so I removed the card. Oops. “Card removed too early, transaction cancelled”. What was the clunk, and what should it mean to the user?

The John Lewis website has the option for premium delivery of goods, which when selected presents a drop-down list of available dates. These dates currently start from after the Christmas break, on Wednesday 28th December. If I’m ordering something yesterday (Tuesday), and I see a drop-down with Wednesday already selected, and I’m in a section titled “Premium Delivery” and subtitled “Next, named or Saturday UK delivery”, I might assume that the Wednesday in question was the next day, rather than one week’s time. Could this have been improved by stating the number of days until delivery, or highlighting the unusual case due to the holidays?

The new Westfield Stratford City shopping centre uses little green parking tokens. You pick them up on entry, and on exit you take them to a pay machine, insert the token, and are then told how much money you have to pay. After paying, the token is returned. If you you’re visiting for late night shopping, you might not have to pay. When you insert the token, it falls straight out the bottom of the machine. Nothing changes on the display. You might end up putting the token back in a few times, wondering what is happening. Couldn’t the machine show a “parking is free” message, or “nothing to pay”?

The door to the corridor below my flat has a large u-shaped handle, so I invariably pull it even though the door needs to be pushed to open. Wouldn’t it be better to have a flat panel, since the door cannot be pulled?

There are so many small but broken interactions we have on a day-to-day basis. Fixing the small annoying details may seem like a needless expense, or something that can be dealt with later. But in a world where we are surrounded by a constant background of such low level frustrations, paying attention to detail and sweating the small stuff becomes nothing short of miraculous.

Andrew Savory: Macbook Pro SSD saga, part two

Andrew — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:12:24 +0000

The tale of my broken Macbook Pro just took a bizarre turn.

Apple called me (not even five minutes after I called them to poke them for an update) to provide an update on the repair. Apparently my laptop works just fine with both the new logic board and the old logic board – just as long as the SSD is not plugged in.

The happy news is I’ve just been saved from a £420 repair bill.

The bad news (apart from having lost a week) is that my Mac won’t boot with the SSD. I have to go back to the old internal hard drive while I decide what to do with the SSD. I’m a little annoyed, as I asked Apple to confirm it wasn’t the SSD, and was told that SSD failures should result in the “select boot device” screen or some other error, not a grey screen. It’s also not clear at this stage if the SSD is outright broken, or if the Mac simply doesn’t like it – I’ll find out when I get it home and plug it into something else.

I’ve seen other reports of SSD weirdness, including Jeroen’s detailed account. This whole situation with Apple hardware and what should be a fairly standard add-on is intensely frustrating. It’s exacerbated by Apple’s boot firmware failing to do anything sensible.

It’s also extremely odd that the whole setup was working just fine for several months before it failed. I bought the SSD in April, and have been reliably booting from it since Lion was released in July. If the SSD has failed, that means it only lasted 5 months of sustained use!

So, lazyweb: what SSD drives are actually confirmed to be 100% compatible with a Macbook Pro? What is the likely lifetime of an SSD? And why are the hardware gods being so unkind to me this month?!

Andrew Savory: Did a book kill my Kindle?

Andrew — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 08:49:12 +0000

I have what is now called the Kindle Keyboard, a 3rd generation Kindle that I bought on 18 October last year. Like my laptop, it’s now dead. Incredible, right?

Aside from observations on how all the gadgets I bought last October are now breaking – less than 2 months outside of warranty – I am left wondering whether in this instance a book has killed my Kindle.

For a few days before the Kindle died, it had been freezing whilst reading The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald (it’s a great book by the way, don’t let me put you off). Around 80% through, every couple of pages it would hang, requiring a forced restart. I also noticed that this book includes graphics which show up on my TouchPad but not on the Kindle 3, and that on both devices it has horrific paragraph spacing.

Whilst reading up on different ways to restart the Kindle, I came across reference to potential indexing problems. Apparently the Kindle can sometimes get stuck indexing a book. The symptoms sound similar: extremely flaky device, and constantly having to recharge it. (Having left mine to recharge all night, I’ve just plugged it in again and it wants recharging, even though all I’ve done in the last 20 minutes is try to restart it.)

So here I am with a Kindle that won’t restart, once again stuck with the cost of ecosystem lock-in and the apparent need to include the cost of warranty extensions in my purchasing decisions.

Update 22:05: So I just went through the fault with Amazon’s (really quite good) Kindle support telephone line. It’s great to be able to click “Call me” and have them phone you right away and talk you through the issue.

Their suggestion was to plug the Kindle into a laptop for half an hour: apparently, the laptop charging is ‘different’ to charging via the Kindle charger. And indeed, after 30 minutes the Kindle booted into USB mode. When I unmounted it from the laptop it booted back into the home screen, and I was able to move the cursor down one menu item, but as soon as my books reappeared the device hung again.

I spoke again with Amazon support, and they suggested charging it for longer. Otherwise, as the device is out of warranty, they couldn’t replace it but they did offer me a discount on a replacement device as a one-time exception. The discount was reasonable, but still put the replacement in the realms of “quite a bit more than buying real books and bookcases”, especially in the context of a device lifespan of just 14 months.

I also don’t have much confidence in this approach as the problem feels like a software issue rather than a hardware issue – given the Kindle boots, allows some input (not enough to perform a factory reset), and then hangs. I’m definitely not about to pay for a hardware replacement if the fault is a software bug.

So I guess I’ll finish reading my remaining Kindle books on the Touchpad, and then look around for alternative ereader devices. The ready availability of electronic books is a model that definitely works well for me: I’ve read 81 books on the Kindle in the year since I first got it. It works out at more than one a week – that’s probably the most prolific reading I’ve done since I was at school.

But I’m not going to pay a hardware tax on ebooks every year.

Adam Bower: I should write more.

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:18:12 +0000

...but I'm too lazy, busy and tired to actually find time to write stuff here.

This entry was originally posted at http://quinophex.dreamwidth.org/1127.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Andrew Savory: WebOS Open Source

Andrew — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:26:07 +0000

There’s lots of noise out there about WebOS being open source. Everything from “WebOS is dead” to “WebOS is saved!” – but what is really going on? Why did Meg make this move now?

Thinking about it, this move makes a lot of sense for HP. Léo Apotheker‘s disastrous handling of the original WebOS announcement effectively destroyed any opportunity for HP to sell the platform. Léo destroyed confidence, and no OEM would want to pick up something that HP could not afford to build. Léo himself stated that building the WebOS business would be a multi-year, multi-$billion proposition. Few OEMs have pockets as deep as HP, and certainly none would have the stomach to invest so heavily – especially after seeing HP back away from the investment.

It would be difficult for Meg Whitman to perform a complete about-turn and start pushing WebOS again with a tablet and smartphone strategy, presumably against the express wishes of the HP board. If there’s no-one to buy the platform, and no politic way to resurrect the platform internally, what are the alternatives? Meg could write off the investment, or disrupt the market. The latter option at least carries the potential to see a long-term return of sorts, and keeps HP’s smart printer dreams alive and leaves the door open for future tablet hardware sales, too.

Whilst the fire sale proved there’s consumer demand for a bargain (as always), I suspect it did little to build OEM confidence in the platform. Everyone is being hammered by Apple: non-iPad tablets aren’t selling well, despite significant investment and endless product announcements. Buying the number two tablet platform isn’t an exciting proposition when it’s only number two by dint of selling at below cost, and when even then it has only a small fraction of the market versus the incumbent.

Meanwhile, Google are tightening their grip on Android. Everything about Android smells from an OEM perspective: the Motorola purchase; the preferential treatment of Motorola and Verizon; the refusal to open source Honeycomb, significant license costs payable to Microsoft; and perhaps worst of all, ‘non-fragmentation’ clauses that seek to end differentiation, in a crowded and contested market where manufacturers desperately need to stand out as they fight over the scraps that iPad leaves behind.

At the same time as Android becomes less appetising, opportunities to adopt other open source platforms at low cost have dramatically evaporated over the last year. In fact, as I tried to illustrate in the death of ‘open’ mobile platforms, we’ve lost Maemo, Symbian, LiMo, and MeeGo in addition to Android. If you’re looking to productise on an open mobile platform right now, your choices are starkly limited. In fact the only platform that’s not been pronounced utterly dead is Tizen – a platform that’s not even alive.

And yet there are plenty of device manufacturers who are desperate to start delivering smartphone hits: LG’s rights issue springs to mind as demonstrable of a manufacturer that’s struggling; even the über-shiny HTC is seeing profits dip; and Samsung will need to switch to an all-smartphone lineup sooner rather than later, if they are to achieve their ambition of not losing all their profit to Apple.

But for all these companies, and any others, there is no sense in buying WebOS from HP. If they buy the platform, they will have to go it alone: running the infrastructure, doing the platform development, handling the developer outreach, building the consumer brand, working with big name brands to get apps on the platform … it’s an enormous resource sink, and a massive diversion from core business. This is the key to the Android success: all those aspects are covered, and the only critical task the manufacturers have is shipping product. And boy, do they understand how to ship product (ship, not necessarily sell).

So the landscape that WebOS fits into as an open source platform is one where Android manufacturers are fighting over scraps in an increasingly locked-down ecosystem; where no other open source platform is currently available; where the manufacturers are desperate for differentiation; and where the most elegant user experience continues to take the lion’s share of the market.

In that context, why wouldn’t the manufacturers consider using an open mobile platform, that has an arguably elegant user experience, and less encumbrance than the only other pseudo open-source alternative?

HP now needs to find a way to establish an equitable level playing field for manufacturers; an open development ecosystem where each can take the platform and commercialise it, free of IP encumbrance and business model conflicts.

As I said about Tizen, there are some obvious metrics to gauge the future success of open source WebOS:

a unified platform (not disparate platforms for different form factors)
availability of source code
open collaborative development
clear and open governance
mature web APIs based on open standards
mature native APIs
mature SDK and emulator
devices shipping from more than one manufacturer and in more than one form factor
route to market for developers (an app store of some description)
significant developer adoption and mindshare
being a credible alternative to Android and iOS, as measured by current features, functionality, stability and performance

What’s most interesting is that WebOS already scores pretty highly on some of these indicators: a unified platform around WebOS 3; good web and native APIs; mature SDK; route to market; features, functionality, stability and performance. Let’s hope they can provide effective answers to all the other metrics in a timely fashion, and bring on board the OEMs who can really benefit from this platform.

Andrew Savory: Ungodly Macbook Pro

Andrew — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:25:24 +0000

A funny thing happened today on the way to the codeface.

This morning, as I was packing up to leave London, I did the usual: hit the Macbook Pro power button, hit S, wait for it to sleep, close it, pack it in the Crumpler laptop case, put it in the padded backpack, and head off to the car.

When I got to Norwich, I unpacked the laptop, plugged it in, opened it up and watched as it popped back to life. It seemed to be struggling to talk to the network, so I toggled WiFi off and back on again. No luck: all the London hotspots were still showing up, and none of the local ones were. Then WiFi did the pizza wheel thing, so I switched to iTerm, planning on finding out what was going on, but then that pizza wheeled too. Opera – pizza wheel. Finder – pizza wheel. Uh-oh.

I gave the Mac a few minutes to sort itself out. Sometimes I struggle to wake properly, so why shouldn’t the laptop? No dice. And without a network connection, I couldn’t ssh in to force a reboot. So I took the only option left, and forcefully powered down the laptop by holding down the power button. And then restarted it.

Except the laptop didn’t restart. It got to the first grey screen, but then stayed there. It didn’t even display a list of drives, or an unhappy mac sign.

I didn’t panic, not right away. This has happened on other laptops from time to time. I did the dance: rebooting and holding ‘Alt’ (Option) to select a different boot drive. Resetting the SMC. Resetting the PRAM and NVRAM. Starting in Safe Mode. Giving the Mac some alone time on the naughty step to think about what it had done, and to decide whether it was going to behave again or not. Nothing worked. Every time the Mac restarted, it would get to the grey screen and then do nothing more.

I fired up the Touchpad, and booked myself a slot at the Genius Bar of the nearest Apple Store. Thank goodness Norwich is now a civilised city, replete with its own shiny geek Mecca. I packed up the disobedient Mac and headed into town, stopping only to make some snarky remarks on twitter, including how autocorrect spellchecking converts the Macbook Pro’s Unibody to ungodly. Rather apposite.

At the Apple Store, it was not good news. The kindly genius I spoke to did all she could: booting from network (no joy), ambidextrous yogic keyboard sequences (no joy), reseating the RAM (no joy), taking the laptop into the magical back room to perform secret rituals known only to the Apple inner circle (no joy). My shiny unibody Macbook Pro, bought just last October, was declared dead and in need of a new logic board, which could be mine for just £350 plus VAT. Ouch. I went home to think about that one (and to pour myself a very large whisky).

Fortunately, my original Macbook Pro 1,1 was travelling with me as well (itself the recipient of a new logic board back in April 2010). The plan was to set it up with Windows for my sister this weekend, and then hand it over to her. She’ll not be happy either.

So here I am, back on my old laptop. Ordinarily, I would be unfazed by the switch. Since the advent of MobileMe and Dropbox, migrating between Macs stopped being a problem. For years now it’s merely a matter of a thrashed network for a few hours as the latest updates sync, followed by productive work.

Unfortunately, life after Lion has somewhat shattered that ideal state:

Lion ‘replaced’ MobileMe with iCloud, so my usernames and passwords (“keychain“) will no longer sync to my old laptop (which is only running Snow Leopard, as it does not have the prerequisite 64-bit processor to run Lion). This is a good argument for building your own cloud infrastructure, or relying on a different third party (Mozilla? Google?) to the OS provider. It also makes me wonder why those of us that previously paid Apple to deliver the MobileMe service would ever trust them again for our business continuity needs.
Despite having downloaded XCode 4 previously (while I was a paid-up Apple developer), I can no longer download the Snow Leopard-compatible version of XCode 4, as Apple only provide the latest version for download. So I’m forced to use XCode 3 on Snow Leopard, or to pay again to get access to 4.0. Somewhat bizarrely, XCode 4 (and many other Lion-only apps) shows up in the Mac App Store list of purchases with an “install” button alongside it. That’s poor usability: I can’t understand why Apple doesn’t grey-out or disable the install button beside apps that won’t run on Snow Leopard.
I don’t recall encrypting an external USB drive, so I’m puzzled as to why it refuses to mount on Snow Leopard, requesting a newer OS before mounting. But until I get a Lion machine running again I can’t definitively pin this one on Apple, so let’s leave it as “grumble grumble” for now.

Other than that, I’m somewhat perversely glad to be back on Snow Leopard. No more bluetooth audio problems. No more (far fewer) kernel panics. No painfully sharp unibody case to chafe my wrists. But boy do I miss the SSD. And the extra memory. And the higher screen resolution. And all those extra processors.

In my rush to be productive again, I’ve thus far (in approximate order) slung on: Scroll Reverser (muscle memory will not be denied), iStat Menus (feel blind without knowing what’s happening on my box), Dropbox, Opera, XCode, Google Notifier (so I can click on mailto: links and be taken to GMail, not Mail.app), Colloquy (IRC ahead of the WebOS all-hands tonight), Growl (used with continuous integration tools for test status updates), Cinch, NetNewsWire (keep up with the news whilst this sloooooow laptop compiles), BreakTime (more tea?), MarsEdit, Alfred, Twitter, Homebrew (and thence git, wget, mysql and the rest of my life slowly compiling), TextMate, and Yojimbo (my life in license keys).

A productive day lost. An expensive shiny brick to fix or replace. But thanks to Dropbox and git, I don’t think any critical data has been lost.

Steve Engledow (stilvoid): Web terminal lense book

steve@offend.me.uk (Steve Engledow) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 12:22:36 +0000

Web servers

After uploading a large file to the gallery application I'd mentioned in a previous post, I discovered that there's a bug in lighttpd that eats up all the memory when shoving a large file through the proxy module.

The gallery application I'm writing is written using node and includes its own (tiny) web server. I was using lighttpd to handle the SSL part of the connection and simply proxy the requests to and from the application. That large file I'd uploaded triggered the bug when I tried to download it later. It's interesting that the upload went perfectly smoothly.

After having been unable to find any convincing fixes for the problem in lighttpd and being unwilling to try to rethink how my application works, I decided it was time to try another web server.

I toyed with the idea of - and in fact partially implemented, just for fun - a web server written with node but really, that's far more effort than I really want to go to and I suspect it wouldn't have the performance characteristics I'd want. That and I'm far too lazy to want to reinvent the wheel.

Taking my queue from work, I though I'd have a look at nginx. At Proxama, we're using nginx on our Amazon EC2 instances to proxy requests to the django application that is our application server. From my limited experience of setting it up (well, I've only needed to do it once), it seemed pretty simple to configure and yes, after half an hour or so I'd managed to set up web server with all the virtual hosts, SSL certificates, and proxy settings I had before. And with a much cleaner-looking config file ;)

For future reference, here are the tricky bits and caveats I came across:

Make sure you define an index somewhere as there isn't a default
```
location / {
    root /srv/http/;
    index index.html;
}
```
The CA cert goes under the ssl_client_certificate option. This wasn't mentioned in the SSL howto page.
Uploads are, by default, limited to 1MB. This is controlled with client_max_body_size
FastCGI is a dark art and I really hope I never have to see another PHP script in my life.
- php-fpm made it slightly easier
- but it uses a unix socket rather than running 127.0.0.1:9000 which had me confused for a while
- roundcube, despite being written in PHP, is still the best webmail option for me
Don't forget the semi-colons at the ends of lines!

So far, nginx seems to be doing the job very well, solves the issues I was having and (that I've noticed) hasn't created any new ones.

White terminal

The other day, I decided that I was bored of having white text on a black background in my xterms and resolved to spend a day working in black on white.

It didn't work; I'll stick with white on black, thanks.

Chilli lenses

No matter what method one uses (with the probable exception of using rubber gloves), however much one washes one's hands after chopping chillies, some residue remains. This became particularly manifest when taking out my contact lenses last night; yowch.

Having a liking for scotch bonnets does not help ;)

Facebook

After a month's experimental non-usage, I finally deleted my Facebook account several weeks ago. I really haven't missed it. What I have noticed is that I'm quite relieved to not feel compelled to spend several minutes of every day reading through my friend feed :)

Twitter works fine for me and, because it's so full of content and I'm not personally acquainted with most of the people I follow, it doesn't compel me to catch up with every single post. The same applies to Diaspora.

I highly recommend ditching Facebook. There are an increasing number of reasons to do so which I don't think I even need go into ;)

Jonathan McDowell: All I need is a large enough white wall

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:28:12 +0000

I think I'm currently supposed to be out buying a TV at the moment. Or something else expensive. Instead I'm lying on the sofa listening to Whale and drinking tea. That's much better in my opinion, but it reminded me that I hadn't mentioned that I bought a projector.

I had the loan of a projector for a while when I was in Belfast. It was a huge thing that made a lot of noise, but was pretty cool for watching films with. When I moved to the US I decided not to bother with a TV to start with - using my laptop did just fine for most things. Except films. They really benefit from a bigger screen. Especially if you want to watch them with someone else. So I started looking at pico projectors, because I wanted something small and cute that I could throw in a bag with my tiny laptop. At the time the best the pico projectors could do was 840x480, which I felt wasn't really that great. However back in January TI announced their DLP Pico HD chipset, offering a resolution 1280x800.

I kept a look out for projectors using this to appear, and eventually, in July, Amazon claimed to have availability of the Vivtek Qumi. So I bought one. And I'm very happy with it. I'm not a heavy user, and there are some niggles, but it's small and does exactly what I want. In low light conditions it'll happily throw an image all the way across the room, which is more than it's rated at. There's a mini-HDMI connector on the back, so it's a doddle to plug it into my laptop using the supplied HDMI to mini-HDMI cable. The laptop auto-detects the device and extends the desktop appropriate, as you'd expect.

It'll also do media playback itself - there's a USB host port and a micro SD slot on the back. This works ok, and the included remote means you can easily set the projector somewhere above your head and still be able to easily control it. Unfortunately the built in speakers are fairly useless. There's a 3.5mm socket for external speakers, but having to plug something else in detracts from the convenience factor of the built-in media player. Also my unit had the power switch installed upside down (the little red line indicating the power is on actually shows up when it's off), but that's the only complaint I've got about the build quality. There's a little neoprene case to store the thing in as well.

So, er, yeah. I think I can continue to make do without a normal TV for a while longer and avoid the nightmare that I suspect are the shops on Black Friday.

Steve Engledow (stilvoid): Strange lunch break

steve@offend.me.uk (Steve Engledow) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:43:26 +0000

With a burning need to fill our fridge, I set out for the land of Sainsbury's during my lunch break today. On the way, a number of strange things happened - or rather, a number of strange things seemed to happen. I suspect they're more a reflection of my state of mind today. I've probably been watching too much Dexter.

Strange thing number 1: The tail

After coming home from rehearsal on Monday night, I'd been forced to park my car on the next street as all of the spaces were taken on mine (something that I'll probably rant about in the future). Having walked to my car, got in, and started down the road, I realised that I'd left my shopping list at home. I began the twisty-turny drive around the block back to my house and noticed that a blue car had been following me all the way along my illogical route.

I parked outside my house (there was space!), went in and grabbed the shopping list. After starting my car up and performing a quick three-point-turn, I continued my pilgrimage to Sainsbury's. Near the end of my road, the same blue car went past me and I'm sure the driver looked at me guiltily.

Strange things number 2 and 3: The cyclist and the woman in the car

After I'd completed my shopping, I returned to my car, filled it with my shopping and got in. I then realised I'd forgotten to buy a lettuce. While crossing the car park, I noted that a woman in a black car who had started her engine around about the time I'd emptied my trolley had now stopped her engine and was watching me walk past her back to the store. Just before I got to the store, I was nearly hit by a cyclist who was cycling across the car park much too fast.

I bought my lettuce.

On the way back to my car, I had to stop for a car that was crossing the car park very quickly; the driver looked the same as the cyclist!

Once I'd got in my car and pulled out of my parking space, I noticed that the woman in the black car had started her engine and was also pulling out!

Strange thing number 4: The geography teacher

On the journey home, I drove past my old high school geography teacher who I'd mentioned only the other day to my old high school IT teacher who I'd bumped into in a queue at the fish'n'chip shop. I've not seen or thought of either of them for some years.

The End, or is it?

Nothing more happened except that I had a strange compulsion to blog about these events ;)

Brett Parker (iDunno): Holy Crap - another set of books to re-read when the last comes out.

Brett Parker (iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:45:54 +0000

ARGH! Have just finished "The Wise Man's Fear" - fantastic book, but still the middle of a trilogy, without the last book in sight... If you've not read "The Name of the Wind" and "The Wise Man's Fear" by Patrick Rothfuss, I seriously suggest going and picking them up (at least if you read some fantasy, even if you don't they're worth a read I reckon).

Steve Engledow (stilvoid): Markdown

steve@offend.me.uk (Steve Engledow) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:28:58 +0000

I've just finished converting this site and blog over to using markdown for its content. I'd been using ReST for work and nearly went with that but decided I slightly prefer the syntax used by markdown.

I really hope this kind of thing catches on; HTML is so ugly and not particularly suitable for writing content. Writing a blog in markdown just feels a lot more natural - like I can just get on with the writing and not have to think about how it will look on a web page.

If only code could be like that! I've had a number of moments of fancy when I've thought it would be great to have a programming language that looks like english. I've tried out a few ideas but never really come up with anything that would keep me totally happy. The best example I've seen of this kind of "literate" programming language so far is Inform 7, which I've dabled with a little.

I still have some ideas and might consider breaking a few of them out again.

I think I'm unecessarily obsessed with dreaming up toy languages. (See obfuna)

MJ Ray: Growing Your Co-operative, Bristol

mjr — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:44:22 +0000

Eli Sarre from Essential Trading speaking at C-SW Annual Conference

Last Friday (11 November 2011), I was at the Cooperatives-SW annual conference at the Cube Cinema in Bristol, titled “Growing Your Co-operative” and sponsored by the Co-operative Membership South and West. It was another sold-out event, featuring headline talks from Co-op Party member and Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, Eli Sarre of Essential Trading worker co-op (pictured), Carole Theyer of Sparks Inc and Jim Pettipher from Co-operative Futures.

There were also some great workshops – I went to a finance workshop led by Ian Rothwell from Co-operative and Community Finance and a regulations one with Paul Martin of Kabin (details may appear on their event page) – and a brilliant lunch from Runcible Spoon (and those of you who know me will know I have been livid with some co-op event lunches!) with some time to chat and network, although I also went to a fringe meeting about the RISE problems.

The event concluded with the formal AGM of Co-operatives SW (electing a new chairperson and approving transfer to a new co-op corporation) as well as a bit more chat afterwards. I felt it was a great event and well worth my time being there. I’m glad that some people from outside the co-op movement, from community businesses like the Strawberry Line Cafe and a few people considering joining or forming co-ops, were there and I hope it was good for them too.

Andrew Savory: Samsung Bada 2.0 Developer Day

Andrew — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:08:51 +0000

At the start of November, Samsung held a Bada Developer Day to herald the launch of Bada 2.0. This followed on from the 2010 Samsung Bada developer day they held (I took some pictures during the 2010 event).

Bada was launched in December 2009. It’s part of Samsung’s plan to dominate the mobile industry and to beat Apple’s iOS and iPhone juggernaut. It’s also clever sleight of hand: Samsung’s target is to gain a significant percentage of the smartphone market in 2010, so by releasing Bada as a ‘smartphone’ OS on featurephone devices, they can at a stroke redefine a market segment and meet their internal targets. Or, as Samsung put it:

The vision of bada is “Smartphone for Everyone”. bada’s main goal is not to compete with other existing smartphone platforms. Instead, bada will turn Samsung’s conventional customers into smartphone users by providing cost-effective smartphones.

As The Register said in early 2010 when the first Samsung Wave device was announced:

If Bada had come from anyone except Samsung then it probably wouldn’t be worth pursuing, but Samsung shifts an awful lot of handsets and if the company decides to back Bada properly then it’s going to be an important platform.

Now in late 2011 we can see the steady advances that Samsung has made with their multi-year Bada platform investment, and it does indeed appear that the company is backing Bada properly. Some of the highlights (see the timeline embedded below for the full details): in June 2010 the Wave handset went on sale in the UK; in July Samsung published a developer book; in August the 1.0 Bada SDK was released; in October 2010 the Wave II handset was announced; in August 2011 Bada 2.0 was announced; and later that month the Wave 3 handset was announced along with the Wave Y and Wave M lower-spec devices.

It’s a fairly consistent attempt to carve out a niche for Samsung with their own phone operating system. At first glance at least, Samsung are focussing on many of the things that are critical to platform success: a steady flow of devices, an SDK, comprehensive documentation, a potentially compelling proposition for the consumer, monetisation routes for developers, continued outreach, and an evolving platform.

Compared to last year’s event it seemed like there were far fewer attendees this year: maybe less than half (150 or so as opposed to 400 or so). The day was also half as long, with maybe a quarter as much technical content.

Last year’s London developer day agenda began with the usual marketing and positioning presentations, and then moved on to more than four hours of technical content. At times it was really heavy going, but there’s no doubt that leaving the event most people will have had a solid understanding of what Bada was about.

This year’s event had much shorter marketing presentations, followed by an overview of the changes in Bada 2.0, a rather long coffee break for networking (which only works if there’s enough people to network with), some partner presentations, and a final closing talk by David Rowan. David’s the editor of Wired UK, and his talk on the future of technology was amusing, entertaining and insightful. It was interesting of Samsung to add this to the agenda, and is a subtle bit of positioning of Bada.

I did leave this year’s event feeling like there was more I needed to know about Bada 2.0, and many unanswered questions. What about upgrades of older devices to the latest Bada release? Is it possible to publish apps that support Bada 1 and Bada 2? What is the benefit of writing apps for Bada rather than Samsung’s other mobile platforms, Windows Phone 7 and Android?

The last question is particularly important given Samsung’s own analysis, from their marketing presentation, that suggests Bada and Windows Phone will have 17% of the market each in 2012, with Android at 66%:

If those numbers are correct, wouldn’t it be better to develop for Android’s larger market share?

The Samsung Hub appears to be in part Samsung’s answer to that question (though it should be noted Samsung Hub is creeping on to Android devices too). By developing for Bada, you get access to some interesting Samsung-specific functionality, for example being able to share phone content with your Samsung TV or PC. Another cool example I heard about during the day was using a Bada phone as a remote control (including remote viewfinder) for a Samsung camera. Samsung are also borrowing heavily from other mobile platforms with remote device location and wipe (iOS and Blackberry), aggregating contacts across multiple social networks (WebOS Synergy), flip to silence the phone (HTC Sense).

In addition, Samsung are challenging the likes of Apple, Google and Amazon head-on with a range of content provision services: music, films, curated games, books and other media, all under the branding of Samsung Hub.

You’ll note in the pie chart that there is absolutely no mention of iOS. There’s a marketing tactic which involves never mentioning the competition by name, but if you take it too far you end up with graphs like this that are blatantly wrong. Horace Dediu at asymco has assiduously been keeping track of smartphone shipments including Bada (for example here, here, here,here), and fortunately he’s done the hard work of putting together an accurate smartphone platform share chart for Q2 2011, which might help us imagine the situation in 2012. According to Dediu, Android is currently closer to 48%, Bada at 4%, with iOS at 19%.

If Samsung want Bada to succeed, they need to be a bit more honest about the market reality, and have suitable explanations for why developing for Bada makes sense. Perhaps the statistics are the best answer, as they show a real revenue opportunity for app developers:

In summary, Samsung continue to make progress with Bada and to promote it strongly. But whether it is a long-term success or not will depend as much on the devices and the developer experience as on the strength of Samsung’s engagement with the platform.

This is part one of a three part series of blog posts on Samsung Bada. Coming up: a review of the Wave 3, and a review of the SDK and developer experience.

Steve Engledow (stilvoid): Violining a contemptible fellow

steve@offend.me.uk (Steve Engledow) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 21:51:35 +0000

I was going to write about a very strange and excellent dream I had the other day. I'd even written some notes down so that I'd remember it but I managed to delete those notes during some git fiddling.

So I'll write about that instead :)

The back story

I've been working on a photo gallery application to use for my photos as I'd become dissatisfied with everything else out there. Here's an example of where I've got with it so far.

The basic features I wanted were:

that it's easy to upload files and put them into a gallery
images don't have to go into a gallery
galleries and files each get a unique, unguessable id
There'll be no real security as such, but:
- the site will operate over SSL
- "public" images/galleries are simply those whose IDs have been published (on a blog or whatever)
- only a gallery's owner can add things to it
a user can view a complete list of their files and galleries
galleries can also contain galleries
galleries and files can store arbitrary meta data
the default view for a gallery is a page full of thumbnails
selecting a thumbnail expands the image and provides a scrolling bar to move through the others

I've implemented all of those features but the UI needs work. For example, there's currently no good method of adding/editing meta data and I need to work out how to do multiple file uploads, I think HTML5 has features I want.

The git fiddling

During the development of the gallery, I've obviously tested it out with quite a number of different images and, at some point, decided to check some of those in to the repository. A while later (this was obvious in hindsight - as most stupid decisions are) I realised that was a bad idea and subsequently removed them from my working tree.

As any git user will know though, the history of those files stays around which means that your .git folder stays very big. After having checked out my repository on another machine and realising why it was taking so long to download, I decided I'd better do something about it.

Enter git filter-branch!

This is a feature of git that I wish I'd known about ages ago. Ok, it's not something that anyone should be using every day (not even every month) but if you find yourself in a situation like mine - the sole user of a repository, misguided check in of a large file in the past - it's a very handy tool to know about.

Here's the man page.

The basic idea is that you ask git to rebuild the current branch by working through every commit from the first to the most recent, run any commands you like and then re-commit that commit. Eventually, you end up with a branch that's made up of entirely new commits that are based on the original commits you made.

For my need, the git command I needed was:

git filter-branch --prune-empty --index-filter "git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch gallery" HEAD

Translated, this means: Rebuild the current branch from the ground up, one commit at a time. Before re-commiting each commit, run "git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch gallery". This means I'm asking git to remove the gallery folder at each commit. --prune-empty means that if, after removing the gallery folder, the resulting commit would consist of nothing else, skip that commit.

After that was done (it took a while), I was left with a nice clean history that contained no mention of the gallery folder.

Now, because git isn't reckless, the gallery files were still kicking around and, if sufficiently motivated, I could bring them back. Even the old commits still hang around in the .git folder just in case. To properly clean up, I git cloned the repository folder. Success! The new folder was smaller by around 90% :) I deleted the original folder and did a forced push to my remote. It's necessary to force push when you change history - something every time-travelling Jedi will know well.

Then I realised that any untracked files were lost forever! That's why I'm not writing about the dream I had that I am still convinced was extremely interesting and revealing.

Unlike this rather rambling article about git. I'm rather tired. Just pretend you read something great and feel a lovely warm glow inside. ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!

Jonathan McDowell: The cost of progress

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 05:53:51 +0000

You should probably ignore this post. I'm just venting. I'll be better after a nice cup of tea.

Things that are causing me to fume about the fact Gnome Shell just hit Debian/Testing:

Spacefun came back. Even on GDM3. Just fucking die already.
I had to reboot to get bluetooth working again.
/desktop/gnome/shell/windows/workspaces_only_on_primary set by default? SRSLY?
It failed to carry over my previous monitor settings.
I'm pretty sure I don't have a latent desire for a machine running OS X, whatever the GNOME devs might think.
How many mouse clicks to get to the list of applications?
Er, why have you changed my default apps? (Why is clicking a link in a terminal opening Epiphany rather than a new tab in Iceweasel?)

I update my testing boxes (work + home laptops) almost every day. It rarely breaks, and certainly when it does I accept that's what I get for doing rolling upgrades. I can't remember the last time I did an upgrade that actually made me angry.

Also I suspect this thing is going to have a complete fit on my binary nVidia/hacked up DisplayLink configuration at work (the DisplayLink side refuses to do 3D for starters). Perhaps better not to upgrade there until I have a sufficient block of free time.

Maybe it's time to go back to evilwm. I only stopped because I wanted a dock for wifi/bluetooth etc applets on my laptop that didn't get hidden when I fullscreened things. Implementing _NET_WM_STRUT might make that doable...

(I'm sure some of this is just dealing with the change but it's a bit bloody difficult to deal with a complete change in user interface that hasn't even managed to carry across settings from the old one.)

Andrew Savory: Installing Windows on a Macbook Pro without a Superdrive

Andrew — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:40:50 +0000

So you want to install Windows on your Macbook Pro? It’s easy, as long as you haven’t replaced your internal SuperDrive with an SSD upgrade.

The Apple Boot Camp Assistant doesn’t let you create a bootable USB if you’re on certain hardware. This seems to be because quite a lot of Apple hardware doesn’t support booting from USB (for example, my mid-2010 unibody Macbook Pro).

Almost all the documentation you’ll find on installing Windows on a Mac is aimed at those who can burn and boot from a DVD, which obviously doesn’t work if you have no DVD. There’s also lots of documentation about workarounds using rEFIt and USB keys or virtual machine software, but few clear descriptions.

After a weekend of fighting, I’ve found a way that works for me. My setup: I have an internal SSD running Lion, and an internal HD running Snow Leopard. I have a copy of Windows 7 as an ISO (disk image). Here’s what I did.

In Lion, I fired up Boot Camp Assistant and used it to shrink my Snow Leopard partition and add a Boot Camp partition. I also let the Boot Camp Assistant download the latest Windows support software from Apple.

When you start Boot Camp Assistant, it will warn you about not having an optical drive. You can ignore this warning:

After clicking Continue, you’ll be able to select tasks for installing Windows. If your Mac doesn’t support booting from USB and does not have an optical drive, the option to create a Windows 7 install disk is greyed out. Select the other two options and click Continue:

BootCamp will download the drivers (almost 700mb, it’ll take a while), and then move on to the drive partitioning. I selected my Macintosh HD as the one to partition, primarily because it’s way bigger than the SSD but also because I don’t know how well rEFIt and Windows will work with Lion’s whole disk encryption. Because I want Snow Leopard around, I chose to create a new second partition for Windows (shrinking the Snow Leopard one in the process) rather than taking over the whole disk:Select the amount of space you want to give to Windows, and then click Continue:

The process of repartitioning can take some time, as Mac OS X has to shuffle around the contents of your Mac OS partition in order to make space for Windows. This was particularly bad in my case as I deleted several GB of data prior to starting the whole procedure.

When you get to the end, you may get an error about not being able to install – just ignore that.

I rebooted into Snow Leopard and installed rEFIt and VMWare Fusion trial edition. The plan is to use VMWare to boot the Windows ISO and install the initial Windows setup files on to the Boot Camp partition, and then to reboot into that disk and let Windows carry on without VMWare.

To do this, you first need to configure VMWare to use the Boot Camp partition ‘raw’, as a real disk rather than a virtual disk. To do this, open up a terminal and type:

mkdir Virtual\ Machines /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-rawdiskCreator print /dev/disk0

The output will be something like:

Nr      Start       Size Type Id Sytem
-- ---------- ---------- ---- -- ------------------------
 1          1     409639 BIOS EE Unknown
 2     409640  583984384 BIOS AF HFS+
 3  584656896  392116224 BIOS  B Win95 FAT32

Identify the correct drive number on the left – as a guideline, it’s probably listed as FAT32 or NTFS formatted under ‘Sytem’ (sic).

Next, create the raw disk description:

/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk0 3 windows7 ide

This will give you two raw disk description files:

Next, start VMWare Fusion and select “New…” from the File menu. Select “Continue without disc”:

On the installation media page, drag and drop the windows7.vmdk file previously created onto the “Use an existing virtual disk” drop-down (where it says “None”). You can’t just select the disk by clicking the radio button and then the drop-down, because the disk files are in a different format and will show up greyed-out.You will be prompted to convert the virtual disk to a newer format. Select “Don’t Convert”. If you select “Convert”, you will get an error about insufficient permissions. It works just fine without converting.If all went well, you should see your vmdk listed and be able to click Continue:Accept the defaults for the operating system and version, and click Continue:On the last page, click “Customize Settings”:Accept the default save filename and click “Save”:You’ll then be taken to the Customize Settings screen, where you want to configure the ISO to boot from. Click on the CD/DVD (IDE) option:And then select the location of your Windows 7 ISO:

Go through preliminary install up to the point that Windows does the first reboot. At this point, power down the VM, and reboot the computer.

You should see the rEFIt boot prompt:

Select the windows partition, and your computer should boot into Windows and setup should continue. When setup is done, copy over the Windows support software that BootCamp Assistant downloaded, and install it.

At this point, you should have a working Windows install. Congratulations!

Andrew Savory: CentOS 5.7 Guest with VirtualBox

Andrew — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:55:28 +0000

If you’re trying to install the VirtualBox guest additions on a fresh CentOS install, you may find that the kernel drivers compilation fails. To work around it, try this as root:

yum install gcc kernel kernel-devel -y

That worked for me.

Andrew Savory: Save UEA Music

Andrew — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:14:17 +0000

As an alumnus of the University of East Anglia (in Computing), I was shocked to hear that UEA are closing the School of Music.

As an Honorary Research Fellow of the School of Music, who saw first-hand some of the brilliant teaching and research that takes place there, I am furious.

MUS has long been a source of inspiration, passion, innovation and excellence, and I am amazed that UEA does not recognise this. UEA putting a dubiously-evaluated financial bottom line ahead of excellence in teaching is extremely disturbing.

The UEA press release about the School of Music is amusing and fact-free. In one particularly entertaining bit:

the University will draw on best practice from other universities’ experience of handling departmental closures of this kind

I would have thought they could also draw upon their experiences of closing the School of Physics, which they did some years back. How many departments will be left at UEA in a few years’ time? How many other UEA departments have been kept on life support for decades, and are still around today?

The report of the Music Review Panel is available.

Perhaps some of the money UEA pays on ridiculous rebranding and management consultancy could be funnelled into a proper recruitment effort, to bring the School of Music up to the minimum staffing recommended in the external review report from 2002.

There’s a Save UEA Music website. Please consider signing the petition. There’s also a twitter account and Facebook page.

Andrew Savory: PostgreSQL on Lion with Homebrew

Andrew — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:20:53 +0000

There are several ways you can get PostgreSQL up and running on Mac OS X Lion (see for example OS X Lion #2: PostgreSQL as default database, PostgreSQL 8.4 on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), How to install PostgreSQL on OS X Lion). However, if you’re already a Homebrew user, perhaps the easiest and best-integrated route is to install the postgresql recipe for homebrew:

brew install postgresql

Unfortunately, this doesn’t give you world peace, a cure for cancer or a working postgresql install: there’s also some post-install configuration required. For more information tailored to your install, type:

brew info postgresql

The extra steps boil down to running initdb and then pg_ctl start.

(Sound familiar? It should do – I did the same with MySQL yesterday.)

MJ Ray: RISE Faces Demutualisation Threat at EGM

mjr — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:58:25 +0000

UWE Frenchay, Bristol: Venue of the RISE EGM

The RISE co-op is the sole shareholder in the Social Enterprise Mark CIC and its members have been called to an Extraordinary General Meeting during the lunch break of next Tuesday’s “Knowing and Growing” conference at UWE Bristol. The RISE board has proposed Four Special Resolutions that would dissolve the co-op and transfer all assets as windfalls to the SEM CIC and a trust, ignoring RISE Ltd’s Memorandum of Association. software.coop is calling on other RISE members to attend the EGM and oppose this demutualisation attempt. Update: dissolved but not demutualised (see below). Update 2: new vote called (see below).

RISE is constituted as a common ownership co-op and its Memorandum of Association contains a clause that directs the assets to be transferred to another common ownership social enterprise organisation if the co-operative is dissolved. However, unlike the CIC asset lock, there is no independent regulator enforcing it and, unlike in many co-ops, there has been no requirement for new members to pledge to obey the RISE common ownership clause at an individual level and there has been no member education about common ownership in the last three years.

This demutualisation is the wrong solution for RISE because:

it has recieved much public money and money from members on the understanding that it would be kept in common ownership;
there are common ownership social enterprises that could really benefit from the legacy assets at this time of budget cuts, but if those assets go to a CIC, they are lost from common ownership;
the EGM is the day after the global launch of the United Nations International Year of Co-operatives, which is about promoting mutualism around the world and the RISE co-operative should support this;
many RISE members are mutuals, including the world’s largest consumer co-operative and demutualisation would be embarassing to them;
demutualisation should be discussed seriously, through a proper democratic process before the regular Annual General Meeting, not sprung from the board to members in a short meeting during the lunch break of another event;
the proposal has not been published on RISE’s website or email newsletter;
appointing the former directors of a dissolved co-op as trustees without member oversight seems unlikely to secure the assets in the long term.

software.coop will vote against the demutualisation, in favour of social enterprise, and calls on other RISE members to show solidarity with the co-operative and common ownership social enterprise movements.

Update 2 November: rise has announced its dissolution but they’ve got to “give further consideration” to where the assets go because the demutualisation resolutions were defeated. I fear that they’ll still try some way to bail out the Social Enterprise Mark despite the rejection, but I hope they’ll do the right thing and give the assets to good common ownership social enterprise like the RISE Memorandum of Association requires.

Update 10 November: We got another “Dear Member” letter today, dated 7 Nov, saying “there are two key issues to be resolved” (which is rubbish because the Memorandum offers a default – I think the board just hates that clause) and that there will be a new postal vote that will run from 18 November to 5 December.