Freedom Dreams

Long time no blog. I’ve been busy with university for the past few months, but now that the much dreaded exams are over, I’ve had a temporary influx of free time – (before I start working part-time over the summer again) – so, I decided I would install Arch.

For the past couple of years I’ve been mostly using Ubuntu as my main operating system. Its the Linux distribution distribution I’ve used most, because its the one I properly got started with (after briefly trying SimplyMEPIS and SUSE), and I haven’t felt the need to switch.

Ubuntu has many good qualities as a distribution, it tries to be as user friendly as possible, and has a regular release cycle. However, I’m no longer a basic level user, so some things were getting annoying. The Ubuntu team likes to make certain design decisions on how stuff will work and look. Whilst this is fine for what a basic user wants, for someone who wishes and is able to configure there system to look and work how they want to, this can be annoying. The most recent example would be the movement of the window buttons to the left hand side, which messed with my setup.

The release cycle often annoys me too. I usually want to be running the latest release of software, for whatever new features, and to have to wait 5 months for this to filter through can be frustrating. Either that or I spend the time installing extra repositories and hope they don’t conflict. Plus, when it comes to upgrading, some stuff invariably breaks. Whilst this known time of breakage works for some people, I’d much rather just get the newest stuff, when it is availible.

Which is why I switched to arch. Its rolling release, which means precisely that – packages are updated whenever there is a new version -so there are no “releases” as such, you just get the packages you want. This is probably the greatest feature of arch for me. Arch also has a really nice package management system for these systems, which is binary (so no days compiling like gentoo), and amazingly simple to understand (unlike DEB, which is fine for users, but a pain to work with as a developer).

The other big difference between Ubuntu and Arch is how they treat the user. Ubuntu tends to make it easy to get going, but configuring stuff can be a pain. Arch, on the other hand requires some technical knowledge to set up – although, it wasn’t as difficult as I feared it might be. However, because Arch makes you set up your system yourself, it gives you much more control over how your system works, and goes out of its way to make things nicely configurable. For example, it has a really simple init system, which is really simple to edit.

Of course, as with anything, there are some annoyances with arch. One of these is that its package database is not as large as Ubuntu or Debian’s. For some packages I’m used to being standard, such as Gwibber, I needed to compile from source. On the other hand, arch has the AUR, which provides a really easy way of installing packages from source that people have already built packages for.

So all in all, I’m rather pleased with mi new Arch install. It requires some technical knowledge and time to set up, but it certainly has its benefits. Arch is certainly not for everyone, but if you feel like you would like more control and understanding over your system, then perhaps you should give it a try.

There’ve been quite a few interesting things that have happened me over the last week. Firstly, last Thursday, I finally (after 2 months of waiting), received my A-Level results – AAAA, in Maths, Chemistry, Physics and General Studies – so, I will definitely be going to Cambridge University in about a month’s time. Also, well done to everyone else who got their results, A-Level and GCSE, and good luck with your new colleges/universities.

Secondly, last weekend, I went with the rest of DFEY, to Young Rewired State -  an event to get young (~15-18) coders doing cool stuff with government data. Me, Joe and Richard worked on creating something to give bloggers opinions on the various bills currently going through parliment – Blog-o-tics. This uses Google blog search, and then does a manual count of predefined positive and negative words – as a result, it is heavily inaccurate, as our word lists were limited and language can be used in confusing ways (this is not *good* at all). I do plan on reworking blogotics to use a different, more reliable source of sentiment data at some point, but I’ve not got round to it yet.

The event it self rather good, and accommodation and travel costs were kindly provided. The venue used was Google’s UK offices, which was quite cool. The food was okay, not amazing, but much better than at 2morro (the other event DFEY attended this summer). The whole thing seemed quite well structured, each group had a mentor to help them along. I would very much like to thank Prem (who also blogged the event) for being our mentor. I don’t think our group would have managed to pull it all together without him.

Finally, this week I’ve be coding the innovative new Web2.0 app, pokebook. Which has just as much importance and relevance for the future web as its ad campaign suggests.

Over the past few years, Web 2.0 has become all the rage. Closed web apps and social networking services, however have a serious problem – the user’s lack of control over their data, and their inability to interact well with other services. However, it is good to see that the “free software community” (for want of a better term), are increasingly starting to compete offering open Web Apps. Laconica/identi.ca, for micro blogging, libre.fm for music “scrobbling”, and most recently daisychain, which should soon be a facebook competitor.

However, the one thing I have not yet managed to find a good replacement for, is Google Mail (Gmail). To this end I have resurrected my long dormant libreapps project. I’ve got the site back up and running, and my two “Apps” functional – mail and rss.  Anyone interested in testing/evaluating these as they are should ask me for an alpha account (this is only to make sure no-one expects stuff to Just Work, and so I can keep track of resources), or if you’re adventurous, check out the source code (bit of a mess atm). The site is still in a very alpha, or even pre-alpha type state, but any feedback would be appreciated.

The RSS code on libreapps is TT-RSS (GPLv2) but the Mail code I have written myself, and had previously released as AGPLMail. Now, however, I have released it under the MIT license (the most permissive commonly used license there is). Why? Well, firstly, I’m no longer happy with using the governmental force of copyright to affect what people do with my code (see this blog post). Yes, I disagree with people not sharing the source to code they write, but I am not willing to threaten/hurt them to make them change their mind. This is a very contentious and political issue, but, there are other reasons why I think the AGPL is not as great as some claim.

Firstly, compatibility – this is the killer with any copyleft license. Because I am using TT-RSS, my core libreapps code needs to be at least as permissive as GPLv2. Since I plan to add other apps, most likely under other licenses, my core code needs to be permissive so it is compatible with all.

Next, how much “protection” of a Web App does the AGPL actually provide? It is supposed to force the release of the code of a hosted modified version. But, what defines modification? Or, rather, where. Obviously, changing one of the files of the application is modifying, but the (A)GPL is supposed to also cover linked works. But, with webapps, it is possible to make a site that behaves differently with out technically linking (eg. php include). One example I can see is an ajax script added to the main app (and source released)  could pull data from closed app, and the user experience would be the same. Also closed software could read/write to the db of the AGPLed software without technically being linked.

So, whatever the license of a web app, there are ways to change it and not return source. And, it is hard to prove anything, all that is returned to the user is html and js files – they can not be sure how they are generated. Returning source for AGPL apps relies partly on good will, something that also benefits an MIT app.

However, there is a more important point here. I would argue that it is not really the software that is the biggest issue in webapps – it is the data. Writing a twitter, facebook or other webapp clone is perfectly possible, and compared to some tasks, not that difficult. However, what really sets open web apps apart is primarily the availability of source, its the fact you can run your own copy and, crucially, communicate with the original site. The AGPL can do nothing to stop someone creating a large laconica instance with the federation turned off. A federatable twitter is many times better than one with source code released. (Interestingly, facebook actually releases some of their source code, but, for the reasons above, it is useless).

Finally, one of my other personal reasons for choosing MIT it means I get more users of my software I write (people can reuse snippets/functions in whatever they are writing, for example). True, someone could create a non-free fork, but, they would be silly to do so. For those who “hate freedom” there is Goole Mail/Apps. The main thing that makes libreapps mail valuable, is not the code itself, but the fact it is open/free.

So, that’s why I use MIT, even for Web Apps. However, it does really mostly boil down to my dislike for the governmental copyright system – the above are just reasons why I don’t feel like I’m missing much. I know many people don’t come from that angle, so AGPL makes sense to them. That’s fine. I’m happy to support any web app that federates and gives me access to source. I’m an identi.ca user, and am looking forward to trying daisychain. Hopefully though, people will now understand why I personally use MIT, and respect that.

Soo, its over a week since my exams ended \o/… now I just have the long wait for results day near the end of August. So, now I have time to write a long overdue blog post. There are two things that make this blog post different to previous ones…

Firstly I’ve started using the microblogging service identi.ca again. For the uninitiated, identica (I never know whether to include the full stop or not) is basically a free software version of twitter, which uses an open protocol. (The software is actually called laconica, and anyone on one laconica instance can follow anyone on any other laconica instance.) I’m not on twitter because, most the people who’d want to read my messages (people in the free software/open tech movement) are on identica (or some other laconica site) anyway.

I’m not entirely sure how to use identica yet. I don’t mean with regards to the technical aspect, type 140 characters or less into a box on the website, or in a client such as Gwibber, and you’re away. No, I mean what to type, how, and when in order to make it most useful for me. At the moment I’m probably overusing it a little at the moment, but I think what it boils down to for me is a notebook. A notebook that is published for others to see, should they find it interesting. But equally, a notebook for me to look back at. For example, I’m writing this blog posts using some of my notices as reference (tags make this especially useful. I don’t know if you can show tags for just one user yet though).

And the second thing? I’m writing this blogpost using yet another different keyboard layout, colemak. This is the second time that I have switched layout, the first being to dvorak. Colemak is still slightly less popular than dvorak (it is third after dvorak and qwerty). So what made me switch? The fact that I had several weeks to spend doing something rather pointless… well kindof. But colemak does have some nice benefits. Your fingers move much less than on either qwerty or dvorak (dvorak places emphasis on hand alternation instead). But what really sets colemak apart from dvorak? Its pragmatism.

Okay, I’m not sure that’s quite the right word, but it sounds good. Basically, whereas dvorak moves keys, including punctuation, all over the place, making it harder and more formidable to learn, colemak moves only letter keys and not all of them at that. Many of the loss common keys, especially those on the bottom row, are in exactly the same place as in qwerty. This is ro much so (especially to the far left) that I showed the layout to a friend, who said, “thats not much different to a normal keyboard”. That would never happen with dvorak.

This may be a silly thing to be picking up on, but its important. As much as I like to be weird and different, it would be great if more people started trying more efficint layouts. Not only is colemak easier to learn coming from qwerty, it also simply looks less intimidating – making perple more likely to give it a go.

Confession time. I didn’t actually find colemak any easier to learn than dvorak, but that is because i was previously using dvorak full time, and dvorak and colemak are *very* different. However, the similarity to qwerty did manifest itself in a different way: it was much much easier to switch between colemak and qwerty than it had been between dvorak and qwerty. In fact, for the first couple of days, whilst I was learning, I used qwerty at night to type faster to people.

This is in *massive* contrast to dvorak. Whilst dvorak destroyed my qwerty skills at first, and i never properly recovered them, using colemak actually seems to have improved my qwerty typing! This ability to have both the common and the efficient layout at a good proficiency, without them conflicting inside your mind, is what really sets colemak apart from dvorak in my opinion. The fact is, as efficint as a layout might be, you’re still going to run into qwerty quite often in this society we are in, and colemak allows you to have the best of both worlds.

I’ve been practising and learning colemak for just over a week now. Its now very usable, although, maybe not as fast as I would like. More than good enough for writing an 800 word blog post. And, the problem in my case is not with colemak itself, it is coming to it from the weirdness of dvorak.

So, do I think most people will be using colemak it any time soon? No, afraid not. However, I do think its a great alternative, and hopefully, as aproachable as it is, will attract a growing userbase, in the geek community at least.

Jokosher is one of those really annoying applications at the moment. The ones that look all nice and lovely, and seem like they should be able to do exactly what you want…. only, they’re not finished.. and they crash every few seconds. Today I’ve been recording my Freedom Socks podcast with it, and it has been interesting, to say the least…

Firstly, yesterday, we started off using the Jokosher from the repos. It sucked, it literally crashed every minute or so, which was very frustrating, as the software looks so nice. However, I finally got the svn version, which runs slightly better, and ended up recording, today, using that.

Then, once we had recorded everything, it froze up, and I tried re-opening it, but that failed. I then changed computers (I could not stay at my friends house forever xD) and tried opening it on my pc. This involved creating an extra directory in home, since Jokosher uses static links to files . And, of course, I had the same problem. I eventually solved that, by deleting the levels directory.

So, yeah, Jokosher has so much potential, but is currently so much annoyance… I guess trunk being more stable than an actual release kindof tells you something. However, for what I want (recording from multiple sound cards, and mixing), it seems the best free tool. I’ll probably end up persevering and using it again next time.

So, yesterday I finally installed gnewsense on my two machines. It was doing some weird stuff, and I didn’t know why, so I was going to write an irate blog post. However, I now know what was going on, but it brings me to the same conclusion – Gnewsense is not a viable alternative for most people.

So, I install it on both of these machines. Well, on one machine ethernet didn’t work, but I had tested it with the livecd and expected this.  The wireless card on my other machine also required firmware, but it worked out of the box with gnewsense. Before we all give gnewsense a pat on the back for having hardware support, let my explain what happened when I installed updates – both the wireless and the sound stopped working. A package had been removed, since it contained firmware – now this makes sense, and is the way gnewsense works in order to fuffill its goal, but it means two things:

1. The gnewsense deltah-h cd I was using contained the non-free software required by my graphics card. Yes, let me say that again the gnewsense cd contains propreitary software.
2. Regreesions are happening, quite major ones where sound or 3D stops working for many or all people, which is just not something most people will accept, without caring an awful lot about the ethical issues. Not only this, but if someone asks why some of these regreesions happened, you must tell them: sorry, we lied to you – gnewsense wasn’t actually all free software, so we had to remove the bits that weren’t.
   Now, I think most of the people who are ready to use gnewsense will understand the technical difficulty in separating out all propreitary software – but for new GNU/Linux users it will just sound highly hypocrytical, and make gnewsense seem even more pointless than they already though it was.

Now, there was something that rms said in his talk at manchester about people being cowards if they don’t use 100% free software. These are words that I’ve thought about a few times – he is calling 99.99% of the population cowards. But, then again, it is in Stallman’s nature to say such things. His point is partially valid, IMHO, but it is more laziness than cowardice.

We should be trying to introduce people to free software by starting off with gnewsense, as someone on irc said – it is a journey. Think about it – fair trade and free range groups concentrate on getting people to buy increasing ammounts of ethical food, rather than saying that people should switch 100% straight away.  We need to first show people firefox, then openoffice, then ubuntu, then gnewsense.

So, yes, the message of this blog is that giving out gnewsense cds to windows users will just give them a perception of a technically inadequate and hypocritical system. Far better to give them ubutnu cds, explain its weaknesses to them, and let them realise the need for gnewsense themselves.

I just bought an old system from my friend for a small fee. Its not all that powerful, with only 256MB of ram, but thats twice as much as the pc that was in my room previously. (We do have a much more powerful family pc though).

Now, one great thing about free software is that it will run on much slower machines than propreitary software will. I could actually run compiz on this machine, but it slows everything else up – to get windows aero in a similar state you would need a machine several times more powerful.

Frustratingly, the machine is not as fast as I thought it would be. Perhaps I don’t have enough swap, or perhaps its the many services that run with (x)ubuntu (i had debian with xfce on my even older machine).

However, the thing that really got me thinking was this – how does free software’s ability to run on older hardware relate to Moore’s Law? Gradually the free software most people use regularly is requiring more memory (look at how memory hungry firefox and openoffice are). The ubuntu live cd for example wants >384MB to run, and I think there was controversy a while ago about fredora upping their requirements.

So, we know that the mainstream free software distributions is gradually requiring more powerful hardware, which is not really such a bad thing, since more poweful hardware is becoming more and more affordable (Moore’s law), and free software distros don’t require the expensive specs that vista does to run decently.

This brings me to my question, is the rate at which free software “slows” (for want of a better word), the same as the rate at which propreitary software slows, and at which hardware speeds up (albeit with a certain offset)..
OR is free software slowing at at a lesser rate, which would mean that the gap between the “midrange pc” and what gnu/linux needs to run well growing. Surely the conclusion of this would be that those who run free software would only need a pc ten times less powerful than the affordable midrange pc.

Since this would be such a startling and dangerous (for the hardware industry) thing, I presume it would be the first – same rate but with an offset. After all, it turns out that our needs do grow – 640k wasn’t enough for anybody.

Does anyone have any ideas on this?

Hey everybody, its rant time!

So, firstly theres the annoying issue with wordpress. Yes, thats you you annoying blog site. Eating up my cojmments and putting them in the wrong places. It only seems to do it occasionally, so its hard to diagnose, and I cba doing anything about it – but an irritance none the less.

Then, theres firefox, good old Mozilla Firefox 3 beta 5. No-one quite knows why its the default in hardy, considering it is supposed to be an LTS. Maybe it makes sense to work towards having firefox 3, but the thing its ITS SO DARN CRASHY. Yes, and (afaict) this is not Ubuntus fault. Its you firefox!
CRASH. Reload. Do something. CRASH. Reload. Try something else. CRASH.
And you may think I’m exagguariting when I describe it like that, but I’m not! It seems to have got worse, to the point where I can have 4 crashes in under one minute – I’m serious! I mean what on earth is going on? I guess it must be something to do with my particular setup. However, I’ve tried running in safemode and removing all plugins, but just the same: CRASH CRASH CRASH.

Well, at least I have a clue whats causing it. Its when I close a tab of a complicated page (thing Google Reader or Google Mail) in a particular way, either whilst a different tab is active (middle click) or when there are only two tabs open. So I know what to avoid, its less annoying. But all the same, a crash every 10 minutes, it takes the p*ss.

I tried talking to a #firefox guy about it, but it seems difficult to get debug information from my version of firefox. He said to try the official builds, so maybe I will when I get the chance. Maybe see if has been fixed in the nightlies. Weirdest thing is, I had no trouble before beta 5 (other people have been noticing this too). But, the annoying thing is, Mr Crash Crash Crash is in a long term support release!!!?!?!?!??!?!?!

Okay, enough of that rant, and onto another Docuemnt Formats, an absolute pita. My brother did a document at home, using OpenOffice on Windows (we’ve never bothered buying Word, and OpenOffice is so much better than Works; also, fwiw, its my printer and not my brother that is the freedom hater). Anyway, he takes it to school, and happily it opens. A vast improvement over a few months ago. However, here’s the wonderful thing – the reason it works is because of a filter designed to add .docx support – yes! that wonderful lie of an open standard and pile of mess OOOXML makes an appearance. However, as if the irony was painful enough, Word and its plugin, in their infinite wisodm decide to save the document, after my brother has made some changes, in .docx. Yes, thats write! It steals a .odf, rapes it and leaves it as a .docx!!!!!!!!

So, now my brother comes home and complains to me about the fact he can’t open his work! So, I endure the 20 minute wait to get OOo beta 3 running, only to find, the document is NOT OPENED PROPERLY!!!!! And, of course, I know this is not Open Offices fault, its god damn OOXML. Open standard with multiple implementations my foot:

1. Its not open, because no-one can understand the mess of a “specification” that they have put out (oh, im sorry, theres a newer one, but that ones just imaginary isn’t it). Which is why Open Office have a hard time writing import filters.
2. Microsoft Word does not implement it! The files it produces differ from the spec!!!!!!!! No wonder its not compatible!

Btw, the point about multiple implementations is that OpenOffice is not an implementation of the Open Shamdard! No, its just for compatiblity with the non-OOXML files that Word produces. And as you can see, that format is lovely and clear, and OpenOffice are finding it easy to implement….. NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And, that brings me onto one last annoyance, lack of ext2/3 support in Windows. (My brother wanted a look at one of my old documents). I have to install this rubishy freeware. Actually, the freeware itself is okay (its not freedomware, but seeing as you’re running windows anyway, who really cares), but if Windows crashes, as is its favorite pastime, every mounted ext3 must be checked at next Linux boot. Maybe I need to find something that can easily be turned off when not in use.

</rant>

I’ve switched to the Ubuntu Hardy Beta as my main OS, which is also a switch from using KDE to using GNOME. However the DE switch didn’t really affect me much.

The main things I like about GNOME is the fact that firefox and compiz integrate well (the later is probably partly the ubuntu team’s work.

However, I do have a few issues with the system (which isn’t surprising for a beta).

• Firefox 3 can not handle apt: links properly without being told where the apturl binary is.
• Firefox plugins (ie. java and flash) do not load as expected and I had to do some jiggling to get it to work. (Firefox seems to look in /usr/lib/firefox-3.0 and /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9b4, but surprisingly not /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins or /usr/lib/firefox/plugins)
• The add user dialog box does not work (probably due to bugs in the new policykit  integration)

And there a few things I would like to see added in future versions:

• The ability to restore items from the trash
• A passwordless login option for gdm (I solved this rather messily by using null passwords for non sudoer users)
• Policykit intergration into more apps. It would be great if the “permission denied” dialog in gedit would let me esculate to root, it would save me so much time.

I also found pidgin to be an annoyance. It does not show msn personal messages which for me, is quite important. In fact, I am now using Emesene, which is designed specifically for the WLM (aka msn) network so does the important things like personal messages, offline messages and even has a plugin for the Plus! colours. Also, it is quite similar to the layout of the official client without the ugliness that aMSN has. All in all, I would recommend it it as a drop in replacement for people who currently use the MS client, especially as it is still being actively developed.

I also had a mess about with the gnome themes, which despite what the KDE folk might say, was nicely customizable.  I got interested in the application transparency that murrine can provide. Unfotunately, this is only available in the svn build. So, no problem – im confortable with compiling my own stuff. However, I wanted to try and install it via a deb package, to make future maintenance easier. So, I’ve been trying out packaging which isn’t all that hard, once you get the hang of it. Hopefully I’ll be able to put these skills to use. I’m building up a (very small) apt repository.

So, in the end after some “learning” (can be frustrating sometimes) I got murrine installed. So, a few plugins later and I have transparent apps (fwiw emesene has support built in).  However, there were a couple of things bothering me:

1. tbh, its not all that great – just the transparent gnome-terminal would have sufficed for me. It looks a bit messy at times (perhaps more blur is needed?)
2. Why is this not in the distros yet? Vista has had this for a year! Where is the innovation of the open source community? Or is the answer see 1, is it just not a big deal to most people?