Freedom Dreams

Free software is a good thing, its empowering, I might even go as far as to say its the way things should be done. One of the biggest threats to free software at the moment is “web services”, or if you’re an airy fairy Web 2.0 person “The Cloud” (airy could, geddit?). The reason its such of a threat is because not only most open source advocates, but also a lot of free software fans are using these propretiary, remotely hosted applications. Including me.

Now, I personally think web services are a useful thing, especially since most people end up using multiple computers. But, the critical requirement for web services that respect the users freedom is that the user can take their data and run the software, in freedom, on their own server. If they can’t do this, they are locked into one vendor who may go bust at any time, this isn’t right. (A great example of doing-it-right™ is wordpress, I was able to migrate this blog, onto my own server, using free software, with great ease.)

So, a couple of weeks ago, I had one of my amazing code genius moments, and I decided to write a free software replacement for GMail. I did this because no-one else seems to be addressing this issue (except maybe the Bongo Project, but they’ve decided to rewrite the entire web front-end, so it doesn’t seem very ready at the moment).

Anyway, I know have a working (but rather hackish) email client written in php that supports conversations and archiving, which I have called AGPLMail. The name is due to the the fact its released under the AGPL (bet you’d never have guessed). For those not in the know, this is an FSF license, like GPL, but which extends the provision about users right to source code to include programs accessed over the network. This means someone can’t take my code, change it, offer it as a service, and then not contribute this. My application actually prints its own source code.

Now, the problem with my “code genius” moments, is that over about a week I write several hundred lines of codes, and then get distracted by something else, and leave it half finished. This is the fate that greeted Freedometer, something I don’t think I’ve even blogged about.

And that, is I guess the point of me writing this, I have written this code, which works and is useful, but I don’t want to be the only person involved. So, please tell me, am I doing something valuable? Is my code/overall design good or completely crap? Does anyone else want to use it (this we be a cool honour for me). Most importantly, would anyone be willing to help me develop it.

If anyone is interested, I have created the project a git repo [1], and my own copy can be found here. There is a demo account (username: demo; password: password), if anyone is interested in having a play. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Whether anyone else jumps onboard will make a big difference to wether AGPLMail becomes a succesful project, or just another of my abondoned projects.

[1] Noww, time to open a real can of worms. I’m hosting this project on github, which does not provide the source to there interface. However, as a git host, the data is inherentley get-at-able, and more importantly decentralised. The important thing and the reason that I don’t see github as a problem is the escapist principle. I don’t need github, if it were to go down suddenly, I’d still have my own personal repositories (which have exactly cthe same info as the github one) and could point people to them instead.

In my ongoing fight against spam I have resorted to using captchas. Now, in one way, captchas generally do there job quite well, they are a big barrier to automated spam systems. However, they also act as a barrier to legitimate users, or just end up being fucking annoying.

The best solution in my opinion (since its the one I’m using xD), is reCaptcha. It uses words from books that failed OCR, so is unreadable by even the most sophisticated OCR tochnology (in theory). But, because it is words, it is inherently very readable by humans. Not only is it accurate and bearable, it is also helping to digitize the books the words are from (presumeably it must decide what the right answer is by taking a consensus).

Sooo, generally nice nice nice. I’m not sure why I haven’t tried it before now. Fingers crossed, and be sure to let me know if it breaks.

So, yeah, a little update from the Freedom Dreamer. There might be more posts coming soon, there might not.

So, I’ve never blogged about the results of the TeensOnLinux merger (with TeenLinux) vote. This is because, I was wrong in my assumption that most people in ToL wanted a merge, and I had nothing more to say about it. However, my former enemy cactaur (aka he was very vocally opposed to a merge) has written a very observant blog post about the situation we are currently in. (Apologies for taking all this time to reply to it.)

To be honest, I’m not even convinced that a merge would be as beneficial as I once thought. However, as cactaur rightly notes, the way we are currently so divided is certainly not good. He manages to some up very nicely what makes the two groups different - ToL doesn’t speak much about GNU/Linux, wheras TL does. This, he suggests, means tthat ToL and TL can work together with TL being an on-topic group and ToL being an off-topic group.

I would suggest going one step further, the two groups can be kept distinct, but should both gather as one community under one banner (ie. name). Cactaur’s argument for keeping the names distinct is that ToL has invested a lot of resources into the branding. Whilst this is the case, he misses the fact that TeenLinux, meanwhile has not got any realy investment in the name (apart from domain names of course), and, as far as I can tell, most people in TL aren’t that attatched to the name, it was simply chosen to be dilomatic during the merge between TeenLUG and TeenLinuxLounge.

So, my suggestion is this, we should both use the Teens on Linux name. How do we keep the two groups distinct? TL can become TeensOnLinux.Com and the current ToL can become TeensOnLinux.net (since it is more of an off-topic network). The current .org domain name can be a splash page, explaining the existence of the two groups. The IRC channels would similarily be renamed to the .com and .net names, with pointers in the topic to the other one (e.g. If you would prefer more on/off-topic chat, please see #teensonlinux.com/.net).

I would be interested in what others think of this idea. In my opinion, its a both nice and plausible compromise, and if we can go ahead with it, I feel it would help put an end to all the tension between groups.

So, unintended consequences. This is always an annoying thing, something you do or say just is misterpreted and causes something you don’t want. As a random example, two friends of mine were discussing, on Monday, when to have a meeting (of a Fairtrade group as it happens). A says “on Tuesday?”, B says “tommorow?” and A responds, “nah maybe on Wednesday instead”. Person B was simply trying to clarify, and proceeded to state as much, but person A went and choose Wednesday, consequntly clashing with another group!!! WTF!?!

So, another recent example of this would be Spore. I’m not going to debate the ethics of Spore in respect to software freedom, because that would take for ever. Instead, I’m thinking about people’s perception that spore is hinting at Intelligent design. Tihs is a tricky one, because I’m sure this wasn’t intended (but, you never know), but is rather hard to avoid - you have to have a designer in a simulation based game, because otherwise its not a game, just a simulation!

So, a final tangental topic. It would be the ultimate unintended consequence if a Physics[1] experiment destroyed the world, I am of course thinking of the LHC. Now the big thing here is that the chances of this actually happening are similar to an evil wizard killing us all (since both require large parts of our recent scientific understanding to be wrong). However, surely the LHC could have managed the story a bit better… or maybe they couldn’t - people do love a, sensationalist story, and people can understand End of the World much easier than actual science. The biggest irony about this whole thing is that if the LHC were to create a large black hole, it wouldn’t happen today “Switch on Day”, but in a month’s time when the first collisions happen, or maybe even later when the energy is increased.

So, to sum up, I hate conclusions.

[1] I always seem to do Physics with a capital P - should I? Am I just a Physics fanboy?

So yeah, I’m writing another blog post. Theres been a longer delay than normally between posts. Even once I decided to write this post there was a longer than normal delay to me actually getting it written (who knows how long before its actually published and you read this). If you haven’t guessed already, this is going to be another post of a collection of random things going through my mind, squashed to fit in under one title. Perhaps not the most elegant way of writing a blog post, but it works for me. And I don’t know if anyone will find it interesting, but at least I get to write some of my thoughts down (which I still haven’t got into the routine of doing properly).

My blog is now popular, but not in a good way. I have 2976 spam comments waiting for moderation, thats not good (…bloggers thats not good). And, I’ve not got round to installing a proper spam control mechanism yet, so I guess they will have to stay there. I could use akismet, but I don’t like it, because it is a third party service.

Then there’s my podcast. The last episode was later than usual, especially since neither of us are on holiday. We had to record over two seperate nights, which we have only done once before, but, we did do an interview. Also, its taken much longer than expected to sort out the sound issues(noise and echo). It looks now like we need to get a proper sound card, but they are sooooo expensive. £100 for a four input one, yeah, I can probably sort out the money, but it seems a lot to pay, before I even start thinking about microphones!! Anyone have any ideas?

Something I finally got round to doing recently is updating my facebook pic (I know, I know, it hates freedom…. or does it), from a not so flattering one, to a rather nice one. Perhaps I should finally get round to creating a hackergochi for myself; maybe with my head in a sock? (freedom socks related) - or would that look too silly?

The final thing thats been taking me a long time to achive is my goal of having my primary system fully free. At the momnt, the only thing that is stopping me is wireless card firmware,so hopefully in the next few days I will get round to ordering a nice atheros based card. The one I’m thinking of getting is supposed to have good range (and with three aerials on the back! I’m tempted to believe it), so hopefully this will sort out the annoying connection problem I have so often (apparently I’m the person that joins/leaves most in ##teenlinux). Ironically, I have just and only just worked out a way to get my internet to reconnect without a reboot (modprobe all three relevant modules and restart network manager, although I’m not sure if it’s just a fluke.

Actually, I lie when I say its the final thing, there is something else, but it deserves its own blog posts. (Although, this may be one of the times I say that and it never happens.)

I haven’t posted for a while, mainly due to using my podcast, Freedom Socks, as a means of expression, and I’m afraid that today you’ve got a fed up rant.

Firstly, i think I managed to cause my pc to power off by having a plasma ball too close. I also managed to get a bit of interference on my podcast from it (when I say a bit, I mean *very* loud, bit we didn’t have it switched on for long), on top of the fuzzy sound from my on board sound card.

Then, I decided to try using networking scripts intsead of network manager, so that it wouldn’t wouldn’t drop the wireless connection when I plugged an ethernet cable in, and then not being able to reconnect (I’m not sure why).

So, whilst I was messing around with the networking scripts, I plugged an old hard drive in to look at one I had on there. Unfortunately, this meant opening up the side of my pc, and whilst doing this, I knocked my brocken SATA cable connector out of the electrical tape that was holding it in place, and thus lost my primary hard drive.

The cable connector has to be in just the right place for the contacts to touch, so I could not get it to work again, no matter how much tape I used, without holding it in place myself. After much frustrastion, I realised that I could achieve a temporary soltion by plugging the cable in the other way around.

All this messing with with the hard drive caused a bit of corruption. Firstly, there a lot of fscking when I finally booted my system back up. Secondly, some of the files in /var/lib/dpkg/info/ are now corrupted, some containing weird SATA errors. This means that I couldn’t use the package manager. I managed to lessen this issue by removing corrupted files, and reinstalling some packages, however, I still get warnings all over the place.

Also, these are not the only files that are corrupted. I have got a few suspicous errors from other programs (mplayer and gconf). In fact, mplayer refused to play video due to one of them, so I might have quite a problem and end up having to abadon this install (of debian). I could just switch back to gnewsense partition, but jokosher did not seem to work very well with that…. don’t get me started on jokosher.

And the reason I started all this messing that got me into this trouble? To have a go with some more pxe booting on that brocken laptop.. I’ve actually ended up doing nothing with it.

Im typing this in dvorak, which is still slower than my qwerty was. I haven’t done much deliberate work on it since becoming able to touch type though. I also now fail at qwerty. I was hoping to be able to do both well, but it isn’t looking promosing at the moment.

So, yeah, I’m a bit fed up.

Well, this weekend has been an interesting one. I finished school on the friday, ate pizza and watched Wall-E. On the Saturday, me and Joe went to Lugradio Live, which was really cool. Now you may wonder what either of these things has to do with the title of my blog post, well not much. There were a couple of minor annoyances with lugradio live, such as the fact I only went for one day and I didn’t manage to meet up with Fred.

However, the main topic of this blog post is about my frustration with my computer setup. Firstly, something that has been annoying me for a while know. Being quite a novice to the insides of computers, I managed to snap off part of my SATA hard drive data cable, so the connection is loose, and I have to constanly stick it down with tape (which only works so well). Soo, if anyone in the Manchester area has a spare sata cable…… otherwise, I may end up buying one from amazon.

The other annoyance is wireless. I did have both my computers networking working perfectly fine with ubuntu, but I hope to switch to gnewsense, and both computers have freedom hating network cards. One is plugged directly into the router downstairs, but the ethernet card requires non-free firmware; the other, a desktop upstairs, is connected via wireless (and is some distance from the router) - the wireless card, of coures, also required firmware.

So, I bought a Linksys WUSB54G, a usb card that seemed to be highly recommend by the FSF. And yes, it did work with gnewsense, didn’t require any firmware, but its wireless capabilities are quite frankly crap. It is not usable upstairs. With a lot of palaver I managed to get it working in one minute bursts, but only with WPA turned off. Now, AFAICT, neither of these problems are due to the drivers, since it works fine on my downstairs computer, when right next to the router. This is useful to an extent, since it allows me to use gnewsense, despite the non-free ethernet, but I had hoped to be able to use the linksys card on both computers.

So, I don’t know what to do, I hoped to try to use 100% free software for a certain length of time, but at the moment, I still need 24576 characters of non-free firmware for my freedom hating wireless card. Is there anything I can do to improve the reception of the linksys one? Solder a new antenna on? baked bean cans?… has anyone got any ideas?

*sigh*

Well, I’ve said I’d follow up on stuff on here a few times, but never did do. Well, heres time to change that tradition. Firstly, Freedom Socks! This is the new free software podcast I am doing with a friend. I’d love to know what people think of the first episode.

Also, as an update to my last post. The new fan is also being silly. Its slighly larger size means it is catching on the motherboard, so I occasionally have to nudge it a bit, to stop it catching and overheating. *sigh* Why are things always so complicated.

Well, now I’m 17, w00t. As birthday presents, I had a fsf membership and a nice gnu-friendly hp printer. The printer works out of the box, which is really great, and has really quite nice print quality too. I also got a new mouse (the old one was clicking more than one button at once) and a microphone headset, which I will hopefully be using to record a podcast.

Most of the above isn’t really blog worthy (or at least no more than the stuff I keep on not getting round to blogging), but the thing I really wanted to mention is my cake. Yep, that’s right, my Mum made me a GNU/Cake for my birthday. It really looks like a GNU, (especially the baby gnu that it is modelled after) and is also twice as high as a normal cake (yum yum).

I think GNU/Cake is the natural porgression from the tux cake I had last year. Question is, what will I have next year, a bsd daemon to complete the collection?

Okay, so we had another ADFA meeting today, although it wasn’t much of a meeting. We’re at a point know where its no point starting any campaigns since the end of the school year is so fast approaching. Annoying thing is, we’ve not really achieved much, other than a few firefox downloads and the early victory of the trial of debian pcs. But, hey, I guess its just a bad time of the year to be starting, and hopefully we can get going again in September with full force, and do something big for Software Freedom Day.

Another big bombshell was to hear that lugradio is going to stop podcasting. omg omg, how can they? those guys are so great and the show isn’t getting old at all (imo). Well, on the upside, lugradio live should be great, and will hopefully kick of a couple of new podcasts, one teenlug are planning and one me and Joe are thinking of doing.

Sooo… watch this space.