I've been using Twitter for a little while; racked up just over 100 tweets. But at the end of the day, there was nothing of lasting value coming through, no point in telling people what I'm doing, I'd rather be doing things than talking about doing them.

Well, there's the point. On Twitter, you're not really talking about things, it's too lightweight. You can't say anything subtle, unless it's an in-joke. I'd rather have a few high-quality interactions than a flood of noise.

It's an interesting experience to look out at a social network of friends of friends, but a touch voyeuristic. So, my account is now deleted. Perhaps I'll get round to more blog entries now …

Lawrence Lessig is happy – a US Court of Appeal has provided precedant for the theory behind copyleft ; the basis behind numerous Free Software licenses such as the GNU GPL and specifically in the court ruling, the Artistic License.

The copyleft premise is this: source code has been published in a written form, therefore copyright law restricts your ability to distribute copies of it. A Free Software license grants you an additional license, allowing you to distribute copies; but only if you follow certain conditions.

If you fail to follow the conditions, you are not allowed to claim usage of the Free Software license; therefore full copyright law is in play, and you cannot distribute copies at all.

However, in the US at least, it hasn't been clear whether the conditions attached to these Free Software licenses have actually been “conditions”, and aren't just “contractual covenants”. It makes a big difference when you break them; in the latter case, you are penalised for breaking a contract, and that's all. It would probably result in some monetary damages being due, and they're difficult to assess when the original product was generally available without charges being made. However, given that these clauses are now known to be “conditions”, breaking them means that you have no license at all, and you are infringing copyright – and there is no confusion here regarding money or lack of money.

So, a high-quality precedant from the US legal system supporting the copyleft principal.

I've typed up a transcript of Richard Stallman's recent interview on the Kim Hill Saturday programme on Radio New Zealand.

See /articles/rmsrnz/index.html for the full transcript.

Early spam references

The Picture of Dorian Gray / Oscar Wilde / 1891

Chapter VIII

… He sat up, and, having sipped some tea, turned over his letters. One of them was from Lord Henry, and had been brought by hand that morning. He hesitated for a moment, and then put it aside. The others he opened listlessly. They contained the usual collection of cards, invitations to dinner, tickets for private views, programmes of charity concerts, and the like, that are showered on fashionable young men every morning during the season. There was a rather heavy bill, for a chased silver Louis Quinze toilet-set, that he had not yet had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not realise that we live in an age where unnecessary things are our only necessities, and there were several rather courteously worded communications from Jermyn Street money-lenders offering to advance any sum of money at a moment's notice and at the most reasonable rates of interest.

I'm feeling a little virtuous at the moment. Worik on the DUNLug mailing list asked how to delete a user and eradicate all their files. I said “ deluser –remove-all-files ”. Worik said that didn't work.

Rather than assume that he'd made a mistake, I tried it. It doesn't work, just like he said. A bug!

We're both using Ubuntu, so I turned to the Launchpad and checked for bugs on the adduser package. There was a “fixed” bug that said it fixed a specific failure, the inability to remove the Ubuntu default symlink ~/Examples, in 2006. I checked my test machine, and this was exactly the problem I was seeing – everything except ~/Examples had been removed OK.

Further testing showed that the --remove-home option worked just fine. Hmmm …

Luckily, deluser isn't an executable, it's a perl script. So I was able to do some digging, even though my perl is quite rusty (thanks http://perldoc.perl.org/ !) I added some debug comments and managed to categorise the problem … which lead to a fix … and a small patch file, all submitted onto the launchpad bug.

Usually I stop at the categorise-and-report stage. It's nice to be able to propose a fix too :-)

Yeah, I know I like finding fault with MS … but I have to work with their tools, too.

I have an Excel spreadsheet, with some currency values formatted as “Accounting”, which provides nice alignment of the currency symbol and decimal point.

When these cells are cut/paste'd into Word, the presentation of these cells is “preserved” by simulating the alignment with multiple spaces … but actually these cause the presentation to break, and the cell contents split onto multiple lines, and no longer align.

So, the hack would be to replace all those extra spaces, wouldn't it? Except MS Word doesn't have greedy matching! You can't replace, say, 8 spaces with a pattern of <space><star> … or even <space><at> (which is the “one or more” operator). You have to manually repeatedly do replace-all for decreasing explicit numbers of spaces; e.g. repeat “replace-all <space>{8} with <space>” until there are no matches, then repeat “replace-all <space>{4} with <space>” until there are no matches, then {2} …

There has always been a conflict between my personal and working life over the subject of a mobile phone. My employer needs me to have a mobile phone, and provides it (well, at least the SIM! And a ‘free’ handset to a reasonable value too). I also value having a mobile phone of my own; but I don't want to carry two.

Therefore I have to use just the one incoming number – it belongs to work, not me. And my outgoing personal calls have to be separated out from the work ones for expenses purposes, too.

I've been waiting for the sensible option – a phone that can hold two SIM cards at the same time. That way, you can differentiate between personal and work calls both incoming and outgoing; and if you change employer you don't lose all your contact data and have to change your number!

While reading a post about the OpenMoko GTA02 getting into production, I spotted a google ad for “Dual SIM phones”, and ended up on a page from a Malaysian company, DuoSIM. It looks like the world is finally catching up on what people really need from their technology, eh?

(Now, what will be more fun? An OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner or the new iPhone? Both with Wifi, touch screen, bluetooth, GPS, accelerometer, similar battery life; the iPhone has significant data storage that the Neo doesn't (but it will take microSD), but has a mostly-closed development environment …)

In September 2000, on the comic strip Schlock Mercenary we saw inside the workshop of Commander Kevyn Andreyessand …

The worrying safety warning signs on the wall was part of the inspiration for Anders Sandberg's article Warning Signs For Tomorrow …

And now … (well, soon) you can get your hands on your very own set of Schlock Mercenary Magnetic Miniature Warning Signs !! Dust off that credit card and haunt the Schlock Store …

As part of the new home office setup, I decided to run with a SIP phone service from my wireless ISP rather than any fixed-line installation.

I don't want to be tied to a headset, so a real desk phone was the order of the day. Initial trials with a D-Link DPH-120S were disappointing; there was a nasty audible hum coming through, and the unit felt a little too lightweight in construction.

So off to http://nicegear.co.nz and see what they recommend … a SNOM 300 VoIP phone!

This unit feels much more solid on the desk, and has a nice handset too. There was a little bit of trouble getting it set up with WIC, which needed a full factory reset and reconfigure to fix (it looks like the device breaks the authentication hashes under some circumstances, and just re-entering the account details doesn't fix it). However, if this became a problem in regular usage it would be easy enough to use DHCP/TFTP to provide full automated configuration at boot time anyway.

The web interface is nice and comprehensive, and the phone can be configured with up to four separate SIP accounts; so you can separate between business and personal lines, or between incoming/outgoing calls – just indicate which identity you want to use in the address book for that number. Settings are flexible and well documented – in order to encrypt SIP all I had to do was specify ;transport=tls at the end of the Registrar IP address (RTP was already encrypted, thanks!)

As the phone receives calls and other events happen, you can ask it to hit a URL on one of your own servers. This would nicely form the basis of a “stop the music!” on an incoming call :-) Of course, you can also hand off to a syslog server, or query the phone with SNMP.

So, it's a very flexible device, which makes it easy to fit in with however you want to handle calls. Thanks to Hadley of Nicegear for the recommendation and prompt shipping!

For many years I've been using the excellent Philips SBC RU880 8-in-1 remote controller … although only for three devices at a time, but the learn ability meant that it was always easy to program in a new device.

However, I finally wore out it's abilities with a Panasonic home theatre (SC-PT450 … not multiregion hackable AFAICT, unfortunately); it wasn't able to reproduce the IR signalling. So time for a new remote …

Welcome to the Logitech Harmony 525 (from Dick Smith Electronics, NZ$99). It will run up to 15 devices (now I have 5; TV, Freeview, theatre, multi-region DVD, video), but more usefully it thinks in terms of “activities” rather in devices. This means that I can “watch TV” or “listen to radio”, and the remote will change the state of all the devices to match the goal.

As an example, when I want to watch a non-NZ DVD I need to use my old DVD player; so the remote needs to have three systems switched on, and to set the correct inputs on them all … This takes a long time and uses three separate remotes, but with the Harmony it is one button press …

“When you start this Activity, the remote will ensure your system is set up as follows:”

This isn't “Macro” programming, this is the way the whole device likes to think and operate. It keeps track of the state of all the devices over time, so it knows what operations to use to get things into the requested state. If you do change things with your old remotes (or even manually!) then things will go wrong … at which point you press the ‘Help’ button and it steps through a whole bunch of corrective actions (“Is the TV on? (yes/no); Did that fix it?” etc.)

The biggest downside to the remote is the programming method; a Windows or OSX bit of code that mediates between the USB-connected remote and the Logitech website, where they hold not only a full database of current AV equipment remote control codes, but they also seem to hold your remote control's profile. If I were dedicated I'd sniff the traffic to be sure that's what is happening, but it feels like the case.

Overall, it's a great remote, not just to replace the set of originals, but also to control complex interactions between systems.

So now I've used wubi to install the latest Ubuntu onto my Windows machine. Interestingly easy.

For some reason it won't allow you to set a default user password that has a space in it – but at least it tells you that before you commit the install! Otherwise a peaceful and anonymous install process, that naturally asks for a reboot when it has finished, but politely doesn't demand it.

The second-stage installer carried on happily, but it wasn't immediately obvious that it wanted a reboot, it looked a little like it had crashed. Each real boot takes a long time to get past the swap initialisation stage, but I had the restraint to leave it alone, and it eventually came up into a nice functional Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron system.

With the exception of the mounted disks, we have direct access to hardware, and have to do all the usual things to install Broadcom wireless support, bah. On my laptop there was no Restricted Hardware support required, and compiz worked well. Unfortunately, my acid test is running bzflag, and it's performance was terrible at even medium graphics levels. Perhaps I'll have to hunt down a non-free video driver … :-)

So, that was wubi installing Ubuntu. Now, what did it do within Windows?

At boot time, the Windows selection menu pops up – most of the time Windows users won't see this option. Ubuntu is listed at the bottom, but Windows itself is still the default choice.

C:\ubuntu now exists, taking up just over 8.16GB for the 8GB install of Ubuntu. There are a couple of large .dsk files in there, one for the root volume and one for swap. Under “Add or Remove Programs” there's an entry called “Ubuntu”. There isn't anything under the Programs menu, but hopefully that won't confuse anyone.

Uninstall was very quick, but left the Windows boot menu in place. Not a problem for people who have figured out what dual-boot is in the first place, I guess.

So, pretty straightforward from the Windows perspective. I don't really like dual-boot solutions in general, but this is a good one – simple, straightforward, functional. And none of that dabgerous messing around with partitioning that used to be necessary!

I've downloaded my Ubuntu ISO files … and now I'm sitting on a Windows XP machine I'd like to try the wubi installer to be found on the Desktop CD.

But it's not exactly easy mounting an ISO file under Windows …

Luckily I ran across a blog post from Michael Bowman that discusses a few options :- http://proxy.11a.nu/2005⁄05/08/mounting-iso-image-files-under-windows

There's an ugly-as-but-functioning put of code available from Microsoft, the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP that needs some manual installation. I think I'd rather install crap code from Microsoft than some random third-party all-singing-all-dancing thing to use only one small feature once …

For some reason, the Vodafone Coverage page is really difficult to locate on their site …

And it tells me that my new home, Dunedin, is not very well blessed with 3G … up on Highgate, I'll get “excellent” 2.5G, but no 3G or 3G Broadband. Guess I don't need to get too excited about the new iPhones, then …

A great relief to hear that Vodafone NZ will be supporting the iPhone, I presume after the June release of the 3G/GPS models. Probably a deal related to the Australian situation, where unlocked phones seem to be the only way forward for Apple … and therefore no barrier to adpotion in NZ.

Not that it will make any real difference to early adoptors – we're already using more services from our devices than Apple provide, and therefore we're independant of carrier. And I still want a handset separated from a 12 or 24 month contract …

But imagine the impact on businesses – with ActiveSync in place, the iPhone will start to threaten the rollout of Blackberry services that I have to keep on looking at for the larger customers. All we need is a better set of wireless authentication options (client certificate PEAP for a start) and a decent VPN (although I suppose we could support IPSec with too many tears if we had to). Much cheaper than a couple of BES servers and a deal with data going to Canada …

Most of the world wants to present a single issue and make you comply with their views. The ‘news’ media and of course the advertising industry don't really want you to think for yourself; from the ‘news’ perspective it means that they might actually have to work hard in order to present information, and from the advertising perspective the whole point is to switch off your critical faculties and accept their version of your needs and resources …

Some pressure against these tendancies has been successful, but in general no-one really wants to have to think, because it's difficult. We now have single-sided information presented along with an obvious strawman, called "presenting Both Sides of the issue".

My problem isn't so much the strawman itself, or the trivial representation even it is given; but the insulting oversimplification that there are only two sides to things.

There are an almost infinite different number of “sides” to an issue; multiple viewpoints for every person touched by something. Telling us that there are just “two sides” is more damaging than simply ignoring the alternatives in the first place …

The Sluggy Freelance webcomic is doing another “Harry Potter” satire. I wasn't really enjoying it very much, but they just hit a high point …

Lord Moldypants is weilding a 10" wormwood wand with a rabbit-whisker core!

chi-chikt Torg weilding a 26" chrome plated .724' back-bored barrel with a buckshot core.

Microsoft Windows is the face of the desktop-of-no-choice; Microsoft Office is the face of the corporate-standard-of-no-choice.

By which I mean, if you don't know anything about computers, when you buy a PC you get Windows. If you're a corporate, you give users Office. Anything else requires thinking, and is too hard.

So the Microsoft market is Corporates, and end-users.

Ray Ozzie has to change that. He made Groove, which understood the need for small business users to establish ad-hoc secure collaboration workspaces, and was so good that Microsoft bought it, and him. So what is the latest thing from Ray?

Live Mesh :- ''Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about – available wherever you happen to be.''

Errm … is it just me, or isn't this just Groove with a different name? Sure, Groove didn't spread out into “devices”, but that's not really very difficult …

I wanted to see if Borders book shop was carrying a particular book — http://www.fishpond.co.nz was, and I was interested in comparing prices …

The Borders NZ website doesn't have a search facility.

There is a self-service catalog search facility in the store. But I'm sitting at home.

The Borders NZ website doesn't have a search facility.

FAIL

Please note that our online catalogue only has a small selection of Borders huge range of products.

The Borders full range has over 200,000 titles, so if you haven't found what you're looking for, you may want to try your nearest store.

The borders.com website has search; it is actually just a skin over the Amazon.com service, which is an interesting way of outsourcing your web service!

But Borders NZ? You have the data; but you don't seem to want the Internet to even advertise for you. I can understand if you don't want to get in to the whole online ordering thing, but why not just advertise the titles that you stock?

<rant> We all know that car drivers think that they own the road; but road-using cyclists should understand that we all share the road … we are all vehicles traveling together, and have responsibilities to each other.

Yes, cyclists that ignore road markings and the boundary between the road and pavement annoy me. If cyclists wish to be treated like vehicles, they have to act like vehicles.

There's another thing; cyclists should not feed the car-drivers' feelings to superiority. We should not let car drivers think that their arrogance is acceptable. A recent article in the Hutt News local paper reported a test drive of a recumbent velomobile, with the quote

It's a little disconcerting being so low-slung, well below the bonnet level of most cars and I found myself wondering whether drivers could see me.

Here's a cyclist (the journalist is a mountain biker) allowing car drivers license to not see him. Expecting that the poor little darlings are blind.

Here's news for you … somehow, against all the odds, car drivers can see things no taller than 1 freaking millimeter on the road. They're called lane markings and they're made out of paint for crying out loud!!

Car drivers are like children; they behave the way you expect and allow them to. Don't expect them to disregard you – don't allow them to disregard you. Cycle responsibly and safely, prove that you are a vehicle, and show them that you won't be disrespected.

If you don't know how to do that, because of a lifetime spent scared, riding on the pavement and in the gutter, get hold of Cyclecraft by John Franklin, and read that. This excellent book explains how to share the road and integrate safely, even with fast-moving traffic.

Take back the roads. </rant>

I posted a less-ranty letter to the Hutt News editor :-

I have enjoyed reading the recent coverage given to Neville Whitlock and his velomobile, and occasionally spot him from the bus on my daily journey into Wellington. Good on you, Neville!

Jim Chipp's recent test drive report was quite fair, and as a rider of a recumbent bicycle myself, I quite understand his discomfort about being seated far below the position he is used to from his “upright” mountain bike.

However, I was unhappy about the way he worded his fears about car drivers, “wondering whether they could see me”. Somehow, car drivers manage to see painted lane markings on the road – these stand at a height of around 1 millimeter. There is absolutely no way that any driver, except for a criminally negligent one, can fail to see a recumbent bike, velomobile, or any other vehicle properly positioned on the road. The safest place to be, in general, is clearly on the road, often in between the headlights of the vehicle behind you. All cyclists know that pedal power is usually not as fast as petrol power, and try to ride to the side of the lane in order to minimise the disruption caused by passing vehicles; but when the road narrows, or traffic slows, the cyclist should reconsider this position with an eye to safety, remembering that they are a vehicle with a full right to their position on the road. Car drivers need to remember that cycles are vehicles too, and that cars are all too easily converted into lethally dangerous weapons as a result of simple inattention or intolerant actions.

I recommend the excellent book Cyclecraft, by John Franklin – see http://www.cyclecraft.co.uk/ for details. This explains how cyclists can share the road responsibly and safely, and techniques for integrating with fast-moving traffic. It is published by the UK's Stationery Office, recommended by our own Land Transport NZ, and should be available for around NZ$50 from a good local bookseller.

Oh, that handy acronym LAMP

Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP! The darlings of the Web!

The argument over the letter P should have been easy – it was perl, but by the time we needed the word “LAMP” it had become PHP, simply by sheer weight of numbers (and not by quality). These days it's more likely to be Python, if you want a robust platform. Or Ruby!

Next to fall was the A – Apache is heavyweight, compared to lighttpd and now nginx. The language-specific apache modules are catered for by back-end application-dedicated HTTP servers like mongrel and my favourite workhorse, tracd.

And now the M, MySQL, seems to have shot itself in the foot and lost open-source credibility, confirming the utility of SQLite for small projects and PostgreSQL for big ones.

At least we can rely on the L for a bit longer … L(LN)(SP)(PR) ⇒ LNSPR ? Linspire? Nooooooooo …..

What a busy day for communications it is in iNode-land! I think the recent Fring and Vodem successes have gone to my head a little …

In a couple of weeks time the whanau and I will be moving from Wellington to Dunedin; I'll have to lose my TelstraClear cable connection to the net :-(

Is it time to go wireless? Vodafone are now selling their Home Phone Plus service, which promises $40 per month and unlimited calling (they don't actually say “free” but that's what they must mean) for NZ land-line phones. It's physically portable, which will be useful.

I need international calling too; but SIP may be the way to go there (last time I researched prices, VoIPBuster was one of the cheapest for the UK, €0.01/minute but closer to me in the Internet is Xnet, who reputedly have a great service in VFX, and 5 cents per minute to the UK)

There doesn't seem to be a very good 3G Broadband service in the areas of Dunedin that we'll probably end up in, so there's no point bundling up the Vodafone data services (plus, under vodem I get horrible ping times; that'll break my BZFlag habit) … but WIC might rescue me there, even though their setup isn't as portable as a mobile phone … but they also offer a local (03) number on their SIP service at $25 per month, but I don't know what the call-out rates are …

Interesting times ahead, I think!

Fring have released their first beta for the iPhone. Being connected to Google Talk while at the bus-stop (via Cafenet, of course) was very very useful (mostly because I'd just missed my bus and needed to sort out a pickup from the alternative route) … so useful that I actually switched on EDGE connectivity for the first time just to keep chatting!

I wish that Fring supported generic Jabber/XMPP as well as just Google Talk, but that's a start. I also will start to play with SIP, which I've been meaning to look at for ages. Now that the AIM/ICQ protocol is published (see http://dev.aol.com/aim) I could consider appearing on those networks, but I can't really see the point … I'm not going to be on Yahoo! or MSN any time soon, either, and I'm also considering dropping my very occasional use of Skype, too.

Anyway, Fring on the iPhone seems to be f'ringing excellent, and although there are a few niggles, it's still an early beta and can only get better :-)

At the end of last year, I got a Vodem for my team to use, for away-from-home support connectivity purposes. In theory we all have broadly the same version of Windows on similar Dell laptops, but while it worked just fine on some machines, on mine it refused to register reliably.

Once or twice I saw the storage device it offered, and ran the install software on there; but it always just left me in a repeating grey-bar land (actually a blue bar …). I'd tried downloading the fuller VMC software from the Vodafone website, but that didn't recognise the device at all.

So last night I tried to hook the vodem up to one of the Ubuntu laptops at home; downloaded the latest .deb from Vodafone Betavine Forge and everything worked first time; the SMS application and the 3G connectivity (including usage metering). Thanks Linux!

This morning I took far too much time to uninstall everything Vodafone-related on my Windows machine, grab the latest version of VMC from the Vodafone website (the download looks like it's the Vista version, but that's just the misleading text around the download link), reboot, reinstall, reboot, see the storage device again at last (hooray!), watch VMC fail to detect the vodem as a PC card, try the software on the vodem itself (to be greeted with a message saying "this installer is corrupted" and another infinite looping greybar), reboot, uninstall everything, reboot, install VMC, reboot, and then … VMC detects the vodem as a “mobile phone” at last!

So, it all seems to be working under Windows at last. Considering the number of Linux distributions and the number of Windows ones, what does it tell us that the Linux install these days is the easier one?

The button in my iPhone headset has failed …

This is the headset that came with the phone; I've had it for about 2 months. The microphone still works, but the click is only registered one time in 10 or thereabouts.

This isn't a big problem; I already have an iPhone headset adaptor from the nice folks at iGeneration, but the Apple unit is of course smaller and neater. I bought the adaptor to use with a cassette adaptor for the car (have a look on TradeMe for these) which works a treat and is good-enough quality for my car and it's default stereo system.

I considered raising an Apple support request; after all it will still be under warranty. But the amount of trouble I'd have to go to seeing as I'm not really in the US seems disproportional compared to similar units being sold for $1 on eBay … they're not as slick as the original, but that's really not a problem :-)

So now I can open the old one up without risking anything … I'll wait until I have a decent camera to do that, in case it's really interesting :-) The iPhone camera just won't hack it – the target item is too small and I can't get focus and zoom at the same time …

I'm just a command-line person I guess. I've set up a new blog at http://tommix.net/ covering Information Security topics, and I've chosen to use vee, the blog tool to power it with. In order to interact with vee (i.e. post new entries) you run vee from the command line and it fires up $EDITOR …

This blog runs with nanoblogger, which has the same interaction style – ssh in to the host machine, run nb and get $EDITOR … both engines also generate static HTML, which is easy to serve with a lightweight and secure webserver. Both can be driven non-interactively, which might provide an interesting way to hack a feed up for random data-sources …

Nanoblogger handles blog entries and articles, provides a calendar-based archive access, ‘recent changes’ section, categories indexing and overall looks like a much bigger blog engine. Vee just lists your blog entries in time order.

With a small amount of hacking, I've fitted the Disqus comment system into vee (yeah, it's just one line of HTML, I know), nominated quill as the blog entry markup language, generated an Atom feed, and provided an error page that has similar contents to the index …

Vee is written in Bourne shell (/bin/sh, which is often linked to the Bourne Again shell on Linux boxes), and although I've hacked the main script a little bit, most of the customisation has been able to play out in local per-instance scripts. Because it has so few files to update, it is noticeably quicker than nb.