townx

A while back, I bought a Dell Inspiron 1100 for home use. A few months later, Dell recalled a load of Inspiron power packs, though fortunately not those for my model. They have now released another warning about batteries causing burns on people's desks. It comes to something when you have to monitor the safety of your laptop, as well as everything else.

I've been thinking about piracy a lot recently. On the news this morning, the BBC reported that the music industry is experiencing a massive boom in sales, both through record downloads (an increase of 400% over last year) and CDs:

The race for number one and demand for digital music players will push sales to an all-time high, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) predicted.

Such a shame piracy has destroyed the music industry, isn't it? I'm starting to get really annoyed having to sit through a FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft) presentation before every film I watch at the cinema or on DVD. On top of this, I watched a Bill Bailey DVD at the weekend, and had to sit through another patronising dramatisation about piracy at the end of the DVD. Yes, I know piracy is a problem; but perhaps the solution is to reduce record company and record shop profit margins per CD (e.g. record shops take about 30% of the cover price of a CD; the artist and/or writer gets about 10%). Give people what they want: cheap, easy-to-download music they can play wherever they want and get fair use from. There should be more places like Bleep.

Here's an interesting dilemma, on that subject: I have some friends who have a 20 year old video taped off the TV of nursery rhymes, dramatised by actors against painted sets. I think it was some one-off special. The point is, they have recently had this transferred to DVD, so their daughter can watch it, as the video was wearing out. Their daughter loves it. The video is no longer available, and it hasn't been released as a DVD (and probably never will be).

Technically, this is piracy; but should this deny their daughter the opportunity to see this programme? I can still read books my dad read when he was growing up, and can give my children's books to my daughter. But I have no right to do this with TV programmes I watched as a nipper. The difference is perhaps that books can last forever, while multimedia erodes over time. It won't be long before you can't even buy a video player (in the same way I am using an ancient turntable to play my vinyl, as new ones as so specialised they are extortionately expensive). So all the videos I have will be obsoleted, with no legal way for me to make backups of them. Sad that our culture has become so throwaway, with responsibility for preserving the past in the hands of commercial companies who would prefer to sell the profitable parts of it to us again (endlessly), and discard the rest. I know this isn't a radical or new thought, but it continually depresses me to watch culture transmuting relentlessly into commerce.

I was browsing my old email today (actually looking for an address to send a Christmas card to) when I came across an email to a friend, dated 17th November 1994, explaining how I'd been setting up my first home page. There are a few interesting points to note: my first exposure to the web was via lynx; I still called it "the world wide web"; I had to explain hyperlinks to my friend; my view that the web/internet would be commercially important one day turned out to be right (it was by no means self-evident at the time); and I ended up doing pretty much what I said I probably would, even though I'd only been using the internet for about two months when I made the prediction. Anyway, here's the quotation:

I'm setting up my home page on the world wide web. If you want to have a look, try opening a package like netscape, xmosaic, mosaic or lynx, Once you get in, do one of the following:

* Type 'g' if in lynx

* Click on 'Open' if in netscape or xmosaic or mosaic

When you get the little box, or the prompt at the bottom of lynx changes to a 'URL to open', then type in

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~ezs/home.html

That should connect you to my home page, which has got exciting things to go to. If you point at the underlined words and click on them with
the left mouse button, you'll be transported to exciting locations across the world. I might even set up a lit crit type page within it, and stick some interesting addresses in it, to save you the hassle of having to look for them yourself. I spend at least an hour a day 'surfing' - I reckon it'll be an important skill in the future, as businesses will realise that the web and the net are full of pertinent business information, and will need people like me to find it, or write programs to find it.

Do you ever get this: you think about an obscure actor or film, and next thing you know they are on television? I think they are called "coincidences", but sometimes I wonder. E.g. I was thinking about Lou Diamond Phillips the other day (you know, the one out of Young Guns (I think) and those other bratpack films normally starring Kiefer Sutherland, whose film career mysteriously seems to have ended). Can't remember why. Next thing I know, I'm watching Numb3rs (which is OK, but seems desperately far-fetched, to make the point that maths can help make sense of a senseless world). And there's Lou, playing a sniper (on the side of the police, but with a hard cold view of the world, ironically at odds with the humanity of the mathematicians, who are generally seen as cold and hard). Funny.

I like these photos and think they are amusing. I may try to work them into a presentation soon.

I've been trying to complete my work with Ruby on Rails on XAMPP (ROROX - I know the name will catch on). Was nearly there, then the bastards went and released version 1.0 of Rails. Have got all the latest source etc., recompiled everything, extracted it into a XAMPP add-on, and moved all my applications to it. Took one evening, and as soon as I get some spare time, I'm going to put it out there. On the subject of Rails: might try to write a submission for RailsConf. Just need to think of an interesting slant.

Really nice blog entry by Jonathon Schwartz. I will surely be quoting this baby. Particularly this:

"Opening up Solaris and giving it away for free has led to the single largest wave of adoption Solaris has ever seen - some 3.4 million licenses since February this year (most on HP, curiously). It's been combined with the single largest expansion in its revenue base. I believe the same will apply to the Java Enterprise System, its identity management and business integration suites specifically. Why?

"Because no Fortune 2000 customer on earth is going to run the heart of their enterprise with products that don't have someone's home number on the other end. And no developer or developing nation, presented with an equivalent or better free and open source product, is going to opt for a proprietary alternative."

r0ml Lefkowitz's blog has an entry which links to the open source licence statements in the Microsoft Windows release notes. Haven't been able to find them any time I wanted to, so r0ml has done me a favour. r0ml makes the point that this sort of makes Windows "hybrid open source"; I like to make the same point when I'm explaining open source to people.

A few things have prompted me to think about how open source is gradually being recognised as "enterprise-ready":

• Articles in IT Week and Computer Weekly give a nice summary of the OSDL's survey of why companies deploy Linux desktops. Surprisingly, the respondent companies' top reasons for going with Linux on the desktop were due to pressure from employees, and due to successful roll-outs by competitors. In one of my talks, intended for IT SMEs, I use one of these arguments to try to persuade SMEs to go with open source: "Look, here are some successful companies like you who are already using open source; why aren't you?". It seems odd that this is a better reason for doing something than for other business reasons, like cost, stability, security, removal of vendor lock-in, etc.. But there you go: it seems to work for the companies I deal with, as well as enterprise types looking to do Linux roll-outs.

• Computer Weekly runs a series each week called "Hot Skills", where they highlight skills IT professionals should learn to make themselves employable. What's interesting is that for the past half dozen episodes, the technologies have been open source: PHP, Python, Linux, LAMPP, PostgreSQL. Contrast this with the bulk of the paper, where open source is frequently completely absent, and there is a gross emphasis on monolithic dinosaur companies and their god-awful, horrifically expensive, locked-in, old-fashioned software.

• My article "Why you should care about open source" is now available online as part of the British Computer Society's Annual Review 2006. Looking at the rest of the articles, there are a good number about open source; compare this with last year's review, where none of the articles had "open source" in the title.

So open source is (slowly) gaining more acceptance in the mainstream (enterprise). My feeling is that it's not so much acceptance as recognition: I reckon most decent/big companies use open source somewhere, whether they know it or not, and this wave of interest is simply highlighting the fact that executives have realised this and are formalising casual use. Open source was there all along: big companies are only just now admitting it.

Last week I was off work, so I took the opportunity to do loads of programming and administering computer systems :) This included:

• Shifting this site (townx) to new hosting. (Rushed Sunlight: service has been fantastic so far, and Paul (the proprietor) has been extremely responsive. Rails hosting uses FastCGI, which was the main attraction, but I also get PHP 5, a few MySQL databases, DNS administration panel, unlimited email accounts, and 500Mb space, for €10 per month.)

• Upgrading Drupal. This was extremely painful, as I was going from Drupal 4.5.2 to 4.6.4. I also had half a dozen modules to upgrade, which involved determining how the database tables had changed, tracking down dependencies, and data conversion. But it was worth it because I've got much better spam filtering (including trackback spam), added support for Textile, added path aliases for nicer URLs and turned on URL rewriting (great Drupal features), and a beautiful new template called FriendsElectric (XHTML Strict compliant with CSS for layout).

• Moving my email to the new server.

• Setting up automated backups for all my sites to Strongspace.

• Completing my packaging system for Ruby on Rails on XAMPP (or ROROX as I affectionately call it). So far, I have a drop-in tarball which can be added to any XAMPP installation: untar on top of XAMPP, and you get a XAMPP-centric Rails setup, including some nice extras like RedCloth and SwitchTower. I plan to put a few more gems (Ruby packages) in there if I find any useful ones. Before it's ready for release to the world, I need to write a README, and possibly an installation script to patch the Apache config. file to turn on FastCGI.

• Learning about BIND. I actually managed to set up my own DNS server using this, and got it serving domain names onto the internet. Not sure why I did it: I was just interested, and wondered what was going on when I was moving domain names around. I'm also kind of interested in the idea of trying to set up a hosting solution, probably just for myself, but maybe for other developers too (in the long term). I'd like fully integrated management for domain names, Apache virtual hosts, email, etc., and have started looking at Webmin as a possibility.

I've spent a fair few evenings over the last week on my FlickrLilli search engine. The idea is to provide an easy-to-use, fast interface to the Flickr search API, and in particular to enable license-based searches. The reason for this is because I use Flickr a lot to find images for presentations, but to keep the intellectual property issues clean, I only use CreativeCommons licensed images. Because our presentations are CreativeCommons licensed themselves, and we are a non-commercial organisation, I can use any CreativeCommons licensed image, providing I attribute it and respect the share-alike provisions of the images.

So, I've completed the first version, and it works well. However, I was under the impression that the API allowed searching by multiple licenses simultaneously, which turns out not to be the case. This means the current interface only allows searching by one CreativeCommons license type at a time. Which is crap.

I've altered the back-end code to do a search across multiple license types simultaneously, returning all matching images and a total number of matching images, but the problem here is that paging gets screwed. This is because you have to fetch a page of results at a time from the Flickr API for each license, whereas the paging in the application should be across the combined result sets. The only way I can think of doing this is to keep track locally of which page for which license I am currently at so I can query at the right place in the API, and build the results output page using slices from each result set I'm tracking. This seems like a fairly tricky problem, and I've only just started addressing it. For the moment, the single license search restriction remains. Even in its current form, though, it provides a feature (license-based searching) lacking from Flickr's default search engine, so it will still be useful for me at least.

I'm installing Ubuntu Breezy at home, and thought now's the time I should review music players for Linux. I've been using Rhythmbox for a while now, but being obsessive about having well-organised files with perfect tags, get a bit miffed that I can't fix nasty tags when I spot them.

I tried out Banshee, but it is pretty much the same as Rhythmbox, barring the facility to correct tags. However, these changes aren't written to the files, but only stored locally. So the file still has the bad tags.

The next I tried was Quod Libet. Never heard of it before, but first impressions are great. It has practically the same interface as Rhythmbox (which I quite like), but with the added facility to directly edit tags on files. So I can tweak to my heart's content. It's also got a feature to normalise track volumes as they play, which I don't think is in Rhythmbox. The only downside is that it seems to load the track list slightly slower than Rythmbox or Banshee and be slightly less responsive. I'm going to stick with it and see how I get on.

All of these things install from the "Add Applications" option in the Breezy menu. To get mp3 support, you'll probably need the gstreamer-plugins-0.8-multiverse package.

I urge those of you who like good music, and aren't averse to electronica, to get hold of some Autechre tracks. They are the greatest electronica band ever, as far as I'm concerned, and I remembered this today as I was listening to their epic "Second Peng" on the bus. I consider several of their tracks to be the most beautiful and/or melancholic music ever made. They're easy to get hold of, too, as you can buy their entire back catalogue from Bleep. Go on, treat yourself.

My favourites:

• Second Peng: rich, abstract, majestic, mournful - possibly my all-time favourite record
• CapIV and Gantz Graph (both on this superb EP)
• Piezo (pretty)
• Surripere (bear with it, the middle section is a fantastic dislocated grind)
• Leterel (the nearest thing they've had to a "hit record" - the BBC used it on one of their trailers recently)

I really like Pandora: personalised radio stations, playing music similar to music you already like (determined by a funky relevance-like algorithm), customisable as it allows you to mark songs you do and don't like, and with (limited) skip forward if it throws out something really duff. Over time (the theory is) it should align itself to your tastes while still surprising you. I've used it a fair bit, and it has come up with a fair few nice tracks I hadn't heard before, plus played quite a lot of my CD collection.

Good news is, they've now released a free, ad-supported version. Go on, sign up. It's well worth a listen if you're bored of your music collection, has an attractive and intuitive interface, and is completely legal.

It requires Flash, and if you're having trouble getting the Flash player to work with Ubuntu Hoary, see this previous post.

Barely two weeks ago I wrote about my plans to write an ecommerce application under my new nooq imprint. Blow me, if someone else hasn't had the same idea. Spot the uncanny similarities to my idea, not all of which I articulated in my blog post:

• Written in Rails
• Emphasis on elegance and ease of use for shop owners
• Presented as a hosted service

I promise I didn't read this before I made my blog post! They've obviously put a lot more work into this than I have, and had the idea a while ago. Nothing to stop me giving it a blast too, though. They've also released their Liquid templating system as open source, which could be a nice way to write Rails templates.

In other news: I investigated getting hold of nooq.com, but it turns out it's been grabbed by some bizarre company in the US which makes names up for its customers. Are there any combinations of letters, representing real words or otherwise, which have not yet been snapped up? Before long the world will be filled with companies with websites like "appapooh.com" and "klokkaspok.co.uk" because there are no real word domain names left.