Planet Fellowship (en)

A Good way to publish Photos copyleft

emergency exit | 21:29, Monday, 17 June 2013

I am looking for a good way to publish images as copyleft. The current state of the art in licensing non-software seems to be creative commons, but its copyleft is so weak, that I don’t see how it protects the end users’ freedom. To be more precise, here is how I perceive the legal effects (please correct me if I am wrong):

· I publish a digital picture in high resolution, with intermediate files under CC-by-sa
· Magazine XY takes the picture, touches it up and prints it as part of some article in a small size
· user Z sees the picture in the article and doesn’t even know the associated rights, unless she looks in the table of figures; and even if she does she can only demand the ready-to-print down-scaled version of the photo, possibly with text covering it, in a non editable format

→ what’s the point? Where is the freedom? What do I gain as an author, if I let commercial magazines use my photos, that in turn, don’t share with my fellow citizens?

Why do we not treat pictures like software? Obviously there is a preferred way of making changes, which might be a format with layer and effects information, or even a non-destrucitve instruction set, like with darktable. This is != to the preferred form of distribution, which is some form of bitmap, so it makes sense to speak of source and non source in my opinion.

I want to release my photos in a way that forces people to make the source of my photos as well as the source of their changes available to all third parties. So I thought about just stuffing the original image, with intermediate formats and/or instructions in a tarball, add a GPLv3 file and a note, on how I define that the GPL applies. Does that make sense? Or have you come over other, easier ways to achieve a similar effect?

Monitoring with Ganglia: an O'Reilly community book project

DanielPocock.com | 21:31, Sunday, 16 June 2013

Girls Around Me and the NSA

DanielPocock.com | 18:58, Saturday, 15 June 2013

Skype Scandal and the Jedi Council

DanielPocock.com | 22:10, Thursday, 13 June 2013

Evaluating Free Software Groupware: Kolab

Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog | 14:48, Thursday, 13 June 2013

I have recently had the inclination to evaluate Free Software groupware solutions in more detail, and perhaps the first that came to mind was Kolab: a long-running project that provides a range of groupware functions including e-mail, calendaring, address books, task management, and various other functions for a fairly wide range of organisation sizes. Of course, there are plenty of Free Software groupware projects offering complete and integrated solutions as well as individual components for use with existing infrastructure; the Debian Wiki page on groupware provides a fair (but probably incomplete) overview of the more interesting projects.

Installing and Configuring Kolab

Intrigued by accounts that Kolab is fairly easy to install on Debian Wheezy – the latest stable release of the Debian GNU/Linux software distribution – I set out to investigate, making use of my own tools to set up a User Mode Linux environment in which I could install the software. Initially, I tried to re-use an existing virtual environment, but a quick attempt to configure the software using the setup-kolab program was not successful, and a brief excursion via the #kolab IRC channel (on freenode), indicated that I might be better off starting with a completely fresh installation of Wheezy. Although I imagine it is possible to deal with the problems I encountered – setup-kolab did not like the presence of an existing LDAP server – the easiest way to troubleshoot is to start with a known configuration and see if things can be made to work from there.

Installation of Kolab 3.0 on Debian is fairly straightforward, as described both in the manual and more concisely in the blog article mentioned above (and also in older reports). The Kolab packages in Debian are set up to prefer the postfix packages to the apparent default of the exim4 packages and thus want to replace the latter. This might be a problem in some environments, and it may be possible to retain Exim for use with Kolab, but I haven’t investigated this. A somewhat undesirable feature of the currently available packages is that they are unsigned: Debian makes extensive use of package signatures to prevent tampering, and although it can be an annoyance to sign and publish packages and to publish the necessary keys for verification, hopefully Kolab will make its way into Debian as a collection of official packages once again.

Some Current Pitfalls

With a fresh system, setup-kolab seems fairly happy, and with the initial configuration performed it is possible to log into the administration interface, although it seems to be necessary to explicitly start the Apache server first. One strange problem with the Debian packages seems to be in the absence of a library file in the correct location, and this manifests itself in the administration interface as the absence of any way to add users. I fixed this for my system as follows:

ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/nss/libsoftokn3.so /usr/lib/libsoftokn3.so

(Unlike the message linked above describing this fix, I still use a machine with the i386 architecture, not the x86_64 architecture, and the underlying problem seems to be related to the way that libraries are now stored to permit support multiple architectures on the same computer.)

I also noticed that some Kolab component, at least after some administrative tasks have been performed, tries to communicate with the IMAP server unsuccessfully but persistently. To reset their relationship, the following seemed to be required:

service cyrus-imapd restart

Some other complaints emerged on the console about mailbox creation, perhaps due to some resources I created, but it is possible to verify the state of the mailboxes as follows:

kolab list-mailboxes

I noticed that no matter which resource type I specified, the type of created resources would always be “Beamer”.

This probably doesn’t matter so much for actual resource booking, but I imagine that there’s a problem here needing to be fixed. It is possible that the Debian packages suffer from the above problems but that these problems have since been fixed in the project’s repository and in subsequent non-Debian package or distribution releases; I haven’t verified this, however.

Fun With Administration

Administration is never really much fun, but the administrative interface seems to provide a reasonable way of adding users and resources, populating the different information stores with user and mailbox details.

With the packaging issues mentioned above all sorted out, users can be added in the users section:

And resources can be added in the resources section:

Given that Kolab is based on conventional services like LDAP directories, IMAP mailboxes, and so on, if you needed to integrate with existing infrastructure and accommodate existing user populations, you probably wouldn’t spend much time in the administrative interface, but it is nice to see that an interface exists for quick edits to the system.

What About the Users?

With some users set up, one might be interested in seeing things from their perspective. Out of the box, the Debian packages provide a Roundcube webmail interface:

On the inside, the interface is much like the Roundcube many people have come to know. For instance, the mail interface is more or less what you would expect. Here, the folders on the left are IMAP folders that are also available to IMAP clients, but to start with there obviously aren’t any mails to look at:

Amongst the usual view buttons at the top of the window, featuring the mail, address book and settings, we find additional buttons for the calendar and tasks. First, the address book:

Here, it seems to pick up other users added via the administrative interface. Meanwhile, the calendar interface is probably slightly more interesting to look at because it’s something that you don’t usually get in Roundcube:

The calendar widgets seem to be rather familiar and those who do more JavaScript programming than I do will probably be able to identify the project that pioneered them. Nevertheless, they seem to behave mostly as I would expect from having used them elsewhere on other sites and services. One strange thing is the date numbering above the days in the week view (“Mon 6-10” meaning “Monday 10th June”, for example) which I imagine could be customised somewhere, although I didn’t see a setting to do exactly that.

Fun With Events

Given the existence of the calendar in Roundcube, and given that calendaring interests me already, I decided to make an attempt at creating a new event, inviting a participant, and requesting a resource. Dragging an area in the calendar caused the event dialogue to appear:

The location field appears to be non-autocompleted free text, but it would be nice to have a menu of recognised locations or resources, and perhaps there is some kind of setting or extension to provide that. With the main details filled out, on I went to the participants tab:

Just like the mail interface in Roundcube, the calendar also supports address lookups and offers autocompletion of names. However, I found that autocompletion didn’t take place for resources, so I ended up having to invite resources by using their full e-mail addresses (which were defined previously in the administrative interface). For example, for the “Forest” resource, I had to specify resource--forest@example.com as a participant. Maybe this is also something that should be done another way, but I didn’t manage to figure it out.

Finding the availability of participants seems possible. Kolab does support the retention of free/busy information, so for those people making this information available to Kolab, their status should be visible in the user interface:

In principle, it should be possible for people to exchange free/busy information via e-mail and for the recipient to record this information and use it to schedule events, but I haven’t looked into whether Kolab or Roundcube support this at their respective levels. I found that in the availability view, it is possible to change the role of each participant by clicking on the icon next to their name, and this made it possible to give a resource the appropriate role. Again, if there were a better way of choosing a resource that I missed, maybe this wouldn’t be necessary.

With an event created and participants invited, Kolab manages to notify those participants, and to make things interesting I decided to configure Kontact in a KDE 4 environment (running in Debian Squeeze) to connect on behalf of the invited participant. Here is what that participant sees when they check their mail:

Although it is rather small in the above screenshot, Kontact shows a collection of links that allow the recipient to act on an incoming event notification. Here is a close-up:

For Kontact to be able to do this, it appears that the kdepim-groupware package is required, and indeed this functionality supports the iTIP technology mentioned above (here, in an invitation context instead of the free/busy context discussed above). It is important to understand that the open standards underpinning this workflow do not require that everyone have a login to a common server and manipulate information on that server directly: a critical feature of the iCalendar-related standards is that people are able to schedule events collaboratively without all being part of the same monolithic organisation and/or infrastructure. It is also interesting to see that where a recipient’s e-mail program cannot handle the workflow defined by iTIP, the message includes a link to the Roundcube webmail that can be used to signal a participant’s attendance or absence.

When a participant responds using one of the links provided in the message, the organiser gets a notification. Here, the Roundcube user gets to see a mail message telling them that the participant accepted the invitation:

Upon pressing the update button provided, the status of the event is updated in the calendar:

Here, the organiser is shown with a crown next to his name, the participant (using Kontact) has accepted the invitation to the event, and the resource has apparently been secured.

In Conclusion

There are obviously plenty of other experiments that could be performed here, as well as other features that could be explored. For instance, some more evaluation of the free/busy information, how local and remote users interact with it, and how well those with non-iTIP mail clients fare with over-the-Web notification of attendance or absence might be in order. Publishing calendars for over-the-Web consumption is also apparently supported, and it might be interesting to see how well Kolab supports the general “invite people you hardly know” event-planning paradigm that the likes of Doodle have been attempting to popularise.

It seems that Kolab at the very least supports basic calendar functionality in association with standards-compatible clients, and perhaps a brief investigation with Thunderbird (plus Lightning) and even more elementary mail and calendar clients might be informative. Since Kolab is Free Software, of course, the chances of resolving any shortcomings are increased for those willing and able to peruse and modify the code, and maybe I will take a closer look at that, too.

As noted above, calendaring and scheduling systems are already an interest of mine. The only problem now is that there’s just so much to look at and yet so little time to do so!

When conspiracy theories come true

DanielPocock.com | 21:43, Wednesday, 12 June 2013

The week that everything changed

DanielPocock.com | 10:58, Wednesday, 12 June 2013

Avoiding the Microsoft tax in 2013: I bought a new laptop

the_unconventional's blog » English | 10:00, Wednesday, 12 June 2013

For all free software users out there, trying to find a new laptop without having to pay the Microsoft tax has become harder and harder. Ever since UEFI and especially Resticted Boot came to surface, concerns about hardware compatibility started growing, but neither one really had anything to do with the now complete impossibility to buy any store-bought laptop without being forced to pay for Microsoft Windows 8 as well. It is in fact their new licensing policy that does.
Since their latest release, license keys can no longer be refunded. This essentially means that anyone who refuses to accept the Microsoft EULA and wishes a refund for the operating system has to return their entire machine, by which Microsoft is essentially saying that people who don’t agree with their license terms, may not own laptops.

Due to this development, many companies that used to sell laptops with GNU/Linux preloaded, have gone out of business over the last couple of months. Some examples from my home country are hettes.nl, mingos.nl, and linuxcomputers.nl. They all claimed the same thing: they can no longer stock laptops without Microsoft Windows preloaded, and are unable to refund the licenses that came with them. Therefore, they don’t really add any value over buying a laptop with Microsoft Windows and installing GNU/Linux yourself anymore.

Anyone looking for a general laptop by Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, Asus, et cetera, might as well stop looking. At least, people in the Netherlands; and most likely the rest of western Europe as well. Microsoft has killed off yet another field of fair competition, without anyone stopping them.

 

Barebones

So what if you want a laptop without having to pay Redmond? Well, the only thing you can do is look for one that didn’t have Microsoft Windows installed in the first place. In essence, you’ll need to get a barebone.
Well-known GNU/Linux vendors such as System76 and ZaReason have been doing this for years, but the downside to both companies is that they are U.S.-based, which obviously makes importing them incredibly expensive, but will also be quite challenging when it comes to warranty and such.

 

BTO

However, I happen to know about a barebone laptop vendor in the Netherlands which sells machines without any mandatory Microsoft Windows pre-installs: BTO Notebooks / N4ALL B.V. in IJsselstein, Utrecht. I recently contacted them, and asked them about the GNU/Linux support of their 15CL13 model, advertised as an entry-level machine. But as we all know, GNU/Linux isn’t nearly the resource hog that Microsoft Windows is, so even the most basic setup will be more than sufficient for everyday use.

They promptly replied and assured me that the machine was tested with Ubuntu 13.04 without any issues. They also answered my other questions, confirming that both UEFI and Restricted Boot could easily be disabled (and were by default). They were also able to tell me the exact barebone type: a Clevo W258EU; to some perhaps better known as the System76 Pangolin Performance.

 

At the moment of my purchase, BTO had a special action, giving away a 120GB Samsung 840 SSD for free. The price was very alluring, to say the least. For a configuration with an Ivy Bridge Penitum 2020M CPU, 2x 4GB DDR3-1600 SO-DIMMs, and a 120GB Samsung 840 SSD, it was only €537 including VAT, handling, and shipping.

 

Disabling Big Brother

Due to obvious privacy concerns, I have never really been a fan of built-in cameras and microphones. I never liked the fact that virtually every laptop comes with them even in the most basic models, because I’d just rather not “bug my own home”, as David Petraeus would put it. I want a laptop, not a telescreen.
So with all the laptops I’ve owned, one of the first things I’d usally do would be opening up the screen bezel and physically removing the flatconnectors from both the webcam and the microphone modules. I never make (video) calls anyway, and in case I’d want to record audio, I could always use the 3,5mm jack connector on the side, as built-in microphones are generally rubbish for anything other than spying anyway.

In order to avoid having to do that on a brand new laptop, I asked BTO if they could do it for me during the assembly. At first, my preposal was shot down by the sales manager, but later I received an e-mail from a technical staff member, saying that pulling out the plugs wouldn’t be an issue. I placed my order, wired the money, and my laptop was assembled, tested and shipped by the end of the next day.

 

Opening the box

Within four days after placing my order, the laptop arrived at my doorstep. The accessories pack was quite impressive: it came with a very decent carrying bag, a wired mini mouse, a mousepad, earplugs, a microfiber cloth, and obviously a 19V power supply.

The laptop itself was very appealing. Generally speaking, barebones tend to be rather ugly, but Clevo has actually done a very decent design job with this one. The screen bezel is very small, the chiclet-style keyboard looks very nice, and the touchpad is well integrated into the palm rest. All in all, the machine has a very solid, ‘non-plasticy’ feel, although most of its body is ironically made out of plastic.

The BIOS (or well, UEFI) is rather simple, as with most laptops it is. It appears to be a well-known American Megatrends AMIBIOS implementation. Amongst other things, it features the ability to switch between BIOS and UEFI boot modes, to enable/disable Restricted Boot (UEFI-only, of course), and to switch between AHCI and IDE on the SATA controller. Other obvious options are boot priority, supervisor and user passwords, and the enabling/disabling of the boot logo.

 

Installing Debian

Installing Debian jessie was a breeze. The system can boot up from both the USB 3.0 ports on the left and the USB 2.0 port on the right. Pressing F7 pops up the boot selection menu, and the Debian netinstaller worked without any problems.
I chose to install Debian using the old-fashioned BIOS booting method, as I am yet to see any advantage to using UEFI. To me, all it seems to be is a bloated hypervisor which does not have any source code available, making it a potential privacy risk (as in back door). Good old BIOS is dumb as can be: it has little to no control over the operating system once booted, and it can hardly be modified without explicit user action. UEFI, on the other hand, has its own shell and networking stack, and can be fully accessed through interfaces like efivars. It’s none of my business what other people do, but I’d recommend everyone to avoid that stuff like the plague.

I did, however, use GPT instead of MBR to partition my SSD. I never liked the whole primary/extended partitions thing, and GRUB supports booting from GPT without UEFI very well. All you need to do is create a 1MB BIOS boot partition on /dev/sda1, called “reserved BIOS boot area” by the Debian installer. GRUB will then embed itself into that 1MB partition, and you’ll be good to go.

 

 

One small mistake

After the installation was done, nearly everything worked immediately. The wireless LAN, however, did not. I quickly discovered that BTO had placed the wrong module. During the assembly, I specifically chose an Intel Centrino 135, but I was given a Realtek RTL8723AE instead, which has very poor Linux kernel support. Because I wasn’t up for a custom driver compilation hell, I went to the local PC store and picked up an Intel Centrino 2230.
One of the best things about barebone laptops is that they’re very easy to self-service. I only had to remove four screws from a bottom plate and I could access pretty much everything: the CPU, the RAM, the WLAN, the cooling fan, and so on. Only the SSD is positioned under a different plate, which can be accessed by removing two other screws. There were no silly (and moreover, illegal) “warranty void”-stickers to be found, so replacing the WLAN module literally only took me two minutes.

As soon as I contacted BTO about the switch-up, they immediately apologized and offered to send me the Intel Centrino 135 as soon as possible. It came in the mail the next day, and they said I didn’t even have to return the Realtek module. All in all it was an honest mistake, and it was taken care of very quickly. I decided to keep the 2230 in my laptop, as it’s a better chip, but a spare 135 can always come in handy some day.
I also notified BTO about the poor support of the Realtek module, and advised them to always use Intel or Atheros chips for GNU/Linux users, just to be on the safe side.
I’ve been a freelance PC assembler for many years now, so replacing a WLAN module is not an issue for me, but obviously not everyone would be able and/or willing to do so.

The Realtek module (left) next to the Intel Centrino 135 (right) that arrived the next day. Looking at the label, the Realtek module probably came with the barebone by default.

 

Microcode

The only downside to Intel WLAN modules is that they can’t be used with 100% free software. Technically, the iwlwifi Linux kernel module is free software, but the cards require non-free microcode to be loaded from userspace. On Debian, you’ll need the firmware-iwlwifi package from non-free for this, but most other GNU/Linux distributions will probably have kept this in their default kernels. In my case, the required firmware file is located in /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-2030-6.ucode – which is roughly 700 kilobytes of proprietary code. It may not be perfect, but I can live with it, considering the fact that those 700 kilobytes are the only non-free bytes of data on my entire computer.
The upside is that Intel’s WLAN chips are generally very well supported with the Linux kernel, and, in my opinion, usually perform best.

In case you would really want a 100% free software system, you’d probably be best off buying an Atheros chip supported by the ath9k module. Sadly, those are not available on the European consumer market, so you’d have to look on eBay (or a similar marketplace) and get one from China / Taiwan / Hong Kong, et cetera. They generally cost less than the shipping costs from Asia.
If you’re planning to install a fully free-as-in-freedom GNU/Linux distribution such as gNewSense or Trisquel, you’ll have no other choice (aside from always using ethernet). As far as I’m aware, the BIOS does not contain one of those horrible WLAN whitelists, so you can use any half-size Mini PCI Express module you want.

The bitrate is automagically lowered when the connection is idle. WiFi reception is great: I can find over 15 networks in the vicinity of my house.

 

Testing the rest

After having solved my wireless woes by replacing the WLAN module, I could start testing all the other parts. And I must say that I’m very satisfied so far. The keyboard is actually quite comfortable, unlike many other laptop keyboards I’ve used in the past. Admittedly though, I’m quite spoiled when it comes to typing, because I use an original Model M keyboard with my PC. That said, this keyboard easily comes in second-best of all my current machines, and is probably the least noisy of them all.

The touchpad is pretty decent. It’s fully integrated into the palm rest, but it does contain two physical buttons. Two finger scrolling and tap-to-click both work perfectly. It may not be the very best touchpad I’ve ever used, but it certainly isn’t bad either. There are far more laptops out there with worse touchpads than there are with better ones.

The most amazing aspect of this machine has to be the fan noise. Or, better said, the absence of it. I can easily say that I’ve never owned a laptop as silent as this one. Most laptop fans have the tedious tendency to switch between ‘off’ and ‘full on’ every 40~80 seconds or so, but this machine features more of a desktop-style fan regulation. It’s always running, but at such a low speed that it’s barely audible. When idle, you really have to put your ear to the unit in order to hear anything. This way, hot air is always being dissipated, so the fan doesn’t have to spin up like a mad man as soon as some sensor limit is reached. It simply revs up a bit as soon as the load requires it. I still don’t understand that it took laptop vendors such a long time before they realized that this was the best way to implement this.

The idle temperatures of the CPU tend to be around 50 degrees Celsius, although the unit itself is probably well-isolated, because it barely feels warm to the touch at all. I’ve only used this machine on relatively warm summer days so far, so it’ll most likely even be cooler in the winter time.

kevin@andalusia:~$ sensors
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:              +54.0°C  (crit = +120.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:    +55.0°C  (high = +72.0°C, crit = +90.0°C)
Core 0:             +55.0°C  (high = +72.0°C, crit = +90.0°C)
Core 1:             +54.0°C  (high = +72.0°C, crit = +90.0°C)

Both the Ivy Bridge CPU and the on-die HD2500 GPU work great. I can run all kinds of WebGL content in both Chromium and Iceweasel without any problems, and streaming 720p videos from my Raspberry Pi over 802.11g WiFi has been working great without any noticeable strain on the processing units, which is a great improvement over my previous laptop (from ~2007), which used to choke, chuckle, and burn itself up a lot.

 

Beware of a 3.9 kernel bug (EDIT: fixed as of 3.9.6.)

The sound system worked out of the box with PulseAudio. Plugging in headphones automatically switches off the built-in speakers as one would expect, and pulling them out will reactivate them.

I honestly don’t have a clue on why the digital connections all show up twice.

However, there appeared to be a bug in >3.9 kernels that broke the headphone functionality for this particular chip (VIA VT1802P). Plugging in headphones on >3.9 kernels did in fact still mute the built-in speakers, but the headphone output would be silent as well. A patch for this issue has been released and merged into 3.9.6. Kernels 3.8 and below were unaffected.
The sound quality of the built-in speakers isn’t too great, but that can’t really be said about any laptop anyway. I do feel that laptop speakers have gradually become worse over the years, as my six year old previous laptop does sound a bit better than this one. (A trend I’ve noticed by reviewing many different machines of all ages.)
As I’ve stated before, I requested the built-in microphone to be physically disabled, so I was unable to test it. However, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work if it had been connected.

 

One potential issue

The only thing that might be a bit tricky is the card reader: a Realtek RTL8411, also known as the Realtek Barossa Plus. If you’re using a stable distribution such as Debian 7, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or CentOS 6, you’ll likely be running a Linux 3.2.x kernel, which does not support this card reader yet. In that case, you’ll either have to compile the rts_bpp module yourself (as described here), or use the DKMS driver that System76 uses for their Pangolin Performance and Gazelle Professional models.
As of Linux 3.8, support for the RTL8411 has been added to the in-tree rstx_pci kernel module, so if you’re using a more bleeding edge distribution, the card reader will work out of the box. I’m running Debian jessie with the 3.9 kernel from sid, and I can report a fully working card reader without any intervention.

With kernel 3.9, the card reader works entirely as expected.

 

Power, ACPI, ASPM, suspend, hibernate, and things actually working

Perhaps even more amazing than the incredibly quiet fan, is the incredibly decent battery life. This machine is only packing a relatively small 4800mAh lithium ion battery, but I can easily get around four and a half hours of normal use on a full charge. And by that I mean four and a half hours of constant operation, constant screen on, and constant WiFi on. I do not have any automatic screen blanking enabled, but for those who do want to use it, I can assure that it works perfectly. I’ve also tested suspension and hibernation; both of which work without any issues. Moreover, this is one of the first laptops I’ve ever owned without any ACPI issues. Clevo actually did a good job with the BIOS, and ACPI simply works. There’s no power being wasted on devices that don’t power down properly, ACPI_OSC control is actually granted, and ASPM is properly implemented.

So, in a nutshell, the hardware of this laptop works perfectly, as long as you make sure you have an Intel WLAN module and use a recent kernel. I would advise to use at least 3.8, although 3.9 works perfectly as well.

Detailed information

One of the biggest annoyances in the process of hardware buying is the small amount of technical details most vendors offer. I’d simply like to know exactly which hardware parts my machines consist of, but it can be quite hard to get that information in most cases. Therefore, I decided to make a list of every hardware part in this machine. Please note that some of them are interchangeable, so the specific configuration will depend on the order you place.

Chassis: Clevo W258EU
Chipset: Intel HM76 Express (Panther Point)
BIOS: American Megatrends v4.6.5
CPU: Intel Pentium 2020M @ 2,40GHz (Ivy Bridge)
GPU: Intel GMA HD2500 @ 650MHz
RAM: 2x 4GB Fujitsu Team Elite DDR3-1600 SO-DIMM
SSD: 120GB Samsung 840
LAN: Realtek RTL8411 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet
WLAN/BT: Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230
Audio: VIA VT1802P
Card Reader: Realtek RTL8411 (Barossa Plus)
DVD Drive: Lite-On DS8A8SH
Keyboard: 105-key QWERTY with chiclet keys and a numeric keypad
Touchpad: Synaptics PS/2 Touchpad (id: 0x1c0b1)
Display: 15″ 16:9 (1366×768) glare/glossy with LED backlight
Connectors: 2x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, 1x HDMI, 1x VGA, 1x Gigabit Ethernet, 1x 3,5mm audio out, 1x 3,5mm audio in

System configuration:

Debian jessie netinstall
Linux 3.9.4 kernel from sid
X Server 1.12.4
MESA 8.0.5
Intel X driver 2.19
Intel VAAPI driver 1.0.17
GNOME 3.4.2

 

Daily use, papercuts, and workarounds

Although my usage experience is still fairly limited, I can say that this laptop is extremely well capable of being a daily driver. There aren’t any noteworthy bugs or issues that might decrease its usability. Perhaps a few very little things, but none of which could possibly be a deal breaker for anyone. The machine is compact enough to be carried around, and is much, much lighter than my previous laptop was. I’ve dated girls less heavy than that thing.

Nevertheless, I have made a list of commonly used features, followed by my test results. Please note that all tests were done with kernel 3.9.4 from sid/unstable.

USB: xhci and ehci working out of the box
Ethernet: working out of the box
WiFi: working out of the box (requires firmware-iwlwifi to be installed)
Bluetooth: working out of the box (when enabled in BIOS)
Speakers: working out of the box
Headphones: working out of the box (except for 3.9.1-3.9.5 kernels due to a bug)
Keyboard: working out of the box
Touchpad: working out of the box (two finger scroll + tap-to-click)
Hotkeys: brightness, volume, touchpad, screen switch, and WLAN working out of the box
DVD drive: working out of the box
Card reader: working out of the box (requires kernel 3.8 or above)
HDMI video: working out of the box
HDMI audio: not tested (but it is recognized by PulseAudio)
VGA output: not tested (but it is recognized by X)
Webcam: not tested (disabled)
Microphone: not tested (disabled)
Suspend/resume: working out of the box
Hibernate/resume: working out of the box
ACPI: little to no bugs, power management works well, battery life is very decent, battery percentage appears to be accurate
Sensors: ACPI thermal zone and coretemp working out of the box, fan regulation properly managed by firmware

Bugs and issues

• The Bluetooth hotkey (Fn + F12) does not work. Essentially, this means that Bluetooth will always be enabled, and the hotkey can’t turn it off. You can, however, disable Bluetooth by using the panel icon in GNOME Shell or Unity, or some other Bluetooth front-end (such as blueman). Disabling Bluetooth that way is not persistent in case of a reboot.
  You can disable Bluetooth permanently by entering the BIOS and setting the Bluetooth power setting to Disabled. This will, however, completely disable it without any way of turning it back on. The system will be unaware of any Bluetooth capabilities, and rfkill will not show the hci0 interface.

• The only way to re-enable Bluetooth is by doing a BIOS reset and a complete off/on power cycle (not a soft reboot), after which the interface will be recognized by rfkill again.

• The screen will flicker about ~500ms after opening the lid. This is usually already over before you’ve moved the screen into a workable position, so it is hardly an issue. In case you have your system suspend or hibernate when closing the lid, this won’t be an issue at all.

• By default, the PC speaker beeps upon shutdown and reboot, and sometimes even as a notification sound. By this I mean the old IBM-style buzzer beep. It can be disabled by blacklisting the pcspkr and snd_pcsp modules. Simply add them to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf:
  blacklist pcspkr
  blacklist snd_pcsp
  Changes will be applied after a reboot. In case you want to apply them immediately, run sudo modprobe -r pcspkr && sudo modprobe -r snd_pcsp just this once.

Sadly, the unit came with a Windows 8 logo on the super key. I asked BTO whether they could get hold of a keyboard without one (kind of like what System76 does), but they said that would be impossible for them. Luckily I have a whole stash of Tux keyboard stickers laying around. You can order them here.

 

All in all, if you’re looking for a Microsoft-free laptop within the euro zone, I’d recommend you to give BTO a shot. I’ve already tried to convince them to pick up full GNU/Linux support, but obviously they’d need to find a sustainable market first. They are most likely the only company left in the Netherlands offering such laptops, so their target group could potentially be very large. There are thousands of free software users in the Netherlands alone; let alone in all of western Europe.

 

Technical details and logs

I’ve collected the output of some useful analytic commands for your information. At this point, I’ve run lshw, lspci, lsusb, dmesg, dmidecode, and glxinfo. If you’d like to see anything else, please let me know.

Booth at Veganmania in Vienna 2013

FSFE Fellowship Vienna » English | 08:38, Wednesday, 12 June 2013

On 8^th and 9^th of June 2013 the Vienna fellowship group of the FSFE organised an information booth at the Austrian vegan society’s summer festival. This year’s festival was the 16^th and, as always, welcomed visitors from all over Austria and quite a few guests from other countries too.

On the run up to the festival it looked dangerously like it wasn’t going to work out very well due to the awful weather – In the days before there was heavy rainfall causing floods all over central Europe. Fortunately, the days of the festival, and only those days, saw perfect weather: It was warm and sunny. According to official estimations – about 9000 people visited the festival.

For our booth we ordered new leaflets from the German headquarters and, as before, we prepared free software operating system discs. This time we made more than 200 pieces with five different distributions: Ubuntu 12.04 (for absolute beginners), Debian 7.0, openSUSE 12.3, Fedora 18 and Trisquel 6.0 (for experts).

Our little booth was at the centre of the festival area directly opposite the main beverage stand. At times most areas were too crowded for comfortable walking or standing. Nevertheless, our booth, even at those hectic times, provided a calm little corner, which was obviously inviting for people to stop by. We can say without doubt that our spot was one of the best.

On both days we set up our booth at about 9am and packed up at about 10pm. Starting from about midday it was hard to take a break because there were always people very interested in our subject of independence on computers and mobile phones. On no other of our quite successful booths before have we had so many engaging talks with people who had been unfamiliar with free software before, but who were instantly very interested in giving it a try.

This time we made sure that we didn’t just give away random discs to anyone willing to take something for free. We evaluated the knowledge level and explained the basic concepts of free software and even the history of why we insist on the term free instead of open and GNU/Linux instead of Linux. Our visitors listened very carefully to our explanations about why free software can’t always work on any proprietary hardware and why open file formats are the saner way to share digital data.

Like always in such situations, one of the most frequent questions was about, the nowadays unexpected fact, of how something good and reliable can be given out for free. We narrowed the wide field of possibilities down to two main ways that free software emerges: The first route is paying programmers to write something needed, but not yet existing (without the plan to sell the result afterwards). The second explanation refers to all those programmers unsatisfied with writing crippled proprietary software in their jobs, since many of them just want to prove to themselves (and others) how well their programs could work if there was no need to ensure that workflows are profitable for companies.

In numbers we handed out fewer discs than at other occasions such as DFD or SFD, but I’m sure we got a lot more about our core concerns across.

Looking back on both days, I’d like to say, that Veganmania seems to be by far the best kind of event for our booth. At Linux weeks and similar events most of the people are not very interested since they believe they know everything that they need to know about free software already. It makes more sense and reaches more people when we have a booth in a shopping street. As far as Veganmania is concerned, it seems that people there are generally open to thinking critically and therefore, more willing to try out something new in order to limit the control of corporations and governments.

We even got invited to have our booth at the large vegan summer festival in Zagreb in September.

New material

Feel free to use and adapt our information material as you please:

cd-huelle.pdf

DVD/CD cover (for DIN A4 sheets, extended with openSUSE)

cd-label.pdf

DVD/CD label (for printable disc, extended with openSUSE)

frei-schild.pdf

Basic free software introduction (DIN A3 poster)

distro-schild.pdf

Distro information sheet (DIN A3 poster)

Images

You can open images in full size by clicking on it. (Unfortunately the quality of the images is very limited due to a very old digi-cam.)

.

Install Ardour 3.1 on Fedora

Sam Tuke's blog | 12:18, Tuesday, 11 June 2013

Ardour 3 is the most powerful Free Software music software currently available. Although Fedora isn’t a GNU/Linux distribution that’s designed for audio professionals, with a little work it can be configured to process sound with low-latency (without millisecond delays or artefacts like pops and crackles), and get easy access to repositories with many recent pro-audio apps.

We’ll compile Ardour from its source code in this tutorial, because this will get us the very latest version (with features and bug fixes missing from older copies), and because Ardour recently switched to a payment-oriented package distribution model which promotes source compilation as the installation method for people who aren’t Ardour donors.

We’ll also set up the CCRMA package repositories, which contain many audio apps not found in the default Fedora repos, and most importantly will supply us with a real time kernel (which Ardour, and low-latency operation in general, requires). The CCRMA repos are provided by the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

These instructions are designed to work with Fedora 18 and Ardour 3.1.1, though I expect they will work as well with later versions of both. If not, let me know and I’ll try and tweak the guide.

1. Install package dependencies required by Ardour:
   yum install git jack-audio-connection-kit-devel libsndfile-devel liblo-devel aubio-devel cppunit-devel cwiid-devel liblrdf-devel libsamplerate-devel lv2-devel serd-devel sord-devel sratom-devel lilv-devel flac-devel gtkmm-2.4-devel gtkmm24-devel libgnomecanvas-devel libgnomecanvasmm26-devel suil-devel libcurl libcurl-devel uuid uuid-devel libuuid libuuid-devel lib fftw3 fftw3-devel liboggz liboggz-devel
2. Setup the CCRMA repositories (more detailed info in the Fedora manual):
   su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/fedora/linux/\
planetccrma/13/i386/planetccrma-repo-1.1-2.fc13.ccrma.noarch.rpm
3. Update existing packages and refresh what’s available:
   yum update
4. Install real-time (low-latency) kernel and drivers from CCRMA:
   yum install planetccrma-core
5. Reboot your machine to use your new real-time kernel.
6. Download Ardour via  Git and compile it by following the simple official instructions (see “Building Ardour 3.x”). I recommend not installing Ardour unless you really need to (installing is the final step in the official instructions that simply creates links within Fedora’s menus etc. and isn’t required for compiling / running / using Ardour).
7. Start the jack sound server by running qjackctl (either from system menu or CLI), and click on “start”.
8. Run your newly compiled Ardour (execute this from within the directory you compiled Ardour in):
   cd gtk2_ardour
./ardev

Those are all the necessary steps and you should now have a fully functional copy of Ardour! I recommend installing some additional LV2 plugins however to extend the built-in MIDI instruments that are available within Ardour.

1. (Optional) Install additional synthesisers for Ardour:

sudo yum install lv2-triceratops lv2-synthv1 lv2-calf-plugins lv2-calf-plugins lv2-mdaEPiano

Those synths should appear automatically as available MIDI instruments when you restart Ardour.

I hope that running Ardour in the way I’ve described will whet your appetite to dive more deeply into audio production on GNU/Linux. If so, I recommend using a dedicated GNU/Linux distribution for audio work, because it’ll provide you with many more tools and features, and save you having to manually configure them all yourself. For now KXStudio is my clear favourite.

Good luck, and let me know how you get on in the comments

Interrupt-free computing

DanielPocock.com | 10:44, Tuesday, 11 June 2013

I’m going to Akademy 2013 and will talk about the FLA

Hook’s Humble Homepage | 22:04, Monday, 10 June 2013

Hello, hello! I’m going to Akademy 2013 in Bilbao, Spain …

… where I will hold one of the lightning talks; namely “Learn more about the FLA — What is FLA good for and why you shoud sign it“:

The Fiduciary License Agreement is a type of a very well balanced copyright assignement that enables KDE e.V. to manage your contribution and if needed protect you in court, while making sure that you get all the freedom you need both for your code and yourself.

After the talk, there will be time to answer any questions you may have about the FLA.

After I finish my talk, I’ll hang around for any and all questions regarding Free Software licensing and other related legal questions … and if all fails, I’ll just practice my debugging-fu and throw hard to find, yet certainly there, bugs in every direction ☺

hook out → extremely looking forward to finally meeting all the nice KDE people in preson

Join me in Kiberpipa to learn Python from the Mechanical MOOC

Hook’s Humble Homepage | 21:17, Monday, 10 June 2013

I’ve decided to re-take the course “Gentle Introduction to Python” ((I dropped out in week 5 or so out of 8 due to other obligations.)) on MOOC-E, which is starting on the 17^th of June.

But this is not about letting people know of my personal plans: If you’re from Slovenia, or better yet from Ljubljana, I’d like to let you know that I’m thinking of holding (ir)regular meetups with any local participants and the wonderful Python guys and gals from Kiberpipa.

Now, if you haven’t heard about MOOC-E or the Mechanical MOOC yet, a quick glace at their website says it all:

Mechanical MOOC is two things: A massive open online course (MOOC), and an experiment in how to offer these courses.

First, the course: We’re offering an eight-week course called A Gentle Introduction to Python. It is, as it sounds, a course in learning the basics of Python programming.

Second, the approach: Rather than trying to create a platform that structures the end-to-end learning experience, as recent MOOCs have done, we’re taking the best of existing open learning site — content from MIT OpenCourseWare, communities from OpenStudy, exercises by Codecademy — and joining them loosely with a mailing list that will coordinate student activity.

Instead of a professor or university organizing the class, our e-mail scheduler will do it — that’s why it’s mechanical.

As already said, I already experienced this system and can warmly recomend it — at least for me the balance between the freedom not to be bound to a strict deadline and a certain amount of peer pressure, is a exactly the right way to study at the moment.

hook out → sipping Korean Osulloc oolong tea with cocoa splinters and caramel (plus a bit of sugar and a dash of milk)

The Pope saw right through them

DanielPocock.com | 22:00, Sunday, 09 June 2013

Site Licences and Volume Licensing: Locking You Both In… and Out

Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog | 14:01, Sunday, 09 June 2013

Once upon a time, back in the microcomputer era, if you were a reputable institution and were looking to acquire software it was likely that you would end up buying proprietary software, mostly because Free Software was not a particularly widely-known concept, and partly because any “public domain” or “freeware” programs probably didn’t give you or your superiors much confidence about the quality or maintenance of those programs, although there were notable exceptions on some platforms (some of which are now Free Software). As computers became more numerous, programs would be used on more and more computers, and producers would take exception to their customers buying a single “copy” and then using it on many computers simultaneously.

In order to avoid arguments about common expectations of reasonable use – if you could copy a program onto many floppy disks and run that program on many computers at once, there was obviously no physical restriction on the use of copies and thus no apparent need to buy “official” copies when your computer could make them for you – and in order to avoid needing to engage in protracted explanations of copyright law to people for whom such law might seem counter-intuitive or nonsensical, the concept of the “site licence” was born: instead of having to pay for one hundred official copies of a product, presumably consisting of one hundred disks in one hundred boxes with one hundred manuals, at one hundred times the list price of the product, an institution would buy a site licence for up to one hundred computers (or perhaps as many as the institution has, betting on the improbability that the institution will grow tenfold, say) and pay somewhat less than one hundred times the original price, although perhaps still a multiple of ten of that price.

Thus, the customer got the vendor off their back, the vendor still got more or less what they thought was a fair price, and everyone was happy. At least that is how it all seemed.

The Physical Discount Store

Now, because of the apparent compromise made by the vendor – that the customer might be paying somewhat less per copy – the notion of the “volume licence” or “bulk discount” arose: suddenly, software licences start to superficially resemble commodities and people start to think of them just like they do when they buy other things in bulk. Indeed, in the retail sector the average person became aware of the concept of bulk purchasing with the introduction of cash and carry stores, discount stores, and so on: the larger the volume of goods passing through those channels, the bigger the discounts on those goods.

Now, economies of scale exist throughout modern commerce and often for good reason: any fixed costs (or costs largely insensitive to the scale of output) in production and distribution can be diluted by an increased number of units produced and shipped, making the total per-unit cost less; commitments to larger purchases, potentially over a longer period of time, can also provide stability to producers and suppliers and encourage mutually-beneficial and lasting relationships throughout the supply chain. A thorough treatment of this topic is clearly beyond a blog post, but it is worthwhile to briefly explore how savings arise and how discounts are made.

Let us consider a producer whose factory can produce at most a million units of a product every year, it may not seek to utilise this capacity if it cannot be sure that all units will be sold: excess inventory may incur warehouse costs and also result in an uncompetitive product going unsold or needing to be heavily discounted in order to empty those warehouses and make room for more competitive stock. Moreover, the producer may need to reconsider their employment levels if the demand varies significantly, which in some places incurs significant costs both in reduction and expansion. Adding manufacturing capability might not be as easy as finding a spare factory, either. All this additional flexibility is expensive for producers.

However, if a large, well-known retailer like Wal-Mart or Tesco (to name but two that come to mind immediately) comes along and commits to buying most or all of the production, a producer now has more certainty that the inventory will be sold and that it will not be paying people to do nothing or to suddenly have to change production lines to make new products, and so on. Even things like product variations can be minimised by having a single customer or few customers, and this reduces costs for the producer still further. Naturally, Wal-Mart would expect some of the savings to be passed on to them, and so this relationship benefits both parties. (It also produces a potential discount to be passed on to retail customers who may not be buying in bulk after all, but that is another matter.)

The Software Discount Store?

For software, even though the costs of replication have been driven close to nothing, the production of software certainly has a significant fixed cost: the work required to develop a viable product in the first place. Let us say that an organisation wishes to make and sell a non-niche product but needs to employ fifty people for two years to do so (although this would have been almost biblical levels of manpower for some successful software companies in the era of the microcomputer); thus one hundred person-years are invested in development. To just remain in business while selling “copies” of the software, one might need to sell one hundred thousand individual copies. That is if the company wants to just sell “licences” and not do things like services, consulting, paid support, and so on.

Now, the cost of each copy can be adjusted according to the number of sales. If things go better than expected, the prices could be lowered because the company will cover its costs more quickly than anticipated, but they may also raise the prices to take advantage of the desirability of the product. If things go worse than expected, the prices might be raised to bring in more revenue per sale, but such pricing decisions also have to consider the customer reaction where an increased price turns away customers who can no longer justify the expense. In some cases, however, raising the price might make the product seem more valuable and make it more attractive to potential customers, despite the initial lack of interest from such customers.

So, can one talk about economies of scale with regard to software as if it were a physical product or commodity? Not really. The days of needing to get more disks from the duplicator, more manuals from the printer, and to send more boxes to distributors are over, leaving the bulk of the expense in employing people to get the software written. And all those people developing the product are not producing more units by writing more code or spending more time in the office. One can argue that by adding more features they are generating more sales, but it is doubtful that the relationship between features and sales is so well defined: after a while, a lot of the new features will be superfluous for all but “power users”. One can also argue that by adding more features they are making the product seem more valuable, and so a higher price can be justified. To an extent this may be the case, but the relationship between price and sales is not always so well defined, either (despite attempts to do so). But certainly, you do not need to increase your “production capacity” to fulfil a sales need: whether you make one hundred or one million sales (or generate a tenth of or ten times the anticipated revenue) is probably largely independent of how many people were hired to write the code.

But does it make sense to consider bulk purchasing of software as a way of achieving savings? Not really. Unlike physical production, there is no real limit to how many units are sold to customers, and so beyond a certain threshold demanded by profitability, there is no need for anyone to commit to purchasing a certain number of units. Especially now that a physical component of a software product is unlikely to be provided in any transaction – the software is downloaded, the manual is downloaded, there is no “retail box”, no truck arriving at the customer, no fork-lift offloading pallets of the product – there is also no inventory sitting in a warehouse going unsold. It might be nice if someone paid a large sum of money so that the developers could keep working on the product and not have to be moved to some other project, but the constraints of physical products do not apply so readily here.

Who Benefits from Volume Licensing?

It might be said, then, that the “economies of scale” argument starts to break down when software is considered. Producers can more or less increase supply at will and at a relatively low cost, and they need only consider demand in order to break even. Beyond that point, everything is more or less profit and they deliver units at no risk to themselves. Certainly, a producer could use this to price their products aggressively and to pass on considerable savings to customers, but they have no obligation and arguably little inclination to do so for profitability reasons alone. Indeed, they probably want to finance new products and therefore need the money.

When purchasers of physical goods choose to buy in bulk, they do so to get access to savings passed on by the producer, and for some categories of products the practice of committing larger sums of money to larger purchases carries little risk. For example, an organisation might buy a larger quantity of toilet paper than it normally would – even to the point of some administrator complaining that “this must be more than we really need!” – and as long as the organisation had space to store it, it would surely be used over time with very little money wasted as a result.

But for software, any savings passed on by the producer are more discretionary than genuine products of commerce, and there is a real risk of buying “more than we really need”: a licence for an office application will not get “used up” when someone has “reached the end” of another licence; overspending on such capacity is just throwing money away. It is simply not in the purchaser’s interest to buy too many licences.

Now, software producers have realised that their customers are sensitive to this issue. Presumably, the notion of the site licence or “volume licensing” arose fairly quickly: some customers may have indicated that their needs were not so well-defined that they could say that they needed precisely one hundred copies of a product, and besides, their computer users might not have all been using the software at the same time, and so it might not make sense to provide everyone with a copy of a program when they could pass the disks around (or in later times use “floating licences”). So, producers want customers to feel that they are getting value for money and not spending too much, and thus the site licence was presumably offered as a way of stopping them from just buying exactly what they need, instead getting them to spend a bit more than they might like, but perhaps a bit less than they would need to if money were no object and per-unit pricing was the only thing on offer. (The other way of influencing the customer is, of course, the threat of audits by aggressive proprietary software organisations, but that is another matter.)

Regardless of the theory and the mechanisms involved, do customers benefit from site licences? Well, if they spend less on a site licence than they do on the list price of a product multiplied by the number of active users of that product, then they at least benefit from savings on the licensing fees, certainly. However, there are other factors involved, introducing other broader costs, that we will return to in a moment.

Do producers benefit from site licences? Almost certainly. They allow companies to opportunistically increase revenue by inviting customers to spend a bit more for “peace of mind” and convenience of administration (no more having to track all by yourself who is using which product and whether too many people are doing so because a “helpful” company will take care of it for you). If such a thing did not exist, customers would probably choose to act conservatively and more closely review their purchases. (Or they might just choose to embrace Free Software instead, of course.)

All You Won’t Eat

But it is the matter of what the customer needs that should interest us here. If customers did need to review their purchases more closely, they might find it hard to justify spending large sums on volume licences. After all, not everyone might be in need of some product that can theoretically be rolled out to everyone. Indeed, some people might prefer another product instead: it might be much more appropriate for their kind of work, or it might work better on their platform (or even actually work on their platform where the already-bought product does not).

And where the organisation’s purse strings are loosened when buying a site licence for a product in the first instance, the organisation may not be so forthcoming with finance to acquire other products in the same domain, even if there are genuine reasons for doing so. “You already have an office program you can use; why do you want us to buy another?” Suddenly, instead of creating opportunities, volume licensing eliminates them: if the realm of physical products worked like this, Tesco would offer only one brand of toilet paper and perhaps not even a particularly pleasant one at that!

But it doesn’t stop there. Some vendors bundle products together in volume licensing deals. “Why not indulge yourself with a package of products featuring the ones you want together with some you might like?” This is what customers are made to ask themselves. Suddenly, the justification for acquiring a superior product from a competitor of the volume licensing provider is subject to scrutiny. “You already have access to an intranet solution; why do you want us to spend time and money on another?” And so the supposedly generous site licence becomes a mechanism to rein in spending and even the mere usage of alternatives (which may be Free Software acquired at no cost), all because the acquisition cost of things that people are not already actively using are wrongly perceived as being “free”. “Just take advantage of the site licence!” is what people are told, and even if the alternatives are zero cost, the pressure will still be brought to bear because “we paid for things we could use, so let’s use them!”

And the Winner is…

With such blinkered thinking the customer can no longer sensibly exercise choice: it becomes too easy to constrain an organisation’s strategy based on what else is in the lucky dip of products included in the multiple product volume licensing programme. Once one has bought into such a scheme, there is a disincentive to look elsewhere for other solutions, and soon every need to be satisfied become phrased in terms of the solutions an organisation has already “bought”. Need an e-mail system? The solution now has to be phrased in terms of a single vendor’s product that “we already have”. And when such extra purchases merely add to proprietary infrastructure with proprietary dependencies, that supposedly generous site licence is nothing but bait on the end of the vendor’s fishing line.

We know who the real winner is here. The real loser is anyone having to compete with such schemes, especially anyone using open standards in their products, particularly anyone delivering Free Software using open standards. Because once people have paid good money for something, they will defend that “investment” even when it makes no real sense: this is basic human psychology at work. But the customer is the loser, too: what once seemed like a good deal will just result in them throwing good money after bad, telling themselves that it’s the volume of usage – the chance to sample everything at the “all you can eat” buffet – that makes it a “good investment”, never mind that some of the food at the buffet is unhealthy, poor quality, or may even make people ill.

The customer becomes increasingly “locked in”, unable to consider alternatives. The competition becomes “locked out”, unable to persuade the customer to migrate to open-standards-based solutions or indeed anything else, because even if the customer recognised their dependency on their existing vendor, the cost of undoing the mess might well be less predictable and less palatable than a subscription fee to that “preferred” vendor, appearing as an uncomfortably noticeable entry in the accounts that might indicate strategic ineptitude or wrongdoing – that a mistake has been made – which would be difficult to acknowledge and tempting to conceal. But when the outcome of taking such uncomfortable remedial measures would be lower costs, truly interoperable systems and vastly increased choice, it would be the right thing to do.

One might be tempted to just sit back and watch all this unfold, especially if one has no connection with any of the organisations involved and if the competition consists only of a bunch of proprietary software vendors. But remember this: when the customer is spending your tax money, you are the loser, too. And then you have to wonder who apart from the “preferred” vendor benefits from making you part of the losing team.

Rendition link to PRISM

DanielPocock.com | 22:39, Saturday, 08 June 2013

"Do as we say, not as we do"

DanielPocock.com | 22:31, Friday, 07 June 2013

Friday folly: EP requires proprietary software to register for workshop [Update]

Karsten on Free Software | 15:08, Friday, 07 June 2013

There’s a great workshop coming up at the European Parliament, on “Legal aspects of Free Software”. The official link is rather understated, but the speakers are first class [Update" here's the preliminary agenda]. They include Eben Moglen, economist and Free Software researcher Rishab Ghosh, FSFE’s very own Carlo Piana, and the project lead for Munich’s migration to Free Software, Jutta Kreyss. The workshop will take place on July 9 in Brussels, coinciding with RMLL, so a great many Free Software people will be in town.

So far, so good, and I’m very glad this event is taking place. Of course I want to be there, and registration is required. And to register, you need what? Adobe Acrobat.

*facepalm*

Fortunately, you can also register by mail. I’ve done so, and used the opportunity to raise some concerns about what this choice of procedure means for the EP’s relation to Europe’s citizens. In case you want to come for the workshop, and if you share these concerns, feel free to re-use whatever you see fit of the points below.

UPDATE: I’ve been assured by the people who have been working for about a year to make this workshop happen that they’ve actually tested the sign-up form in a number of Free Software PDF readers, and that they’re going above and beyond their obligations in making sure that people can also register by mail. So the blame for this doesn’t fall with the EP staffers running the sign-up process, who have apparently done the best the can, but rather with the people in charge of the EP’s overall software environment (and those setting their priorities). The problem just becomes more apparent because this particular workshop deals with Free Software.

 

Dear Madam, Sir,

I would like to register for the

JURI Workshop on LEGAL ASPECTS OF FREE AND OPEN SOURCE
SOFTWARE

taking place in the EP on July 9. Please find my registration data
below.

The workshop program is highly promising, with great speakers who
are leading experts in their field.

However, I would like to express my severe disappointment at your
decision to require would-be participants to sign up using Adobe
Acrobat. This choice means that in order to participate, I would
have to purchase and install non-free software on my computer,
which might not even work on my operating system.

The European Parliament must set itself the highest possible
standards for transparency and citizen participation. In this
instance, it has clearly failed to do so.

If I were to recommend a more suitable procedure for handling
registrations in an efficient manner, I would suggest setting up a
simple web form. This is easy, efficient, and is done frequently
at a wide range of institutions, including the European
Commission. I would expect the EP’s IT department to make
available such a tool available to all parliament staff; if this
is not already the case, I recommend requesting it from them.

As regards PDF files, you might be interested in the website
PDFreaders.org

http://pdfreaders.org/

which lists Free Software [1] PDF readers for the most widely used
operating systems.

Requiring people to use non-free software in order to
participate in the Parliament’s activities erects unnecessary
barriers between European citizens and their institutions. I urge
you to help reduce those barriers, rather than making them
stronger.

My registration data is as follows:
[...]

Best regards,

Karsten

 

[1] Free as in freedom, not price.

 

The mobile-first Web

Henri Bergius | 07:00, Friday, 07 June 2013

The growth of mobile web users is staggering. While some of us have been browsing the web on mobile devices for nearly ten years, most of the world population is only now getting there.

The number of mobile web users is already at 1.5 billion, which happens to be quite close to the total number of Internet users back in 2009.

And it is growing rapidly. In 2015 there will be an estimated 2 billion smartphone users which is quite close to the total number of Internet users currently.

In the developed world, this is likely to be a mixture of tablets, smartphones, and traditional desktop computers, with most users having at least two different web-capable devices. In the developing world, the smartphone is the computer.

Considering these statistics, it is insanity to design websites and services PC-first, with mobile only as an afterthought.

How to prepare

Just some years ago, the mobile web was a slum. Instead of getting full-featured websites, many sent us out to poorly-built and featureless m. sites. Now more and more sites go with responsive web design that makes the site itself adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions.

But even with responsive design, it is easy to go overboard. Tools like WordPress Jetpack and jQuery Mobile oversimplify the site itself by trying to make it look and feel like a native app. In the mobile-first world this is not the right way to go.

In The Rise of the Mobile-Only User content strategist Karen McGrane makes a valid point (emphasis added):

Mobile users should get the same content. It's frustrating and confusing for them if you only give them a little bit of what you offer on your "real" website. If you try to guess which subset of your content the mobile user needs, you're going to guess wrong. Deliver the same content as your desktop user sees. (If you think some of your content doesn't deserve to be on mobile, guess what — it doesn't deserve to be on the desktop either. Get rid of it.)

There is no pixel-perfect

In this new world users will access your content or software using a wildly varying set of devices. And each of them has the reasonable expectation of being able to access the full experience and the full set of features you're providing.

This changes web design substantially. Even in the old world of different PC browsers, pixel perfect web design was rarely that. With responsive design, it is even less so.

Instead:

• Think in visual components instead of full pages. The composition of a page out of these components can vary for different screen sizes
• Design the compositions always for at three screen form factors: a full-sized desktop or tablet screen, a smartphone screen, and the 7" tablet in between
• Make your user interface elements big enough to be used on inaccurate touch screens
• Never, ever require a plugin to access some content or functionality

CSS Media Queries make responding to different form factors quite easy. And besides that, they also make it easy to optimize for the different screen densities we now have. This way your images will look sharp on anything the users have, from the "retina-class devices" to the lowest-specced Chinese smartphone, while requiring the user to only download the assets that their device can utilize.

The devices people use to access the services you provide will vary greatly not only in their display capabilities, but also in the ways you can do input. Some will have mice and physical keyboards, but an increasing amount will instead have a touchscreen. For these users, it is a big service to use the correct HTML5 input types so that the on-screen keyboards and widgets can adapt to the content being entered.

The web is not native

The web is its own platform, and as such it is foolish to try and mimic traditional desktop applications. It will never feel quite right whatever you do.

It is a lot better to accept this and fully embrace the unique advantages of the web platform:

• The web is an universal runtime that works on 100% of the computing devices your users have
• There are no gatekeepers telling what you can publish, and no middlemen taking a cut of whatever you sell online
• The web is built out of URLs that users can easily share with each other, and continue using when they switch devices
• URLs also allow any application on the web to link to any screen or state of another application
• It is just as easy to provide content as it is to provide functional applications on the web

Every major software company on the planet has their own web browser, and the competition between these is fierce. This will ensure that over time, the web will keep on getting better and faster. Compare this to traditional software platforms that can easily stagnate or get abandoned. Thanks to the standard protocols it also allows you to use any technology of your choosing for the server side of your software.

Paul Graham put it well in his The other road ahead from 2001:

And you don't have to know if you bet on Web-based applications. No one can break that without breaking browsing. The Web may not be the only way to deliver software, but it's one that works now and will continue to work for a long time. Web-based applications are cheap to develop, and easy for even the smallest startup to deliver.

Things are getting better

As somebody who has been developing for the web for nearly twenty years the rate the web developer experience keeps improving is sometimes dizzying.

We get used to some limitations in the stack, and then suddenly something comes along and removes that shortcoming. We're still exploring the new kinds of designs and visual experiences technologies like Media Queries and WebGL make possible, just like it took years for the community to find best practices around things like AJAX.

And yet new amazing things keep pouring in. My personal favourite recently has been Web Components which gives a standard way to provide reusable widgets on the web, and to do things like data binding and templating. This alone will make a lot of the popular frameworks and libraries obsolete.

Just watch this video and see how much easier web development is becoming:

<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="281" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0g0oOOT86NY" width="500"></iframe>

The current work on standardizing Web Payments together with more grassroots efforts like BitCoin promise to add better ways to do business on the web. This should remove the last big advantage of native applications in that they're easier (but very expensive) to monetize via app stores and in-app payments.

Linked Data on the web and new features like Yandex Islands make it easier to connect web applications and data on the web together. Tools like my Create.js make the web easier to edit, and Web Intents promise even closer integration between web apps.

Each of these will make the web richer and better. Each of them will allow new startups to be built, and new meaningful connections to happen over the internet, many of these using mobile devices.

It is an exciting time to be a web developer.

GNU Xnee 3.16 (‘No Show Jones’) released

hesa's Weblog » Free Software | 21:51, Thursday, 06 June 2013

We are pleased to announce the availability of GNU Xnee 3.16

GNU Xnee is a suite of programs that can record, replay and distribute
user actions under the X11 environment. Think of it as a robot that can
imitate the job you just did. GNU Xnee can be used to:
    Automate tests
    Demonstrate programs
    Distribute actions
    Record and replay 'macro'
    Retype the content of a file

Getting the Software

   ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/xnee/xnee-3.16.tar.gz
   ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/xnee/xnee-3.16.tar.gz.sig

or one of the mirror sites as found in:

   http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html

Checksums

  md5sum:

d70f26e135ebf5b1a307f1434c451eaf xnee-3.16.tar.gz
  cksum:

368848631 1798348 xnee-3.16.tar.gz

New in this release

New features:

Gnee can record XInput events

* Fixed bugs:

Savannah:

Fedora:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=962456

And the name “No Show Jones”? It’s a tribute to one of my favorite singers of all time, George Jones. He passed away in April earlier this year. George earned his nickname from his habit of not showing up at shows.

Horseplay in Public Procurement? “Standards!”

Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog | 16:46, Thursday, 06 June 2013

There is a classic XKCD comic strip where the programmer, “slacking off” in the office and taking a break from doing work, clearly engaging in horseplay, issues the retort “Compiling!” to get his supervisor or peers off his back. It is seen as the ultimate excuse for not doing one’s work, immediately curtailing any further investigation of what really is going on in the corridor. Having recently been investigating some strategic public sector purchasing decisions, it occurred to me that something similar is going on in that area as well.

There’s an interesting case that came up a few years ago: Oslo municipality sought to acquire infrastructure for e-mail and related functionality. The scope of the tender covered “at least 30000 accounts” for client and server software, services and assistance, which is a pretty big tender but not unexpected given that the municipality is one of the largest single employers in Norway with almost 50000 employees (more statistics available here). Unfortunately, the additional documents are no longer available (and are generally not publicly available at the state procurement portal – you have to register as an interested party), but they are quoted in various places. Translating one particular requirement…

“Oslo municipality has standardised on Microsoft Office as office productivity software. It is therefore expected that solutions use MS Outlook 2003 and later as client.”

Two places where the offending requirements are reproduced are in complaints to the state procurement panel: 2009/124 and 2009/153. In these very similar complaints, it is pointed out that alternatives to Outlook can be offered as options (this is in the original tender), but that the municipality would only test proposed solutions with Outlook. As justification for insisting on Outlook compatibility, the municipality claimed that they had found “six different large companies of relevant software in connection with the drafting of the requirements”, and thus there was a basis for real competition. As a result, both complaints were rejected.

The Illusion of Compatibility

Now, one might claim that it is perfectly reasonable to want to acquire systems that work with the ones you already have. It is a bit like saying, “I’ve bought all this riding equipment: of course I want a horse!” The deeper issue here is whether anyone should be allowed to specify product compatibility to limit competition. In other words, when you just need transport to get around, why have you made your requirements so specific that you will only ever be getting a horse?

It is all very well demanding compatibility with a specific product, but when the means by which compatibility can be achieved are controlled by the vendor of that product, it is never going to be a fair competition for anyone trying to provide compatibility for their own separate products and solutions, especially when the vendor of the specified product is known to have used compatibility breakage to deliberately undermine the viability of competitors’ products. One response to this pitfall is to insist that those writing procurement tenders specify standards instead of products and that these standards must be genuinely open and not de-facto proprietary standards.

Unfortunately, the regulators of procurement do not seem to go even this far. The Norwegian government states that public sector institutions must support various standards, although the directorate concerned appears to have changed these obligations from the original directive and now insists that the dubious, forcibly- and incompletely-standardised Office Open XML document format must be accepted by the public sector in communications; they have also weakened the Internet publishing requirements for public sector institutions by permitting the use of various encumbered, cartel-controlled audio and video formats. For these changes, entertained in a review process, we can thank the likes of Statistics Norway who wanted “Word format” as well as OOXML to be permitted in the list of acceptable “standards”.

In any case, such directives only cover the surface of public sector activity, and the list of standards do not in general cover anything more than storage and interchange formats plus basic communications standards. This leaves quite a gap where established Internet standards exist but are not mandated, thus allowing proprietary protocols and technologies to insert themselves into infrastructure and pervert the processes of procurement and systems integration.

The Pretense of “Standards!”

But even if open standards were mandated in the public sector – a worthy and necessary measure – that wouldn’t mean that our work to ensure a level playing field – fairness in procurement – would be done. Because vendors can always advertise compliance with standards, they can still insist that their products be considered in any procurement contest, and even if those products do notionally support standards it does not mean that they will end up using them when deployed. For example, from the case of the Oslo municipality e-mail system, the councillor with responsibility for finance and development indicated the following:

“Oslo municipality is a complicated and comprehensive organisation and must take existing integration with specialist/bespoke systems into account. A procurement of other [non-Microsoft] end-user software will therefore result in unnecessary increases in costs for the municipality.”

In other words, even if existing software was acquired under the pretense that it supported standards, in deployment it may actually only function with other software using proprietary mechanisms, and the result of this is that newly-acquired software must also support these proprietary mechanisms. And so, a proprietary infrastructure grows, actively repelling components that employ open standards, with its custodians insisting that it is the fault of standards-compliant software that such an infrastructure would need to be dismantled almost in its entirety and replaced if even one standards-compliant component were to be admitted.

Who benefits the most from this? The vendor peddling the proprietary platforms and technologies that enable this morass of interdependency, of course. Make no mistake: any initial convenience promised by such a vendor fades away when the task of having to pursue an infrastructure strategy not dictated by outside interests is brought to bear on the purchaser. But such tasks are work, of course, and if there’s a way of avoiding it and insisting it doesn’t need attending to, a distraction can always be found.

And so, the horseplay continues under the excuse of “Standards!” when there is no real intent to uphold them or engage in the real work of maintaining a sustainable infrastructure that does not exclude open competition or channel public money to preferred vendors. Unlike the character in the comic strip whose code probably is still compiling, certain public sector institutions would have experienced a compilation error and be found out. It appears, unfortunately, that it is our job to peer around the cubicle partition and see what is happening on screen and perhaps to investigate the noises coming from the corridor. After all, our institutions don’t seem to be particularly concerned about doing so.

How to stay in the HTML5 trail when you clear your cookies

anna.morris's blog | 13:41, Thursday, 06 June 2013

I recently made a video and how-too guide for Documentfreedom.org about how to watch videos on YouTube using HTML5. You can checkout that info here.

The problem with the YouTube “trial” system is that it uses a cookie to record your “in the trial” status. Many of us who wish to join the future by using HTML5 for video and audio also like to clear out cookies regularly, to avoid being “followed” by creepy internet marketing people: however, by doing this we also clear the cookie which keeps them in the HTML5 trial.

Below are two guides for how to keep the HTML5 trial cookie whilst deleting others. The first guide is simple and requires little future action, but less effective at isolating the cookie: the second guide is slightly less simple, requires more regular action in the future, targets the exact cookie for the HTML5 trial. This guide is only for Firefox users for now, but “Method Three” invites people to share there knowledge of how to achieve the same thing in other browsers, and through other methodologies.

Method One: very simple.

This first method is very simple. It assumes we want to remove all cookies when we close Firefox and that all cookies from YouTube will be accepted (or “Whitelisted.” This method is therefore less effective than method two, as there will probably be other cookies relating to advertising etc from YouTube stored as well as the HTML5 trial cookie. However, you won’t need to take any further steps or routines relating to the this topic once you are done. Once you have followed this guide, you will be all set to forget about this issue (or at least until you next upgrade your browser when you may need to await add-on compatibility). For this method we will use Selectivecookiedelete, which is licensed under the GPL compatible Mozilla Public License 1.1.

1. Clear all cookies by going Tools > Clear Recent History, selecting cookies and clicking Clear Now

2.. Download the app here by clicking

After download is finished, you will be prompted to restart your browser. Once you have restarted go to www.youtube.com/html5 …

…and click to join the html5 trial.

Then go to Tools > Selective Cookie Delete > Show Preferences

We want to add our HTML5 cookie into the “whitelist” box, so, we click Edit Site List and we see the following dialogue box:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We need to click on “youtube.com” (not accounts.youtube.com) and then click on the right pointing arrow

 

 

And then we should see youtube.com on the list of websites who’s cookies will not be deleted:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you wish to add other sites to this list, you may do so, for example, I would be happy to permanently keep cookies from my FSFE blog by adding blogs.fsfe.org to my whitelist. I know that these cookies are mostly related to my blog preferences and I know that FSFE is not / unlikely to be using cookies in a way that is unacceptable to me. However, I am less happy with stroring google’s cookies (even though I use their services every day) because Google has a poor privacy record. You will see cookies from most sites appear in the list after you have visited them, so you may want to check back here a few times over the next few days and see who else you wish to whitelist.

Click Update Sites when you are done with this stage.

We have only one more step to take to make our cookie deletion automatic:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We need to check the “Automatically remove cookies ….” box. This means that all cookies, except those on our whitelist, will be deleted when we close our browser.

Note that it may still be worth removing cookies periodically while you are still using your browser, for example, while you are browsing shops on-line. You do this by going Tools > Selective Cookie Delete > Show Preferences > Shave preferences and remove cookies. One reason for clearing cookies mid-session rather than only at the end is that there have been reports in the news of, for example, airline companies using cookies to artificially inflate prices. However, bear in mind that your shopping cart contents and previously viewed products may also be based on cookies so you need to take steps to avoid losing the links to products you want to buy.

Method Two: more effective.

This method is a little more complex, but not by any means difficult for an average computer user. The main difference is that we will specify the exact cookie that we want to keep, rather than keeping all cookies from YouTube. In this method we will use the add-on Cookies Manager+ both for keeping hold of our HTML5 Trial cookie and also, for ease of use, for general cookie deletion (ie, we will use it instead of the Tools > Clear Recent History menu). Cookies Manager+ is licensed under the GPL compatible Mozilla Public License 1.1

1) First we go to Tools > Add-ons and search for “cookie”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We need to look down the list for “Cookies Manager +” and click the install button.

 

Wait for the download to finish and restart as prompted

 

 

 

Once you have restarted go to Tools > Cookies Manager+ and you will see the Cookies Manager+ Dialogue appear. First of all, you are going to clear all your cookies so you can start afresh. To do this, tick the Select All box on the top left of the list of cookies. Then click on Delete.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Confirm to Delete All.

 

 

 

 

Now close this Cookie Control+ window.

Now, you need to go to www.youtube.com/html5 to join the html5 trial.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here you need to click on the Join the HTML5 Trail button. This will change the web page to say “You are currently in the HTML5 Trial”

 

 

 

This action has set a preference cookie on your hard drive: this means that each time you visit YouTube the website will recognise you as a brilliant and forward thinking individual (and you will see videos in HTML5). You can, using Cookie Manager+ see this cookie. Go to Tools > Cookies Manager+ and you will that several new cookies have appeared. One of them is from youtube.com and is labelled PREF. This is the cookie that we want to always keep when we detele our cookies, because this is the cookie that ensures we view YouTube videos in HTML5 when possible.

 

So now we must ask our Cookies Manager+ add-on to make a back up of this cookie. We select it, just the youtube.com / PREF cookie:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We now go to File > Backup/Restore > Backup Selected and choose a good place to store our cookie. I made a new folder called “cookies_i_like” in my documents folder.

 

 

 

 

 

Then, to try out our new backup and restore system, we must delete all our cookies again and restore the html5 cookie using our new backup file.

First of all, tick the Select All box on the top left of the list of cookies and click Delete.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next go to File > Backup/Restore > Restore All

We then need to find our backup file that we made earlier, select it and click open. Our html5 trial cookie will then be resorted and we will continue see YouTube videos more freely by default.

We can double check this by going back to the www.youtube.com/html5 and checking that we are still “in the HTML5 trial.”

Method Three? You tell me!

If you are an expert, please get in touch!

My ideas for improved methods are:

1) For GUI users this add-on seems better because it can no only isolate the exact cookie, but can automatically restore it (rather than the manual restore you need to use in method two): however, I could not get that feature to work, and still had to manually restore.

2) I found a script to isolate and keep the HTML5 trial cookie, however, I have no idea how to use it. Is this script effective? Could you write a beginners guide in how to use it?

3) Could this be built into Firefox? There was some discussion in the Tor project about building HTML5-trial into the browser: given that Firefox has worked so hard on HTML5 video, could we ask for trial inclusion to be the default?

4) Who can write guides for other browsers? So far I have had little success with HTML5 video in Chrome, however, if you know more, a guide would be great! Also, here is some information about the issue in Seamonkey.

5) What about Vimeo? I have also had very little success watching HTML5 video on Vimeo – what about you? Could you write a guide? Is HTM5 video in Vimeo cookie based too?

Ideas for more cookies to keep:

Which other in/out cookies should we think about keeping?

You may wish to look at locating and keeping the cookie mentioned in this video. This cookie is involved in disabling targeted advertising (but it doesn’t stop the data collection in the first place).

Do you have any more suggestions? Post a comment or email me at anna . morris @ fsfe.org

 

Cutting out a photo and removing white edges in GIMP

anna.morris's blog | 19:41, Wednesday, 05 June 2013

This Blog is taken from my Ethical Pets Wholesale blog for small businesses.

Here is the problem:

When you view this image on a white background it looks fine, but when you view it on a black background (or other dark colour) then there are little white bits around the image. It may be tempting to try and remove these with an eraser effect – but that will take a very long time and won’t look as good. Here is a simple way of removing them using a mask.*

This guide uses GIMP – the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. The GIMP is a Free Software photo and image (raster) editor and you can download it, gratis, here..

Right click on the layer in your layers dialogue and click “Layer to Image Size”

Once you have opened your image, make sure that your image is on a layer which fills the whole screen by right clicking on the layer in your Layers dialogue and clicking Layer to Image Size.

Next You need to duplicate the layer. To do this you right click on the layer again in your Layers dialogue and this time choose Duplicate.

Right click on your layer and select “Duplicate”.

 

Next turn the duplicate layer into a black and white version. To do this click on the layer, and in the GIMP menus go to Colours > Threshold. When the Threshold dialogue appears drag the arrow all the way to the left. You are aiming to have an image where the background it totally black (or transparent) and the area with your image in is totally white.

Other dialogues, such as the Brightness-Contrast option, also under Colours, may be helpful in this stage of the process.

Use the Select by Colour button to select the BLACK / TRANSPARENT area (not the white)

Select the black / transparent area of your new layer using the Select by Colour tool. Go to the Select menu and click Grow. Choose a small number of pixels, depending on how much white you have. I have chosen 4 pixels. Click OK.

If you zoom in (use the plus / add key) you will see that the selection is now a few pixels closer to the centre of your logo than it was before.

Press your Delete key (depending on your current layers and transparency set up you may or may not see a noticeable change). Go to Select > None.

Right click on your layer in your Layers dialogue again and this time select Add Layer Mask. In the Add Layer Mask dialogue click Greyscale copy of layer. You will see your layer mask appear next to the layer in your Layers Dialogue.

Go to Edit > Select All (or try using Control+A) and the go to Edit > Cut (or use Control+X). Click on your logo layer then right click and Add Layer Mask. This time choose White (full opacity).

You will see a new Layer Mask next to your logo.

Go to Edit > Paste (or Press Control + V). You will see the layer mask you made with your Duplicated layer appear in the layer mask for your original logo layer.

If you now look at your logo with a black background behind it (try Layer > New Layer if you need a dark layer) you will see that the white bits have been cut away (they are actually only hidden at this stage, if you right click on your logo Layer and click Disable Layer Mask you can see your logo is untouched).

If there are any white parts left, right click on your logo layer (not the duplicate) in your Layers dialogue and click Mask to Selection. Go to Select > Grow and chose a small number of pixels again. Press OK. Press your delete key. Notice that more of your logo has been hidden. Repeat this until all of the white parts are hidden. Save your file at this point especially (File > Save or Control+S)

Last of all, you need to apply your layer. It’s probably worth saving the document as something else first to allow you to make changes to your mask in the future if you need to. I saved mine as Logo_Perfect.xcf (xcf is the gimp format. I will export it as a .png or a .jpg later). When you have saved your file right click on your logo layer in your Layers dialogue and choose Apply Layer Mask. You will see the mask has gone and the white parts have now been properly cut away, and not just hidden.

You have done it! Well done!

*You could use this guide to cut out the whole image from scratch. This guide is is useful too (but out of date). Also, there may be other ways to do the task I have described, this is just the way I figured it out first

 

Why I am switching back to *BSD

stargrave's blog | 19:13, Wednesday, 05 June 2013

I was FreeBSD user for six years and worked with it’s versions from 5.0 to 7.0. There appeared to much work with GNU/Linux related subsystems exclusively and it was easier for me to switch yet another UNIX-like operating system temporarily.

I tried several distributions but stayed exactly on Debian. My requirements were:

• mature, stable and reliable system without any bleeding edge software. I do not worry that there is no latest version of Firefox for example. Included in stable Debian’s distribution one fully satisfies me. Maybe it is not so fast as can be, but it is mature and working.
• less or more permanent distributions overall architecture without any sudden surprises after yet another packages upgrade. Of course sometimes it can not be skipped, but serious changes are always must be in a major software/distribution version that is rather seldom event.
• big collection and wide availability of various software. Debian has one of the biggest packages collection. And all of their binary compiled versions can be easily installed using single command. Of course you must trust it’s maintainers. I trust and rely on them.
• it’s basic installation should not have anything that I am going to remove as a first step. Just minimal bunch of tools and daemons. Ubuntu for example does not provide that: I have to remove huge piles of GNOME-related things and only then install my preferred ones.

Debian even now is the single distribution that can fit in those requirements. But several weeks ago I was very disappointed hearing that most part of it’s developers support integration with systemd.

You see, modern GNU/Linux-es are not a UNIX-like OS with UNIX-way hackerish concepts anymore. UNIX-es in my opinion always were very beautiful and smart programmers creations with really very elegant tasks solving. Most GNU/Linux-es lost that property.

Several decades there were quite few interprocess communication choices. Most time it is either plain text or, unfortunately, binary data floating between conveyors, pipes, domain or network sockets. Each daemon representing any subsystem can be less or more uniquely determined by socket path of pair of network address and port. In nearly all cases it can satisfy anybody.

Even at the very early days of UNIX systems hackers preferred plain text and similar driven protocols and file formats. Though rather relatively big SMTP responses are not as good as binary ones could be, exceptionally on that time slow links, hackers preferred human readable choices anyway, because they are simple, easy to debug, easy to maintain and easy to use.

But GNU/Linux does not like idea of beauty clever decisions and long time proven software. It’s developers (I can not call them hackers in most cases anymore) have to invent the wheel again and create yet another incompatible solution like several IPCs before and DBus itself. It requires heavy dependencies, it does not use well known socket-like paths and addresses, it uses unreadable binary protocol, it is slow and does neither guarantee any delivery nor has any buffering queue.

Access to various low level hardware devices used simple device node filesystem-like access. Of course many of them dictate standards existence and audio has one: Open Sound System, represented by entries inside /dev. Easy to use, easy to implement proven and mature system. If you want to stream audio data other the network you can easily use UNIX power to connect it for example with either pipe or network socket.

GNU/Linux folks do not understand that elegant solution and invent ALSA, aRts, ESD, NAS and PulseAudio at last. So many reinvented creations for rather simple thing. Of course OSS is not the right solution if you have to mix various sound inputs and outputs of both hardware and software modules. But JACK does this job pretty well. GNU/Linux developers do not think so again.

What about operating system’s initialization part? You have various daemons that should be started and controlled. You have to do various file system related steps, manage process execution somehow. All that tasks are done for a long time using shell interpreter, intended to solve them. As a fact each daemon has small shell script used to control server’s behaviour. Hackers need to glue those daemons together. For me, it seems to be very elegant solution to include trivial plain-text metainformation as script’s comments and to create symbolic links dependent on that metainfo with number included to force sorting done right, as in System V.

UNIX-way is to have many small tools, where each of them does single job, but does it well. Simple separate initialization system, simple separate logging system, simple separate shell interpreters, simple IPC socket-oriented libraries, simple daemons, cron, inetd and so on. Looks simple, clear and nice.

You are wrong! Modern GNU/Linux-es can not accept that, because they are missing written on compiled language (does not depend on already existing software for controlling process flows (shells)) program, with own IPC dependency, with own declarative language bloated combine of initialization, logging, cron/at-ing, inetd-ing and DBus/socket listening systems at once. Wait, systemd is pretty modular: several dozens of separate executable. Hackerish SysV is just a shell interpreter with several shell-scripts. Thirty years ago logs have been written on rather small hard drives in plain text, but today seems that hard drives became much smaller and more expensive and systemd decided to write human unreadable and unprocessable with any kind of sed/awk/shell/perl tools binary logs.

I still do not understand why GNOME and derivative distributions (I am sure that udev, systemd, dbus and GNOME are single aggregate) does not use very simple mailcap-files to decide what to do with various kinds of data. mailcap contains plain text lines with data content type and shell script code saying what program you need to run and apply to data. Just find the line by it’s content type and execute related command line. This can be done with single sed call. Just simple plain text file to rule all user’s software preferences. GNOME has to prerun software that will register itself on DBus (should be already running), then another software must create proper message, send it over DBus hoping that someone with catch it doing probably what user wants. It is awful.

And at last I see in Debian maillists that they are going to remove local sendmail server. I see what is happening: when systems are created by very clever hackers — they are very cool for educated technicians and other hackers. When ordinary labour crowd is falling in this world: it will be ruined. Usenet was destroyed like that. Email etiquette has mostly disappeared and replaced by top-posted huge quoted HTML messages, after user-friendly email clients born.

Security is not compatible with user-friendliness. Simple clever hacks are not compatible with classical user’s world of view. Developers never speaks users on the same language. There is always separation of developer-friendly and user-friendly. They can not coexists together, as like servers are pretty different from desktops.

Current Debian is very developer and server friendly system, while Ubuntu is aimed to be user-friendly. Systemd is great for desktop requirements, so let’s integrate it to desktop system. Why one is going to replace cron/at, SysV/rc, inetd, sockets, syslog, devnodes with single all-in-one bloated monolithic combine and remove sendmail? What will stay from UNIX itself? Arch Linux is going to mess /bin and /sbin with /usr/bin. So I won’t even find /bin/sh in that OS. It is not UNIX-like system anymore. It is yet another unmaintainable crap of compiled monolithic POSIX-compatible (hope so) code.

Of course there are really true hackerish UNIX-like GNU/Linux distributions, but all known ones require much manual work with them. Free software *BSD does not, as it has cool port collections and well maintained high quality overall system’s design (not a pile of absolutely different software pieces).

Calendar synchronisation between Nokia N900 and the Calypso CalDAV server

Colors of Noise - Entries tagged planetfsfe | 17:50, Wednesday, 05 June 2013

One of the replies to the post about Debian's last groupware meeting was from Patrick Ohly of syncevolution fame pointing out that syncevolution already implements calendar autodetection for CalDAV calendars as described in draft-daboo-srv-caldav-10.

While looking at the code I noticed that there's a backend for the N900s calendar by Ove Kåven as well.

When I tried Ove's latest package on my N900 it lead to an immediate crash when doing a:

syncevolution --print-items target-config@webdav calendar

According to Patrick the bug was supposed to be fixed in recent versions so I set up scratchbox and built a newer git snapshot for maemo (sources). This wouldn't crash but didn't show up any items either. It turned out to be a minor bug in calypso returning no content type for REPORT queries which resulted in libneon discarding the whole reply (now already fixed in calypso upstream).

With this out of the way setting up synchronisation is quiet simple:

# Configuration
CALDAV_SERVER=192.168.0.10
syncevolution --configure username=<username> password=<password> \
              calendar/backend=caldav calendar/database=https://${CALDAV_SERVER}:5233/private/my_calendar \
              target-config@webdav calendar
syncevolution --configure --template SyncEvolution_Client sync=none syncURL=local://@webdav username= password= webdav
syncevolution --configure sync=two-way backend=calendar webdav calendar

You should then be able to print the items on the local (N900) and from the remote (CalDAV server) end:

# This lists the current calendar items on the server
syncevolution --print-items target-config@webdav calendar
# This lists the current calendar items on the N900
syncevolution --print-items @default calendar

And from there on sync away:

# initial slow sync
syncevolution --sync slow webdav
# from there on
syncevolution webdav

The syncevolution source code has great documentation about debugging problems (e.g. src/backends/webdav/README). So check that in case you run into problems. The tl;dr version is

SYNCEVOLUTION_DEBUG=1 src/syncevolution loglevel=10 --print-items target-config@webdav calendar

to debug CalDAV related problems. In case you need to run syncevoluton from source be sure to set these beforehand:

export SYNCEVOLUTION_TEMPLATE_DIR=$PWD/src/templates/
export SYNCEVOLUTION_XML_CONFIG_DIR=$PWD/src/syncevo/configs/

On the CalDAV side I used current Calypso git which (with some additional minor fixes) now also interoperates nicely with Iceowl/Icowl-Extension aka Sunbird/Lightning on the desktop side. There's also an ITP for it. So it'll hopefully end up in Debian soon.

The Gold Standard in Free Communications Technology

DanielPocock.com | 16:37, Wednesday, 05 June 2013

kdenlive image clips always wrong size – part two

anna.morris's blog | 15:20, Wednesday, 05 June 2013

Hi, this post part two of a thread relating to a forum post on the kdenlive forums here where I am discussing the issue of image clips. Part one is here.

So I now see that if I import a video clip, choose the recommended profile suggested by kdenlive, and then add a image clip from the same camera then the problem desists:

there are the settings and here is the image showing perfectly

however, then photos from other cameras have the problem: here are ones from my phone, my nikon coolpix and my webcam:

Also, my pink clip which is 1080 x 1440 looks the same:

I accept that I may be a little slow on the uptake with understanding this, and that, as I am not from a video background, I don’t know much about the size that pictures are supposed to be – however,

a) I still think there must be a more attractive way for kdenlive to handle the issue and

b) There needs to be a clear manual somewhere relating to this issue for other people like me (of which there are many!). I am happy to write it if i have help!

 

Git – A New Training

Computer Floss | 13:12, Wednesday, 05 June 2013

Git continues to encroach upon the space of existing version control systems. More and more development projects are opting for Git over the likes of CVS and Subversion. But Git is not an easy system to handle. You’ll need someone to give you a nice, gentle introduction. I’ve long since elbowed out all other version… read more

Ruby on Rails – A New Training

Computer Floss | 12:57, Wednesday, 05 June 2013

In May, I spent a week in Hamburg giving a training in Ruby on Rails. I’ve already been a team-member on two Rails development projects, and it was as much a joy to teach as it is develop. Ruby is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language that particularly encourages simplicity and elegance in its users. Rails… read more

More trainings. Updates will follow

Computer Floss | 12:42, Wednesday, 05 June 2013

My intense three-weeks/three-trainings period is now over. I’ve been all over Germany teaching and training various IT subjects, and now I’m home for some rest and recovery. A couple of the trainings were actually new courses that I offer. I’ll write a couple of follow-up posts with details about them later… maybe… I’m enjoying Berlin… read more