‘Til All Are One

Two weeks ago, we had the Education Expo.

Here’s my report, as co-ordinator of the Linux Australia stand:

Education Expo
Sat 14 to Sun 15 June
Rosehill Racecourse, Sydney

The Education Expo is an annual trades show targeted towards the K-12 educational space. Visitors consist of families and educators. Linux Australia once again had a stand, with volunteers spreading the word about free and open source software.

As always, we were very successful. With each passing year, the level of awareness of FOSS noticeably improves. Whereas at previous shows we would spend much energy expounding the basic concepts of FOSS/Linux, this year most people had either heard of it or were already using FOSS products such as Firefox and OpenOffice.org.

One thing we did differently this year was place more focus on FOSS running on Windows. Our past efforts have been meet with some resistance, as installing a different operating system posed a barrier to entry that many would not surmount. We had plenty of copies of the OpenEducationDisc to distribute, in addition to Fedora, Ubuntu, Edubuntu and Mandriva.

The fact that the NSW Dept of Education is migrating over 40,000 PCs across the state to OpenOffice.org was a useful selling point as well.

Our marketing efforts have been improving with each event. Our message is becoming more refined, and our leaflets are becoming more relevant. On the technical side, FOSS is becoming easier and more accessible, with projects such the aforementioned OpenEducationDisc and Wubi leading the way.

Our Web presence is improving, too. It’s far easier to point a newbie to just one easy-to-remember URL instead of confusing them with a list. In addition, I built an education portal for Linux Australia just in time for the expo.

There were at least two other stands that were FOSS-friendly. In fact, one of the largest stands were demonstrating their Web-based software product on about ten computers, all of which were running Ubuntu. Other stands expressed real interest when approached.

Other highlights of our presence included:

• OLPC XO laptops (from OLPC Australia)
• Intel Classmate PCs (from Mandriva Australia)
• ASUS Eee PCs
• laptops showing Edubuntu

Rodger Dean has some photos of the event.

A big thanks to everyone who helped at the stand:

• Ashley Lynn
• Ashley Maher
• Brendan Puckeridge
• David Andresen
• Gloria Arnold
• Harrison Conlin
• John Arnold
• Megha Kanth
• Pia Waugh
• Rodger Dean
• Vicki Burke

A special thank you goes to Melissa Draper, who was instrumental in ensuring the success of the stand in more ways than one.

LotD:  Insurance company bets health on open source — I’m quite heavily involved in this project, so needless to say I’m proud of what we’ve achieved

Those who remember my ancient quest for the perfect IRC solution might be interested in these posts by Aaron Toponce explaining how to couple a remote irssi session with GUI notification. I’m still quite happy with my current Bip + Xchat combination, but I’ve always lusted after the 1337ness of irssi. Icecap looks intriguing, but my first instinct tells me that their solution is over-engineered.

Note: If you see duplicated words in the above post, I am aware of them. Wordpress is doing something funny and I can’t figure out what it is. When I get the time I’ll upgrade to 2.5.

LotD: Ubuntu theme for Symbian S60v3 (works on my Nokia N95)

Simon and Lindsay: EasyTAG is indeed a useful tool for tagging many music files at once. While EasyTAG does automate a lot of the work, it is still quite a laborious process. This really grinds when you’re trying to manage a large music collection. What if your tagger worked more like your ears and brain — it just listened to the music and worked out what song was playing?

Enter Picard, stage left.

Picard ‘listens’ to your music and ascertains an audio fingerprint of each track. Using this information, along with more traditional data such as existing filenames and tags, it consults various online sources to deduce the details of the track and populate the metadata fields. I’ve found the results to be amazingly accurate. Sometimes it finds multiple matches, and it can occasionally get confused if the same track is available on different albums (e.g. a single, an original album and a ‘best-of’ compilation). If you have some idea of what the track is, you can lend Picard a hand by manually adding a more useful filename or some tags. This is where EasyTAG works well with Picard, since Picard isn’t geared towards manual tag editing. Still, it’s bloody impressive nonetheless.

As an album-based tagger, Picard behaves somewhat differently from file-based taggers like EasyTAG. It can take some getting used to, and it might be less accurate for people who prefer to collect single songs and not entire albums. If you’re like me and do compile full albums, it can do clever things like ascertain that you have the ‘White Album’ (or part of it) if it sees ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ as well as ‘Revolution 9’. The developers have recognised that the UI does need some love, but once you’re used to it it isn’t too bad.

Picard is a mass-tagger, so drag a whole stack of music files onto it and watch it do its work. It’ll try and group your music into albums. To correct allocations, drag their entries to arrange them in the way you please (or drag them away if nothing is suitable). Depending on how esoteric your music tastes are, you should find that most tracks are handled fairly accurately. If you sign up for a MusicBrainz account, you can submit your changes for others to benefit.

Addendum: If you’re using Ubuntu, don’t forget to install libtunepimp5-mp3 for MP3 support.

LotD: Excellent speech by Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop Per Child. I would especially recommend that the naysayers listen to it.

George Orwell’s classic allegory, Animal Farm, presents many perspectives on human behaviour and society. One of these is how people can be led and manipulated through the control of information. In the story, the Seven Commandments formed a de facto constitution for the Animalistic society. Since only a handful of animals could read, the rest were dependent upon what they were told was written. Gradually, the writing was cunningly altered to the benefit of the pigs above all other animals, and the populace was taught to not trust their recollections of what was written in the past.

What made this subversion possible was the inability of most animals to read. The two animals that could read (aside from the pigs) chose not to do anything about what they saw. Amongst other things, the right to access and read information is an important cornerstone of democracy.

This is where open file formats come in. As our lives become increasingly defined by electronic records, there needs to be a way for independent viewing and auditing. Paper is easily read, but computer files require software to decypher them. Imagine if you needed special (and expensive) glasses just to read the letter that you yourself wrote only a few years ago.

There has been a fair amount of discussion in the press regarding the OpenDocument and the so-called ‘Open’ XML formats. The primary focus of this reporting thus far has been on the political and technical facets. This is slowly changing, as the importance of long-term data preservation and freedom of information become apparent to ordinary folk.

The BBC has published a report on the problem, and discusses how the UK National Archives are attempting to deal with it. Alas, it appears that they have opted for a short-sighted approach, relying on virtualisation of older operating systems and applications, through a direct partnership with Microsoft. With this approach, the format decoders/viewers (not to mention the operating system and software performing the virtualisation itself) remain closed in source and specification, and one must deal with a cumbersome virtual machine just to view a document.

Where is the guarantee that files can be read hundreds of years from now, just as we can do today with paper documents such as the historic Magna Carta? How does this partnership benefit me, an ordinary citizen who might wish to view ten- (or even two-) year-old public documents that are only available in a proprietary electronic format?

It’s both sad and frustrating to see that history is yet again repeating itself. Whilst the contents of the Domesday Book can still be read nearly 1000 years after completion, the digital BBC Domesday Project was rendered virtually unreadable a mere 16 years later.

Thankfully, there are efforts to create an infrastructure for long-term preservation and management of digital documents. To start with, there are open formats such as OpenDocument and PDF. The Australian National Archives have long been supporters of OpenDocument, to the extent that they are standardising upon it. Putting their money where their mouths are, they are building a completely open source (GPL, no less) data managment system that anybody can use or improve to suit their needs. Michael Carden gave a great talk [Ogg video] at this year’s linux.conf.au about this technology, known as Xena [PDF]. Whilst their UK counterparts seem to have forgotten that access to data is not just a privilege for those able to make exclusive agreements with purveyors of lock-in technologies, the Australian National Archives have been striving to ensure that nobody is left out of the digital revolution.

Four legs good, two legs… better? Let’s prevent this subversion from happening.

LotD:  Mexican ‘world’s richest person’

Are you receiving syntax errors when running a shell script on Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)? If so, you might want to check what shell you are using. While testing scripts for the LCA A/V Team a few months ago, I discovered that the Ubuntu developers decided to symlink /bin/sh to dash, for faster and less memory-intensive script execution. For POSIX-compliant scripts, this isn’t a problem at all. However, there are many third-party scripts which call /bin/sh but use shell-specific (typically bash) syntax. They can be fixed by altering their first line to call the most appropriate shell, for example:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

env makes it possible to call bash, wherever it may lie. While my Ubuntu and Gentoo systems have a /bin/bash, there are other distributions which have /usr/bin/bash or /usr/local/bin.bash.

While you can and should fix your own scripts to operate in this way, constantly mending others’ mistakes can become tiresome. You can return your /bin/sh to point to bash with the following command:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash

When asked if you wish to install dash as /bin/sh, tell it to go to hell

Note that bash does use more memory, but on a modern desktop machine the difference is negligible. This change will not affect the default login shell, since that is already bash.

LotD:  Obese Aussies get big ambulances

There has been a lot of debate lately about the issue of binary drivers in Linux. Most of these discussions centre around the nVidia graphics driver. What many of these debates under-emphasise or even overlook is the importance of the Nouveau project. Nouveau is an effort intended to go beyond the 2D capabilities exposed by the nv driver, by providing full support for 3D. The end result will be a 100% free driver on Linux-based systems for nVidia graphics hardware. This is all without the assistance of nVidia, so much work needs to be done to interpret how the hardware behaves and write the required supporting code.

To support these valiant efforts, a pledge has been established to raise at least $10000 USD towards Nouveau’s development. This target has been successfully met with a month to spare, but don’t let that stop you from contributing. Even if you would like to see nVidia’s driver included in GNU/Linux distributions, I’m sure that most of you will agree that it is preferable for us as a community to have our own free driver. All it costs to play a part is a meagre $10 USD. How much is your freedom worth?

LotD: LCA2007 presenters should consider incorporating Gems into their presentations.

Lucas Nussbaum has posed an eerily familiar question: what is the best way to maintain a single and constant IRC presence, accessible from multiple locations? After some experimentation with different solutions (including Irssi + Irssi-Proxy), I finally settled upon a combination of Bip IRC Proxy, an SSH tunnel and my favourite GUI IRC client. I was planning to write a guide, but I came across an excellent one which explains the whole process. Managing the SSH tunnel is easy with gSTM.

Now I can use the same nick from multiple sites at once. It is completely transparent to other people, so it doesn’t matter where in the world I am provided that I have an Internet connection with an SSH and IRC client. I am not forced to use a particular IRC client, and I don’t have to give up a GUI. I can even stay logged in at both home and work at the same time.

My primary feature request would be for Bip to have the capability to set myself as Away when I have no IRC clients connected. At present, it only provides the option to change my nick in this circumstance, which is too heavy-handed and pollutes the channel with announcements.

The following is an e-mail that I posted to the SLUG mailing list:

Subject: [SLUG] Maintaining a constant IRC presence
Date: Sunday 03 September 2006 13:07
From: Sridhar Dhanapalan
To: SLUG list

I am in a situation that I’m sure a lot of SLUG members are in. I am a
prolific user of IRC, using it from one of three machines depending on where
I am. I have three main problems:

  (1) maintaining a single and constant online presence
  (2) maintaining easily accessible chat logs, even when not at the machine
  (3) being notified of messages that suit specific criteria

I currently use Xchat, which means that I am logged in at least two places at
once. Being a fat client, it can beep when I have a message. If I leave it
connected, it keeps logs (I only need the last 1000 lines or so). I can’t do
this with my laptop, though (I need to disconnect when travelling). Also, it
forces me to have a separate login for each machine (and hence each Xchat
session) connected.

Issues (1) and (3) can be addressed by something like irssi-proxy[1], since it
would allow me to use local clients with a single login. I could ssh into a
single system running irssi, which would alleviate both (1) and (2).

I understand that there are plug-ins for irssi that perform a notification
service or run commands on certain cues. If irssi was running locally, I
could do all kinds of things with such a feature. If running remotely,
however, I believe that I am limited to notifications inside the irssi window
itself. This would force me to manually check the window on a frequent basis,
which will either become annoying or be forgotten. I would like to have
audio/visual cues to let me know that my attention is required.

[1] http://www.garion.org/irssi/irssi-proxy.php

In January, during Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote speech announcing the new Intel Macintoshes, Microsoft made a "commitment" to continue to develop for and support the Apple Macintosh platform. In true Microsoft style, they conveniently didn’t explain how deeply that commitment went. Now we know.

Microsoft have decided to kill their Virtual PC product, removing a virtualisation option from Mac OS at the same time that similar functionality is being folded into Windows Vista. They are aware that virtualisation is quickly becoming a killer feature, and they’ll be damned if they allow anyone else to have it. Fortunately (and probably preferably), VMware will be made available for the Apple Intel platform. There’s also Parallels, but they still do not have any server-oriented products.

In addition, Microsoft will also be removing Visual Basic support from Office for Mac. If you can’t stop supporting something, why not cripple it instead? Many businesses are dependent upon VB scripting, or exchange files with people/organisations that make use of it, so this is a major blow indeed for Apple. Such a deficiency will be subtle: people will purchase Office for Mac expecting it to work with files created in its Windows counterpart (or vice versa), and will be sorely disappointed. This has already been occurring for a number of years, but the problem is becoming increasingly acute.

Ultimately, the best solution is to remove our dependency on proprietary formats and languages, for they are the root cause of this mess. OpenOffice.org already does what most people require, and in some cases it does it better. It even has growing support for Visual Basic for Applications. OpenOffice is truly looking like a better Office than MS Office. The OpenOffice file filtering support developers work hard to support all the MS Office formats they can find (people have counted over 20 different versions of the Word .DOC format alone), which is more than I can say about the MS Office programmers, who are notorious for breaking compatibilty with older versions. Using the OpenDocument formats (which are now an ISO standard) assures that your data will be accessible on many different platforms for many years to come.

The main stumbling block to OpenOffice adoption on Mac OS is the Windows-like interface and its reliance on X11 for display. There is work being done on a native Aqua version, but in the meanwhile there is NeoOffice.

Last month’s SLUG meeting (Friday 28 July) was an interesting one for me. The SLUGlets topic was Web browsers, so I decided to volunteer my services to give a demonstration of my favourite, Galeon. Its philosophy of "The Web, only the Web" felt extremely refreshing back in 2000 when the world was dominated by Web browsers that were either integrated into some form of software suite or even into the operating system itself. Its position as a top-dog Web browser has since been usurped by its offspring, Epiphany, and its parent, Firefox, both of which have been clearly inspired by Galeon. Nevertheless, the slickness and functionality of Galeon has left it cemented as my Web browser of choice.

One thing I was not prepared for was a fair number of my co-workers to be present. That in itself was no surprise, given the SLUG-friendliness of my workplace. The effect of their heckling was another matter. Their light-hearted distractions may have diminished the quality of my talk, but they also made it much more enjoyable for everyone, including myself. This informality is a clear defining characteristic of SLUGlets as opposed to the Special Interest Talks, which are normally quite serious and intellectual.

I had also offered to give a "Privoxy in Under Five Minutes" talk as well, but unfortunately we ran out of time. Perhaps another time.

All in all, I am mostly happy with how things went. Sure, my talk could have been slicker, but nobody expects a professional presentation in SLUGlets. The fact that I was trying to demonstrate a Web browser without Internet access didn’t help either, nor did the time constraint. This was the first time I have done something like this, so I couldn’t have expected it to be flawless.