Older blog entries for rossigee (starting at number 33)

Todays blog comes to you from the small toilet. I am sat on the throne with my iPaq 5450, reading advogato, planet GNOME and some other news sites using the Minimo browser, doing some shell work on a remote computer using rxvt and ssh, and composing this on what appears to be a cut-down version of gedit (gpe-edit). All good!

I ended up losing my patience a little with Ali. He just can't help himself. I figure the 'reply all' button on his mail client must be getting as worn out as people are fed up of listening to his rants. I filed a kind of counter-complaint about his behaviour, and I think (hope) he got the message. I don't feel good about the whole episode, but I feel I have done what many people may not have had the front to do, and hopefully we can all now get a little piece without his constant wind-me-ups.

I also managed to break the GNOME mailman mhonarc mail archiving a little bit, and struggled yesterday to identify the problem. My understanding of the whole setup is now much better, and a few seconds ago I think I figured what I'd cocked up, and it's all working again now. Now to see if I can fix up the namazu indexes and get the search facility working again.

Mee seems to be getting a little fed up because I haven't had much time for her with all this drama going on. Luckily we've got a busy weekend of social activities, so she should cheer up. Her English is getting rapidly better though.

I'm now annoyed at letting myself get dragged into another stupid argument which spilled over from desktop-devel-list@gnome.org to foundation-list@gnome.org, because of a highly opinionated and excessively verbose someone who seems to enjoy stirring things up within the GNOME community.

I remember this guy first turned up on #gnome a few years ago using the nick 'oGALAXYo'. He starting out by slagging off GNOME to all the developers and started listing all the problems he was having with it on the channel. He was advised to use appropriate support channels, such as bugzilla and the project mailing lists, but had decided to himself that they were all a waste of time and that bothering people on #gnome was the best way to get things done. I ended up /ignoring him, and he hasn't caused me much bother since. Until this dropped into my inbox. In my opinion, this guy brings shit-stirring to a whole level. Do a google search for 'oGALAXYo' and 'gnome' and just see how he winds people up.

I agree with Alan Cox (although he misunderstood my position) - at the end of the day Ali is a developer, and Mark was a bit 'short' with Ali. But I can sympathise with Mark was trying to better the signal/noise ratio on a busy list he is responsible for, and was simply pointing out a better place for it. Although not condonable, I think it was understandable that he lost his temper, because (IMHO) Ali is someone who seems to enjoy making a public nuisance of himself.

So if you're reading, Ali, I'd still love to know why was it so important that you made people realise that you were annoyed by Mark? What has this achieved in relation to your intentions wrt to the HIG? And, as Glynn says, why should personality conflict be a problem for the foundation to deal with? Even if it is in the charter, do you feel righteous to have wasted all these people's time because of your little playground squabble with Mark? Actually, I'd rather not hear it. End of story.

Once again, I fail miserably to regularly make an advogato journal entry, and when I do get round to it, it's down for a few weeks. Looks like I haven't made one since I was in England last. Ten months have passed, since then.

I've been to Thailand, moved off Samui island and bought some land on the mainland. I'm now back in the UK (with Mee, my Thai girlfriend) looking for work to pay off the land and build a house, and to let Mee meet my family etc and see what life is like back here. Who knows, one day maybe the crazy Thai politicians will make it unviable to live there. If we can't find a nicer country to live in, we'll have to go back there to live (god forbid!), and I'd like to see how she handles the pace of western life (she's only just beginning to learn English too).

Paid-work wise, things are looking good, with a few potentially promising new PHP development projects in the pipeline, coming from two sources, plus a couple of weeks standby cover for an old company I used to work for while their guy goes on hols. Should mean we have enough to take Mee for a few rides around the country to see England (Scotland, Wales and Ireland too, if possible), and enough to put a safety reserve back in the bank. If all goes well, it should even lead to plenty of work to keep me going when I return to Thailand in three months time.

Open-source wise, I washed up some of my favourite PHP classes into a decent rock for myself and other web application developers to smoke. For now, I've called it Harmony, and it simply consists of a few common classes and an example website. The website provides the facility to log in, authenticating users against an enterprises' LDAP database. Once logged in, links are provided according to the groups the user is in. If they are in the 'admin' group, they have the facility to create new users and groups, and maintain them. Most of the PHP scripts that support the site use XSLT as a templating mechanism to convert a generated result fragment into an XHTML page (or other). That's about as far as I've got so far, but it's useful enough to start creating sites with.

It's certainly an interesting approach, and I'm not sure if there are other people out there doing something similar, but I'm hoping that people give it a try and give me some feedback. I'm currently in the process of setting up a website to release it (GPL), which will include a demo site where people can log in and play admin with a dummy LDAP backend, and see some of the other modules in development. Really, I need to square it off so I can use it to finish developing the revamp for my main homepage (and my personal homepage). My main homepage is flaky and useless, and it's nearly two years since I updated my personal one!

It's all based on code I wrote and used in a couple of projects already in daily use. I'm just trying to document it and package it up a bit, so that I and other people that have to maintain my future projects can easily apply bugfix releases and/or work out what's going on etc. Still a few design flaws that I can't figure out (such as a nice way to handle i18n - I want to see my website and homepage viewable in English or Thai using a combination of gettext (the easy bit) and standard XML/XSLT methods (still struggling with this).

Anyway, GNOME Thai translation seems to be rolling along nicely at the hands of native Thais, so I've diverted that portion of my spare time to helping the GNOME sysadmin team out after their (not-so-recent now) server compromise. Still lots of big important tasks on the to-do list, but between us several of the jobs have been completed and slow progress is being made on the remainder. I should also be able to leverage my work on Harmony (if I quickly knock up some stylesheets and one or two PHP subclasses) to implement an web admin interface for managing the GNOME LDAP server (used for CVS accounts/authentication etc), and perhaps the mirrors database too to make that side of things easier to automate and delegate.

Sadly, still haven't had time to nurse gtranslator. I'm also getting twitchy fingers at the thought of helping the GPE developers get multisync working with the GPE addressbook/calendar/tasklist, so I can sync between my iPaq and my laptop, although I think I'd fall into the bottomless pit of time mismanagement if I started on that route. Also getting twitchy fingers reading recent discussions about getting the 2.6 kernel working on the iPaq.

Nice not to have to use a 56k dial-up connection and be tethered to a wall. I'm still tethered by my power cable (I'm not paying 200quid each for new laptop batteries), but having wireless DSL just about everywhere I go is a real blessing.

Got to go take care of Mee now, as she's got bored of the jigsaw and the knitting that was keeping her occupied, and as it's Friday night, I suppose I'd better go introduce her to my friends, entertain and translate things for her.

I hate living in England. Just not enough time to enjoy yourself. You have to work to make a living, and to make a living you have to work hard. And the living you make isn't worth sh*t when it comes to putting a roof over your head, or petrol in your motor. A big waste of time, apparently called the rat-race.

I'm back in Thailand now, and the money I would have wasted on buying expensive cars and unaffordable houses and other the other apparent necessities of the western world is now being put to better use on a small wooden house, on a tropical island. Life is sweet and simple. I have a beatiful girl by my side and but a 100cc scooter for transport.

Sure, Thailand has it's problems, but they don't affect me as directly as the problems found in the western world, which affect everyone that lives in it.

Anyway, enough grumbling for now. I've got lots to keep me busy for now. I have to sort out a few development environment issues, so I can continue with gtranslator development, and help bring GNOME to the Thai people. It appears there is only one other translator of GNOME to the Thai language, and he (a native Thai) is busy atm with a new university course, so it looks like I am on my own for now (once I've finished the outstanding gtranslator bugs, that is).

More to come later. Nice to have time to post again. I'll try to fill in the gaps a bit too, next time.

ADSL has arrived

I was told by BT this week that I wouldn't be able to get ADSL until Wednesday. Well, it's Saturday night (1am), and I've just come up to go to sleep, and I noticed the sync light on my router lit up.

I'm probably the first person on the exchange to be using it.

Just read about the 'TCPA'.

I can't see that it's anything to worry about. Consumers aren't all as stupid as the vendors think they are. There will always be a large number of sheep-like consumers that will blindly follow the largest companies in the market, never realising that they're being abused, ripped off and manipulated. These people will probably float the TCPA boat for a while.

However, there will also always be the 'hardcore techie' contingent too, who will demand that the hardware they run will run open source operating systems, applications and development tools. And where there's demand, there'll be supply. So there will always be hardware vendors out releasing hardware platforms capable of supporting open source operating systems. Hardware that incorporates the TCPA will simply be narrowing down it's potential market for deployment.

For example, I can't see all the existing sendmail and Apache servers out there having to be replaced with Microsoft-based servers, because hardware to run Linux/BSD cannot be found any more! Right?!

Hopefully, the whole thing will turn around and shoot the TCPA consortium in the foot. As should have been a long time ago, hardware companies will release hardware with the specs required to develop operating system support for any operating system. These hardware companies will wrest a large proportion of market share from the less open players.

I'm certain that it's inevitable - eventually, open source operating systems and applications will reach a level of maturity sufficient to be a suitable desktop replacement for the likes of Microsoft Windows. Then, people will say to themselves, 'why am I throwing my money at these greedy, monopolistic, fascist hardware and software vendors? This fancy TCPA technology isn't helping make the software I use stable and bug-free. Why am I not using the cheaper and more reliable open source hardware and software the real techies are using?'.

Either way, it won't bother me personally, as long as there are hardware platforms out there that I can buy that run free software, and I can't see that changing now or ever.

I've just come back from a WiFi show, at the Olympia in London, where I had the opportunity to blag free beer off vendors, before launching into the usual line of questioning:

And then I wandered over to the Intersil stand.

None of this was technically useful, and won't have made any earth-shattering difference, but it made me feel better.

Blimey. Haven't used advogato.org for ages. Quick update since October, then:

• Spent 7 months in Thailand.
• Now have a Thai girlfriend, called 'Mee'
• Can speak, read and write basic Thai
• Got knocked off motorbike the day after getting back from Thailand. Arm in plaster. Bike not too much damage.
• Will be doing contract work until going back to Thailand in October.

I'm now fairly interested in picking up the 'gtranslator' project and trying to co-ordinate it. Trouble is, I'm only finding snatches of time here and there to look at it, so I'm making no promises yet. Mind you, I have fixed one simple bug so far.

Wireless is cool, too. I bought some wireless kit in Thailand (that's a long story too!), so now have a wireless house. My main client also has two sites with wireless clouds, which is nice. I haven't had to plug into a hub for months, and have been able to work in whichever part of the house/garden/garage I feel like!

However, only having a 56k net connection is a PITA. ADSL comes next week. I'm just waiting for the 'i' to light up on my NetGear DG814, and my cloud gets faster :)

My cast comes off June 2nd, and I'm looking forward to getting back on my bike, and for the weather to clear up so I can go fly my hang-glider again. It's been a long time, baby.

Whoohoo! My last day of work. As of tomorrow, I will officially be un^W^Wself employed! As of Monday, I will officially be gone to Thailand!

I hope to be able to spend the next six months generally relaxing, socialising and exploring various parts of South East Asia. Hopefully, I'll also find time to finish off (and/or start) some of the open source projects I've been involved in. After that, I'll either come back to England (just for the summer months), or move on to have a better look around Australia and New Zealand.

This last week has been a nightmare. My laptop LCD has an intermittent problem that worsened and had to be returned to Dell. They'll not be able to get it back to me by the time I leave, so it'll cost me at least 100UKP to ship it out to me. Also, all my home servers are behind an ADSL line, served by a NetGear DG814 router which keeps crashing and needs physically rebooting (I can't do that from Thailand!). And to cap it all, I moved my co-host at work into a proper server room, and had to change IP addresses, for which the DNS is taking a long time to propogate, leading to a few confused users.

I can't begin to explain how much I hate what England has become. Maybe I should leave and come back as a refugee. I'd probably have a better quality of life than if I came back and worked as a normal citizen!

To live in England, you typically need a house and a car. To afford even a one-bed flat where I live, you will need at least 100000UKP (1/10th of a million pounds stirling). Double that if you're anywhere near London. To qualify for a mortgage, you need to be earning about a third of that per year. How many people do you know on 35000UKP salaries? Is it any wonder that most people in their mid-twenties are still living with their parents, or have been forced to move back! The only people I know that aren't are either having to rent (can't get a mortgage) or are on the social (can't even get a job!).

And, for most people, you have to get to work and back every day, so you need to run a car. The government has now priced most people off the road, both with road taxes and petrol taxes, and by allowing the insurance industry to continue to rip everybody off. Luckily for me, I run a motorbike, which whilst a bit cheaper, still isn't practical for most people, or indeed at all during the winter months.

So it seems that anyone with more than half a brain is fleeing the country, whilst immigrants with less than half a brain are flooding in. Well, they're intelligent enough to know that if they can get themselves in, they will find the government quite happy to feed and clothe them, put a roof over their head and money in their pockets. And if they have any problems with that, they can turn to one of the 'charities' getting lottery handouts, and launch costly appeals. I appreciate that many refugees are legitimate and deserving, but they should not be taking priority over the more deserving long-standing UK citizens (inc my grandparents who risked their lives for this country) who work(ed) hard for this country are forced to pay ever-increasing taxes to hem.

I'm no politician, but it doesn't take an idiot to see through all the spin that all the politicians put on things. The quality of life is declining at the same rate that the cost of living is rising. Even if the firemen did get 30000UKP a year, that's still not enough for them to buy a one-bed flat! Imagine how hard life must be for the nurses who (IMHO) risk their lives more and get paid less than the firemen. Some major industries are being forced out of business, and nothing is being done. Many companies are migrating their facilities abroad due to costs and beaurocracy. I can't see the future getting any better.

No, I shall probably not return permanently until there is something here (other than just my family and friends) worth coming back to. At the very least, until I can afford to set foot on the property ladder, without signing my life away. Much as I love them, I'm not going to live with my parents for the rest of my life!

A little burst of activity on the weekend led to a few little open source possibilities. In looking into a problem using NOCC with large POP3 mailboxes, I discovered that the 'c-client' library that PHP uses is pretty inefficient. So I started writing a simple POP3 client as a native PHP class (using fsockopen).

And in parallel with that, I began developing a new webmail client, so I can eventually stop using NOCC for all my webmail projects (NOCC has design issues). Hopefully over the next week or two, I'll find enough time to bring these two little jobs to fruition.

I've been looking into GNUe (http://www.gnue.org/) as an open source business management platform. It's still in the very early stages, but it seems to be fairly well designed and implemented. I'll need to spend some more time getting it working, but there is the possibility that I can use this as a platform for developing the kind of system I have been envisioning for years. Whether my ideas will gel with the ideas of the GNUe developers remains to be seen :)

I'm also preparing to shut down my trusty ISDN line, set up ADSL on a friend's line (who doesn't live in the sticks!) and move my kit down there when I go away. ISDN has been sucking me dry over the last years, and for what? 8K/s!

Other than that, work still ticking over. Only another five weeks left until I'm off to Thailand, with one week holiday next week when Kate and Sandy come down from Scotland - party!

As for our mail server problems at work, despite my recommendations, it looks like it'll remain a problem for the foreseeable future. The plan is to develop a whole new mail system and migrate people over to that, which is sensible, but will ultimately leave thousands of customers with a dirty mail feed until then (if it even happens).

This, and a handful of other easily resolvable problems I could mention have sadly lowered my estimation of the ISP I have promoted for years (and now work for) to the point that I am finding it hard to recommend them to friends, family and clients any more. They used to be top of all the tables. As I see it, the company lost it's edge when it was taken over by it's parent company. It used to be technically led company and attract technically-minded customers, who could rely on decent technical support. Now, it is just another over-subscribed commercial ISP, with an inundated support line, unable to cope well with it's sudden growth. Nothing that can't be addressed, but only if it's prepared to take the steps required to do so, with the minimum of delay, before it's too late.

There, that's everything off my chest. Sounding off therapy over, I'd best get back to work. Once again, I find myself writing documentation in the hope that people will be able to maintain the systems I have lovingly developed for them, so that I can sod off and be left in peace for a while :)