Recent blog entries for slef

Rinse and repeat

Forgive me, reader, for I have sinned. It has been over a year since my last blog post. Life got busy. Paid work. Another round of challenges managing my chronic illness. Cycle campaigning. Fun bike rides. Friends. Family. Travels. Other social media to stroke. I’m still reading some of the planets where this blog post should appear and commenting on some, so I’ve not felt completely cut off, but I am surprised how many people don’t allow comments on their blogs any more (or make it too difficult for me with reCaptcha and the like).

The main motive for this post is to test some minor upgrades, though. Hi everyone. How’s it going with you? I’ll probably keep posting short updates in the future.

Go in peace to love and serve the web. 🙂

Syndicated 2016-10-18 04:28:23 from mjr – Software Cooperative News

Mick Morgan: here’s why pay twice?

http://baldric.net/2015/06/05/why-pay-twice/ asks why the government hires civilians to monitor social media instead of just giving GC HQ the keywords. Us cripples aren’t allowed to comment there (physical ability test) so I reply here:

It’s pretty obvious that they have probably done both, isn’t it?

This way, they’re verifying each other. Politicians probably trust neither civilians or spies completely and that makes it worth paying twice for this.

Unlike lots of things that they seem to want not to pay for at all…

Syndicated 2015-06-11 03:49:00 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

Recorrecting Past Mistakes: Window Borders and Edges

A while ago, I switched from tritium to herbstluftwm. In general, it’s been a good move, benefitting from active development and greater stability, even if I do slightly mourn the move from python scripting to a shell client.

One thing that was annoying me was that throwing the pointer into an edge didn’t find anything clickable. Window borders may be pretty, but they’re a pretty poor choice as the thing that you can locate most easily, the thing that is on the screen edge.

It finally annoyed me enough to find the culprit. The .config/herbstluftwm/autostart file said “hc pad 0 26″ (to keep enough space for the panel at the top edge) and changing that to “hc pad 0 -8 -7 26 -7″ and reconfiguring the panel to be on the bottom (where fewer windows have useful controls) means that throwing the pointer at the top or the sides now usually finds something useful like a scrollbar or a menu.

I wonder if this is a useful enough improvement that I should report it as an enhancement bug.

Syndicated 2015-05-14 04:58:02 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

Rebooting democracy? The case for a citizens constitutional convention.

I’m getting increasingly cynical about our largest organisations and their voting-centred approach to democracy. You vote once, for people rather than programmes, then you’re meant to leave them to it for up to three years until they stand for reelection and in most systems, their actions aren’t compared with what they said they’d do in any way.

I have this concern about Cooperatives UK too, but then its CEO publishes http://www.uk.coop/blog/ed-mayo/2015-02-18/rebooting-democracy-case-citizens-constitutional-convention and I think there may be hope for it yet. Well worth a read if you want to organise better groups.

Syndicated 2015-02-20 04:03:00 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

Outsourcing email to Google means SPF allows phishing?

I expect this is obvious to many people but bahumbug To Phish, or Not to Phish? just woke me up to the fact that if Google hosts your company email then its Sender Policy Framework might make other Google-sent emails look legitimate for your domain. When combined with the unsupportive support of the big free webmail hosts, is this another black mark against SPF?

Syndicated 2015-01-22 03:57:00 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

Social Network Wishlist

All I want for 2015 is a Free/Open Source Software social network which is:

  • easy to register on (no reCaptcha disability-discriminator or similar, a simple openID, activation emails that actually arrive);
  • has an email help address or online support or phone number or something other than the website which can be used if the registration system causes a problem;
  • can email when things happen that I might be interested in;
  • can email me summaries of what’s happened last week/month in case they don’t know what they’re interested in;
  • doesn’t email me too much (but this is rare);
  • interacts well with other websites (allows long-term members to post links, sends trackbacks or pingbacks to let the remote site know we’re talking about them, makes it easy for us to dent/tweet/link to the forum nicely, and so on);
  • isn’t full of spam (has limits on link-posting, moderators are contactable/accountable and so on, and the software gives them decent anti-spam tools);
  • lets me back up my data;
  • is friendly and welcoming and trolls are kept in check.

Is this too much to ask for? Does it exist already?

Syndicated 2015-01-08 04:10:54 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

GPG Transition Statement

Rather late but I guess that just confirms it’s really me, right? ;-) The signed text and IDs should be at http://mjr.towers.org.uk/transition-statement.txt

Thank you if you help me out here :-) I’ll resign keys in a while.

Syndicated 2014-12-30 10:34:09 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

Autumn Statement #AS2014, the Google tax and how it relates to Free Software

One of the attention-grabbing measures in the Autumn Statement by Chancellor George Osborne was the google tax on profits going offshore, which may prove unworkable (The Independent). This is interesting because a common mechanism for moving the profits around is so-called transfer pricing, where the business in one country pays an inflated price to its sibling in another country for some supplies. It sounds like the intended way to deal with that is by inspecting company accounts and assessing the underlying profits.

So what’s this got to do with Free Software? Well, one thing the company might buy from itself is a licence to use some branding, paying a fee for reachuse. The main reason this is possible is because copyright is usually a monopoly, so there is no supplier of a replacement product, which makes it hard to assess how much the price has been inflated.

One possible method of assessing the overpayment would be to compare with how much other businesses pay for their branding licences. It would be interesting if Revenue and Customs decide that there’s lots of Royalty Free licensing out there – including Free Software – and so all licence fees paid to related companies are a tax avoidance ruse. Similarly, any premium for a particular self-branded product over a generic equivalent could be classed as profit transfer.

This could have amusing implications for proprietary software producers who sell to sister companies but I doubt that the government will be that radical, so we’ll continue to see absurdities like Starbucks buying all their coffee from famous coffee producing countries Switzerland and the Netherlands. Shouldn’t this be stopped, really?

Syndicated 2014-12-04 04:34:00 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

Three systems

There are three basic systems:

The first is slick and easy to use, but fiddly to set up correctly and if you want to do something that its makers don’t want you to, it’s rather difficult. If it breaks, then fixing it is also fiddly, if not impossible and requiring complete reinitialisation.

The second system is an older approach, tried and tested, but fell out of fashion with the rise of the first and very rarely comes preinstalled on new machines. Many recent installations can be switched to and from the first system at the flick of a switch if wanted. It needs a bit more thought to operate but not much and it’s still pretty obvious and intuitive. You can do all sorts of customisations and it’s usually safe to mix and match parts. It’s debatable whether it is more efficient than the first or not.

The third system is a similar approach to the other two, but simplified in some ways and all the ugly parts are hidden away inside neat packaging. These days you can maintain and customise it yourself without much more difficulty than the other systems, but the basic hardware still attracts a price premium. In theory, it’s less efficient than the other types, but in practice it’s easier to maintain so doesn’t lose much efficiency. Some support companies for the other types won’t touch it while others will only work with it.

So that’s the three types of bicycle gears: indexed, friction and hub. What did you think it was?

Syndicated 2014-07-22 03:59:00 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

#coops14 sees last days of Downham Food Co-op

image

While  cooperatives fortnight is mostly a celebration of how well cooperatives are doing in the UK, this year is tinged with sadness for me because it sees Downham Food Coop stop trading.

This Friday and Saturday will be their last market stall, 9til 1 on the Town Square, aka Clock or Pump square.

As you can see, the downturn has hit the market hard and I guess being the last stall left outside the market square (see picture: it used to have neighbouring stalls!) was just too much. The coop cites shortage of volunteers and trading downturn as reasons for closure.

But if you’re near Downham today or tomorrow morning, please take advantage of this last chance to buy some great products in West Norfolk!

Syndicated 2014-06-27 10:14:04 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

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