July 31, 2005
July 30, 2005
July 29, 2005
July 21, 2005
July 18, 2005
July 14, 2005
July 13, 2005
Software commons and the social sector
(These are some thoughts I put together for a workshop I was unable to attend. Not fully thought-through yet.)
I've spent the last ten years trying to convince universities to engage in the concept of public good over locked-in value; the first five years working from within as a software developer, the second five years working as an external agent of change. My method has been to advocate that all software should be made available as source code, in a form and under a license that allows anyone to run it however they like, look at and modify it, redistribute and fix bugs in it. This is known as the "four freedoms", and is the underlying tenet of Open Source and Free Software.
The reason for this is that human endeavour is most successful when it is built upon the successes of others - as Sir Isaac Newton wrote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants". This argument is particularly poignant in university circles, where many amazing discoveries and insights would not have been possible if it were not for the ideas of peer review and publication of one's research. In order to achieve evolution of ideas within a computing ambit, we must make the code we work with available to all for further study and innovation.
Directly opposing the ideas of innovation and evolution (both in computing and even wider remits), we have the increasingly common practice of exploiting intellectual capital through lock-in: patents and other IPR mechanisms designed to "cash in" on the intellectual capital of institutions. Whilst in the harsh economic climate it is completely understandable for universities and other organisations to look for direct revenue wherever possible, I argue that this disregards the indirect revenue effect (profiting from publishing and being seen to be the experts), and has a detrimental effect on both our economy and our learning community in the long term.
Bringing this back to the more central question of how to work in a social enterprise / co-operative model: the Open Source / Free Software community are experts in the advancement of society through co-operation. The linux operating system is the best example: hundreds of developers all over the world making contributions to a project, for the benefit of all. Universities can learn a lot from this model: by giving away IPR they can stimulate other communities to work with them, and better exploit their resources through being expert practitioners rather than through lock-in and lawyers.
Aside: there's also a question of social deprivation, particularly in the eastern region. When money is short, cost can be a major disincentive to innovation. Open Source software is often available for low or no cost, making it an ideal choice. I'm not keen on stressing this point too much however, since there's no real reason for Open Source to be free - it just tends to happen that way.
What is making it hard for academics to engage the social sector—cost, timelines, differences in research concerns? In my experience, the biggest block is institutional policy: the management that insist every approach must take into account IPR and paths to exploitation. Obviously universities have every right to take advantage of the wealth of intellectual capital they retain, but a more open policy that looks at methods other than solely "incorporate; patent; sell" is in order.
How can universities support new ventures in the social sector? By engaging with them! Certainly as an SME I experienced a great deal of ignorance on the part of universities regarding our existence; universities should look beyond traditional models such as "town and gown" and should actively work with business development agencies to find out who and what is going on in their regions. They might find that SMEs and the social sector have exploitable intellectual capital as well, and that it is beneficial to all if they work together.
Should universities be encouraging their spin-outs to use social enterprise/cooperative models? Most certainly. If we try and compete on the basis of lock-in and IPR we will all fail: there's always someone with bigger and better lawyers or stores of intellectual capital. Approaching the problem as knowledge practitioners, where value is exemplified by ability rather than through contracts, is a much better model for engaging the community. (Think meritocracies.)
Glorious, wonderful Ubuntu
I've installed multiple linux distributions over the course of the last decade or so. I was there, back in the day, installing slackware from floppy disks on a souped-up 486 with a stonking 64mb of RAM. I dallied with SUSE, I actually ran RedHat for almost 24 hours before the self-loathing grew too great. I tried Fedora, which got at least a couple of weeks of my life. I tried a couple of releases of Ubuntu, including a pre-release alpha when they were just nearing 1.0. The one constant has been Debian, which despite the truculent awkward oblique installer and the overbearing social conscience of the whole thing, is still the only distro I could live with for any period of time. I run it on servers, desktops, and everywhere I rejoice about the excellent package management and the fact that it almost works.
In trying to set up a spare machine, I failed twice to get a newly-burnt Ubuntu CD to install, due to errors in the CD. Looks like it's a problem with burning the image from a Mac, since it worked when I burnt the image on the target machine. Anyway, this led to a brief attempt to install Debian's latest and greatest. Within about 30 minutes it was clear that my three-year-old laptop's LCD monitor resolution was not recognised (1400x1050), and that significant tweaking of the config files would ensue.
So I tried once more to burn and install Ubuntu, and this time it succeeded. There was lots of whirring and chugging and one reboot. I was sat working on the powerbook when suddenly, with a drum roll, the laptop sprang into life, and there was the Ubuntu login screen, at the correct resolution. Logging in unveiled a fully workable desktop, with sound, networking, everything. This is what linux should be like. This, my friends, is the future.
Adventures in Mac hardware
A couple of months ago, David's powerbook started exhibiting a curious flickering on the screen. With some patient repositioning, it was possible to make it stop.
Over the last few weeks, the problem got progressively worse. The sensible thing, of course, would have been to stop, back it up, and send it off to Apple for repair. But with an estimated turnaround in the region of two weeks, that starts looking like an expensive option. And besides, he'll be on forced vacation in a few months when he becomes a father, so maybe we can limp along until then ...
... which brings us to the start of this week, when instead of booting the machine let out a plaintive series of beeps with the screen dead. Uh-oh.
After speaking to our local Mac service centre, it turns out that the beeps-of-death actually mean a memory problem, so we removed the RAM, checked it over, reseated it, and lo! the machine booted. Still with flickering screen, naturally. Unfortunately, for the past couple of days the machine has been randomly freezing. I put the memory into my machine and ran memtest against it, and it came up clean. So it seems like there's a dodgy connection somewhere in the machine.
Fortunately, we have a spare x86 laptop in the office, so a quick install of Ubuntu later and he now has a machine from which he can pull together the threads of his life again. Meanwhile, we're faced with the curious economic decision of one perfectly fine powerbook (*cough*) that may cost upwards of £600 to repair, versus replacing it with something like an iBook for around £600. Or giving up on this seemingly fragile Mac hardware and opting for commodity PC laptops, which we can dispose of guilt-free at the end of their 1.5 year lifespan.
This is just the start of what went wrong this week. And it's only Wednesday. Sigh.
July 12, 2005
IWMW 2005: Tags
An interesting demonstration of the problem with arbitrary tagging/folksonomies: in a thread on Conferences, Workshops, Training etc. Brian Kelly points people to Google IWMW 2005 to see a list of blogs on the subject.
Unfortunately I selected IWMW2005 as my tag for the topic, which means the Google results are skewed against me - at time of writing, 9th entry instead of first. Of course, it's not about search results - I like to assume no-one reads this.
Another curious thing that googling for IWMW2005 throws up is the number of places my blog is aggregated, often unofficially. People seem to be doing lots of curious experiments with RSS feeds.
July 11, 2005
Mac-fu
Help!
My Mac has cheerfully indexed the contents of my external USB drive, complete with a backup of all my applications. Now whenever I right-click on a file and select "Open With", I get duplicate entries for all possible applications, and the first entry for each is the copy on the USB drive!
This means I can barely use my Mac when the external drive is not plugged in, as it hangs whenever I'm trying to open stuff.
How do I stop this happening?!
July 8, 2005
Homeward bound
On my way back from IWMW2005. Some observations:
- A week away from home with approximately twelve hours on board trains and planes is too much.
- Edinburgh is a stunning place. Manchester is not bad. I probably need to see more of Manchester to appreciate it.
- Our rail network is in trouble. I'm on a central trains service that has only two carriages, and has had passengers standing on and off all the way from Manchester. One carriage has broken air conditioning. This carriage has a broken toilet. It's all quite grim.
- The CMS problem is still a major issue in academia. No one vendor or product seems to have gained any momentum.
- East Anglia really is very flat. I quite liked seeing hills in my trips up north.
- Conferences require a strong constitution and an even stronger liver. I think I broke mine.
- Two laptop batteries are not enough for a five hour journey, particularly when the batteries don't hold charge like they used to.
- The lascivious biddies are perfect company on long journeys.
Looking forward to getting home.
London
"And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub."
A Letter To The Terrorists, From London
July 7, 2005
IWMW2005: Day two
"Geek Corner" at IWMW2005, as the laptop users cluster around the power sockets.
July 6, 2005
IWMW2005: fourth session
... that would be mine, then. The parallel session was "Whose work is it anyway?" and was intended to address the issues of outsourcing (or insourcing). Unfortunately I don't think this time round the choice of subject struck much of a chord with the delegates - for some it was second choice, and some had misinterpreted the title. Certainly compared to the last session I did (which was on XML Publishing Frameworks), this was poorly attended.
I'd also be curious to know if listing my affiliation as "UEA honorary researcher" would have made a difference to numbers: going to a discussion of outsourcing led by someone from a commercial company could be construed as inviting oneself to sit through advertising. I tried hard to talk in generic terms and keep the issues away from the commercial perspective. I don't know if I succeeded in that - this is the first time I've tried to do a "business focussed" session rather than a technical session.
I felt the session went reasonably well, given the mix of people. There were certainly times when everyone seemed to be engaged in the discussion, and as usual quite a few ideas and viewpoints came out of the discussion that I hadn't anticipated. One particularly interesting point is the increasing use of methodologies such as Prince 2, or stripped-down versions of it. As Sebastian said to me afterwards when I pointed out this seemed odd in an academic environment, "I guess most universities are businesses now" (or words to that effect).
IWMW2005: third session
Discussion Group ... interesting idea to divide everyone up by region. South-East turns out to be the biggest, I thought I knew quite a few of the locals, but I didn't do too well in placing many of them.
The idea was to think up challenges with CMSes. Rich material for discussion, indeed. It didn't take long to have a dozen problems up on screen. It'll be more interesting seeing how we propose to resolve those challenges in tomorrow's discussions.
The "CMS issue" seems like a well-travelled road nowadays, and a problem that is diverse and well-documented. Perhaps the biggest problem of all is "what is a CMS anyway?". In some respects I'd have liked a more quirky discussion topic, but I guess you can't beat the CMS as a problem that everyone has something to say about - and that's the point of a discussion group, after all.
IWMW2005: second session
Customers, suppliers, and the need for partnership. I can't help but think that OmniGraffle should be mandatory for anyone doing presentations including diagrams.
Speaking hypocritically, I suspect Edward Tufte would have a field day with this presentation.
But still, it's expected that the conference will be a diverse set of presentations and won't appeal to all. I've met Stephen in the bar at previous events and he's quite interesting on a one to few basis. I suspect this material was just a little dry for me.
IWMW2005: early thoughts and first session
The pros and cons of wifi/laptop-friendly conferences:
Pros: the backchannel
Cons: a room-full of people staring at screens
Pros: being able to tune out and check email
Cons: it's hard to ignore email and focus on the interesting stuff
Pros: being able to go off and bookmark / research interesting issues
Cons: the perpetual clickety-click of a room full of keyboards.
The first session is on blogging at Warwick. The chat in IRC is about which universities support blogging or have a policy on blogging. Apparently there are no blogs at Kent or City; Oxford have no central facilities, but are running a student blogging project based on PDAs; no policy at Bath, Birmingham don't allow them at all; nothing at Bristol other than a bit of web space.
I was wondering why it seemed that Warwick had built a blogging tool themselves. Turns out they are aiming to scale to 10,000 blogs. Ouch. (I wonder how many TypePad support?) Interestingly, their website reports 3433 already, so they are well on the way.
Warwick did an advertising campaign for their blogging service - with fridge magnets! Nice.
An excellent sequence of video clips, interviews with the students about why they blogged, what they blogged, etc. Not sure which is most interesting - the views of the students interviewed, or that Warwick took the experiment so far in terms of interviewing them. Does this mean blogging is a mainstream corporate tool for pacifying customers, students etc?
Final thought: I wonder if Warwick will share their blogging tool code with other universities?
July 5, 2005
OSS further reading ...
In my talk at the OSS Watch conference ... hmm, there's a theme developing here. Anyway, I gave two references for further reading, but due to time constraints in the talk I wasn't really able to expand upon them and explain how I think they apply to Apache. I thought I'd make a note of them here, and then someday when I have more time I will try and expand on the theme a little.
The first reference was Tim O'Reilly and his description of the architecture of participation in his article on the Open Source paradigm shift. It seems to me that the ASF is the ultimate architecture of participation, not just because of the excellent infrastructure but also because of the hard work that takes place in fostering the community around it. The social structures are just as much a part of the architecture as the mailing lists and source control systems.
The second reference, suggested by David, was Robert Axelrod and his theories on the evolution of cooperation. This is a less well thought-out reference, since I really need to read the book cover to cover (and probably The Complexity of Cooperation too). Essentially, what's happening to the ASF is literally evolving and emergent cooperative work, without any real need for central authority.
OSS quotes
In my talk at the OSS Watch conference, I drew on the words of several people far smarter than I, to help develop the theme of communities and how Apache is different to repositories such as Sourceforge or projects affiliated to specific companies. I'll put the slides online shortly (though until then you could look at Stefano's "How the ASF works" whitepaper and presentation, which provided a lot of inspiration and material for me). In the mean time, some of those quotes:
I believe our neutrality, both real and as perceived by the market, is key to being able to marshall the greatest amount of investment to bear on specific projects.
- Brian Behlendorf
Commercial entities are more likely to feel easier about "giving something away" if they don't feel they are giving it away to another commercial entity.
- Matthew Langham
In Open Source, keeping a good balance between commercial interests and community-based development is the hardest thing ever. The Apache way goes a long way to make it easier.
- Gianugo Rabellino
Gianugo's quote in particular seems fitting right now as Open Source communities work to integrate the Google Summer of Code students into their projects. It's certainly going to be an interesting summer.
Sightseeing in Edinburgh
After the OSS Watch conference this evening, I headed into Edinburgh with D. to get some food and do a bit of the tourist thing.
We originally intended to walk along the royal mile, but as we approached North Bridge we couldn't help noticing large crowds of people and emergency services on the junction with Princes Street, so we decided to investigate.
The subsequent mad moblogging photo sequence of the Edinburgh riot speaks for itself. (I'll upload the rest when I have a proper connection, along with a short commentary.)
Afterwards, a quick trip to the Castle (shut), and then a brief search to find my favourite restaurant in Edinburgh, Rick's. An excellent meal of shredded duck in ginger followed by crispy chicken and parmesan, and some very enjoyable conversation. Everything from SMEs and FLOSS to drunken mishaps and lifetime experiences. And y'all know what a talkative guy I am, right?
Tomorrow morning is an early flight back to Norwich, but I'm hoping I'll have time to climb the hill in Holyrood Park before I go, since I failed to do it last time I was here. And it is right outside my window.
I'm beat. G'night.
July 4, 2005
OSS Watch redux
Best OSS-Watch conference ever, so far?
I was surprised by how well today's event went. Despite being in Edinburgh, despite being at the same time as the anarchist protests against the G8 (what self-respecting free software revolutionary wouldn't prefer to be rampaging through the streets?), it was a really good day with a great line-up and good attendance.
And I'm not just saying that because I know the OSS Watch cabal are inclined to peruse these hallowed pages from time to time. Hello, guys ;-)
Maybe it's because the subject was closer to my heart (building open source communities). I suspect it's actually because some of the talks were genuinely interesting and informative, even for a FLOSS old-timer.
I found Jim Farmer's presentation to have interesting insights despite feeling slightly unfocused (a generic presentation of which we only saw parts?). It would have been interesting to explore the issues raised in more depth: I was fascinated hearing how an open source Siebel would make more money than a closed-source Siebel.
Helen Sharp's talk on co-located agile development was brilliant. She presented research from five different software development companies she had visited, sharing their experiences of XP and what worked and what didn't. XP is a methodology Luminas has taken aspects from, but never fully implemented (it's certainly difficult to implement fully with smaller development teams, I think). Despite Helen's lack of an open source background, or maybe because of it, the session was entertaining and extremely useful.
The panel discussion kicked off some lively debates (such as what happens to a software project if the lead developer is offered $75m?). It was a shame most of the delegates had left by this point to catch trains, throw molotovs, or whatever.
What could have been done differently? Well, the venue was a challenge, and I left with eyes stinging. Excessive aircon is not as good as an open window when it comes to keeping people awake. This was out of OSS Watch's hands, as they were hit by a last minute venue change. The food was curious, though I may have missed the best of it as I was talking and prepping for my presentation. I certainly enjoyed the trip up north - Edinburgh is a wonderful place regardless of the trouble some poxy politicians are causing. I don't think there was anything I could complain about.
All in all, a pretty good day. Next stop: Manchester, IWMW 2005.
July 3, 2005
Edinburgh, G8
I'm in Edinburgh for the OSS Watch conference tomorrow. I'm staying in the University of Edinburgh's accommodation. I've been here before on business. This time it's a totally different place.
There are police everywhere.
I went across to the diner to get some food earlier, and there was a queue of police stretching out the door. I decided to head into the city instead. It took a black cab about 15 minutes to negotiate around the various road blocks and redirects.
Coming back to the residences, more police from all over the country were just arriving. Hundreds of them. It's like an army assembling, and is quite intimidating. I guess that's the intention.
Of course, the advantage of this is that it will be the securest open source conference in history!
Life
This one's for me.
When i was just a little boy... actually, when I was about 15, I was on holiday with my parents and my best friend from school. We were staying in a tent in the south of France, and there was a pool on site. We ate croissants every morning for breakfast, and were amused and amazed when our neighbours from back home ended up next to us on the day we left. Small world. (This was before we moved for the first time to West Hill. A discussion on the merits and drawbacks of moving is an entirely different conversation).
(Here's a funny thing ... try and google map your way to a childhood home whilst drunk, with only a slim recollection of the geography of the time. I'd planned to provide google map links to illustrate this tale, but damn it's tricky without remembering postcodes.)
On this holiday, we spent most of the time in the swimming pool. On one particular day, I got struck down with a hereditary affliction: cramp. Apparently my grandma suffered, and my dad suffers. So there I am, slightly surprised, in the middle of a swimming pool with one leg doubled-up in pain telling me "I ain't working any more". My friend, recalling his lifeguard training, tried to do the whole dragging me to the side of the pool thing. He didn't seem to appreciate the fact that I can swim with only one leg ;-)
As a result of a bad night's sleep, or possibly some excessively fast cycling, I woke up early this morning with a leg full of knots and pain. For the first time in a long while, I was screaming in pain as my leg cramped. It's the weirdest feeling - with no control whatsoever your muscles lock solid, and nothing you do can relieve the pain or ease the muscle. You kinda have to wait for it to unlock. And the pain can last a whole day.
So nowadays I'm not drowning in a pool, but the pain brings back some recollections of how I used to perceive life, when things were quite a lot simpler and there were less complications. Back then, I was absolutely sure that the eyes were a window on the soul, and that you could tell a lot about a person by looking them in the eye. Somewhere along the way I think I lost sight of this. I still have good reasons for what I do, but I don't know how I expected to find happiness by ignoring this basic truth.
(Limping home tonight, I notice that the second neighbour in a row has gutted their kitchen and is opting for a burnt terracota style paint job. I painted my kitchen that colour (or bright orange, as my friends like to refer to it) many years ago, and I'm thinking I need to paint it a different colour now that everyone else matches...)
So there I am tonight in a nightclub, with one leg barely prepared to take my weight, dancing my usual bizarre drunken flailing dance. And there's a girl across the room, and the first thing I notice is that I could spend the entire night staring into her eyes and I would be happy. And I'm reminded of the drowning episode, and of how I viewed life back then, and where I am right now. I'm mindful of some friends that were talking about how fairy-tale doesn't exist any more, and I can't help but think that it has to be worth waiting for.
I just need to pay more attention to the eyes.
July 2, 2005
GPRS on Tiger
I'm setting up GPRS ready for next week's travelling. I'm shocked, astounded, gobsmacked, gutted, disappointed, and amazed to find out that I still need to download Ross Barkman's GPRS scripts for Nokia phones in order to connect. Come on, Apple, it's about time you fixed this. (Actually, it's way past time you fixed this, but I'm being gracious, ok?)July 1, 2005
Upgrades
Over the last few hours I've been making the jump to OS X Tiger. I actually did a clean install late last night, when my backup had successfully completed. This morning has been the process of copying the essentials back from the backup: my Development directory (10gb), Documents (3.2gb), Mail (1.3gb), preference files (why aren't they kept in a more obvious place), and finally the biggie, 34gb of music. It was a lot easier to get everything up and running this time - maybe three hours tops. It helps to know what is where and what you need.
It took me two attempts to get Tiger installed. The first time I missed the 'customise' option on the install, which gives me the opportunity to dump support for other languages and printers. That makes quite a saving on disk space.
I also missed a trick with spotlight indexing: the first time I installed, it automatically started indexing my external drives (which are slow as hell, and don't need indexing). The second time round, I went into System Preferences and into the Privacy tab before plugging in the external drives. When I plugged them in, they automatically appeared in the indexing exclusion list. Nice. (I wonder if this affects the unix locate utility? I'd love to exclude the external drives from that, but all the howtos I read suggest you need to modify binaries ... urgh).
One thing that really hits home as I try and work on the laptop during significant file copies: the hard disk in the powerbook is really slow. Mind-numbingly slow. Not only that, but every application slows to a crawl despite CPU load being relatively minor. I wonder how much battery life would be affected by a bigger, faster drive in this machine.
So, first impressions of Tiger: meh. Not sure I like the new-style interface, it's just another layer of confusion. Mail.app really needs to go full-screen now the Mail folders drawer is built-in. Dashboard: well, I had Konfabulator before so no big deal. iChat: it's nice to have Jabber built-in. Mail.app seems to want to make all my signatures look like HTML. More as I discover it...