This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

According to the BBC, the Gowers review will recommend not extending the term of UK copyright from 50 to 95 years. Cliff Richard is disappointed by this but, well, fuck Cliff Richard. The proposed extension was to "harmonise" UK copyright law with US law, so when the US extends we all follow on behind? The hell with that. Nice one Andrew Gowers. Obviously the recording industry is getting their knickers in a twist over this, not that I care very much. Applauds to the independent review!

Matt and Lyne Revell have a son! Welcome into the world: Alfie Revell. Doesn't he look cute!

Yesterday we had a Jokosher developers meeting to work out what should be worked on for the next release. After some boisterous discussion we've got a list of specifications for it! I'm avoiding making reference to a version number for Jokosher Next because it's still unclear whether it's 0.3 or 0.9 or 1.0. I'm pretty excited about the feature list: we'll have better installation (we know that the current installation stuff is a bit of a pain, even given the magic runscript for Ubuntu) when we don't require CVS GStreamer (and I need to talk to the autopackage guys), and we'll have mixdown profiles. I've started drafting a spec for mixdown profiles, which will be refined by Lots O'People before it gets implemented, but this is another thing which will fulfil Jokosher's promise to do stuff and be really usable at the same time. It's gonna be exciting. We got some good press for the 0.2 release, although there are still (amazingly) a few bugs with it, and I intend to put out a new version of the runscript to make installation on Ubuntu better. This next release doesn't contain much wild-and-crazy new stuff, but it should get even more usable and have fewer bugs. Something that'd be highly cool, if you're interested in getting involved with Jokosher and you can write, is to help us with documenting it. We've got a user documentation area at userdocs.jokosher.org, which is there so you can write down the stuff that you do with Jokosher and fix any problems you found with the manual. Take a look, and write up what you do, or make the manual better, and you'll likely end up as part of the Jokosher doc team!

We bought some furniture from Ikea and opted to have it delivered. The firm who handle the delivery are called NightFreight, and they don't answer their phone. So a quick trip to their website was in order, where I discovered:

Unlike rival organisations, Nightfreight uniquely provides a total service capability encompassing every delivery opportunity from single parcels to complex logistics solutions across a growing B2B and B2C client base. This comprehensive service is achieved by harnessing its extensive nationwide network resources to handle everything from overnight satchels, packages, pallets - IDW (irregular dimension and weight) freight to dedicated supply chain management for multi-outlet high street retail stores through to large industrial groups. By integrating its service offering to meet customers’ specific needs Nightfreight is unprecedented in its ability to bring added value and cost efficient solutions to practically every requirement

Bingo!

In hardware acquisition news, I now have a big telly! A massive telly, in fact. A 37'' Evesham Alqemi S LCD TV. Rumours that I only bought a 37" one so that it was bigger than Bastian Nocera's big telly will be treated with embarrassed foot-shuffling followed by a rigorous denial :)

The Open Schools Alliance are asking people to write to their MP in support of an Early Day Motion by John Pugh, MP. It reads:

That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; and expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market.

I'm entirely in favour of this campaign. Every time I go to Niamh's school I think that they could be doing so much more with IT if it wasn't that they can't do what they want. Sam tells horror stories about software for teachers. It needs fixing. So I wrote to my MP. Why don't you write to your MP too, if you agree?

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Dear Lynda Waltho, John Pugh MP has tabled Early Day Motion number 179, entitled Software in Education, which I found at http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=31752&SESSION=885. The text of the EDM refers to the Open University and other educational institutions using free and open-source software, and expresses concern that Becta and the DfES are effectively denying schools the best choice of software by making it difficult for them to use open source. Open Source software is software that is free of cost to everyone, and can be worked on by everyone. You may have heard of Linux, which is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Windows. Linux is created by a worldwide community of computer programmers, some employed by large organisations such as IBM and others devoting their free time to it. The idea behind open source software is that it gives IT staff the freedom to work with the software that they have; they can make changes to it to make it better or more appropriate to them, and the software isn't controlled by one organisation who can refuse to fix the problems you find in it. You can find out more about open source software at http://opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.php. Speaking as one of your constituents, as an IT professional, and a father with a 6-year-old daughter at [redacted] School, I'd like to encourage our government to encourage schools to look at open source software as a way of saving cost and of helping schools work together to make the software that they need, rather than the software that large companies choose to give them. The e-Government unit published a report recommending that government agencies look at open source software as a strong candidate for software rollouts, with phrases such as "UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services", and "UK Government will only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments". (I read their report at http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/policydocs/policydocs_document.asp?docnum=905 but you may have access to it some other way.) The issue that John Pugh's EDM is hoping to address is that schools receive questionable advice on IT procurement from Becta, the government agency responsible for the use of IT in education. BECTA's framework agreements look only at the long-term financial performance of suppliers, which seriously hampers the involvement of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). There are large software houses which tender to the education market, but there are real opportunities for SMEs to become involved in software provision; this would allow a small software house to concentrate very specifically on a particular area of educational software, which brings employment across the country (rather than just at large 1000+ employees conglomerates). Concentrating on solely large enterprises ignores the risk that schools could become locked into expensive and restrictive contractual arrangements. Becta's lists of approved suppliers are very limited both in number and variety - only fifteen suppliers for non-curriculum software for example, none of which has any commitment to open source software despite both the e-Government report above and that Becta's own case studies found considerable savings in cost for schools using open source software. Thanks for reading through this. I'd like to urge you to consider adding your name to John Pugh's Early Day Motion. I'd be happy to talk to you further about this issue if you feel you'd like more information! Yours sincerely, Stuart Langridge

A mate of mine (Andy, the Man with Big Stones) is selling his car. It's a really rather nice Honda Prelude. If you like the idea of a car that will never ever break down and will also tear your face off with acceleration, and you're somewhere near Scotland, go take a look on eBay at the auction.

A new LugRadio is out! I've just done the release for "That's Arr-Path", episode 6 of season 4 of the world's finest radio show. I've been pretty lax about mentioning them here recently, I must admit. Busy life. You get a pathetic exhibition of laughing on air at the beginning, and a big rambly outro at the end: what more could you want? Oh yeah, and some things about rPath Linux, planets, and push email. Go get it.

Cor, look at that. In the Top Rated section on GnomeFiles.org, the top app is...Jokosher!

Yes! The Jokosher train rolls onward. We've just put out version 0.2 of what will eventually be the best audio editor in the whole world. Featuring user-createable Extensions, volume fades that actually work and also look rather pretty, effects, GStreamer fixes, and a lot more besides. Go get it.

Ade has, as repeatedly requested on LugRadio, opened up his secret wiki to the world. In other news, a pig got airborne. But seriously, folks. This is good work by the bald man. His wiki has much cool information on it. Kudos, Mr Bradshaw.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format. Signed up. Also: new petition system, on the Prime Minister's official website, and built by MySociety!

My Broadcom bcm4318 wireless card is now working properly in Ubuntu, by which I mean that it'll get a DHCP address and doesn't require loads of weird hacks and fail half the time. Well done the bcm43xx Linux driver people!

Anyone know anything about this PNRP thing where Microsoft Vista machines will have their own "domain name" without registering with DNS? In particular, does it use some MS-specific stuff that'll stop anyone else using it? I've read the spec but I don't really understand it...

Dear last.fm, I don't like the White Stripes. Why do you think I do? Stop bloody sending me White Stripes songs! That is all. With love, sil

DraXus tips me off that people are looking to mix up Beryl and Jackfield. Beryl is the new uber-eye-candy compiz, the flashy 3d and other mad graphical effects window manager for Linux, and some people are talking about wanting Dashboard-ish widgets for it...and Jackfield was suggested. Blimey. I need to get some more time to spend on it...

J5 releases D-Bus 1.0.

Well folks the time is finally here and the D-Bus library has come of age. Today it is my proud honor to announce to the world D-Bus 1.0.0 code named “Blue Bird”. With this we now have an API/ABI Policy which will be strictly followed. Thank you all who have helped out through patches, bug reports and well wishes.

This should make Jackfield much easier, since most of the reason that people can't get it to start up is because of the D-Bus stuff. I might just make it depend on1.0, since it's not going to actually be finished in any way before 1.0 hits distros anyway.

Goodness me. Today for the first time I approved a comment which Wordpress had marked (well, Akismet had marked) as possibly spam. It was about spam, mind.

Some quality chaps at the University of Arizona put together a report calculating how long you should slack for. The Effects of Moore’s Law and Slacking on Large Computations (beware PDF) Essentially, the idea here is that if you're running a long computation, you might be better to sit on your hands for a bit and wait for computing speed to get faster before starting it; if computers get faster enough quickly enough then you might end up finishing before you would have if you'd started straight away. Or, in one of the more memorable phrases from the report

[Y]ou could start a computation now, calculate for 40 months, and get a certain amount of work done. Alternately, you could go to the beach for 2 years, then come back and buy a new computer and compute for a year, and get the same amount of work done.

I wasn't kidding about it being for long computations, though. t₀(s), the time for which it's always worth starting now rather than waiting, is 26 months. If your calculation is going to take less than two years then you might as well start now, and (and I don't think that this will come as a surprise to anyone) I personally don't have any computations that will take that long currently outstanding on my to-do list. As the report has it

Note that the size of the calculation does not vanish as s → 0, ie. there is a minimum calculation for which it is ever worth it to slack. This is reassuring, since otherwise it would always be worth it to wait and we would never get anything done.

Genius. Unutterable genius. Well done Chris Gottbrath, Jeremy Bailin, Casey Meakin, Todd Thompson, and J.J. Charfman.

There's a useful trick that I first read about from a Microsoft developer, but I can't remember which. If you want to confirm that your application properly handled international characters, put the following into it: Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn Lots of non-English characters, but still readable. Since I can never remember what this phrase is, I'm recording it here for my future self.

OK, you lot have failed me. None of you offered to buy my house. Since no-one else has either, we're no longer on the market. Yes! We're staying where we are! Actually, the real reason is that Niamh's doing really well at school; we don't want to break that up if we can possibly avoid it. Anyway, that aside, this means that we're doing Interesting Things to the house. Making the library bigger, moving some stuff around. It's gonna be cool. Anyone got, ooh, about five grand I can borrow?

Someone should do this. It'd be me if I had five million quid around the place. One of the big advantages that Apple have over Linux is that it's easy to buy a laptop with Mac OS X on it. You can buy them online, and there are Apple stores if you're near a big city, but the key point here is that there's a brand. Buy an Apple laptop. If you want a Linux laptop, though, you're less able to do so. You have to buy someone else's laptop and put Linux on it. Now, there are places slowly arising from the market that do this; System 76 and Emperor Linux in the US, Transtec and The Linux Emporium in the UK, and doubtless others across the world. What I'd like to see, and what I'd like to buy, is this sort of thing; not a Windows laptop that someone's installed Linux on for you (and the SD card reader doesn't work, and nor does the wireless) but an actual Linux laptop. Make a deal with ODMs to build it. If I had the money, I'd set up a company called mirrorbright. They'd do laptops. There are a few important facts: The outside of the laptop, the whole external case, is a mirror. Not chromed, not just shiny, but an actual mirror. You should be able to shave by looking in it. This is tricky but not impossible; there are plastics firms around that do mirrorised plastics which you then lacquer. I think this would involve making a case for the laptop bits; you can't take an existing case and mirrorise it, because you can't get the surface flat enough to avoid imperfections in the mirror. The firm should do two laptops. The important point here is that that's not "laptop ranges", that's "laptops". Call them the "mirrorbright one" and the "mirrorbright two". A mirrorbright one has a 12" screen and 1GB of RAM; a mirrorbright two has a 15" screen and 2GB of RAM. Each has 120GB of disc space (or something like that; lots, anyway). Each does wifi and bluetooth and has a small webcam built into the case, above the screen. You don't get to choose the spec of it; every mirrorbright one is the same. Twelve months from now, release the three and the four which are updated. Every part on the laptop is supported with free drivers, including the graphics card to do dualhead. This will involve some fairly careful hardware choices but it's critical. Install the latest Ubuntu on the laptops, with a custom mirrorbright theme. If these existed I'd buy one tomorrow.

Lazyweb: I'd like to set up a mail server that doesn't do anything other than receive mail for a certain set of nominated addresses (and "catch-all" addresses, i.e., *@example.org), and forwards them on to another email address. What would be the simplest way of doing this? I'm aware that complex mailservers like exim will obviously be able to do this, but I'd rather not use something like that if I can avoid it because exim confuses the hell out of me. Your suggestions are much more likely to be entertained if the software is in Debian :)

If someone is an obvious choice to win something, then they are a shoo-in. Not "shoe-in". See WorldWideWords for derivation. That is all.

Niamh has started piano lessons at school! And she seems to be able to do it! This is remarkable. I have the musical ability of a rubber hammer, and Sam is (if this were possible) even worse than me. My parents are utterly unmusical. Sam's parents are. (Sam's brother was in a metal band, but (a) he was a drummer, which requires no real musical ability and (b) they were a metal band, which doesn't require musical ability either.) Now I need to get the piano tuned, since it's supposed to sound like a mellifluous and beautiful instrument and it actually sounds like someone's dropped a load of cymbals when you play it. Niamh is having to practice only on the bottom couple of octaves, which seem to be less out of tune than the rest. Anyone got any good recommendations for piano tuners in the Midlands who won't charge me a fortune? Bonus points if they fulfil the cliche by being blind.

The Jokosher project tracks its bugs and does development stuff through a hosted Trac installation at Python Hosting. They offer free Trac installs for open source projects, which is pretty useful. However, we were having some pretty serious problems with bug spam. There are Trac plugins to help with this sort of thing, but Python Hosting don't let you install plugins to their free Trac installs (which isn't too unreasonable a policy, to be honest). Since we need people to be able to file bugs, we had three options open to us:

1. Open up anonymous bug submission or account signup on our Trac, and try and stay on top of deleting the bugspam. Don't wanna do that, because it's really annoying.
2. Write a separate bug form, which people use to submit bugs, and have that submit the bugs for them (by giving it an account on our Trac that it can log into). I had about 90% of this done, but it was pretty fiddly and susceptible to breakage (because it had to pretend to be a web browser to submit the bugs)
3. Move bugtracking somewhere else.

After some consideration, we've decided on option 3. Where we've gone is Launchpad. We were already handling Jokosher translations through Launchpad anyway, so it made sense to move there (our other major options were running our own Trac or the Gnome bugzilla). A few issues have come about while looking at the move. Firstly, there doesn't appear to be a bug import. I'm still talking to the Launchpad developers about this, but there isn't any easy way of importing bugs from an existing system. I think this is pretty important; for Launchpad to succeed in the goal of managing lots of projects, it's gotta be easy to move your existing project from wherever it is at the moment to Launchpad, and that means importing the existing bugs. It wouldn't matter to us (although it might matter to others) if the import went through a "translation" format: imagine a textfile which listed all the bugs in it, where you get your existing system to dump out all the bugs to that text format and teach Launchpad to import that format. Moveable Type sorted this out for weblog posts some time ago, and it makes it relatively easy to do imports; most weblogging systems support the Moveable Type export format. The Launchpad hackers could even write scripts that dumped a Trac or Bugzilla or Mantis set of bugs into the format, to make things easier. (Obviously it'd be easier still if the import process merely asked where your current bug system was and then did the import itself (by screenscraping or whatever), but then it'll only work for systems that the Launchpad guys have catered for.) Secondly, the whole Launchpad concept of teams and projects and products is pretty confusing. Now, I understand why they've done it; you need a pretty complex set of data structures to represent and handle a project like Ubuntu, where there are many teams working on many bits of software with many people in them. However, Jokosher's not like that. It would be highly handy if, when you sign up a "product" (which is Launchpad-speak for one particular software program), there was a "simple" version where you specified the name of the product and the core devs and it took care of creating a bug team, a driver, a product, and linked them all together for you. It's also pretty heavily tied in to bzr as a source code control system. We're a Subversion project, and likely to stay that way for the near future at least, so we need to keep using our external SVN hosting (at Python Hosting, for which we're still very grateful). I'm still undecided about Launchpad, I think. On the one hand, it's pretty cool. On the other, it's pretty confusing at times. I'm given to understand that it's being worked on and the next version will Win Big, which is great news. As one final point, I do like the fact that you can run a project and get external hosting for all the key software management bits; bugtracking, source code, specs, releases, everything. That's great. I like that. We need to get more of that on the desktop, as I have remarked before.

Well, Jokosher is frozen for 0.2. All the features that are going in are now in, and the next two weeks are for art, documentation, and bugfixes before the release. This is quite exciting; 0.2 is actually, I believe, properly usable (although it's still not as comprehensive as some competitors) in a way that 0.1 (which was really a technology demo) was not. I particularly like the extensions code, from a technical point of view, although obviously actually playing music is rather more important. Things I intend to work on in the next couple of weeks:

• The simple bug submitter on the Jokosher website, so people can submit Jokosher bugs (at the moment they can't submit them directly to us because we've turned off anonymous submission and account signup on our bugtracker to prevent spam)
• Documentation on how to write a Jokosher extension

Some sort of official writeup of what 0.2 does will be coming (although it'll be on jokosher.org).