Brian Gough’s Notes

occasional GNU-related news

A year 2010 problem

January 15th, 2010

If you are using Spamassassin and seem to be getting less mail since the start of the year, take note of Spamassassin bug 6269 which describes how all mail sent in the year 2010 gets an extra 3.2 spam points simply because the “date is grossly in the future” according to a rule from 2006 with a hard-coded date.

The great irony about Web 2.0

September 18th, 2009

A nice explanation by Yea-Hung Chen on the Autonomo.us mailing list:

The remarkable thing about “Web 1.0” (and specifically the personal home page and email) is that you can link to anybody or anything you want and you can send a message to anybody you want. It doesn’t matter who is hosting your website and it doesn’t matter who your email provider is.

The same is not true for many implementations of “Web 2.0.” If you’re on Facebook but not on MySpace, and your friend’s on MySpace but not on Facebook, how do you link to him (i.e., tell people you are friends)? How do you send him a message? (Or, how do I respond to President Obama’s tweets if I’m not on Twitter? How do I join the Facebook group for my favorite political cause if I’m not on Facebook? And what are the implications when membership in a closed and private service is a prerequisite for political engagement?)

The great irony about “Web 2.0” is that it is a step back in many ways; even AOL — who, of course, controlled much of Web 1.0 — let you send email to non-AOL users.

Yea-Hung Chen on the autonomo.us mailing list July 2009

GNU Hackers Meeting 11-15 November 2009, Gothenburg.

September 9th, 2009

There will be an international GNU Hackers Meeting on 11-13 November in Gothenburg, Sweden, as part of the FSCONS conference on 14-15 November. The meeting is intended for active GNU contributors and its theme is the continued advancement of the GNU system. Please see the GHM webpage for details of the event.

LibrePlanet 2009

April 9th, 2009

I gave a talk at the FSF’s LibrePlanet event last month — it was a report on the GNU Hackers Meeting (GHM) that I organised last year in the UK.

The LibrePlanet wiki has a summary of the talk including the slides.

The initial part of the talk was a description of the meeting and how it was organised, but the main focus was the role of communication in the GNU Project.

Historically most GNU Project communication has been though email (along with webpages, and IRC) rather than face-to-face. There have been several decades of research on “computer-mediated communication” as it is called in the literature, and there are a number of negative effects which are well established (such as communication being less robust, difficulty establishing common ground, and decreased motivation and commitment).

Given these negative effects, I suggested we should (a) be more explicitly aware of them and how they impact our work, both day-to-day and on the large scale (i.e. in terms of how they “shape” individual programs and the free software ecosystem as a whole) and (b) look for ways to mitigate them.

Having a regular GNU Hackers meeting is one way to do that, and I encouraged people at the LibrePlanet event to hold one in the US.

Two Bits – The Cultural Significance of Free Software

August 27th, 2008

I have recently finished reading the book "Two Bits – The Cultural Significance of Free Software" by Christopher M. Kelty, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University.

In summary, the book examines the development of the free software movement from an anthropological point of view (it is based on research work done as part of the authors PhD thesis).

The author identifies some interesting parallels between different endeavours involving freedom and the creation of information infrastructure, such as the development of internet protocols and free textbooks.
 
The website for the book is http://twobits.net/

It is published under the CC BY-NC-SA license.
 

ASP2PHP – a useful tool

May 31st, 2005

Needing to migrate a client’s website from Windows to GNU/Linux I recently discovered Michael Kohn’s ASP2PHP for converting Microsoft Active Server Pages to PHP.

The site was fairly straightforward, using ASP for menus and contact forms, and the converter worked first time. The software is only at version 0.76, and had a few rough edges, so I was impressed that it worked so smoothly. Up to that point it had seemed like the only game in town was the proprietary Chilisoft, so this was a good discovery.

The project homepage is http://asp2php.naken.cc/.

FSFE cryptocard

May 18th, 2005

I received my admin pin earlier this week and have now got my FSFE cryptocard working. I’ve generated a key that I can use for signing files (or encryption). I’ve still got a lot to learn about smart cards—from browsing on the web I’ve read that its possible to use a smartcard with ssh, or for unix logins (via a PAM module). Those are both things I’d like to get working. Maybe one day I won’t need a password to login to this site if I have my card ;-)

Smart card progress

May 4th, 2005

Success.. I can now read and write to smart cards.

Got my new card reader this morning, so spent most of today getting it working.

I don’t have my FSFE pin yet, so I tried it out on some spare GPG cards I had left over from a talk I gave last year about free software & security.

FSFE Cryptocard arrives

May 2nd, 2005

The fsfe cryptocard arrived today. Looks very nice! After a bit of research I have ordered a new card reader (SPR532). I decided to go for one with an built-in keypad so that the pin can be entered directly into the reader (see here). May as well do things properly, the chain is only as strong as the weakest link and all that.