Barren Frozen Wasteland

Last week I had the fortune of being at the JISC Developer Happiness Days, or Dev8D. I'd like to write a little about what went on there, and why events like it are important.

The format of the event is somewhat unconventional, and therefore quite hard to justify. A large number of developers, not necessarily with any previous affiliation, are brought together for 4 days to work on whatever they feel like. There's no real schedule, just a few pre-planned events which are constantly subject to change. No-one's obliged to take part in any of the sessions. And it's free, which means someone other than the developers' employers have to stump up a not unsubstantial amount of cash. And it's during the week, so their employers are still paying them.

The event is described as "4 days of 100% pure software developer heaven," and that's right on the money. There's unlimited tea, coffee, snacks, electricity and dodgy WiFi. There's everyone from gurus to newbies, and most people are both in one respect or another. Any developer in this environment is going to be happy, but to justify its expenditure the event has to provide more than just smiles.

The first argument in support of the event can be taken straight from The Simpsons. There's an episode where Homer gets promoted to an executive position after growing hair with a baldness cure, and he tells Mr. Burns that there's not enough tartar sauce in the cafeterias at lunch time. After more explanation, Mr. Burns realises that a "happy worker is a busy worker," and by the gods he's right. While I was at Dev8D I achieved more in a day than I sometimes achieve in a week in my office (where I'm the only full time developer). We learned programming languages, we built applications, we designed algorithms, we gave talks, and all for fun! You can see that happiness can be an end in itself, because happiness provides motivation.

Another clear justification is looking at what he developer community produced during just 4 days. Everyone was encouraged to documents their doings on the wiki, and the list is as long as the printout of MPs expenses receipts that was produced on the Friday. A few developers including myself produced a set of web widgets to integrate with VLEs that I'll describe more in another post. People found new uses for existing public APIs. The Arduino workshops produced a storm of ideas for new electronic devices.

Finally, one of the most powerful outcomes from Dev8D is the community it builds. Bringing together like minded people in a situation where they aren't under pressure to see talks and report back to their bosses, but instead have the chance to meet each other and find out what makes each other tick promotes some of the strongest professional and social connections you're likely to find. The whole point of Dev8D is to bring the "chat in the pub" part of the conference (which, in all honesty, is where a lot of the best ideas and connections are made) to the fore, and it truly succeeds.

Here's to Dev8D 2011!

I've been concerned for a while about the Digital Economy bill. So concerned that with a little encouragement from the Open Rights Group, I've been writing to my MP, John Denham (JD from now on). He's from Labour, and is currently Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. While I may not agree with his party's policies, I'd like to start this post by applauding him for doing a great job of representing his constituents. Without him, I wouldn't have anything to write this post about.

So, this all began with me sending an email to JD about the Bill, outlining some of my concerns about it, mainly focused on the provision to disconnect users accused (not convicted) of file sharing, and the introduction of reserve powers allowing the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) to be amended, in order to (in JD's words) "allow the Government to tackle quickly any misuse of emerging technologies for copyright infringement and provide element [sic] of future proofing."
I sent a reply to the initial response I received, and yesterday received a copy of a response to my queries from Stephen Timms. I'd like to look at some key points of that response here, as I think they make some things abundantly clear about the nature of this bill. I'll take very good care not misquote or take any of this out of context. I've added some emphasis to make the key points stand out:

The first point I would like to make is to correct Mr. Johnson's understanding of our aim. We do want to bring about a reduction in on-line copyright infringement, but do not want to mate it easier for copyright owners to prosecute alleged infringers.
Rather we want to bring about a shift in consumer behavior from the unlawful to the legal, and the deterrent to back up the educational message is a means by which the copyright owners can take targeted legal action against the most serious infringers.

I think that this pretty much covers the crux of the issue. The problem that the Government's faced with is essentially a black market. There's demand for a product (media available over the web, without DRM, at a reasonable price), but no supply. When you have demand but supply is illegal, you create a black market. Another example of this is the industry for recreational drugs.

The Government's solution to this problem is to make people stop wanting the product. However, they don't seem to have made any suggestion that they might do (in my view) the sensible thing, and encourage the entertainment industry to provide the product that's being demanded. This would not only satisfy the consumers, but bring about a tidy profit for the industry from a sector who's currently giving them nothing. I'm sure industry spokespeople would say that file sharers are costing the industry money, but can you seriously expect me to believe that every person who downloads a film would have paid £8 each to see it in the cinema if they couldn't? I know people who downloaded Avatar, and yet it made $2 billion dollars in 7 weeks. Now, I bet I can find a fair few of those downloaders who'd happily pay a few quid to download the movie in decent quality, so they can watch it a couple of times on their TV. They might even buy the DVD later on so they could get the extra features. Am I missing something here?

Next, with regards to the "technical measures" (the power to disconnect or throttle bandwidth of those accused, not convicted, of filesharing):

We are all too aware of the issues surrounding wireless hi-jacking and indeed other measures such as use of proxy servers or the like to avoid detection. We have always accepted that there will be a hard core of infringers who will be hard to stop. We also realise that it is possible for these evasive activities to point towards the innocent neighbour, although in truth their is no indication that this will be anything other than the exception.

I wonder if there's any indication that this won't be anything other than the exception? I can't believe that they interviewed filesharers, and when asked "Would you use someone else's network to avoid detection so you can avoid our measures" they said no.
This paragraph sums up quite nicely that it's pretty futile trying to stop people filesharing altogether, just like it's futile trying to stop people in Iran speaking out against the election results online.

...we would accompany any technical measures with a two-stage robust appeals mechanism including an appear to a 1st Tier Tribunal, which is a judicial body. No measures will be applied without the appeals process having been exhausted.

This made me feel a bit better at first, but then I read a quote from the Open Rights Group, which I think counters that point very well:
Appeals are not the same thing as ‘due process’. They circumvent a priori requirements to test the evidence. Given that severe punishments are being suggested – and the evidence may be flawed – there is a fundamental obligation to presume innocence and test the case. Due process is more important when dealing with new fields of evidence and misdemeanour, not less.

Finally, regarding the CDPA:

The bill itself makes very clear in Clause 17 (7) that: "The power does not include the power to create or modify a criminal offense," and is strictly limited in its scope. Furthermore, this power would only be used after consultation with stakeholders and the public, and with approval of both Houses of Parliament via the "super-affirmative" procedure which involves a very high level of scrutiny.

So, it can't change any offenses, and it needs to go through both Houses, but it's obviously preferable from the Government's point of view to having to put a bill forward to amend the CDPA. I don't know enough about the super-affirmative procedure to fully understand why, but it doesn't help quell my fears.

In general, this letter makes it pretty clear to me that this bill is not in the public interest. It's in the interest of an entertainment industry whose business model is stuck in the 1990s and who are very happy about it. An industry who won't move with the times is bad for consumers, and shouldn't be protected by legislation like this. If you think your MP will vote for this bill, let them know you wont be voting for them.

As I write this, music fans across the UK are rejoicing at Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" getting to Christmas Number 1.

This all started last year when someone got fed up of X Factor dictating the charts with it's particularly vile brand of manufactured pop. For 3 years running at the time, X Factor had it's winner at Christmas number one with a pretty average cover of an otherwise good song. In response to this, a Facebook group was set up to encourage everyone to buy Jeff Buckley's version of Hallelujah, instead of the X Factor version. Unfortunately, the campaign died on its arse somewhat and X Factor got it's 4th Christmas Number one.

However, this year we saw something even more out there. Instead of encouraging people to buy the original version of X Factor's cover, a campaign was set up to get people buying the classic funk metal record "Killing in the Name," previously reaching 25 in the singles chart in 1993, for Christmas number one. The difference this time round, is that it worked.

Why do I care? It's not like I listen to pop music, and while I think Rage are an excellent band, they're not one of my favourites. I think that point is here that it shows the music industry that people have moved on. Killing in the Name was *only* available via download, not on CD, while the X Factor single was available in both formats, yet Killing in the Name still won. There was an expectation that Rage's download-only lead would be crushed when the CD single hit the shops, but it wasn't. Some people said it wasn't work trying anyway, but I've made it pretty clear by now that it was.

I hope that the rest of the entertainment industry pricks up its ears and listens to what's going on here. There's a huge commercial force out there who aren't interested in manufactured crap, and don't go into shops to buy their entertainment. They entertainment made with passion, and it available on line, at a reasonable price, where ever they are. Let's see it!

P.S. Sorry if that last bit sounded like a Morrison's advert.

Being the KDE fanboy that I am I was delighted to see that Kubuntu 9.10 was to include a release of Kubuntu Netbook Edition (KNE), with the new KDE Plasma Netbook desktop.
After several failed install attempts (the image on the HTTP download mirror I used appears to be corrupt) I managed to get it installed today thanks to bit torrent. Here's what I think!

Firstly, lets establish some points of reference. The previous OS I had on my eeePC was EasyPeasy 1.1, based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) 8.10, running a few KDE apps. I've always used KDE on my desktop, and have run Kubuntu since its first release.

Booting

KNE booted in under 10 seconds. That's about a quarter of the time taken by EasyPeasy 1.1 on the same machine, and a few seconds faster than the full-blown Kubuntu install on my 2 GHz desktop. The latter difference is probably down to the eeePC's solid-state drive.
However, logging in was where it fell down. KDE is a rather heavy desktop with lots of components and config to load. The inital log in took about 30 seconds, with subsequent logins taking about as long as the machine takes to boot. It's not a problem in the grand scheme of things, but compared to EasyPeasy, it does feel sluggish.

Appearance

The "desktop" itself looks slick and shiny, benefiting from KDE 4 and all of it's eye candy. The window manager even manages to provide some compositing effects. When you log in, the splash screen fades smoothly into the desktop, and switching between applications is done via the "Present Windows" feature (like Mac OSX's exposé). Considering integrated graphics and the 900MHz processor in my eeePC, this really impressive and all the effects are delivered flawlessly.

Interface

This is the real paradigm shift in KNE. The interface introduces two new Plasma "Activities" to KDE: Search and Locate Containment, and Newspaper. The newspaper is basically a container for 2 columns of plasmoids, delivering online content from various feeds and streams (such as RSS, Weather, comic strips and so on) all in one page. The Search and Locate Containment is like the full-screen application launcher found in UNR. Application categories are displayed as a row of large icons, which take you to a set of icons for the applications in that category. There's also a container for "favourite" applications, which show all the time. The feature here that's supposed to differentiate it from UNR is the search feature, but at the moment it just falls short of the mark.
At the far right of the panel (located at the top of the screen) is the Search plasmoid. Clicking this (or pressing the assigned shortcut) summons a search box. Typing in here will search through your applications and files and display the results in the Search and Locate containment, in place of the application category icons. This is great - I use KRunner all the time on my desktop in place of the menu, which works just like this. The problem is that KRunner is better, and it's present on KNE too. Here are the problems with the Search at the moment, which KRunner doesn't suffer from:

• There's no shortcut key assigned by default
• When the search box is summoned, it doesn't automatically get focus
• When you've found what you're looking for, you still have to click the icon - there's no keyboard interface for selecting the one you want

The other "elephant in the room" is ever-present in KDE, and that's KWallet's lack of PAM integration. On EasyPeasy, my WPA password was unlocked when I logged in, and Network Manger could connect straight away. However if I want to connect with KNE I get prompted for my password to unlock KWallet. I can put up with this on my desktop because when I log in to my desktop the time it takes for me to re-enter my password in negligible compared to the time it'll be on for. However, with my netbook (and the new super-fast boot time) I'm far more likely to turn it off and on to check my emails, look something up, take some notes at a conference, and the dual-password requirement would start to become a hassle.

Conclusions

Now, it would be grossly unfair of me to pass judgement on KDE's netbook offering based on this. KNE's download page and installer both clearly state that this is a technology preview release, and that the first production release will be with Ubuntu Lucid (10.04 LTS), after KDE 4.4 is released. Looking at it as a technology preview I'm excited. I never imagined when I bought my eeePC that a machine as low spec as that could have such a good-looking interface running so smoothly. The Newspaper view needs a bit of spit and polish, but reflects and accommodates the way I use my netbook very well. The Application launcher needs some work, though. If it doesn't get as easy-to-use as KRunner, I'd remove it and use that instead.
For now, I'm to switch to UNR 9.10. We'll see how it goes once Lucid is released!

--- a/theme/styles.php
+++ b/theme/styles.php

@@ -116,7 +116,7 @@ $files = array();
 // here can be overridden by theme CSS.
 if ($pluginsheets) {
     foreach ($THEME->pluginsheets as $plugintype) {
-        $files += get_sheets_for_plugin_type($plugintype);
+        $files = array_merge($files, get_sheets_for_plugin_type($plugintype));
     }
 }

That's the one-line patch I submitted to the Moodle tracker last week. It fixes a bug that was preventing plugins in the upcoming Moodle 2 from being able to include their own stylesheets.

Having been on holiday for a few days, I came back in to work today to find that the patch had been accepted and committed to the core Moodle CVS. This is a first for me, so rather chuffed with myself, I tweeted about it.
This was picked up upon by Steve Lee from OSS Watch who provide advice on the use of Open Source in education. He decided that it provided a good enough example of the benefits of the open development model to be worthy of a post in the OSS Watch blog. All because of one little line of code!

To pick up on some of they key points from Steve's post, the Open Source model really does prove advantageous when developing software. I've been working to update our moodle plugins to use the Moodle 2.0 APIs over the last few weeks, when I hit this bug. The open nature of the code not only helped me find and fix the bug quickly (Tim Hunt, who maintains this code, was on holiday), but being able to submit the patch for inclusion in Moodle's CVS repository makes it a lot easier for me to maintain the code at my end, rather than having to re-apply the fix every time I pull updates from moodle.org.
The opportunity to interact with the Moodle community is also invaluable, as it has allowed me to discuss various methods of solving the problems I've come across, giving me the knowledge to help others with similar problems. I've also contributed to discussions on future Moodle developments, such as the formation of the User Interface guidelines. When I studied HCI at university I thought it was a pain, but now I'm in the "real world" it turns out I can put my knowledge to good use!

This is also a prime example of what Jono Bacon posted recently about validation, so thanks to Steve, Tim and Tony for the encouragement!.

2 Surprise announcements in as many days. First off, Microsoft contributes code to the Linux kernel. Secondly, they contribute code to Moodle (which I happen to develop at work). All under the GPL. What is this, bizarro world?

Now these raise some interesting discussion points. Microsoft has long harped on about how Linux contains code that violates its patents, without ever suggesting which code this might refer to. The response from the open source community was pretty much "put up or shut up," but nonetheless enough FUD was generated to prompt Novell into striking a no-sue deal with MS.
However, Microsoft's now a contributor to the software they previously claimed is in violation of their intellectual property. This could be enough to extinguish the FUD fires they've been building. If Microsoft are so anti-Linux, why would they happily be a part of the project? A surprising change of heart, but by no means an unwelcome one.

Secondly, it'll be interesting to see how much Microsoft embraces the open source development model. Will they just throw the code out and say "Look! GPL! Aren't we great!" while only distributing code created in-house, or are they going to be encouraging community development? Are they going to submit the Moodle plugin for inclusion in CVS? Are they going to put it in the Modules and Plugins database?
One worrying sign at the moment is that the plugin is only supported on Moodle 1.9, yet it requires PHP 5. Moodle 1.9 doesn't have PHP 5 as a requirement, and Microsoft's documentation makes no mention of this.
I'm interested, but I'm not getting too excited, yet.

So back in February I wrote a post about Twitter, and why I was joining. That was 5 months ago now, so here's the conclusions I've drawn.

Trends

When I started, you were able to search keywords and view trending topics (the words/phrases that featured the most) on a subdomain, search.twitter.com. This has since been moved to a sidebar on the main site. Terrible idea. This has generated to end of spam and pointless bandwagoning. Not only do you get people posting relentlessly to get their tag on the trending topics list, but you actually get people who write a post consisting entirely of trending phrases then saying "Follow me plz!!". If I follow someone, it's because I find them amusing, interesting or informative, not coz they post bollocks. Go away.

You also get trends that are the same post retweeted a thousand times, which makes being able to search for a trending topic useless. The intention is that you get DIFFERENT posts about the same topic, not so that you get the same post you've just read by someone else again and again. Lookout for followers of mashable on this one.

Followers/Followees

The whole point of twitter is that everything you post is publicly viewable, much like a blog. Anyone can read and respond to your tweets, and you can see anyones. This differs from Facebook who, since I joined Twitter, have tried to make themselves more like Twitter each day, where only your approved friends can see your posts. I think this is great. The only problem is that 50% of the people who have started following me are "hot girls wanting hot sex in my area," or someone who seems to be following everyone on Twitter in the hope that some will follow them back.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, please, but why would you want anyone to follow you unless they find you interesting, and do so of their own accord? If you want your voice to be heard, then surely you only want it heard by those to whom it will matter? Anyone like this gets an instant block from me. I don't care for follower numbers, I'd rather have 10 who want to hear what I have to say that 100 that don't.

The people I follow, on the other hand, are brilliant. In particular, I'd recommend jamescridland, Andrew_Taylor and stephenfry. I also started following a few news-type sites, but it turned out that (with the notable exception of a few like BBCClick), they just posted links to stories syndicated via RSS. If that's all you're posting, I'll just subscribe to your RSS feed, and not have your links clutter my timeline, thanks.

Direct Message/@ replies

This is actually a pretty big relief. When I saw these features I thought they'd be prime spam targets, with people posting as many usernames as they could with a link to their website and it landing in your @replies box, but no. The posts I get there are generally a good piece of conversation, a well thought-out reply to what I've posted, or a retweet of something I've posted (very flattering, btw). Top marks.

API/Clients

One of Twitter's strengths is it's API allowing you to tweet easily from anywhere (within reason). However, I find myself in the small part of the Twitter community that's somewhat hard done by. I have an old phone which can just about run a basic J2ME Twitter client, and a linux desktop. What I'd really like is a desktop widget that gets my timeline, and lets me post tweets. Hold on, what's this? A KDE Plama widget that does just that!
Then I see a post from another user that's come from Spaz, so I check it out. It looks amazing! All the stuff in my Plasma widget, plus searching, retweeting, the lot! I then find Tweetdeck and whole host of awesome-looking Twitter apps. How can I run them on Linux? Do I need Wine? No! They run on AIR, which should work on Linux with no problem. I install spaz, play with my window manager to get it behaving like a desktop widget, and hey presto.... AIR stops working. No errors, it just won't start. Great.

Never mind, someone will have written a sexy, full-featured Twitter client for Linux that doesn't need AIR, right? Err... no. It seems that AIR is the de facto platform for Twitter clients. Hohum.
The result of this is that I tend just to use the website. Not that this is a problem, it's just not as cool as it should be.

Verdict

Twitter is excellent. It's users can be idiots. I only follow the ones that aren't. We need a non-AIR linux client that's as cool as Spaz.

Well, time for a nice hefty blog post I think, as I haven't done one in a while.
I got my final results from university this week. I got a first. Everyone I know has been congratulating me, which is quite overwhelming. I'm happy, but I don't seem to be as happy for myself as everyone else is for me! It's probably becuase I was worried that I wouldn't get one, that when I did it was more a cause for relief then celebration.
Nonetheless, it's the weekend now, so party time tonight. Hells Yeah.

I've also moved into a new flat with my lovely girlfriend, and started a new job. I'm working at Taunton's College in Southampton as their in-house web developer. This involves working primarily with Moodle, the open-source Course Management System/Virtual Learning Environment. This is awesome, for 2 reasons. 1 - I get paid to code PHP, which is what I do for fun anyway. 2 - I get paid to contribute to an open source project, which is a position I've always wanted to be in. And it pays well enough for my nice new flat. And I get a local government pension. And I get to help people teach. Winner. Dream first job? I think so.

Moodle in itself is a pretty cool system, although it's suffered a bit from it's evolutionary development. The main problems are that when new and better solutions get introduced, the old ones remain. This is mainly a backwards-compatibility thing which means a lot of it is being culled for version 2 (the upcoming major release), but it means at the moment there are 3 different ways of keeping track of which javacscript files a page needs, a really flexible permission system which relies on an older "roles" system for assigning the permissions, and lang files for older components all over the place.

That said, the current "best practice" provides some really nifty plug-in APIs,and the database abstraction layer makes interacting with the database a breeze. Hopefully once version 2 hits the mirrors, the cruft will have been cut back, and the new plug-in points will make it an even more versatile platform than it already is (come on, gradebook plugins!).

The Moodle community's also brilliant, as are my Taunton's colleagues. I look forward to working with them all to make Moodle better!

I'm a big fan of BBC iPlayer. However, I'm not such a big fan of DRM-encumbered downloads, and the flash player doesn't work on my netbook. For this reason, I use iplayer-dl, a clever little ruby app that pretends it's an iPhone, and lets you download DRM-free versions on the videos.
The downside of this iplayer-dl is that it requires you to manually copy and paste the URL or ID of the video into the command line. I thought it would be handy if there was a link on the iPlayer page to download an episode through iplayer-dl.

After about an hour of messing, I was successful. The steps I followed are below. Please note that this is a VERY hacky solution, and probably isn't the best way to do it, nor do I recommend anyone else does it this way. One stage of it potentially leaves your system vulnerable to attack.

1. Install iplayer-dl
   This bit's pretty straightforward, the instructions are on the iplayer-dl site linked above.
2. PHP Script
   I run a local web server on my netbook for web development purposes. I created a script called iplayer.php in my public_html folder with code similar to the following:

   <?php
   $proxy = "";
   $dest = "/home/mark/downloads/iplayer";
   
   $cmd = "gnome-terminal -x /usr/bin/iplayer-dl -d $dest -p $proxy {$_GET['id']}";
   
   header("Content-Type: text/something");
   echo("#!/bin/bash\n");
   echo($cmd);
   
   ?>
   

   This code essentially generates a shell script which will open a gnome-terminal window (it could equally use Konsole, xterm etc), and runs the iplayer-dl with the specified parameters. It gets the show's ID or URL from the query string.
   Note the Content-Type header. I haven't actually included the Content-Type I used here, since I've told Firefox to open it in Bash automatically (remember the vulnerability I mentioned?). Suffice to say, I chose something fairly innocuous that I'm unlikely to ever come across on the web, so I won't get weird things suddenly trying to execute in bash.

3. Displaying a link to the PHP Script
   This piece of magic was done with the Greasemonkey Firefox extension, which is well worth a play with, especially if you're good with Javascript. Long story short, it lets you define scripts to run automatically after certain pages have loaded, allowing to you edit how they look.
   I wrote a script to run on BBC iPlayer's episode pages (the pages where the actually video player is displayed). It looks like this:

   var dlFlash = document.getElementById('download-air');
   dlFlash.innerHTML = '<a href="http://localhost/~mark/iplayer.php?id='+window.location+'" target="_blank">Download with iplayer-dl</a>';
   

   Obviously this exact script only works for me. If you did it yourself, you'd have to change the href to the location of your iplayer.php. Essentially all this script does it replace the normal download link on the page (Which tries download the video in BBC's Adobe AIR-based client) with a link to my PHP script (effectively, to the shell script generated by the PHP). By a happy accident, it even keeps the icon and background of the download button, so it's nice and aesthetically pleasing.

4. Click the Link
   Clicking the link pops up the usual "What shall I do with this file?" dialogue. Now, I want as little faff as possible, so I set it to run with bash, and to do it every time without asking. This associates the MIME type I chose earlier with Bash, so in future all scripts produced from these links will open the download instantly. For this reason I didn't use application/x-sh as the MIME type, as I didn't want to accidentally click a link to a real shell script on another page and have it execute automatically! If you were happy to select bash and click "OK" each time you wanted to download from iPlayer, you could use this MIME type.

And that's it! I've now got a handy DRM-free one-click download link on every iPlayer page.

Just a quick post because I've found an amazingly useful application.
As a web developer, I'm constantly plagued by Internet Explorer and it's non-standard behavior. Granted, IE 8 goes a long way to solve this, but all-too-often the places where I work (still!) use IE 6. This means that I build an app, test it on the "proper" browsers and IE 8 (in an Windows Virtual Machine), then take it to the client and they show me a whole load of rendering errors in IE 6. Windows won't let you install 2 versions of IE, or downgrade from the one you've got, so I'm a bit stuck unless I want to run a seperate VM for each version.

The solution: IETester. This is a brilliant Freeware windows app that lets you open a series of tabs for the various versions of IE (5.5, 6, 7 and 8) to test the rendering and javascript engines side-by-side. It Just Works, and until IE 8 adoption is widespread (read: when people are forced to stop using XP), is a must for all web designers and developers!