DoctorMo's Blog

I was listening to an interesting video of the rather flamboyant Jimmy McMillan of the rent is too damn high party campaigning for the New York Governor’s office and he brought to mind the recent insistent views of Katie Hopkins on last week’s Young Voter’s Question Time on BBC Three. I should say that I don’t agree with either person as the first seems to lack rationality and the second both compassion and ironically economic understanding.

These two are rather far a part I admit, but something in their radical and disagreeable views created a new idea for me. That perhaps “rent is too high” because “the market will bear” much more when the goods are a requirement to productive living and increase with the degree to which people are able to not buy and even exit out of agreements easily.

So the main economic factor needed to reduce the amount of rent (because it is too damn high) being paid on average is to provide sensible, comfortable and easily accessible alternative housing to as many people as possible from either the government directly or non-profit chartered organisations at a stretch.

My conjecture is that lowering the tolerance of customers (that’s renters) by providing alternatives to private rented accommodation will reduce the rent burden by reducing the amount the market will bear. After all the amount the market will bear is only the amount to which people will/need to pay in order to get the services.

Ironically it means the people who are right wing poor and middle class are inadvertently increasing their own rent by virtue of being indignant about government provided housing. I know plenty of normally sensible people who would like government housing to be as horrid and uncomfortable as possible in order to encourage people’s independence form the state. Of course economics bites them in the arse on that one.

Never let it be said that doing the right wing doesn’t move you left and doing the left wing doesn’t make you right. This is complex man.

I just got myself a new phone to replace my lost blackberry pearl. I never had a data plan for my pearl so it was _just_ a phone, and a rather pathetic one at that. But now thanks to my carelessness weeks ago I could give in to presure and replace the phone with something better.

Now I have an Android based Samsung Vibrant. So far I’ve rooted it (took a bit of time to do), got a terminal installed and have barnacle wifi tether installed. As well as downloading the Ubunchu Android apps

Maybe I can test a bunch of things now.

Hey there! I’ve just finished the finally editing and correcting for Chapter 7 of Ubunchu. The long awaiting Installfest chapter. I HIGHLY recommend reading this chapter if you are involved in advocacy at all:

English Edition Download

We were having some issues with the updated wizardpen driver in my ppa, it worked in lucid but not in maverick.

Thanks to the great investigative work by negora, he figured out the problem and I repackaged a fix for maverick.

We’ve had good reports, so I’m letting you all know it’s ready for use:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:doctormo/xorg-wizardpen
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-wizardpen

This is for all KYE, Trust, AceCad Flair, UC-Logic (Genius Pen, SuperPen etc) tablets. There are a lot of supported devices which are rebranded so this is an incomplete list.

Let me know how it goes below.

I’m fairly conservative when it comes to upgrading Ubuntu, every upgrade fails in some way on this System76 laptop. One week after the release of 10.10 and after asking lots of people if they had any problems. I decided to upgrade.

I shouldn’t have bothered.

Upgrade took 12 hours, downloading, installing, asking for things to be replaced or kept.

One reboot later and I’m looking at a flashing screen, it’s the text only console but not as you know it. It’s completely messed up and not even the text mode works. The nvidia card in this machine must have got upset and threw a wobbly if not even the text mode will work.

Update: After trying a fresh install for the 6th time, I’ve given up for now. There is something seriously wrong with nvidia. 185 says “not supported” and 173 crashes with a black screen, 180 is missing the main package and well nauvou won’t give me above 800×600 resolution. It’s all rather crap.

Update 2: Looks like the real problem is with the kernel. I reported the bug here. Very strange bug.

Had a great night out with the Army of Broken Toys here in Harvard Sq, Cambridge tonight. I was a bunny with the wife for the act so I was all dressed up as usual.

A highlight of the evening was meeting Neil Gaiman who put to rest a question I’ve had about Terry Pratchett’s book “Going Postal” and the whole Gnu/Crackers sub-plot. I had always assumed that this part of the book was inspired by the whole history of Unix, Gnu and Linux; but every time I discussed this with other Linux geeks they seem to disagree and couldn’t see the resemblance.

So I wanted Neil to ask Terry and see if it was a reference to Gnu and Unix?

I’ll ask him if you like, but I’m certain the answer will be yes. It’s certainly how I read it.

Well that settles it for me, and it certainly confirms just how geeky Terry and Neil are. On a side note I also asked what operating system he uses and he’s currently using a Mac which is replacing a windows machine. There is an Ubuntu machine in the basement, but it’s not getting much use and is getting old. Oh well, maybe an upgrade would help?

We’re almost done with the English editing/translation process and this chapter is a very good one.

Scott Gilbertson did a review of Ubuntu 10.10 for The Register news site and it covered all the usual features. But there is something I take issue with…

Yes more than Scott harping on needlessly over the spit home directory policy.

It’s the garbling of free as in cost and free as in speech and then onwards to mixing up commercial with proprietary.

There’s also a controversial new proprietary software portion section in the Software Center.

No Scott, it’s a non-controversial new commercial software portion. The first app and possibly others will be proprietary as well as commercial; but we are hoping for the sale and economic viability of Free and Open Source software in order to ensure that we don’t end up with proprietary people being rewarded and enabled while Free Software developers are punished and disabled.

Canonical could have a stronger message too in my opinion. Not quite telling journalists if they’ll be selling FOSS software or just proprietary software. We need strong leadership and the best people to deliver a strong leadership on economic viability are platform providers who can communicate and provide the avenues built in to the platform.

Free software purists may decry the move, but Canonical clearly doesn’t care and is ultimately more interested in a free desktop that allows the users to install any kind of software applications they’d like than it is in satisfying the militantly free crowd.

Our Scot isn’t a believer in FOSS (if he even understands what it means), so he’s okay with lobbing insults around. “Oh users want to _own_ their software, next thing you know they’ll want to vote in leaders and own their own shoes and be able to renegotiate working conditions, whatever next!”

Am I too annoyed by the back stabbing of FOSS in this article? Leave your comment.

I’ve been watching the tedTalk by Simon Sinek and I wanted to ask you all as a community what you believe in. According to Simon there are die hard Apple fans who love Apple and their products because they believe in Apple’s think different philosophies and only after will they make practical excuses for why they like the products.

I believe in giving users software ownership, that no matter how much or how little they paid for software that they should have complete ownership and control over their own computers. They should have source code, they should be able to modify it or pay others to modify it for them, they should be able to redistribute and learn from it without strings, restrictions or end user agreements.

I believe it’s your computer, your data and your life and it’s not my business as a programmer and software maker to tell you how to run it. It’s your job to tell me how you want the software to serve your needs.

So now you know what I believe as an official Ubuntu member; I want to ask you all, what you believe in when it comes to Ubuntu and Software?

My good friend S.Gerguri asked me to talk about the nature of the Ubuntu One services offered by Canonical Ltd. and has sent me his thoughts by email, I’ve quoted him here and responded with my own thoughts. Full disclosure: I briefly worked on the team that develops the Ubuntu One service at Canonical and so I’m going to be careful since I’ve seen code and talked about strategy while on the team.

I just saw Martin Albisetti’s post on Ubuntu One Mobile and went to check the service. It appears to be a rather neat way of accessing your music while not having to lug around your whole catalog when you’re away just with your phone. … It is also priced quite fairly, even though I think the cloud capacity could be larger for the asking price.

The amount of space has to be very carefully calculated between the amount offered for free and the amount offered for a price. The servers the files are stored on are Amazon’s cloud, so the money doesn’t all go to Canonical. This is something of a business decision though and it’s really up to the market to decide at what price it thinks the services on offer are worth paying.

The service is also competing against companies for who this service is a loss leader, hoping to attract a large enough user base to sell their companies. This is precisely the opposite of Canonical that wants UO to be self sustaining and ultimately paying for developers to work on Ubuntu.¹

The client code is open source, while the server is apparently under full control by Canonical. Apparently though, there are still people that have a problem with this, as evidenced by some of the comments in Martin’s post.

It’s true that the server component is proprietary, actually it’s also not even available in binary form. It might as well just be a magic wall that talks a certain language. My feelings on services is that the user has already made the decision to give their destiny over to the service provider regardless of whether the server code is FOSS or not.

For the client software, this is more interesting because the protocols are documented and well known so creating a server component is a matter of guile and not hard work. Accepting code in the FOSS client so it can connect to other servers using the same protocol and shipping that by default in Ubuntu is perhaps where Canonical’s community and open market principles will be shown either way.

The service in question here is the cloud storage along with _open source_ retrieval mechanisms (I am talking about the app). … So about the only possible super-wild argument against having Canonical complete control over the server side (including source) is code inspection for security issues, and even that one falls short because the storage software is just part of the server stack.

The security of the server side is more likely to be better than the client side anyway. But I don’t think there is any rationale to holding onto the server code, there are bigger sticks and better ways to use them. At the moment the closed server code is used as a weird proxy for user’s unsettling feeling that Canonical is making money from Ubuntu in ways where it doesn’t invite anyone else to make money too².

Some people are also concerned that it’s a matter of principle. If you don’t as a company _believe_ in free and open source, then why advertise and promote free software principles at all? If you do believe them; then why the hypocrisy? That’s a social element which basically boils down to fear being the greatest eroder of principle and it’s fear of being out-competed on the Ubuntu platform which keeps it closed.

I actually find this pretty insulting from the people that complain about it. Canonical gives out Ubuntu for free, provides 2 GB of free cloud storage which, mind you, is not forced on the user, and provides the client side in full open source.

The 2GB is a loss leader, it’s only partly there to improve the Ubuntu desktop as a feature. It’s a win-win and besides you couldn’t sell anyone music if they needed a paid for account first.

The thing that showed the worst side of UbuntuOne service was the decision to hide the purchased music folder instead of using a standard FreeDesktop.org sub folder for it. There were technical reasons and design reasons but I and others are still uncomfortable with the lack of access users have to their music files and the ability to move them out of the UbuntuOne cloud.

Actually, I think this would be a great idea for any cloud-based open source service – let the parties that participated in developing the server code keep it for a competitive advantage, and provide the client in full open source. It’s the service that’s important anyway, and this way you have a chance to recoup on your development costs by providing the service first for some time (until the other interested parties get their server code and modified client code ready).

I’m generally not fond of cloud based services, I think they’re needlessly grabby with people’s data and access rights. The first priority must be for the user to weigh up the cost of doing it themselves with the cost of loosing control. The one good thing I can say about online services is that general users tend to recognise that trade-off better than with normal software.

It’s frustrating that users consider a lack of control over their own computer to be something to be agreeably ignorant about. Users weighing up and making an informed decision about how to solve a practical immediate problem with a solution that may have bad long term implications is better. At least with online services it’s more likely users will be burned earlier and in a recognisable way that makes them cautious.

What are you thoughts dear reader?

¹ I’d be happier if Canonical just asked for money to work on user feature requests and bugs, but hey I’m just not in a majority on that thinking yet.
² A known bone of contention; general thinking is that creating space for a marketplace is a good thing that attracts investment. But I feel sometimes that Canonical is more concerned with filling all holes with it’s own services than opening up the market and really benefiting Ubuntu.