Andrew Wigglesworth

Frankly, I'm ambivalent about St. George's Day

2013-04-23T00:00:00+01:00

I have ambivalent feelings about St. George's day.

You see, St. George's day has never been something that was much celebrated by the English. Want to see the English at play? Go out at Whitsuntide, Boxing day, May day or a host of other days that were traditionally celebrated in one way or another ... only, not St. George's day.

Proud to be English? Not enourmously. You ought to be proud of things that you achieve. Being English was not something that I achieved. It was something imposed (albeit benignly) upon me by my parents. I quite like it, but really, I would in all likelyhood quite like being Chinese or Danish instead.

Our British Imperialist history is also not something that fills me with pride. I say "British" rather than "English" since despite all their modern protestations the Welsh and Scottish also joined in with the Imperial project.

At heart I'm an internationalist, with a love of traditional English music and song.

I'm also not religious so the celebration of a saint's day seems a rather odd thing to do, especially a saint that is so closely bound up with religious wars (the crusades).

So, why am I playing a gig for St. George's day?

Partly, because I've been asked to, and I'm being paid. Partly so that the day and its growing association with "Englishness" is not hijacked by fascists and xenophobic nationalists. Partly because its an excuse for a good night out.

I doubt that it will ever grow into a partiucularly significant date for me. May day, Whitsun etc have far more meaning and history to them and have many more events that I'm interested in.

Anyhow, I'll be out tonight playing music and songs, and I'm sure that a good time will be had by all.

Cuckoos Nest recording

2013-04-18T00:00:00+01:00

This is a recording of the Cuckoos Nest, but maybe not as you know it ... Jim.

This Jim character probably knows the lovely minor versions of this tune, this isn't one of them, it's an oddity and I'm not sure where I picked it up from, maybe someone will enlighten me.

The Cuckoo's Nest

Thatcher's dead ... good.

2013-04-09T00:00:00+01:00

I was told last night that I shouldn't be glad that Thatcher is dead and that she was someones mother ...

Then I thought, I remember, I remember the General Belgrano and the 500 odd Argentinian sailors, they had mothers. I remember the miners who died on the picket line, they had mothers, I remember the pensioners who died cold and miserable deaths, they were fathers and mothers. I cannot forget or forgive that.

I remember her calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist, praising Pinochet in Chile as a "democrat". I remember how she stole milk from Britains working class school children and privatised essential industries simply to enrich her friends. I remember her destruction of the Coal industry in a fit of spite, I remember the battle of Orgreave and how she and the media lied to the country, I remember being chased by mounted police up the length of Whitehall for daring to bring the demands of the miners peacefully to the capital.

Most of all I remember the city, people and the communities that I love come under attack in the 1980's, industry destroyed, jobs lost, lives destroyed and lives lost. I cannot forget or forgive that.

So, yes, I raise a glass to the fact that I survived Margaret Thatcher and remember the many freinds, comrades and family who did not.

Farewell Hugo Chavez

2013-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

Last night I was on IRC when the news of the death of Hugo Chavez broke. It was the sad news that many were dreading.

I'm not going to write much here, others will say things much better than me and I'll start putting some links at the end of this post when they start to be published.

The corporate media have got off to an early start, printing lies and smears against Chavez, with only occasionally having the decency to hide behind words "critics said".

His major crime was that he didn't respect the rights of capital and championed the poor and the working classes. This is a true crime in the eyes of some, and it made him a hero to millions.

It's not all over though. We know this. Hugo Chavez was a reflection of the hopes and desires of millions of working class people across Venezuela and many other parts of the world.

If he fought well, if he spoke well, if he won or lost battles then they were battles won and lost by us all. Chavez was the embodiment of a political movement, but he wasn't the movement itself. That continues as he knew it would. Others will carry on the work, just as Chavez carried on the work of his predecessors.

Farewell comrade, you were an inspiration, we will not forget you.

Hasta siempre Comandante. Presente.

Long live the revolution!

Changing yet again how this website is built.

2013-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

Here we go again.

I've been using Jekyll for a while now, and it's been pretty good. However, I have some issues with it.

I have quite a complex setup in Jekyll, or rather, one that takes a long while for Jekyll to build the website. This means that I have to wait whilst checking changes to the website. It's tedious to have to wait even 30 seconds each time I want to check a couple of changes.

There's also running the Jekyll process itself. It's a nuisance. Do I have it running all the time in multiple instances for several different websites or do I invoke it each time I wish to check a site? Also, do I build the website on the server or build it locally and then upload it?

I have made a Git post-recieve hook on my server that pulls the files from the repo to a directory on the server and then runs Jekyll to build the website. It is quite convenient and works well, but still takes a while to complete. This "locks up" Emacs whilst it does its stuff, which is another nuisance.

I admit that I want my perfect solution. Something that means I can edit and update the website almost transparently. I don't want to be concerned with extra processes, different mark-up systems, fiddling around with boring stuff in files every time I wish to update the website.

As part of that transparency, I want to try to do everything in GNU Emacs and use its capabilities to edit and update the website. Why faff around with other stuff when there is the power of Emacs at hand?

OK then. I've now changed the site so that everything but the blog is written in Emacs org-mode and then exported as HTML. At some point I'll detail what I've done. Next I'll think some more about transferring the blog to org-mode as well.

It feels like I'm making progress in the right direction. I use org-mode all the time for notes, todos and agendas so I am comfortable with its markup style and am happy to learn more of its capabilities. Using org-mode also brings in other possiblilites like Emacs Lisp in the org-mode files. That could be interesting to experiment with.

I'll stop for now with the recursive comments on a website about how to build the website ...

Emacs on GNU Screen, a multi-window desktop setup without X.

2013-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

I sometimes work without using X.Org on my computer. I can do it since I'm in Emacs or CLI programmes for the vast majority of my time anyway. The only real glitch is that people usually look at websites I edit using a graphical web browser so I occasionally have to fire up Conkeror or an image editor if I'm doing anything more than a bit of image resizing.

That doesn't have to be a fully blown X environment of course, just a startx conkeror on another tty.

Unfortunately, without X and Stumpwm, I also have had to work from one Emacs "window". This is not as good as in X.Org and Stumpwn which puts Emacs frames into different windows. That means I can have each window/frame keep a different layout, and show different buffers, and swap between them. Different things are kept in different windows. Window 3 on Stumpwm, for instance, always contains IRC buffers (using ERC).

Playing around with GNU Screen and with the Emacs server/emacsclient I realised that I could emulate my Stumpwm experience.

Start screen and open a couple of new windows (sorry, I'm not going to explain all about how to use GNU Screen), and then start Emacs from the command line in window 0. In that instance of Emacs do M-x server-start. This starts the Emacs server that emacsclient will connect to.

In each of the other Screen windows use the command emacsclient -t. This will open a new Emacs frame and connect it to the server. This effectively means that you have an Emacs frame in each Screen window all sharing the same buffers and environment.

You can lay out each frame in the way you like and swap between them by switching windows in Screen. This is basically what I do in Stumpwm. Excellent.

Is there a reason for running my computer without X.Org, other than the odd warm feeling I get from doing it? No, not really I probably have to admit. Running without X does mean that everything feels quicker and less cumbersome, and the more that people talk about 3d desktops and "new desktop paradigms" and the like, I suppose the more I start to rebel.

It's free software, I'm allowed to :-)

Notes and links:

X.Org
Stumpwm
GNU Screen
GNU Emacs

My user friendly GNU/Linux desktop.

2013-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

I don't use a graphical user interface (GUI) on my computer. By this I mean I do not use a "desktop environment" using a mouse and icons such as Gnome, KDE or XFCE.

My computer is as keyboard driven as I can make it.

Also, when people talk about "decluttering their desktop" or having a minimalist desktop theme I have a wry smile. This is my "decluttered desktop".

Yes, really, that's it.

"Why make things so complicated?", "Doesn't that take ages to learn?", "Everyone uses a GUI, you're just weird!"

I would answer with, "Why would I use a system that is hard to use?"

More specifically people will talk about "intuitive interfaces" and that they must be "user friendly". When pressed it all goes a bit wobbly. What they actually mean is a familiar interface; ie. similar to one that they already know.

There have been vociferous complaints when companies or projects have changed things (eg. Gnome 3) and if people move to a different computer operating system, they seem to demand the same conventions on their new setup. It's all about usability they say.

All very well. People ought to be free to run whatever software they like on their computer without needing permission from anyone. Familiar ways of working should mean that operations can be done without thinking too much about how the interface is working.

Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work like this.

One of the great things about a system with icons and clickable menus, tabs and and all is discoverability. Yes, you know what I mean. There's something that you don't know how to do, but you can click through menus to find the the right word, right click on the right bit of screen or something and you'll find it.

I've done it many times with a programme that I have a sketchy knowledge of. The user realises that the programme probably does the thing they want, so if they have a click around in the conventional places in the conventional way they'll probably find it.

The trouble is that in the longer term clickable menus and the like tend to keep you at the same level as the bumbling ignoramus.

They're great for systems that you rarely use, but what about programmes and interfaces that you use every day, for hours on end? At first all those menus give you the feeling of power, but after a while they start getting in the way. For this reason, programmes often give keystroke shortcuts for many of their most popular operations.

My desktop is simply this idea ... but massively extended. Who's weird now?

According to conventional wisdom though, I'm supposed to use the same interface as the person who spends a few hours a week surfing on the web and organising their photographs. A person who is quite happy not to have to learn anything particularly and inefficient menus mean that they don't have to.

However, learning is good. Really good.

I can't have conversations in German or if I picked up a Euphonium, I wouldn't be able to play it properly.

"Euphonium? Of course you could play it", you say. "You just need to learn and practice on it" and "millions of people speak German every day, you just need to learn the language".

I do play musical instruments, though not a Euphonium. I have learnt hundreds of dance tunes. To play them at a dance or music session I do not use a point and click method with pull down menus and icons, that would be silly. I use a button keyboard on which I press buttons and combinations of buttons whilst simultaneously opening and closing a set of bellows (it's a type of accordion). Similarly complex interactions happen with with other musical instruments.

There are primitive parts of the human brain that can learn these complex mechanical manoeuvres whilst leaving the conscious brain to do other things. When I've learnt a tune, I can read the paper or watch dancers whilst playing it. More importantly, I can understand the newspaper and analyse what the dancers are doing. My intellect is able to look at and analyse the world whilst another part of the brain goes through the learnt routine of the music.

The usual thing is of course to also think about embelishing and styling the tune, but you still do not have to think consciously where every finger is being placed. You simply think of the tune, place your hands on the instrument and let it happen.

What has this to do with computers? More than you may realise, or you may be ahead of me. My point is that the purely graphical interfaces with icons, mouse clickable menus etc get in the way. They may be a way of interacting with an unknown system whilst sticking to some conventions, however, when you are constantly being distracted by the interface, you can't play the tune fluently, embelish it or watch and think about the dancers.

Notes: Wondering about what I'm actually talking about in terms of real programmes?

I use Stumpwm as my window manager and GNU Emacs for nearly everything else I need to do on my computer.

See: Computers and software on this website.

The web and the failure of the left.

2013-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

This article written is from personal experience in different organisations. There are great generalisations and I'm referring to the left in general as "us" and "we". This just happened as I was writing it and I realise it might read a bit oddly, but it is a missive that is aimed back at our working class movement, at "us".

Why doesn't the left really "get" the web?

You think that the left, and the working class movement etc (say in Britain or the US) are pretty "web savvy" now? Think again.

Comrades, here's some news. A Facebook page is not a "web strategy", it's an indication of abject surrender.

Would we put free adverts for Shell onto our leaflets? Would we trust News International to print and distribute all our propaganda? Would we supply the details of everyone who read one of our pamphlets to the Daily Mail?

No, of course not! How stupid would that be? Yet, this is precisely the type of thing that we do on the web. We put "pages" on websites run by advertisers, entrust control of our communications to corporations owned by people who despise us, and even if we build our own websites we put scripts and "web analysis" onto them that hands all the vital details of site visitors to the same corporations.

They must be creasing themselves laughing over the craven ineptitude of the left and how easy it's been.

Once Policemen had to hide in cupboards at the back of meeting halls to carry out surveillance, now we're falling over ourselves to give them this information ... and the meeting hall too.

Much of the left seems to treat the Web and the Internet as a natural resource that simply exists to be exploited, rather than a part of the battle ground that includes all the media.

The history of many of our own publications should be a guide to understanding this. The Daily Worker/Morning Star has been banned, boycotted by wholesalers and attacked in many ways over the decades. The web is no different, only the blandishments of the self-appointed commentators make it seem so.

Our organisations aren't just some outgrowth of a personal page on a so-called "social networking" website and we should not be desperately clutching to the coat-tails of the corporate web. As I mentioned Facebook page isn't a "web strategy", its' ...

When we don't have control over or even understand our own media or methods of communication, we simply hand it over to others we should know are not our friends but our determined enemies.

Lets be clear, the web is essentially in the hands of big international corporations. We con ourselves that it's all "free and easy" and that anyone can see our web pages and maybe they will all suddenly start reading them. This is a delusion, do you realise the resources needed to run websites used by large numbers of people. The Union movement are probably the only ones we know who get anywhere near to knowing. Running a party website on cheap shared hosting is not communicating with the world. It's a self-delusion.

Lets face it, as organisations we do not have a clue.

However, there are things that we can start to do. There are organisations and people thinking about and dealing with issues such as ownership and control, access, digital restrictions and distributed access on the web and internet etc.

The fact is we've been gifted great opportunities, invented and protected by people we hardly seem to realise exist or even actively ignore. They're just computer weirdos after all. Instead we've let ourselves be dazzled by the bright lights of the corporate led web. The left seems to be perpetually caught in the glare waving its hand and bleating "me too, please!"

OK, so you're interested? Well, start by educating yourself. Read about the free software movenment (it's politics!), find out how computers network, start reading about digital restrictions management, how corporations try to control what people are allowed to do on the internet and with their computers, and more.

Take it to your organisations and start taking it seriously. Don't leave it off the agenda as something only technology freaks are interested in. Would you leave off any other large political issues? No, so isn't it astounding that these ones are habitually ignored?

Stop treating technology, communications and computers as something peripheral to "proper politics", it's not.

The Google Tax

2013-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

Google's Chairman is very proud of the company's tax avoidance.

"I am very proud of the structure that we set up. We did it based on the incentives that the governments offered us to operate" (Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman - Independent 13/12/2012)

Google paid £6 million in corporation tax on £2,500,000,000 (2.5 billion pounds!) worth of sales in the UK. That's less than one quarter of a percent. 0.24%

They're not alone in this, and sure, all the loopholes are "legal", but it does signal the contempt that Google has for the rest of society when they use off-shore tax havens and systems that are only really available to the rich to put up two fingers to the rest of us.

It's with this in mind that I read Google's latest missive by email about its plans for Google shopping. You can read it here along with an offer for some pretend money.

They're turning Google shopping into a paid service. Forming a "commercial relationship with merchants" they call it.

To continue to get worthwile listings of your products on Google shopping you will need "Product Listing Ads based on your existing product feed from Merchant Centre". This is managed in an Adwords account.

All this means that small businesses will be competing against each other and larger businesses in a rigged blind auction for listings on Google shopping.

How does this benefit small businesses? Well, the question is put the wrong way round. It should be, what would happen to them if they refused to start handing over arbitary amounts of cash to Google?

Google has used their effective monopoly on internet search to promote Google shopping. They have integrated it in their search pages in a way that any small business selling mail order goods will fear for their continued survival if they don't have a listing.

It is effectively compulsory, a Google tax on online commerce for small businesses.

Where does this money come from in the end? Obviously it's out of the wages of every ordinary person who has to pay more for goods and services; who also suffer Google's tax avoidance on it's $9,737,000,000 profits (2011 financial statement).

Google dress it up with nonsense saying it's all about getting better quality listings and a better service for searchers. Quite honestly, that is self-serving bullshit.

Small businesses didn't ask for Google Shopping, it fell on them from on high. In the desperate race to obtain any sort of listing on Google they felt compelled to comply. Now, after embedding Google Shopping in its search services, and using the "free" listings as a stalking horse, Google are to extract their tax. Or would it be better to name it protection money?

Will small businesses comply again? Almost certainly. What choice do that have? When the mafia run the neighbourhood and make you a "business proposal", you quickly see that it's to your benefit to simply pay up.

"It's called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this." (Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman - Independent 13/12/2012)

Is Playford overplayed?

2012-06-13T00:00:00+01:00

That heading got some people's attention I bet! These are just some simple musings on Playford, possibly as a result of watching too many videos online.

No, I'm not suggesting that people are playing too many tunes from the Playford publications. What I'm considering that we may be setting to much store in what they can tell us about English country dancing, its origins and how it was practised.

That is, "overplaying Playford's hand".

A lot of attention is given to Playford. Often as if these books were true publications of record or academic treatises rather than a run of commercial imprints by London publishers who were not themselves musicians or dance tutors.

There is nothing in the Playford publications that indicates that they were popular dances or tunes of the time, only what the publisher chose to place in his book. In fact, I wonder that many popular pieces were left out precisely because they were popular or too simple or unsophisticated. Playford was publishing for a paying audience who were looking for the new and unusual in their dancing classes.

Today we can discern many different trends in English social dancing. From the more "sedate" to the more "energetic". There are dance events for the more accomplished dancers, mad festival fun, simple knees ups, cerebral club dances and all those bread-and-butter dances for PTAs, wedding and parties.

The English Dancing Master was publishing at a time of great social change. John Playford published the first edition during the Commonwealth and the Dancing Master imprint continued until 1728. The economic, social and class makeup of English society was changing dramatically and the boom in publication in the 17th century was an indicator of this.

When you consider the economic, social and class changes of that period, can it really be that one set of dance books (even as they themselves changed and developed) could encompass the whole of it? That they could be representative of the whole "scene"?

The thought of "Playford" and what we think he wrote seems to have distorted our popular imagining of English country dance of the 17th and 18th centuries. For some people this imagining defines what English country dance is to this day. Though I think it's clear that the Dancing Master books were in fact a development of country dancing for the middle and upper classes rather than a reflection of it.

I don't think there is anything particularly wrong in using Playford's collections, or the music from them either. Far from it.

However, any modern usage of Playford is perforce a modern interpretation. When people use of Playford for historical re-enactment it reflects their prejudices about the past. The choice of Playford is of course also a part of those prejudices.

I find it strange that Playford is often used as a blueprint for anything from the renaissance to the time of the Napoleonic Wars. What any modern interpretation of Playford can never be is definitive of any period, since that is not what the Playford books can be (they don't contain enough information) or were ever intended to be.

Getting Piwik to list GNU/Linux as an operating system

2012-06-01T00:00:00+01:00

I recently installed Piwik web analytics software on my server, and it seems to be working pretty well.

However, one irritation is that it lists GNU/Linux as Linux with the Linux logo.

Well, I wasn't having this on my own server, so I changed it. It was pretty simple to do; here's how.

First I changed the icon to a GNU icon. Yes, it may be a little unfair to completely leave out the Linux icon, but since so many completely leave out GNU without a second thought, I didn't have too many qualms about it in terms of the icon.

The image is in this location in Piwik:

/plugins/UserSettings/images/os/LIN.gif

This is a GNU icon that you can use.. The original is on this page.

Next, I found this file:

/libs/UserAgentParser/UserAgentParser.php

and changed the line:

  'Linux'        => 'LIN',

  'GNU/Linux'    => 'LIN',

Now my Piwik refers to GNU/Linux and uses a GNU icon to represent the operating system.

Using my own server for pastebin and temporary uploads

2012-05-31T00:00:00+01:00

My usual caveat here; many of you out there will probably look at my scripting and think, "I could do better than that". Well, there you go. I'm not claiming any great revelations or "leet skillz". This is just a little script that is working for me.

OK, so that's out of the way ... what does this little script do?

Well, I often use Pastebin services and Omploader for sharing code snippets and the temporary sharing of files. Temporary in the sense that I don't want to put them onto a website and they only need to be seen by a few people in a discussion.

This script will upload a file to my server, changing its name to a random string whilst keeping its file extension and echoing the URL to the CLI. There are also some bits in there to make sure that the script doesn't start overwriting or deleting files already on my desktop and to report failures.

I've also put a little bit of Emacs Lisp into my .emacs file so that I can upload a region from an Emacs buffer; in this case the file ends up as an html file with syntax highlighting done by code2html. The file's URL on the server is then returned to the kill ring for yanking (pasting) into a discussion on IRC or IM.

Unfortunately code2html doesn't support many syntaxes for highlighting so when I have time I may look at another way of doing that.

Where is all this?

I'm just starting to use one of my domains as a place for my bits of script and "anti-cloud" stuff.

http://www.ecadre.co.uk

A Facebook page != making a public announcement

2012-04-30T00:00:00+01:00

An "announcement" on Facebook does not equal making a public announcement.

Isn't that obvious? It seems so to me, but not to an increasing number of organisations and event organisers. One particular one has been frustrating me recently.

If you do not wish to be used (sic) by Facebook then most of the links to these "public announcements" do not work or you get a tantalising first line if you're lucky.

Of course this is a strategy used by Facebook to encourage more people to engage in its spying programme (see posts passim), but it is supremely annoying when this is information that you need and some berk has put it onto a closed website.

Oh, and then they no longer bother to put it onto their own website because "it's on Facebook".

Met Office gives a lesson on how to degrade the usability of your website.

2012-04-14T00:00:00+01:00

Yesterday I noticed the following notice on the 5 day weather report pages on the Met Office (what the Meteorological Office now call themselves) website.

"This page will be removed later in the year and may not contain the latest information. Please use our new pages:"

These days, when a web service that I use regularly (pretty much daily) announces that they are introducing a new website, I am filled with foreboding.

OK, lets not get ahead of ourselves here. There are a few good things that the Met Office have done. They've added a few more columns to the 5 day reports giving humidity, a precipitation probability percentage, regional weather warnings and a "feels like" temperature indication encompassing the wind chill factor. I like these, thanks.

There's also access to a zoom-able weather map with a time line feature. It's a bit clunky and awkward to use, but there's some good intention there and it might be useful. The time line tab seems a waste of time (heh). It simply recapitulates the information on the 5 day forecast in a different less useful form. The temperature range tab may be useful for people wanting that information so that's good and then there are some text forecasts for regional, national and national park weather.

All that is new, so thanks again.

Now, sadly, for the dogs dinner of the presentation of the new website.

Some major issues, discovered after about 10 minutes or so looking at the website (do organisations actually test their websites anymore?) ...

Turn off cookies and you lose access to the weather reports and site navigation without being told or given any reason or warnings.

Losing access to a public website simply because a cookie cannot be set is completely unacceptable. I'll not mince my words, to get to this level of incompetence (on a major government website) you must be really trying to screw up.

Despite my heading above, I do not think that simply placing a warning on the website would rectify this situation. This has obviously been caused by the bizarre fact that cookies have been used for website navigation (see comments below about bookmarking pages).

When I first suspected this I wasn't sure I could be right, but tests showed that this was indeed the case.

Image: Met Office: off with the cookies

Report page locations are selected using settings in a cookie.

This means that you cannot bookmark weather report pages.

I can't imagine why on earth someone made this design decision, it defies all sense and seriously degrades the usefulness of the website.

Yes, locations are kept in a cookie but when you return to the website after clearing cookies (a sensible thing to do regularly and commonly done by browsers when closing down) you have to negotiate the irritating "search" function to find any weather reports.

Personally, I wish to quickly access a number of weather report pages when I go onto the Met Office website. Previously I bookmarked those pages and could open them all quickly and scan through the reports. The loss of this basic and normal functionality of a website is a pretty inexplicable move by the developer and those who approved what they did.

Search doesn't do a real search. but brings up a Javascript pop-up which is simply confusing.

Instead of an expected search result you get a pop-up Javascript driven box that gives you a drop-down list of possible locations (good), but then invites you in a completely confusing way to "save" or "cancel".

Sorry? I thought that I was doing a search? What am I supposed to be saving and how do I simply get to the weather report page for the location I put in? Confusingly you have to click on "save" to complete your search.

This is a really badly thought out feature.

Image: Met Office: search confusion

"Search" does different things on different pages.

Do a "search" on the home page and it sends you back to the home page with a new default location.

Do seemingly the same "search" on a 5 day weather report page and it sends you a 5 day report for that location.

Doing any location search resets your default location for the whole website. This is confusing and unnecessary.

Turn off Javascript and you lose all access to the weather reports.

Again, this is unnecessary. This is a database driven website. There is no real reason that Javascript should be required to simply load a few words and pictures in a table. This is just a poor decision with a lack of thought about good practice in website design.

Reports have been put in a "widget" style.

Like the Met Office, I put "widget" in quotation marks since their use of the word in this context is pretty meaningless. What it seems to refer to here is that they have used Javascript to create a tabbed table, with a tab for each of the days of a 5 day weather forecast.

What this means practically is that you can no longer scan through a 5 day report and quickly assess the weather over those days. You have to click back and forth through tabs showing separate reports for each day.

I can't see a reason for this other than some vague feeling that it is "cool" and "modern" to use Javascript to create a tabbed interface. Why is it better than being able to scroll through the days and assimilate the information for the whole period in that way? I don't get it.

It is no longer a 5 day report but a selection of 1 day reports that you have to continually click back and forth through to make sense of the pattern of the weather.

Also, as mentioned above, why is it required to use Javascript to present simple tabular data? If you insist on wanting to use a Javascript driven table and tabs, then turning off Javascript should make the page fall back to a simple table. This is good (and very simply implemented) practice that this website lacks.

Image: Met Office: widget
Image: Met Office: old report page

"Improvements to your website"

This is the title of a page on the Met Office website where they try to explain the reasons for the changes. The title of the page is an oxymoron. This is not my website, this is the website of the Met Office and no amount of blather can change that fact.

Talk of "consultation" and "your website" simply seems like a buck-passing exercise. A way to disown any problems with the website by saying "we did consultation, this is what everyone wanted so its their fault".

There seems to be a trend on newer websites. Use Javascript, clever tricks and complicated "interfaces" where a simple layout and HTML would be easier to use and more functional.

Javascript and "clever" css tricks can be useful when giving genuinely new functionality, but it is too often used as a cover for a lack of imagination and any true consideration of what the function of a website really is.

What is Friendica for?

2012-04-12T00:00:00+01:00

Yesterday I installed Friendica on my server. I had an installation before that I never really used ... but I'm giving it another go.

I have a a provocative question though (actually I hope it is since I'd like some ideas or answers), what is Friendica really for? I'll extend that since it's not really just about Friendica, so I'll ask, what are these distributed social web programmes like Friendica and Diaspora etc really for?

Are they blogging programmes like Wordpress? Are they for little snippets or "dents" like identi.ca? Are they discussion forums like the myriad discussion boards on the web?

This is a sort of existential identity crisis, will this software define it's own reasons or do we already know them?

Right now I have installed Friendica really to show a bit of moral support for it. To further express my opposition to walled garden approaches like Facebook with their privacy busting agendas and unpleasant social consequences (see blog posts passim).

I've posted this on my Friendica installation as well as my "blog" to see what people may think.

I'll leave it at that right now and see what happens next ...

Addendum 22/03/13 - I've uninstalled Friendica from my server, I wasn't really using it and wasn't likely to. It's not because it's bad,if you like that sort of thing.

Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey - a thirteen part video series

2011-10-13T00:00:00+01:00

I mentioned on IRC that I was re-reading Marx's Capital volume I when a friend pointed me towards a video series that he was going through. It's recordings of the lecture series that Professor David Harvey does every year on Marx's Capital (volume 1 so far).

From his website:

David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books. He has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital for nearly 40 years.

I remembered David Harvey's name from a very good interview he did with Laurie Taylor on Taylor's BBC Radio 4 programme "Thinking Allowed" early last year; so I was obviously interested.

I'm going (book in hand) through the videos and it's excellent stuff, so I've created a bittorrent so that the whole series can be more easily downloaded in one go. There's just under five and a half gigabytes.

Torrent file for 'Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey'

Top ten GNU/Linux text editors

2011-10-08T00:00:00+01:00

I've seen a few "Top 10 text editors" type articles lately and thought that I'd have a go.

After a lot of thinking here are the top ten text editors ever.

0 GNU Emacs
0 GNU Emacs
0 GNU Emacs
0 GNU Emacs
0 GNU Emacs
0 GNU Emacs
0 GNU Emacs
0 GNU Emacs
0 GNU Emacs
10 Zile

What's the matter??!!! These are the best text editors ever!

Oh, I see, what you actually wanted was a bit of real advice rather than a bad joke?

In my defence, the above list is about as useful as many of the so-called "top 10 editors" lists and more useful than most.

These lists usually purport to give you the "low down" on the best text editors, but in reality seem just to be a list of a few editors that the author might have heard of (or found in a web search) along with a sentence or two saying things like "extensible, syntax highlighting".

Like these authors, reading the web page dedicated to a text editor is something you can do, but in the end, you need to get down and try them out.

In the GNU/Linux world most people use the GNOME or KDE desktop environments, so here is my first thought. Use the default text editors for those desktops, gedit and Kate. Well, apart from the appearances by Kwrite on some KDE desktops, but you are really better off in Kate.

This means that you can use them in your "clicky desktop system" (TM) for some occasional light text editing and they'll run generally in the way that programmes do in those environments. By which I mean, you'll just be able to guess at how they work according to experience in other GNOME or KDE programmes.

Though gedit and Kate start off as nice simple editors, they can also be revved up to be very capable text editors with lots of features. This is done by discovering the surprising amount of stuff hidden away in their menus and with plugins.

Really don't want to stick a GNOME or KDE application onto your ultra-cool lightweight installation. Try Geany in that case.

If you are going to be doing a lot of text editing then I'd really, really recommend that you have a look at Emacs and VIM. Many dismiss these as archaic; often people who haven't actually tried them or to actually learn to use them. But consider the fact that these have been used and developed over decades (yes, decades!) by people who spend large parts of their lives editing text files. They are very powerful and much easier to get started with than is often claimed. Emacs even comes with a built-in tutorial.

I well remember sessions using Kate or gedit with a mass of tabs, screen clutter, hand moving erratically back and forth to the mouse and menus whilst getting lost and bogged down in it all. I can have my moments in Emacs of course, but it really is a revelation for serious text editing.

NOTES: On GNU/Linux you do not need to download these programmes from their websites; use the package manager that comes with your GNU/Linux distribution.

You may notice that all of these are installable on Microsoft Windows (though with rather more difficulty in the case of Kate).

gedit is installable on Apple's OSX as are GNU Emacs and VIM.

One way of starting to move over to Free Software is to gain confidence by using the same applications on your present desktop before moving to a free distribution such as Trisquel.

Skip Skype

2011-08-20T00:00:00+01:00

Suppose you went into a mobile telephone shop for a new deal. After looking you decide which call-price package to go for, then the sales person excitedly picks up a "Skip Inc" telephone and says that you really should go for this handset because you can use it to call other Skip telephones for free!

"Really? Free calls?" you say. "Oh, yes", says the sales person, "just use it on the call plan and Skip Inc won't charge you extra for calling other Skip handset users!".

"So, I'm still paying for the calls through my call plan?", you say.

The sales person gives you a puzzled look, "of course, but Skip Inc won't charge you for calls to other Skip handsets".

"What if I don't want to call a Skip user? What if I want to phone my friend who uses a another manufacturers handset?" you ask.

"Oh, no", says the sales person, "you can't do that. Skip is special, you can only call other Skip handsets".

Do you think you that you would have bought that handset? No, I thought not.

Skype Limited is a company that you may have heard of that claims to give you free voice and video calls. However, Skype uses the internet service that you already pay for but artificially restricts your connexion using their secret software.

Lets ram this point home. Skype is not a telephone network. It is Voice over IP (VOIP), a technology that has been around for a long time and runs over the Internet. "IP" stands for Internet Protocol. Skype did not invent VOIP (not even close) and there's lots of software that provides VOIP. There is no really legitimate reason that one VOIP programme cannot call another, in the way that one mobile telephone can call another over the mobile telephone network.

So, what special things does Skype offer? I mean it must be doing something right ... right?

It offers secret software. That means that absolutely no-one other than Skype Limited has any idea what it is really doing on your computer and how it is communicating. Is that really a good idea for you?
It offers lock-in. If you use Skype then your friends can only call you using Skype VOIP software. You are locking your friends and then their network of friends into Skype.
You get a lovely marketing campaign that has pushed the idea that Skype is unique and is giving you something special "for free".
Because you use Skype you can pay to use Skype's gateway to the real telephone system ... and only theirs. This is at the heart of why Skype Limited use secrets and lockin to gain customers. There are lots of gateways from the Internet to the telephone system, with other software you can choose which one you wish to use.

Is there an alternative to Skype?

Well, since Skype didn't invent VOIP I don't think we should generally talk of an "alternative to Skype". There are quite a few programmes out there, but I'll mostly mention just the one that I've used; Ekiga. On their website you can download a version that will run on MS Windows. GNU/Linux users should use the package manager for their distribution and install it in the usual way. Ekiga is provided by all the major GNU/Linux distributions. If you are on an Apple Mac system then have a look at Jitsi or XMeeting.

Ekiga, Jitsi and XMeeting are Free Software (free as is in free beer and free speech) so they do not use secret software, protocols or lockins and are developed and shared with you by communities of people who also use the software.

New recording - Lemmie Brazil's No 2

2011-07-20T00:00:00+01:00

I did this recording back at the beginning of June.

Lemmie Brazil's No.2, on my "one row 4 stop" in C.

A Git hook for publishing Jekyll websites

2011-04-02T00:00:00+01:00

A git called Jekyll hooking websites??!!?! What?

OK, OK, if you don't know what this is about then never mind. Just be happy that you'll be among the vast majority of people. Those who do know, stop looking so smug. That includes you, Ali!

I've just recently started using Git as the version manager for my websites combined with Gitosis on a remote server. I noticed with interest mentions of automatically publishing websites when you commit your changes to Git.

It turns out to be very simple. In your local repository go into the .git/hooks directory, rename the file post-commit.sample file to post-commit, and then open it and add the bash script that you use to update the website on your server. I use rsync over ssh.

Now I can do my editing, stage the changes and then when I commit them to Git my website gets automatically updated as well.

There are other hooks for different things in Git, I'm sure that I'll start using a few more of them. Useful stuff.