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Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey - a thirteen part video series
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).
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.
Top ten GNU/Linux text editors
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
- 1. 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
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
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
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.
Sun, socialism and GNU/Linux
In the past, computer programming wasn't something that immediately sprang to my mind when thinking of Cuba. These days it does, thanks to Free Software.
Software has long been an issue for Cuba, whether it's always been recognised as such by the Cubans is another thing. The US blockade places a huge ironic marker over the fact that the vast majority of Cuban computers run/ran Microsoft (and other US corporations) software.
It was inevitable that eventually people there would catch onto the Free Software movement and that when they did they would also recognise it's political importance.
For nations like Cuba, Free Software not only means software that is free of nasty surprises (638 ways to kill Castro), but it also enables them to grow indigenous computer expertise. There is nothing hidden in a Free Software operating system, you can teach, learn and adapt it at all levels. You can install it in offices, factories, schools etc and adapt and service it yourself allowing a home-grown computer industry. This is what a group of people at the Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas have been doing with GNU/Linux and their distribution Nova GNU/Linux.
This has also got some interest from the rest of the world, which has come up against another of Cuba's problems with US blockade; it's internet connection to the outside world. Cuba is not allowed to connect to the fibre optic cables that have been laid by US companies across the Caribean and it therefore has relied on a satellite link ... which is pretty slow (379 megabits per second for a whole country according to the Guardian newspaper)
There is some hope due to a new fibre optic cable that has just been laid from Venezuela to Cuba, though the rest of the infrastructure in Cuba needs to be upgraded now with an obvious priority to education, hospitals and government agencies. It will be a massive improvement for the Cubans, but people have to understand that this is just one fibre optic cable so that resources will still be scarce.
All doom and gloom? Good grief, no! Projects like the fibre optic link and Nova GNU/Linux show that Cuba is progressing and that people there are determined and looking to the future.
Want to have a look at Nova GNU/Linux? You certainly can. There is a CD download (it's a live disk with an option to install) offered by UCI which I have turned into a bittorrent. It saves Cuba's bandwidth and means that you can download it rather more quickly. One note of caution, because of restrictions there is no internationally available software repository so what is on the CD is all there is for the moment, but it does work!
Nova 3 GNU/Linux (nova-desktop-2011-r1-i386) at "Legit Torrents".
Nova 3 GNU/Linux (nova-desktop-2011-r1-i386) at "Linux Tracker".
The torrent at those two sites is the same one.
March for the alternative
I went on the TUC organised "March for the Alternative" against the vicious ConDem government cuts on Saturday (March 26th) along with over half a million others. It was a marvelous day showing the depth and breadth of the labour movement that we still have in this country. I watched for several hours as tens upon tens of thousands of people with thousands of union banners, flags and placards walked past. If people thought that they were just individuals coming to a march, then hopefully they would have gone home realising that they are part of a movement.
It was an uplifting experience to see the of people of all colours, marching bands, humourous and angry home-made placards, the young and the old.
We live in a wealthy society. There is literally no reason for the cuts in social services, in the historic welfare state, other than the need for the wealthy few to keep their hands on their wealth. The welfare state challenges the view that the reason for work and wealth creation is to keep a minority of people in great luxury whilst the majority struggle to make ends meet. It speaks of social solidarity and a set of values that mean more than pure self interest.
Here's a case in point about public service. Last week there was an interview on the radio with a man who called himself a postal consultant. He was being interviewed about the announcement of 1,400 jobs being lost at the Royal Mail.
His thesis was that in the near future 30 to 40 thousand would have to go (that's people to you and me) at Royal Mail so that it would be "more profitable" and be ready to be privatised. There was some sort of moral imperative in the way he described this need and his underlying assumptions where not challenged.
The attitude was that the only purpose of the Royal Mail is to be made ready to make a profit for shareholders.
30 to 40 thousand people taking home a wage to their families, supporting communites etc. means nothing to him because he thinks that money should not be in the pockets of workers providing an essential service, but in the pockets of speculators and shareholders who do no work but apparently have a moral right to the profits. There was no talk about how the service could be improved by using new technology, just talk about how technology can be used to cut costs (that's those people again) and increase the holy grail of profitability for the few.
At the demonstration I spent most of the day helping to hand out thousands of that day's Morning Star free to marchers. They had been paid for by various Trades Unions to promote the Morning Star at the demonstration ... well done to Unite, UNISON, POA, RMT and North East Area NUM and well done to the Morning Star for putting out another excellent issue.
Sansa Clip+ on Trisquel GNU/Linux
… and others probably..
My parents recently bought a Sansa Clip+ audio player, which they chose because it plays Ogg Vorbis and simply mounts as a mass storage device on GNU/Linux. They use Trisquel which is a Free Software distribution of GNU/Linux.
Unfortunately there was a problem, when it was plugged into the computer it did not mount as it should. A call to me and a quick look at the dmesg output over ssh showed that the kernel thought that the Sansa Clip+ was corrupted in some way and couldn't be mounted.
It turns out that the Sansa Clip+ defaults to using some Microsoft proprietary extensions (MTP) for accessing USB mass storage devices, and it has to be changed in it's settings to use the standard way of addressing USB drives.
You have to go into the system settings/system info on the Sansa Clip+ and change the USB mode from Auto-detect to MSC. Yes, the Sansa clip fails in it's "auto-detection".
After doing that, the audio player auto-mounted correctly as a mass storage device and was usable.
The Microsoft rubbish (MTP) is apparently to do with using digital restrictions (DRM) on your device, and who knows what other nonsense. There are also apparently libraries for using MTP on GNU/Linux and there are a couple of programmes that claim to use them (will this madness ever end?). However, using the standard access method works with Nautilus (the file manager) and Rythmbox, you can get onto the device in the normal way in a shell etc.
I suppose a few people moving over from Windows might be grateful for MTP capabilities in some programmes … but please tell DRM to go screw itself. In the end, I don't care about MTP, a standard mass storage device is all you really need.
Persistent variables in eZ Publish
Variables called in the eZ Publish content module do not survive outside the module and cannot be used in the page layout templates … except, that is, in the almost mythical form of the "persistent variable".
On using eZ Publish 4.4
I haven't gone into how eZ Publish uses templates or the override system. There's plenty of documentation at http://doc.ez.no covering all those things.
Why "almost mythical"?
eZ Publish has lots of documentation, not always particularly descriptive, but it's there. Information about persistent variables is frustratingly gnomic. Actually, it doesn't really even get as far as being gnomic. A lot of experimentation led to the following understanding of persistent variables.
These are instructions for using a persistent variable to customise the description meta tag in the html header. It's a simple thing to do, and when you see how to do this then with further understanding of eZ Publish you'll see how useful persistent variables are.
So, what does this all mean? Well, what we'll be doing is setting a persistent variable in the article template (article.tpl) and then calling it eventually into pagepagelayout.tpl. The contents of the variable will be a text box attribute (not an XML box attribute) added to the article class.
I'll use the identifier "metadescription" for the new attribute. I also set it as a required attribute so that I didn't forget to fill it out.
In article.tpl place the following:
{set scope=global persistent_variable=hash('meta_description',
$node.object.data_map.meta_description.content)}
This will set a persistent variable called (not surprisingly) metadescription.
Visit the pagehead.tpl file and at least do the following; add the following line after the foreach loops that create meta tags from the information entered into the site design page "look and feel" settings:
<meta name="description"
content="{$module_result.content_info.persistent_variable.description}.
Some default text for pages that have no persistent meta_description variable" />
Of course you'll have to delete the description meta tag that is in the "look and feel" settings or you'll end up with two of them.
You can go further (as I did) and remove the standard meta tag code and write your own routines utilising persistent variables, and other template functions to create whatever meta tags you wish … and not just meta tags of course.
A word on setting the persistent variables. I found that they all had to be set at once, ie in a single expression. The following is the syntax.
{set scope=global persistent_variable=hash('variable_name1', $variable_content1,
'variable_name2', $variable_content2,
'variable_name3', $variable_content3)}
You can set more than three of course.
Deleting files after n days or minutes
This is a useful little command that will delete files in a directory that are over a certain number of days old. It uses GNU find to choose the files according to a criteria (it doesn't just have to be their mtime of course) and then executes GNU rm on each file that it finds. The curly brackets are a placeholder for the file names.
find /directory/path* -mtime +4 -exec rm {} \;
The preceding will delete files in the directory that are more than 4 days old. Using mmin would delete the files older than so many minutes. Using rm -r will delete directories as well.
The command can also be put into your crontab so that files can be automatically deleted, I find this very useful for directories that fill up with podcasts or videos.
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Musician, web mangler and GNU/Linux user.
There are all sorts of bit and bobs here, some computer stuff, politics, a journal, music recordings and a gig bookings list.
