Exploring Freedom with Matt Lee

Usability idea: Internet Radio

2008-05-07T17:18:12Z

Yesterday Mark introduced me to a new streaming radio station, Beatles Radio. It's a stream of Beatles, Beatles-covers and Beatles-related acts.

To listen, I went to the link Mark sent me via IM, and scanned the page looking for a play button. There wasn't one, but there are links that say 'Windows Player', 'iTunes Player' and 'Winamp Player' as well as 'Custom Player' - I had to make a decision which one would be best, and I chose Winamp. I don't have Winamp, and as it turns out, both iTunes and Winamp both take me to the same location.

Would it be neat if there was a defined standard for internet radio stations to put a tag in their markup with the URL of their stream? Maybe there could be an option for Ogg Vorbis streams too?

Today, when I wanted to listen again, I opened Rhythmbox, and clicked 'Radio' on the sidebar. I noticed there was a button at the top 'New Internet Radio Station' (this would probably be better as an 'Add Internet Radio Station') - I clicked this and typed 'beatlesradio.com', but it didn't work.

So, I propose the following.

The 'proprietary' property would be for stream in formats other than Ogg Vorbis/Ogg Theora, which hopefully will still make it to HTML 5. User agents could see this tag and do something awesome with it. Plugins for Firefox could offer one click streaming of Internet Radio, and things would be good.

Some cool jobs for freedom

2008-04-25T16:49:55Z

Open Rights Group is hiring a part-time campaigner in London
Free Software Foundation is looking for a systems administrator in Boston

The Day The Music Dies

2008-04-23T20:57:29Z

After the end of August, music purchased from Microsoft's now-defunct MSN Music store will no longer be able to authorize itself for new devices. Put more simply -- if you get a new player or computer, or you decide to upgrade your operating system (which isn't something I'd advise), your music won't be able to come with you. Once September rolls around, you'll be stuck with your music on the five computers you've previously authorized.

This serves as painful reminder of the real ways in which DRM is bad for consumers. When faced with situations like this, it is impossible to speak of DRM as being part of 'rights', when it only serves to restrict the very people who supported the store in the first place. Of course, you can go and buy all your music again from the Zune Marketplace, but that has another, incompatible DRM scheme... and who's to say Microsoft won't pull another stunt like this when they
finally realize the Zune is doomed to failure.

Instead, buy music from services which don't set themselves up to restrict you if they fail. Check out 'A guide to DRM Free Living'.

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Remix Radiohead. Rickroll Radiohead.

2008-04-02T04:15:50Z

We're no strangers to love...

Radiohead is having a remixing contest. I suggest you take a good, long look at the terms and conditions before you take part, especially the bit about you having to transfer your rights to Warner Chappell, Xurbia (Radiohead's company) and Radiohead personally, by name, as songwriters. You also need a Mac, and iTunes, and to pay to download 5 tracks (which presumably are DRM free as you're importing them into GarageBand), plus GarageBand, which is proprietary.

However, Radiohead are quite happily allowing people to upload a five meg MP3 to their website. Wouldn't it be funny if people took it upon themselves to upload Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up', in various remixes, mashup and other interesting and creative ways, dozens of times, in protest to the rather unfriendly terms of the contest?

Just a thought.

In other news, Sony BMG is apparently threatening people for Rickrolling on YouTube.

I predict the track will get a single release in some form fairly soon. I hope Astley rerecords it and makes a mint off it himself.

Oh, and for anyone else wondering about yesterday's post. Check the date.

New iPastures

2008-04-01T04:35:50Z

So, there comes a time when we all have to figure out what makes us happy. For me, I finally think I've found a place I can be truly content. A lot of my work in free software has been about usability and building communities, which is why it won't come as a huge shock when I say that I've accepted a job with Apple, in California.

On May 12th, I'll be moving to San Francisco and will start working in Cupertino shortly after.

I'm going to be working within the Mac product group, working on the next version of Mac OS X. I hope at least part of my job will building relations with the open source community, but initially I'll be working on user interfaces and won't have much time for that.

For now, my gnu.org email will continue to work, but if you have any questions, email them to macboy@gmail.com and I'll get back to you.

I realise this represents something of a change in direction for me. It won't be an entirely smooth transition, but I hope at least that my friends and readers will be easy on me.

UPDATE: It seems a LOT of people fell for this one. Sorry, but this was just another April Fools :)

Where everybody knows your name...

2008-03-09T17:30:06Z

Just a note to say that from Tuesday 11th - Thursday 20th, I'll be in Boston, staying at the uber-exclusive Acetarium. I won't be going to Cheers though, as it's basically a tourist trap (and they wouldn't let us sit down to drink last time).

I will also be completing my Moleskine Boston Traveller book. To quote the website:

Boston hosts some of the best historical buildings and sites in the country, as well as many world-class universities. Take a walk on the Freedom Trail to experience sixteen historic sites that shaped American history. The Moleskine Boston, MA USA City Book combines a notebook and city-specific map features into a valuable travel tool.

I love how they qualify 'Boston' with 'MA', as if they'd make a book about the other one.

You should also come to the FSF Associate Members Meeting.

Defeating blog comment spam - an experiment

2008-03-09T17:23:21Z

I'm getting a lot of spam comments on here, even with Akismet and other spam filters enabled. I'm going to try a little experimentt for a week - if you want to comment, you'll need either an OpenID or a login with Vox, Livejournal or Typepad.

Also, once you post a good comment on my blog (or at least a non-spam comment), I'll manually add you to the list of trusted commenters, and your post will appear instantly.

Anyway, if you've left a comment in the past, please try and leave a comment on this post, so I can see if it affects things much.

BBC iPlayer on GNU/Linux without Flash using only free software

2008-03-08T20:59:06Z

*Please note. This will only work if you're in the UK. *

A bit of background to this. The BBC is funded by every single household with a TV in the UK (except old people). iPlayer is a platform for watching BBC shows you've missed. Initially iPlayer was Windows XP only, and we had a protest about it in London and in Manchester. Then, they released a Flash version, but as Flash isn't free software, users of free software operating systems were still left in the cold. Ashley Highfield estimated there were 400 GNU/Linux users in the UK, and was proven badly wrong.

A few days ago, they launched an iPhone version, even though they've still not released a GNU/Linux version.

You'll need:

Iceweasel, GNUzilla or Mozilla Firefox
User Agent Switcher
Firebug

Finding the stream

Add a new user agent by going to Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options

The first field, Description - enter something useful here, like 'iPhone'.

In the next field, paste this "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3" (without the quotes)

Click Ok, and then Ok again.

Head over to http://bbc.co.uk/iplayer/

Bring up a show, and enable Firebug from the Tools menu. A frame will appear at the bottom of your browser window. Click 'Inspect'.

Hover over the player window, in the bottom frame '' will be highlighted.

Expand this element by clicking '+'

You'll see something like "http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayerstreaminghttp_mp4/b00937tc" - copy this.

Downloading

Fire up a Terminal, and type...

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3" http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayerstreaminghttp_mp4/b00937tc

Playing

You'll get an MP4 file which you can play in VLC, Totem, etc. No DRM. You might want to rename it to something sensible.

Gnash is a free software plugin for Flash. If you're not already using it, please take this time to download and use it instead of Flash.

Update

Paul Completelymadeupname sends this:

Thanks for the instructions on how to download items from iPlayer. It works really well.

I do have one comment. I notice I'm getting around 300kBps on downloads.

It occurs to me that this download rate is way in excess of the rate an iPhone would pull and might both upset the BBC by stressing their bandwidth,encouraging them to crack down on it earlier than they otherwise might and provide a method of detecting the process.

I downloaded a 30 minute episode of a program and then divided the bytecount by the number of seconds in 30 minutes, coming up with 65062.72 Bps. Assuming all files are the same bitrate, I would like to suggest your command example be modified to:

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3" --limit-rate=65063 http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayer/streaming/http_mp4/b00937tc

This will download the file in real-time, as a streaming iPhone would and hopefully not get up the system manager's nose by spawning a pipe-maxing download-fest.

Also, someone else in the comments suggests that the User Agent is not required for the downloads. I would suggest using it anyway, as the iPhone would.

Red Vines - win. Twizzlers - fail.

2008-03-05T23:00:34Z

Back from Houston. I have a wife now. A quick one - why do Red Vines taste so good, and yet, Twizzlers, a very similar looking product, taste so bad?

A musical experiment

2008-03-03T05:00:51Z

My pal Josh is trying a little experiment with an EP he put out. Get a free download of his record, and if you like it, pass the link on to your friends. His hope is that this will help him get some more exposure, outside of the major label system, which can only be good for everyone in the long run.

A musical experiment

2008-03-03T05:00:51Z

Bug me not

2008-02-25T08:47:28Z

*None of the distributions mentioned in this blog are recommended. *

Software always has bugs, and free software is no exception to this.

When we think of free software, we think of software we can distribute, modify, study and of course, run. I don't spend a lot of my time studying or modifying free software, to be honest. There are lot of people who do this, and they're a lot smarter than me... well, most of them. Apparently, none of the people who write free software bug trackers ever actually use them to report a bug, or if they do, they have a very high tolerance for pain and annoyance.

On Sunday, I was unable to get to sleep, and had been downloading some distribution images, as I like to try and stay vaguely current with the very many distributions of GNU and Linux out there, and while I've previously avoided it, I had heard good things about the Gentoo Live CD. The best thing of all was that it got you up and running really quickly, which given my previous attempts at installing Gentoo, was something I was going to need.

Anyway, to cut a very long and boring piece of the story here, I downloaded the image and booted it in qemu and got a desktop and clicked through the installer and something went wrong. I checked and tried again, and it happened again. So, as stated on the installer, I went over to bugs.gentoo.org and tried to report it, and here's what I got...

I need a legitimate login and password to continue.

Yes, apparently, I now need to register with my email address and my name just to report a bug. I also need to check my email for the made up password you're going to send me. Argh.

This isn't Gentoo's fault. Gentoo is being a good free software project and using a free software bug tracker. At this point, two things came to mind. Firstly, how easy is it to find the bug tracker? Secondly, what do other distributions and large projects do in this circumstance? Finally what software do they use?

So here's a list...

Fedora - Once you click around a bit, you come to bugzilla.redhat.com, and you get the same annoying message. They use Bugzilla.
Debian - This is easier, there's a link to 'Bug reports' from their homepage. They recommend you use the reportbug program. You can also send them emails in some very precise manner. There appears to be no way to report it over the web, but they are using debbugs (and not Bugzilla as I originally said)
openSuSE - Their homepage invites me to 'Get it', 'Discover it' or 'Create it' - there is no option to 'Fix it'. 'Discover It' mentions a wiki. From here, I click 'How to participate' and then 'Test openSUSE and Report Bugs' and to bugzilla.novell.com. I now have to create a Novell account in order to report a bug. I really don't want one. They too use Bugzilla (anybody spotting a pattern here?).
PCLinuxOS - A lot of people think its wonderful, I think it's worrying proprietary in places. Let's see how they do when it comes to taking bugs. Their homepage has a clear menu bar along the top, so I choose 'Documentation' from the support option. This opens up a new window, which was unexpected, and from there I'm given a choice to 'Help PCLinuxOS Grow' - growth comes from having lots of squashed bugs, I guess, so I'll try that. Nothing there, unless you want a new t-shirt. I head to their forum, still nothing. I pause for a moment, noting that their forum is proprietary and try for desperation to see if Google has anything. Nothing there either. PCLinuxOS really don't want me to report a bug. Finally out of sheer guesswork, I discover bugs.pclinuxos.com, which appears to be a completely private bug tracker.

At this point, I was feeling like maybe this was a waste of time, maybe I was not going to find any free software bug tracking websites that didn't want my life story before I could report the damned bug. I whizzed through a couple more distributions.

Slackware - Could not find anything.
Mandrake - apparently this is called Mandriva now. That one passed me by. I don't even know why they changed their name. Their homepage has a nice big 'Help' link in the top right. I click it. There's an FAQ link - I click that and I'm told "You are not authorized to access this page.". Ouch. Sorry. Back we go - but wait, there's a link to "Place a request to our Professional Support team: dedicated Mandriva engineers will work with you to find a solution to your problem." - fantastic. This is more like it... dedicated people will work with me to find a solution to my problem... and then I was asked to login. I was given the chance to search, however, so I searched for bugs. They're using Google for their search engine and the first hit.... "Where do you report bugs? - Mandriva Expert" and it's a 6 year old question on their website, and half of it is obscured by another box telling me stuff I can already see, like who submitted it and when, and if they paid, but it does say "Report them at the bugzilla page of mandrake: http://qa.mandrakesoft.com", which I tried, and it doesn't work.

Slowly running out of distributions in my mind now, I remember Ubuntu, or rather Gobuntu, which is what I'm using on this machine.

Gobuntu - I go to gobuntu.org, assuming it's the right website and I'm redirected to Ubuntu.com. To make sure I'm not doing something stupid, I try kubuntu.org and remember that month I spent playing with KDE recently. That works, there's even a bugs link. I try Xubuntu.org, thinking "Well, if that works, something is definitely wrong with gobuntu.org". It worked, but no bugs link. Anyway, back to gobuntu.org, or rather, Ubuntu.com, along the top in very tiny text is a link for 'Support' and another for 'Community'. Support seemed to be more for people who were paying, or looking for training. I tried 'Community' - I know Jono likes the word, and sure enough was a link to 'Report a problem', which gives me some brief overview of filing bugs and there's a link to 'Report a new bug'. Okay, I'm game... click away. Blah. I have to register. I think I might have an account already, but I don't know which email address I used, and Ubuntu's bug tracker isn't free software, so I'm done here.

Now I was really stuck. I tried to think what other people used... most people I know run either Debian, Ubuntu or gNewSense... gNewSense, of course! Why, we sponsor it at work, and I have it running on my other laptop.

gNewSense - Bring up the website, and there's a bugs link on the left. Excellent, this is a good start, and then it all goes horribly wrong. "You must be logged in to file a bug." - not only that, but it doesn't even link me to the login page. If you want to report bugs here, you have to actually find the link yourself.

Was that really it? I pondered for a moment, to collect my thoughts. I got some food. As I sat, munching on my Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, I had a sudden flash of inspiration... Wikipedia! Not only would Wikipedia provide me with a complete list of distributions to try, but they must have a bug tracker for Mediawiki.

Oh. My. God. There are a lot of distributions. Like, over 170 in fact. "Can I really check all 170 odd of these things for bug trackers?". Sure, why not. Maybe one of these projects is really good, and has a great little group of people working really bloody hard on it...

...in the end, I decided I'd keep going until I found two that met my requirements, just to make sure I wasn't dreaming, but that I'd post the complete list, and let people leave comments to fill in the rest, thus proving my blog as an interactive experience, and not just a bloke talking rubbish.

There's no way I could report much on each one, but for the sake of completeness, I present a list of three pieces of data.

a) The project's name. 2) Does the project have an easy to find bug tracker? d) Do I have to login or register to use it?

Deep breath. Here we go.

64 Studio - Yes. Yes. Fail.
AbulÉdu - No. If they do, it's in French. Fail.
aLinux - Yes. Yes. Fail.
ALT Linux - Yes. Yes. Fail.
Annvix - Yes. Yes. Fail. (They have a nice logo though)
Arch Linux - Yes. Yes. Fail.
Ark Linux - No. Fail.
Arudius - No. Fail.
Asianux - Yes. Yes. Fail.
Aurora SPARC Linux - Yes. Yes. Fail.
Aurox - Project closed down.
Austrumi - No. Fail.
BackTrack - No. Fail.
Baltix - Yes. Yes. Fail.
Bayanihan Linux 2006 - No. Fail.
BeatrIX - Domain gone.
Berry Linux - Yes. No. Win!

Just stop there a second. The first project that allows people to report a bug without registering is Berry Linux, which describes itself as "A bootable CD Linux. Using new technologies." - it's in Japanese though. Still, congratulations to the developers of... Sourceforge Japan, for allowing people to report bugs without registering.

Moving on.

Bharat Operating System Solutions - No. Fail.
BLAG Linux and GNU - No. Fail.
Buildix - No. Fail.
Caixa Mágica - No. Portguese.
Caldera Linux - Ha ha ha ha ha ha. No.
cAos Linux - Yes. Yes. Fail.
CentOS - Yes. Yes. Fail.
ClarkConnect - Yes. Yes. Fail.
Coyote Linux - Website offline.
CRUX - Yes. Yes. Fail.
Damn Small Linux (DSL) - No. Fail.
DD-WRT - Yes. Yes. Fail.
DeLi Linux - Yes. No. Win!

"DeLi Linux stands for Desktop Light Linux. It is a distribution for old computers, from 486 to Pentium II or so. It's focused on desktop usage. It includes email clients, graphical web browser, an office programs with word processor and spreadsheet, and so on. A full install, including XOrg and development tools, needs not more than 350 MB of harddisk space."

This is what I love the most about these guys...

"This is the place to report Bugs in DeLi Linux. If you think you found a bug you can post it here. Think of it as a rudimental bug tracking system (BTS). I think for such a small distro as DeLi a complete and full-featured BTS like Bugzilla would be overkill."

It's just a wiki, but it works.

*Before we go on, it's worth noting a pattern here. *

Bugzilla, Mantis and Flyspray were the three most common bug trackers, and they all required a login to post a bug.

Bugzilla - Bugzilla requires an account to report a bug.
Mantis - Requires a login.
Flyspray - "Error #15: You don't have sufficient permissions to open a task."

I'm almost certain that Trac can do this, but what of proprietary bug trackers? The big list of bug trackers on Wikipedia only gave me two I'd heard of that were proprietary -- FogBugz and JIRA. Because they are proprietary, I cannot recommend them, but I have used them both in previous jobs. Further, JIRA is such a nightmare and so horrible to use, that if someone even offers you a look at it, you should punch them in the face and run away to Mexico, unless you live in Mexico, in which case you should go to Manchester. Also, it seems JIRA sucks because you have to create an account to stick a bug in about it on the developer's website. FogBugz has the same problem, though I have seen installations of FogBugz where you don't need this.

So, where the hell does this leave us? Well, it seems that if you want to report bugs in free software, you have to jump through hoops to get it. It seems like a lot of projects are plagued by spam, or something equally unpleasant which forces them to shut away their issue trackers from the people who actually need to use them.

There is another way of course. Let everyone file as many bugs as they want, and check them for spam of course, but let someone enter an email address, if they want to, and when you do, send them a quick email and say 'We are not going to email you about this problem until its fixed. If you like to get an email every time someone does anything to this bug, click the link below', and you've got a lot of happy people, reporting bugs.

Also, if you're running a free software project, please use a free software bug tracker. Don't use JIRA, or FogBugz, or Launchpad, because by doing so, you say 'The ethics of free software do not extend to the tools I use to create the software and improve it', and that doesn't send a good message to anyone.

Oh and Joel, if you're reading this - please make FogBugz free software - even if you only release your old versions, without any support, it would be something. The world needs less JIRA installations, and you might be the key to that happening.

Oh, and finally, here's my list...

DeMuDi
Devil-Linux
DNALinux
Dreamlinux
DSLinux
dyne:bolic
eBox
Edubuntu
EduLinux
Elive
EnGarde Secure Linux
Familiar Linux
Feather Linux
Feather Linux
Finnix
Fli4l
Fluxbuntu
Foresight Linux
Fox Linux
FREESCO
Freespire
Frugalware
GeeXboX
Gentoox
Gibraltar
gNewSense
Gnoppix
gnuLinEx
GoblinX
GoboLinux
Gobuntu
gOS
Guadalinex
Hikarunix
Hiweed
HostGIS
Impi Linux
IPCop
iPodLinux
Jlime
Jollix
K12Linux and K12LTSP
Kaella
Kalango
Kanotix
Knopperdisk
Knoppix
KnoppMyth
Kororaa
Kubuntu
Kurumin
LiMux
Linguas OS
Linkat
Linspire
LinuxMCE
Linux Mint
Linux XP
Lunar Linux
Lycoris
Maemo
Mandriva Linux Free
MCC Interim Linux
MCNLive
MEPIS
MkLinux
Mobilinux
MontaVista Linux
Morphix
Musix
Myah OS
Mythbuntu
NASLite
NepaLinux
NimbleX
NimbleX
Nitix
nUbuntu
OpenGEU
OpenZaurus
Paipix
PAIPIX
Pardus
Parsix GNU/Linux
PCLinuxOS
Pentoo
Pie Box Enterprise Linux
PingOO
Plamo Linux
PLD Linux Distribution
Protech
PS2 Linux
Puppy Linux
QiLinux
Red Flag Linux
Red Hat Linux
Rocks Cluster Distribution
rPath
Rxart
Sabayon Linux
SAM Linux
Satux
Scientific Linux
Sentry Firewall
Sharif Linux
sidux
Skolelinux
Slackintosh
Slamd64
SLAMPP
SLAX
SME Server
SmoothWall
Softlanding Linux System
Sorcerer
Source Mage GNU/Linux
Splack
SUSE Linux
Symphony OS
SystemRescueCD
The Linux Router Project
Tinfoil Hat Linux
tomsrtbt
Topologilinux
Trisquel
Trustix
Tuga
Tuquito
Turbolinux
Ubuntu
Ubuntu Studio
Ulteo
UserLinux
Ututo
Vector Linux
VidaLinux
Vine Linux
White Box Enterprise Linux
Xandros Open Circulation Edition
Xebian
Xubuntu
Yellow Dog Linux
Yggdrasil Linux
YOPER
Zen Linux
Zenwalk Linux

O, internet

2008-02-23T02:47:50Z

Christ. Fuck you, Google. Fuck you so hard.

One man discovers his youthful posts to alt.personals are still there for everyone to see.

GPLv3, LGPLv3 and AGPLv3 logos.

2008-02-13T14:11:38Z

The FSF published logos for LGPLv3 and AGPLv3 today, along with the existing GPLv3 logos.

They're very cool, and it'll be neat to see them used on more projects.

Wither .co.uk

2008-02-08T16:09:00Z

After almost 8 years of being at mattl.co.uk, today that changes.

In all my toing and froing over Wordpress.com and Litespeed, I noticed that Matt Mullenweg (who I've never met, but occasionally spoken to, and still admire) has moved from photomatt.net to ma.tt.

So, here's how it went down, yesterday.

(14:24:42) mattl: matt mullenweg aka photomatt
(14:24:46) mattl: bought ma.tt
(14:24:50) Rob Myers: :-)
(14:24:58) Rob Myers: is there a tl ?
(14:25:16) mattl: haha, there is.
(14:25:25) Rob Myers: so get mat.tl
(14:42:30) mattl: okay. done.
(14:42:57) Rob Myers: kewl :-)
(14:43:23) Rob Myers: now see if you can get di.af

So, I did. I'm now living at mat.tl - maybe I this should be http://mat.tl/ee/ - what do people reckon?