You can now see if I’m online with Jabber (as BinaryApe) by looking at this neat map. I’m part of the Northern England group.

Link: Jabber World Map

I really don’t trust closed voting systems. And I BANG also don’t trust voting systems in Florida. This supports my grumbles yesterday about government software.

Link: Florida Talkshow Callers Claim Machines ‘Broken’

BANG

A shambling group of fat men and boys have just dropped a small arms-dump sized mound of fireworks onto the lawn outside my flat, and are merrily launching fireworks into the air between this block and the next. This gives a lovely amplified BANG as the sound reflects between both buildings. They seem to prefer BANG over colours, movement or other firework effects. Including height - the bloody things are exploding on a level with my window.

Curses.

and maybe Spencer. “It is without a doubt, American decadence at its finest.”

Link: Sky Driving

I like the BBC, and I like their use of Open Source software. They employ some smart people and produce some great content. Maybe they should produce Open Source software too? After all, the public have paid for it already. This great article by Azeem Azhar (ex-BBC) has started me thinking about this again. He considers the implications of the BBC open sourcing all it’s content, not just internal software systems.

I’m in favour of open sourcing all the “information systems” used by governments, the systems that manage information for the police, the health service, passports, air traffic control, and so on. I’m not sure if open sourcing all the BBC’s content is a good idea, but I’m open to argument which is why the article linked above is so interesting. Azeem Azhar makes a strong case.

In the USA, publicly funded organisations give a lot back to the public. Nasa frees a huge amount of data including photos, videos and research software into the public domain, and even the NSA releases open source code. This is in a nation generally suspicious of state funded organisations, and maybe that’s the reason. The public expects to share the benefits when their tax money is spent. They are the investors after all.

In the UK we are proud and protective of our state organisations, but these institutions seem to give much less back to the public beyond the limit of their immediate function.

Freeing up the main product of a public organisation is very dangerous. There is a high likelyhood that free, publicly available state-subsidised products would wipe out private competitors. This might not be in the interest of consumers, or, ultimately, of the public organisation itself. While I’d like to see the BBC release all its content into the public domain, the BBC is already a very big fish in a small pond…

However, one aspect of publicly funded organisations is much easier to give back to the public: software. Especially when secondary to the organisation’s main objectives, a means to an end rather than a service itself. Why are we paying for numerous government bodies to buy shoddy bespoke software from companies like Crapita, time and time again? Huge amounts of money are being wasted. That money could have bought real things like education and healthcare.

Governments have a duty to spend public money as efficiently as possible, and to me that demands that state software projects be Open Sourced whenever possible. Hire Capita or EDS by all means, but buy ownership of the code and release it freely to the world. Share it with other governments. Work together to improve it. Hire a private company to improve it. But don’t keep paying again and again for the same almost-working code in slightly different contexts. Build towers, not the ground floor many times.

And this should be global, not just national. India should be able to freely take Britain’s NHS software systems, hire programmers to improve them and adapt them to India’s health system, and then give back the extra features and bug fixes they’ve added.

Software voting systems are now being used in some elections, often with no public scrutiny of the software. How on earth can we see that an election is fair when it is effectively controlled by a private software company? Voting software owned by a state and hidden from the public would be equally dangerous. Opening the code is the only way to ensure fairness.

The World’s population is paying over and over for government software that is often inadequate. Unlike physical goods, government software can be reproduced with almost no cost. Try doing that with cancer operations. We must stop wasting money on software. Governments gain no advantage from keeping the code to themselves. We’re all paying for it, we should all own it. The alternative is governments imposing a costly, artificial scarcity on their own citizens.

The irony is that rather than the wealthy countries freeing their existing government software and sharing it with poorer countries, the opposite is happening. Across the developing world, countries are moving towards mandatory Open Source licensing for government software projects. As this continues, Europe’s governments may soon be benefiting from the common sense and civic values of the “third world”. I hope we give them some good software in return.

This is interesting. “American English” has a lot of regional and cultural sub-dialects, just like British English. Sadly the great sandwich issue is being won by “sub”. Monoculture, boo.

Link: Dialect Survey

The most impressive Star Wars Lego set ever.

Were most of the Ewoks killed in an ecological disaster after Return of the Jedi?

More information about the Death Stars than you ever dared ask for. Now I’m no longer confused about the Death Star’s internal gravity. I’ve been wondering about that for about 25 years. (Not constantly, I hasten to add.)

I’ve finally got round to setting myself up with some OpenPGP-compatible keys, so that I can securely sign and encrypt emails and files. This is something that scares the USA and UK governments, as they like to spy on their citizens. The German government has a better attitude - they are actually funding development of this technology.

I’m using Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG), which is compatible with the famous and commercial PGP software via the Open PGP standard, and Enigmail, which signs, encrypts and decrypts emails in Mozilla and Netscape.

In the end it wasn’t at all difficult - GPG’s Mini-Howto and Manual make it all clear. I’ve still got to try a few things, but I’ve tested all the main tasks.

Just in case anyone wants it, here’s my public key.

We’re getting about 40 spam email messages a day now. At work I’ve set up the excellent and free MailScanner to mark spam and make email messages safe, but that’s a little excessive for my home network. I don’t use Windows so there’s very little danger from viruses at present, and I don’t use Sendmail which MailScanner requires.

Instead I’ve just used SpamAssassin and a very simple procmail script. A quick summary of the process is below. Now I don’t need to weed out spam from my inbox every evening.

This is Unix only, so Windows users needn’t bother reading any more, although there are commercial, windows-compatible versions of SpamAssassin.

If your mail system already uses procmail (for example, Mandrake and Redhat Linux using Sendmail or Postfix) all you need to do is:

1. Install SpamAssassin. Just download it, unpack the tar, and as root type

perl Makefile.PL ; make ; make test ; make install

1. Edit your $HOME/.procmailrc script to include this at the top:

:0fw | /usr/bin/spamassassin

1. Add a filter to your email program to move mail containing the header

X-Spam-Status: Yes

into a special spam folder. That way you can check for mistakes occassionally.

There are many more options and settings to tune SpamAssassin and add more features, but that’s all you need. If in doubt, read the documentation.

Or “How to re-enact scenes from Das Boot in your own home”.

I fear plumbing. In the DIY store it looks fun; all those pipes and connectors just like a giant construction toy. In reality plumbing involves leaks, water damage, pipe fittings that won’t link together, toilets and baths being unavailable when needed (aargh) and nasty pipe-dwelling ecosystems of strange black-green gunk. It can be expensive and often ineffective even if you pay someone else to do it.

We’ve been trying to clear our partially/completely blocked bath drain for months. Most of the time water drains so slowly we could use the bath as a clock. A plumber failed to clear the blockage - the water flowed, but very slowly. We failed, even using one of those reels of twisty cable. Our untrained cable wiggling had less effect than the plumbers professional cable wiggling.

The solution is cheap, disgusting and fun. Well, more fun than the cable.

Power Plumber is a can of compressed air with an optional funnel. Fill your bath or sink with enough water to cover the can, block all the other plugs and overflows connected to the same pipe, then fire blasts of air from the can directly into the plughole. Oh, and duck as jets of nasty water explode out of the overflows and other plugs. Try to hold the overflows closed while firing blasts of air into the drain. In a small bathroom with a shared drain it can get quite dramatic and messy. But it works. A few small explosions later and water starts flowing down the plughole. I’m impressed. DIY gadgets rarely do what they claim, but this really does make light work of clearing a blockage. The only problem is that it can spray blockage gunk all over the room, which is why I’m not keen on seeing how it works with blocked toilets.