Category Archives: Technical

Who benefits when challengers give into the establishment?

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Gervase Markham’s blog has a post about OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument format which I found interesting.

A few of the respondants make points I tried to rebut, but my response (below) doesn’t appear in the list of followups there.

“My least favourite feature is that you can’t open a word document without it bugging you to save it when you close it, even when you never made any edits!”

I can’t reproduce this. I had a friend of mine with access to Microsoft Word 2003 make me a .doc file. I opened it in OpenOffice.org (OOo) 2.1 and then I closed that document; I made no edits. OOo didn’t prompt me at all, it just closed.

“Also, every time you try to save a file in word format it bugs you that your ‘losing some formatting’… why don’t they just give it up and make .doc the default format?? (Okay maybe thats taking it a bit too far)”

I wouldn’t want to use the latest .doc format (there are more than one of them and not even Microsoft’s software does the right thing with all of them) instead of ODF. I can edit ODF outside of an ODF program (such as a text editor) and that’s a big benefit to me because OOo’s find/replace needs some enhancement (finding paragraph breaks within a specific style and replacing them with line breaks, for example). I recently had to do this for a large ODF document. Large documents in Microsoft Word don’t work well. For whatever reason, Microsoft Word exhibits odd behavior in large documents.

But if you want to use .doc all the time by default, and if you don’t want to be warned, OOo has two preferences you can set to make this so. See Tools -> Options… and then go to the Load/Save section and pick “General”. There you can turn off the warning about not using OpenDocument format (ODF) and you can set the file type you want as the default for various document types. I think it would be going too far to make these settings the default, as well as being remarkably one-sided: nobody says Microsoft Word should make ODF the default filetype, even though ODF predated Office Open XML (OOXML) by months (or was it years?) and is more accessible for both implementors and users. It simply isn’t wise to let corporate fealty or wishful popularity push us into a non-standard that hasn’t stood the test of time (let alone cleared the hurdles of those who have read some of the OOXML spec).

“Is that “there is” or “there was”? People are already moving to the new MS Word […]”

Most people I know are not using the new Microsoft Office (nor are they using Microsoft Windows Vista). But more importantly, asking if “‘there is’ or ‘there was'” puts aside recent history. Microsoft Word .doc formats predate OOo by many years and OOo still manages to get a wide audience. So even if OOXML support doesn’t appear in OOo or some other free software programs for a while, there remains a big opportunity for free software. We know we can get people to switch; it’s not easy, but it can be done. And we have a format that is more widely deployable—ODF, so that’s one thing we can currently help propagate by use.

Footnote: By “wishful popularity” I mean the popularity others say will be the case someday but hasn’t been the case up to now and isn’t the case now. Since OOXML isn’t popular now, now is a good time to work for increased use of ODF instead. Considering this more now, it’s clearer to me that the best reason to avoid .doc isn’t properly technical—as .doc reverse engineering has proven, one could use this file format and accept the difficulties with document interchange. The best reason for avoiding .doc centers on working against anti-social mechanisms (like secret proprietary formats) that deny us our freedom and (as this poignant essay says) “buttress the Microsoft monopoly”.

Slow down and look at the implications, work for democratic control of your economy.

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Ultra-groovy Lizzie pointed me to the BBC article on RFID’s march through Europe. It is a rather one-sided article; it reads more like an advertisement for RFID. If you haven’t already thought of the social consequences of increased tracking, you might benefit from a piece which educates readers on multiple frames of debate or one which warns readers of what they’ll lose in exchange for increased RFID proliferation.

First, we should ask if RFID has any role to play at all. But the article starts by framing the issue from a proponent’s perspective:

The European Commission is setting up a group made up of citizens, scientists, data protection experts and businesses to discuss how the tags should be used.

Why jump past the question of whether to use them at all? How about restricting their use to prevent any contact with a consumer, leaving RFID as an industrial tracking mechanism?

Shouldn’t any discussion of RFID require proponents to justify why anyone outside the shipping dock needs RFID (if indeed shipping docks need this at all), and not how they are to be used?

As RFID tags become smaller and less easily detected by the naked eye, countries want to put them into more things in order to track more of your interactions. One ought to be concerned about RFIDs implanted into cash and product packaging. So if you want anonymous cash, what effect would uniquely identifying every bill and coin have? What if cash registers were fitted with RFID scanners that could read RFID tags no larger than a couple of ridges on a human finger (0.05mm²) (which should be on the market soon), and those registers wirelessly conveyed the scanned information to a database somewhere on the Internet? Is this the world you want?

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GNOME and the 2007 Google Summer of Code

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GNOMEA fanned out selection of GNOME/Google Summer of Code 2007 posters (the free software desktop project) is working with Google’s Summer of Code again this year. Starting today, students can apply to work on GNOME desktop projects and get paid by Google. Visit GNOME’s Summer of Code 2007 and Google’s Summer of Code pages for more information.

To advertise this project in your campus, find the poster that fits your needs best and post a copy of it somewhere students are likely to see it.

Thanks to Máirín Duffy for the poster art.

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English

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Arabic

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Croatian

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Danish

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Dutch

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French

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German

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Greek

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Indonesian

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Italian

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Korean

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Macedonian

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Malayalam

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Brazilian Portuguese

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Romanian

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Spanish

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EFF kills bogus Clear Channel digital recording patent

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Electronic Frontier Foundation has busted a patent, this time patent #6,614,729 (copy at Google Patent Search).

From the EFF:

The patent covered a system and method of creating digital recordings of live performances. Clear Channel claimed the bogus patent created a monopoly on all-in-one technologies that produce post-concert digital recordings and threatened to sue those who made such recordings. This locked musical acts into using Clear Channel technology and blocked innovations by others.

However, EFF’s investigation found that a company named Telex had in fact developed similar technology more than a year before Clear Channel filed its patent request. EFF — in conjunction with patent attorney Theodore C. McCullough and with the help of Lori President and Ashley Bollinger, students at the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic at American University’s Washington College of Law — asked the PTO to revoke the patent based on this and other extensive evidence.

Revoking illegitimate patents is one way to challenge the patent system, but it is a slow, time-consuming, and expensive process that has a very narrow effect when successful. It takes serious effort to research the prior art . However invalidating patents that harm software developers is incredibly important work (since patents threaten software development) as is campaigning for no more software patents.

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Internet Archive now makes Ogg Vorbis+Theora too!

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When you use The Internet Archive to host your video files, it will offer to make derivative files in alternate formats. Recently, Ogg Vorbis+Theora was added to the list of formats IA will make for you.

This means you can get all sorts of videos in a format anyone can play anywhere using a variety of software without giving up your software freedom. The Ogg Vorbis+Theora files are encoded at roughly the same level of quality people have apparently accepted from Flash video. Higher quality files can be made and uploaded manually, hosted at the IA free of charge.

Thanks Internet Archive!

US Government distributes PDF of 9/11 report with DRM

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The 9/11 report is a US government work and therefore is uncopyrighted. It was born into the public domain and should remain there forever. You may deal in the document fully without any restriction due to copyright law.

Some bloggers (Techliberation.com, BoingBoing.net) noticed that the 9/11 report distributed from 9-11commission.gov has Digital Restrictions Management applied—copying a snippet of the report is disallowed in certain PDF readers (such as the Apple and Adobe proprietary PDF readers). Of course, you shouldn’t install proprietary software on your computer; you would use KPDF or some other free software PDF reader. KPDF lets you turn off the DRM in the application preferences, so you can read, print, and copy any part of any PDF document without hassle. It’s not hard to find or make an unencumbered copy of the report without DRM.

Whether the DRM can be circumvented (technically or legally) is a secondary issue here. DRM is inherently a bad idea and we don’t need it, corporate copyright holders have been arguing for it and are trying to convince you that you should want it too. Part of their argument tries to get you to see the world in the most restrictive way: any restriction we can technically impose on others is virtually self-justifying and hardly needs any debate. That state of affairs should not be seen as unavoidable, acceptable, or the default.

Using Glade and Python to build GUI applications, building websites

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If you’re interested in writing GUI applications with Python, check out this beginner’s video guide to using Glade with Python and GTK+ (large video, small video, PDF slides, OpenDocument slides, code samples). Also interesting, a talk for beginners about doing work on websites.

The videos are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license.

Apparently two clicks away was two clicks too many.

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Ubuntu GNU/Linux’s Benjamin Mako Hill writes that he’s “perplexed by the recent fracas around the possibility of Ubuntu shipping non-free drivers by default as part of the feisty release goal to bring the bling“. “Feisty” is the codename for the next major release of Ubuntu GNU/Linux and “bring the bling” refers to splashy video effects like making windows shimmer when moved, or spinning the desktop image around. As of the time/date stamp on this post, the Ubuntu Wiki (linked above) says that the proprietary video driver software will be installed by default but won’t be enabled unless the user’s video hardware wouldn’t work without it. None of this discussion seems to get into the proprietary firmware (software uploaded to the computer running on some device) which will be employed as well.

So we’re presented with an opportunity to better understand what Richard Stallman is talking about when he describes the difference in reaction between a free software proponent and an open source proponent. I recommend reading the entire question-answer exchange so as to get proper context, but here’s a small quote:

So if I am offered a choice between a proprietary program which is powerful and reliable and a free program which is not, I choose the free program because that I can do in freedom. I’d rather make some practical sacrifices to reject oppression.

But suppose you want both? Suppose you want freedom and solidarity, and you want powerful reliable software? How can you get it? You can’t get that starting with the powerful, reliable, proprietary program because there is no way you can liberate that program. The only way you can get that, your ideal goal, is to start from the free program, technically inadequate as it may be, because you do have the option of improving it. That is the only path that can possibly ever get you to your ideal situation. Insist on freedom and make the program better.

Ubuntu’s choice is hardly surprising. Ubuntu’s unwillingness to abide by their own philosophy (“Every computer user should have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees”) is not new; Ubuntu’s fealty to the open source philosophy is clear (despite any language suggesting that software freedom ranks highly).

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Repetition is the key to learning.

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Alberto Milone is looking for a new video card. Why? Because the driver software he chose to run his current video card doesn’t work anymore.

My old ATI card is not supported any more by the ATI driver (fglrx) since version 8.28.8.

One wonders why treatment like this deserves the name “support”. If ATI really cared about their users they’d at least make the software free for hardware they no longer wish to deal with. Apple has the same problem, as any Apple Newton user or anyone trying to develop bootable CDs for so-called “old world” PowerMacs will attest to.

Milone asks for help picking a new ATI card (!) and lists the criteria he wants you to use to help him place more trust in his apparently untrustworthy master. One of those points is “it should be supported by the latest ATI driver”.

He also says what he’d rather buy—a card that runs with free software drivers? No: “I’d rather buy a card of the X series (e.g. X800) so as to be sure that the support for it won’t be dropped soon.”.

Non-free media for a free software conference? Again?

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Recently there was a symposium at Seneca College, Canada called the Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS). The name tells you what the speakers were supposed to address.

Unfortunately, and contrary to the name of the event, software freedom discussion is apparently not welcome and the recordings are needlessly encoded such that many free software users can’t play them.

See the updates and comments at the end of this post for some news on the struck portions of the post.

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