The Four Ubuntu Yorkshiremen

(With apologies to Monty Python)

Four well-dressed men sitting together at a LUG meeting, surrounding a laptop running Ubuntu 9.04.

First Yorkshireman (1Y): Ahh … Very passable, this, very passable.

Second Yorkshireman (2Y): Nothing like a good install of Ubuntu Jaunty, eh Gessiah?

Third Yorkshireman (3Y): You’re right there, Obediah.

Fourth Yorkshireman (4Y): Who’d a thought fifteen years ago we’d all be sittin’ here recordin’ a podcast usin’ Jokosher on Ubuntu?

1Y: Aye. In them days, we’d a’ been glad to have Slackware installed on t’hard disk.

2Y: A beta of Slackware.

3Y: Without network card or CD-ROM drive.

4Y: Or a hard disk!

1Y: In a filthy Packard Bell.

3Y: We never used to have Packard Bell. We used to have to use RM Nimbuses.

2Y: The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of a Sinclair QL.

4Y: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

1Y: Aye. Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, “Money doesn’t buy you operatin’ systems.”

3Y: ‘E was right. I was happier then and I had nothin’. We used to use Yggdrasil Linux on an old Compaq with half of case missin’.

2Y: Case? You were lucky to have a case! We used to have motherboards and components scattered about floor for ’servers, all hundred and twenty-six of ‘em, no cable ties. Half the things were un-updated; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of being DDoSed!

4Y: You were lucky to have updates! *We* used to have to hand-patch kernels every week!

1Y: Ohhhh we used to dream of hand-patching kernels! Woulda been a weight lifted to us. We used to infiltrate remote systems to snoop on the kernel to see what’d been changed the night before to reverse engineer t’changes back on our own kernels. Patches!? Hmph.

3Y: Well when I say “patch” it was a hard copy of a diff printed on continuous paper with the green lines on it, but it were a patch to us.

2Y: We stopped gettin’ our hard copies; we had to fly to Finland and get Linus to transcribe bloody diffs onto notebooks!

4Y: You were lucky to have notebooks! There were a hundred and sixty of us passing code changes across Europe by t’game of Chinese Whispers.

1Y: By phone?

4Y: Aye.

1Y: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a telephone exchange intercepting phone calls on the off-chance we’d catch your Chinese Whispers. We’d scratch the diffs onto nearby bits of copper wire, swallow ‘em and spend fourteen hours on bog trying to get em back again when we got home. Then our Dad would thrash us t’sleep with his copy of BYTE!

2Y: Luxury. We use to have to swim t’Finland at three o’clock in the morning, sneak up to Torvalds’ house, spy on him until he typed in the bits we thought he was changing, scribble them down on newspaper and post them and ourselves back by DHL, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken Tulip network card, if we were lucky!

4Y: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up at twelve o’clock at night, figure out t’diffs by mental projection, lick t’diffs onto EEPROMs for 1,166 Swatch Internet beats, debug the compiler with a slide rule, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with unsheathed Cat 5.

3Y: Right. I had to steal kernel diffs from you bastards, invent time machine, go back in time, give diffs to Torvalds to implement as the first version of the code instead of the twentieth, go forward in time, and find all the diffs already implemented in the kernel I got with Slackware, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing the Free Software Song.

1Y: But you try and tell the young people today that … and they won’t believe ya’.

ALL: Nope, nope …

Syndicated 2009-03-22 13:28:00 from neuro.me.uk » open source

Defective in the Head

As someone said on IRC this morning: “the FSF appear to have come up with the perfect plan for how to look like a bunch of annoying, smart-arse tossers“. Has the Free Software Foundation gone nuts?

Update 13:30: I don’t seem to be alone on this: popey, mgdm, ZDNet, Slashdot.

I’ve been saying for a while that the more zealous methods used by proponents of Free software have been somewhat over-the-top, and do more to detract from the FOSS public image than to build upon it in a constructive way. Now they’ve taken a sip from the poisoned Kool-Aid. The FSF, via it’s Defective by Design campaign, is advocating that people block-book sessions at an Apple Store’s Genius Bar, a sort of drop-in and bookable repair and support centre. “Having lots of slots booked will get Apple’s attention and ensure that the Geniuses have done their homework”, says the ‘Apple Challenge’ page, posted by FSF employee Matt Lee. The rationale apparently is that Apple is now the enemy, since Vista is doing more damage to itself than anyone else can from outside Microsoft, and the first target are the Apple Store’s Genius Bars.

Update 13:35: Just noticed this on IRC …
[13:33]<mgdm> popey: you mean mattl actually uses a Mac?
[13:33] <popey> he does
[13:33] <mgdm> IRONY OVERLOAD *head asplodes*

My employer purchased both AppleCare and ProCare for my MBP, which has come in extremely handy when the ‘O’ key snapped off (keyboard replaced overnight), my battery failed to hold a charge (replaced immediately upon attending pre-booked Genius Bar session) and my motherboard GPU failed (motherboard replaced in 90 minutes). Now imagine any of the following scenarios: you’re unsure how to use your newly purchased Macbook; you’re trying to connect a camera to your Mac to transfer photos to iPhoto and print them to send to relatives in a frame; your machine has failed in some way and urgently needs repaired, as you use it for your business. You try to book a session at the Genius Bar to resolve any of these issues, and … it’s fully booked. For days. Wow, they must be busy.

Well, no, it’s actually a bunch of uber-asshole Free software zealots thinking they’re “special”, attempting to monopolise a consumer resource in an attempt to “educate” or “catch out” Apple Store employees, some of whom may have used Macs for years, others may have had a crash course in Apple products so that they know as much as they can about the stuff they sell, but little else. Why harass these people? It’s like having a constant stream of people going up to the counter at McDonald’s and espousing the benefits of a low-carb, high-fibre diet to the person who can do the least about it. Genius Bar employees may know all about FOSS, but critically it’s not their job to promote it. It’s not a “product” to be “sold”, but a philosophy to be shared.

A plea to the FSF: stop harassing Apple staff, and stop alienating the very people you’re trying to “save”. There are better, more ethical, more agreeable methods to promote FOSS. What you’re doing is none of those things. In the meantime, you’ve virtually guaranteed I will never promote, condone, contribute or donate to any FSF body, project or campaign. I’ve had a “Warning, DRM” defectivebydesign.org sticker on my Macbook Pro for a while now, mainly for comedic value. It’s gone now. I no longer want to be seen to be promoting these idiots in any way. As much as I love the thought of Free and Open Source Software being used everywhere and anywhere, this is just not the way to be going about it.

Syndicated 2008-07-28 12:07:07 from neuro.me.uk » open source

No More SmoothWall (For Me)

Some of you who know me may know my fascination and infatuation for SmoothWall, the open source Linux firewall distro. You may be interested to know that I’ve decided to take my leave of the project after just over 7 years. To explain, I need to tell a story of how I got there in the first place.

In October 2000, I moved house. My Internet access changed from using a Nokia 5146 mobile phone making data calls to Freeserve and BT Internet (0800 dialup for a tenner a month), hooked up to a Windows NT Workstation to share to my fledgling LAN (of two machines), to having a USR Sportster 56K modem and “real” phone line. I needed a better way to share the access than a Windows box, and decided to investigate building a router firewall running Debian Linux. I lasted about two days and was getting narked off that I had to read all my personal email at work. Then I picked up the December 2000 issue of Linux Format, which had a free Linux-based router firewall distro cover mounted on the CD. It was SmoothWall 0.9.5LF.

I installed it and it ran just peachy, getting way further than my fudged Debian install in about 20 minutes. Internet access had I. Once I was online, I did my usual: subscribe to the mailing lists, check out the project a bit more. Turns out they were looking for some help with the web interface the firewall software used, and at the time I considered myself a dab hand with Photoshop and HTML, so I threw my cap over the wall and sent some UI mockups to the list. Soon, I was part of the project team, and not only helping Dan Goscomb build out the web interface, but also doing some meagre Perl hacking on the UI rendering code, and fiddling with serial LCD consoles to get status information from the firewall onto. Eventually I found myself involved in redesigning the project website from scratch. In short, I had become a member of my very first Open Source software project. I soon grew to know members of the team very well — they included dang, dan_c, whaletales, bill, rebecca, and I especially got to know Richard Morrell and Lawrence Manning (aslak).

A year later, and the whole thing had ballooned to the point where a company could be formed around marketing, developing and selling the whole kit and caboodle in a more corporate-friendly fashion. In November 2001, I did some contract work for the company to create the very first iteration of the SmoothWall company website, and by January 2002, I was employee #4 of SmoothWall Ltd.; employees #1-3 were (in no real order) Richard, Lawrence and George. George had come from building up IT businesses, and we were looking for someone with biz clout to manage the company while we did all the fun stuff like hacking on cool code, websites and teams. I lasted there until mid-2004. This was a time when the company seemed to be doing well, building new commercial products on the back of the open source project output, and we had nearly tripled in size. Richard had already left by this point, leaving a trail of customers and open source users who loved what he had helped nurture, and some people angry at being sworn at a bit. While I enjoyed the work, we were still a small company and I needed a bit more money coming in. I decided to resign after I was offered a job with an ISP in Edinburgh which paid better, and let me explore system administration as a career as opposed to web development; I had spent a fair while doing webdev at SmoothWall, but I decided that my skills in that area were fading fast, and that I’d need an extensive amount of time to train myself up on newer webdev technologies.

Meanwhile, I still considered myself part of the open source project, and still did some sysadmin and forum twiddling in that regard. However, as time went on, I spent more and more time in my work — especially since some of it had an on-call element — while concurrently, more and more Express development seemed to be occurring in-house, sometimes taking cues — and I assume code — from the corporate products. Now, this is A Good Thing; a corporate entity backporting features and code from its commercial products into its open source endeavours, but there just seemed to be no way for me to do much outwith the realm of the company.

This went on until around 2007, when the smoothwall.org website was redesigned, shortly after the smoothwall.net site was overhauled. The team page had always listed me, and when we had text describing what we did, it always gave a pretty accurate view of what I had contributed. But this new version relegated me to “Moderator and user support”. What? In September, I tried asking why this had happened in the team-only forum:

Incidentally, why am I now listed as a “moderator and support” in the team listing? I have done sys admin, web design, UI design, and development for this project. I haven’t done forum moderation or any level of support for years, literally years. Why are my rather sizable contributions being demeaned in this manner? Why was I not consulted about this change? Why, frankly, should I give a damn about this project any more?

… and …

The bottom line is, I want to contribute to this project, and I want to be involved in more than just forum/support monkey stuff, which it seems I’ve been lumbered with. If it’s not clear from my earlier post, if this is where I’ve been relegated to, I’ll leave. It’s not a threat, it’s not an attempt at blackmail, coercion or anything like that, it’s just a reality. I don’t think it’s fair that some of the strongest contributors - and I don’t mean myself, but some of the very experienced and knowledgable folk in the community - appear to have been marginalised in favour of ultimate control resting with staff. The general attitude outgoing seems to be that we can only help with peripheral segments of the project. I do apologise if I’ve completely misread this, but that’s how it seems from the outside. [...] The community. It has to be the sacred element of any open source project, and it simply can’t be abused under any circumstances. There is talent here, use it, leverage it, but for $deity’s sake, don’t marginalise or ignore it.

No meaningful reply was given, and nothing was done about my entry. At one point, I was challenged to define what I did on Express 3.0 to justify any expansion on my team entry; I replied with this:

That I didn’t contribute anything directly to 3.0 should have no bearing on my standing. Are you writing off everything I’ve done in total over the last nearly seven years? Are you happy to see me demoted to someone who helps on the forums (not that I had a lot of time for that even at my most active)? With that one statement, you have undermined my entire confidence in this project, however, I will not let this get to me, and I will not turn into some [censored] threatening all sorts of crap in a lame attempt to Get Things Done.

My work on the firewall user interface, which was built upon in 3.0, not re-engineered from scratch, was ignored, as was my other work on the website. Sadly, my repeated efforts to engage without threatening anything did nothing. Nothing changed.

A conference call was announced to try and talk through some of these issues, and while methods (telephone? Skype? Gizmo?) and times were discussed, nothing concrete came out and nothing was arranged.

Equally crazy things were done around this time; the administrator’s manual for Express 3.0 was gated behind a signup form, nominally to generate opt-in statistics on SmoothWall usage and hardware configurations, to better understand the population and how to tailor the HCL to increase hardware compatibility. Regardless of the rationale, well-intentioned or not, who hides the freaking documentation for an open source project behind a sign-up form? Meanwhile, a poll was fielded in the public forums to see if Express users would be interested in paying SmoothWall Ltd. for a “features” subscription, including “like anti-spam, web filtering blocklist and settings backup”. The answer was a resounding “no”. These were typical of what seemed to be increasingly odd business decisions, and bizarre attitudes on how to run an open, transparent <acronym title="Free and Open Source Software">FOSS</acronym> project.

So five days ago, I posted to the internal forum explaining that I was considering leaving the project, and asking for comments: not to seek pleadings for me to stay, or to incite insults to force my hand, but again to generate a rational discussion, highlighting my issues:

I still appear to be listed on the website as a forum moderator, completely ignoring the work I’ve done on SmoothWall in the last 7 years. I’ve asked about this before, and nothing was done. I’m finding increasingly little time to squeeze in other things outside my commitments to things like Linden Lab, LugRadio and so on. I feel like there’s a stand-off-ish position being taken when communicating with those I know in the core community.

So, I’m giving serious consideration to resigning from the open source project; I’ve already revoked my forum adminship (did it a month or two ago, actually). All the development work now seems to be done in-house. There’s nothing for me to do whatsoever as a sysadmin. I’m not a good tester. I’m not going to sit and just moderate a forum given my level of involvement in the past. So it feels like time.

I made it crystal clear that this was not an attack, that this was not my trying to “get at anyone”, these were observations and my reaction to those observations.

Five days later, and nothing has happened. Again. So I feel it’s time to say farewell to SmoothWall. I’ve no doubt I’ll still stay part of the user community, at least peripherally, and I bear no real ill will to anyone involved. I’m just very disappointed in the decisions made to get where we are today, and I feel it’s hypocritical to stay connected to a project I have misgivings about. This also isn’t to say that SmoothWall the distro and product line aren’t good; they are, and I’ll likely continue to recommend SmoothWall Express where appropriate, although I’ll likely be replacing my own SmoothWall border solution with a Cisco 871-K9 to get my IOS nous up.

So long, SmoothWall. It was fun.

Syndicated 2008-03-05 05:12:20 from neuro.me.uk » open source

Easy Peasy WordPress Upgrades

My blog software, WordPress, has been nagging me to upgrade it for a few days now. It’s normally an easy process: go to the website, download the tar archive, untar into a temporary directory, then cp -a the files into my blog’s Apache virtual host directory.

However, Aq noticed a slightly easier way: use Subversion. Now I can upgrade WordPress with a simple svn switch command, followed by a click on a database upgrade script. Much, much easier.

Syndicated 2007-11-24 05:53:52 from neuro.me.uk » open source

quotes.lugradio.org is Back

Finally, I’ve managed to get the LugRadio IRC Quotes Database back online on the day that the large gents released LugRadio Season 5’s first episode. I’ve migrated from rash to Chirpy! — the same <acronym name="quote database">qdb used by the Mozilla Foundation, amongst others. This migration has been a long time coming, and hopefully LugRadio community folk can enjoy having some fun reading some of the utter, utter random pish we’ve come out with over the last couple of years!</acronym>

Syndicated 2007-09-24 17:12:13 from neuro.me.uk » open source