Advogato: Personal info for slef

18 Oct 2016 »

Rinse and repeat

Forgive me, reader, for I have sinned. It has been over a year since my last blog post. Life got busy. Paid work. Another round of challenges managing my chronic illness. Cycle campaigning. Fun bike rides. Friends. Family. Travels. Other social media to stroke. I’m still reading some of the planets where this blog post should appear and commenting on some, so I’ve not felt completely cut off, but I am surprised how many people don’t allow comments on their blogs any more (or make it too difficult for me with reCaptcha and the like).

The main motive for this post is to test some minor upgrades, though. Hi everyone. How’s it going with you? I’ll probably keep posting short updates in the future.

Go in peace to love and serve the web.

Syndicated 2016-10-18 04:28:23 from mjr – Software Cooperative News

11 Jun 2015 »

Mick Morgan: here’s why pay twice?

http://baldric.net/2015/06/05/why-pay-twice/ asks why the government hires civilians to monitor social media instead of just giving GC HQ the keywords. Us cripples aren’t allowed to comment there (physical ability test) so I reply here:

It’s pretty obvious that they have probably done both, isn’t it?

This way, they’re verifying each other. Politicians probably trust neither civilians or spies completely and that makes it worth paying twice for this.

Unlike lots of things that they seem to want not to pay for at all…

Syndicated 2015-06-11 03:49:00 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

14 May 2015 »

Recorrecting Past Mistakes: Window Borders and Edges

A while ago, I switched from tritium to herbstluftwm. In general, it’s been a good move, benefitting from active development and greater stability, even if I do slightly mourn the move from python scripting to a shell client.

One thing that was annoying me was that throwing the pointer into an edge didn’t find anything clickable. Window borders may be pretty, but they’re a pretty poor choice as the thing that you can locate most easily, the thing that is on the screen edge.

It finally annoyed me enough to find the culprit. The .config/herbstluftwm/autostart file said “hc pad 0 26″ (to keep enough space for the panel at the top edge) and changing that to “hc pad 0 -8 -7 26 -7″ and reconfiguring the panel to be on the bottom (where fewer windows have useful controls) means that throwing the pointer at the top or the sides now usually finds something useful like a scrollbar or a menu.

I wonder if this is a useful enough improvement that I should report it as an enhancement bug.

Syndicated 2015-05-14 04:58:02 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

20 Feb 2015 »

Rebooting democracy? The case for a citizens constitutional convention.

I’m getting increasingly cynical about our largest organisations and their voting-centred approach to democracy. You vote once, for people rather than programmes, then you’re meant to leave them to it for up to three years until they stand for reelection and in most systems, their actions aren’t compared with what they said they’d do in any way.

I have this concern about Cooperatives UK too, but then its CEO publishes http://www.uk.coop/blog/ed-mayo/2015-02-18/rebooting-democracy-case-citizens-constitutional-convention and I think there may be hope for it yet. Well worth a read if you want to organise better groups.

Syndicated 2015-02-20 04:03:00 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

22 Jan 2015 »

Outsourcing email to Google means SPF allows phishing?

I expect this is obvious to many people but bahumbug To Phish, or Not to Phish? just woke me up to the fact that if Google hosts your company email then its Sender Policy Framework might make other Google-sent emails look legitimate for your domain. When combined with the unsupportive support of the big free webmail hosts, is this another black mark against SPF?

Syndicated 2015-01-22 03:57:00 from Software Cooperative News » mjr

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