Yesterday I started some search engines to find out more about a guy I read about. I opened the results in tabs and skimmed over them. And then I saw that I also followed a link to facebook and saw this:

So as I am using konqueror it seems facebook really is not cool enough for me and I will not join (I always thought I will not join because of privacy reasons ;) ). Does someone know if this "coolness message" also pops up when using Microsoft Internet Explorer? ;)

Please keep it real with Free Software webbrowsers!

--
Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE's Fellowship and protect your freedom!

Just before heading off into their summer vacations, the European Commission has decided [press release] to extend the copyright term for sound recordings, from 50 to 95 years.

This significantly lengthens the period during which new creators will be taxed by rightsholders. The EC says this will benefit elderly session musicians who would otherwise now start losing royalties for recordings made in their 20s, and denies that the extension does anything to gold-plate Keith Richards' swimming pool.

The Register mentions a "use it or lose it" termination clause without going into specifics. I haven't seen this discussed anywhere else so far.

The EC's other decision today was to adopt a "Green Paper" [what's this?] on copyright in the knowledge economy. This is supposed to be the start of "a structured debate on the long-term future of copyright policy", and supposedly

The Green Paper is an attempt to organise this debate and point 
to future challenges in fields that have not been a focal point
 up to now, e.g. scientific and scholarly publishing, and the role
 of libraries, researchers and the persons with a disability.

While this doesn't sound so bad, right below the text is a link to a speech that Commissioner McCreevy gave at a BSA-sponsored conference on Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), which contains choice paragraphs like: 

So today we are here to talk about how we in the Commission can 
assist the ICT sector in putting the innovation that is at the 
heart of DRM technologies to use - so that other parts of the IP 
community can deliver protected content securely to consumers.

I hope he's just flogging a dead horse. But this doesn't bode well for the broadened focus of the Green Paper debate.

After Nobel prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and John Sulston last week, now the Wall Street Journal carries an article about the problem that the patent system has become. It's US-focused, but it pretty neatly outlines how the debate on a mild patent reform there sets the pharmaceutical industry against technology companies:

Yet the fault line over patent reform signals the
deeper problems. Many pharmaceutical companies lobbied against the
proposals, fearful of reduced value in their key intellectual property.
In contrast, most technology firms supported the reforms, worried more
about uncertainty in the law than about the value of their patents.

Both sides may be right. New empirical research by
Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael Meurer,
reported in their book, "Patent Failure," found that the value of
pharmaceutical patents outweighed the costs of pharmaceutical-patent
litigation. But for all other industries combined, they estimate that
since the mid-1990s, the cost of U.S. patent litigation to alleged
infringers ($12 billion in legal and business costs in 1999) is greater
than the global profits that companies earn from patents (less than $4
billion in 1999). Since the 1980s, patent litigation has tripled and
the probability that a particular patent is litigated within four years
has more than doubled. Small inventors feel the brunt of the
uncertainty costs, since bigger companies only pay for rights they
think the system will protect.

Link

Even if you know nothing about LaTeX, you can make your first Japanese PDF document by taking a copy of this example file JIS.tex, going to a shell command line and typing "pdflatex JIS.tex". That should produce this output: JIS.pdf.

If that doesn't work for you, then you need to install some LaTeX software or Japanese fonts. On my Debian GNU/Linux system, I think I just installed texlive-latex-base and latex-cjk-japanese, and the package manager automatically installed the other packages needed by those two. I don't remember if I also had to install a fonts package.

Once you've got that working, you can start modifying and removing lines from that example file to see what you really need. I trimmed it down to eight lines:

\documentclass[12pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{CJK}

\begin{document}
\begin{CJK*}[dnp]{JIS}{min}

\section{What I learned today}
I can write this 私はキランです in Japanese.

\end{CJK*}
\end{document}

%%% Local Variables:
%%% coding: euc-japan

 

Ok ok, that's ten lines since I included two commands at the end to tell Emacs which character encoding to use when saving the file. This seems important since when I saved it as utf-8, the pdflatex program failed. Because these two lines start with percent signs, they will be ignored by LaTeX processors such as pdflatex, so it's safe to leave them there even if you're not using Emacs.

In the sixth line of my small example you should see seven mostly-simple Japanese characters. If that's not what you see, try setting your browser's character encoding to EUC-JP or maybe UTF-8. (This might be in [menu-bar]->View->Character Encoding->...)

Once you have this working, you should look at the other examples that came with the LaTeX CJK package. On my system, the examples are installed in the directory /usr/share/doc/latex-cjk-japanese/examples/ (Thanks for the tip, LUK ShunTim) This is probably also the best way to get started with other complex fonts such as Chinese and Korean.

It took me four hours to figure out how to use LaTeX to make a PDF document with Japanese characters. At one point, I became so frustrated with the LaTeX documentation that I gave up and decided to use DocBook instead. Unfortunately, DocBook's documentation was just as bad.

I think I learned something from all this about what makes a good tutorial: get the user to a working example as quickly as possible. Once you have something working, then you can experiment and learning becomes fun.

For a start, I think I'll put the "ruby" commands from JIS.tex back in since they're a pretty useful reading aid for learners. "Ruby" here refers to the little superscript phonetic kana characters, usually called furigana. It has no relation to the Ruby programming language, which was developed by a Japanese guy.

To write Japanese hirigana, katakana, and kanji, in Emacs you just use the function M-x set-input-method and then type japanese at the prompt. The usual command (C-h I) will show the documentation for how the input method works. While using the japanese input method, typing qq will put you into the japanese-ascii input method, which you'll need for typing LaTeX commands and symbols "\{}". And qq again will bring you from the japanese-ascii input method back to the normal japanese input method.

If you want to use other applications, then you'll need to install some separate input method software. I installed the packages "anthy", "scim", and "scim-canna" and then was able to write Japanese in GNOME applications by right clicking in a text box and from the "Input Methods" submenu, choosing "SCIM Input Method". It's annoying that SCIM uses Ctrl+Space as it's activation sequence. You can change this by going to "Show command menu->SCIM Setup->Global Setup" I wasn't able to get OpenOffice.org to work. From looking around, it seems OpenOffice only supports "IIIMP", but I can't see any package that provides IIIMP.

You might find useful info on these pages:

• How to create Japanese language documents under GNU/Linux using LaTeX
• related discussion on an Ubuntu bug forum
• Inputting Japanese text in [GNU/]Linux and some BSDs
• On my Learning Japanese page I've added some links about computing and Japanese and that's where I'll add more in the future.

Hope that helps!

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Thanks to TI and the drawing they did at LinuxTag 2008 I got a BeagleBoard Rev. B4. When the package arrived I started getting the necessary serial cable.

This board is unbelievable small. You get in a small box together with a mini USB cable:

 

And now on to my favorite: The OMAP3 on the board runs at 500 MHz. As you see it is not dangerous to put a finger on the running CPU :-)

Some other CPU manufacturers should better work on being as efficient as this one instead of wasting money with delusive marketing campaigns.

Despite there are not many Beagleboards in the wild the community around it is quite active. Without doubt Koen Kooi is ahead of everyone else: He is fixing kernel, gcc and mplayer problems altogether. Thanks to this work, people will have it a lot easier when the board can finally be bought in shops.

Jalimo on the Beagleboard is currently blocked by libtool 2.2 and/or GNU Classpath issues. I have a workaround but am waiting for answers from the libtool developers about a real solution.

• Groklaw now has a page of Sean Daly's interviews - I've been asking for this for a while.
• Old article about privacy problems with Google's desktop software - I started looking into this because I read an article about the new version of KDE boasting that Google's desktop software could now be integrated into KDE. That's bad, not only because Google's desktop software is proprietary, but also because it gives Google complete access to your data and their privacy policy is strongly criticised by Privacy International.
• Free as in Free Champagne! - Erik Josefsson notes the 3rd anniversary of our massive software patent victory in his usual style. Erik played the lead lobbying role in that campaign and must have lots of great stories to tell, so I always find his short, infrequent, casual blog entries bemusing. (I'm giving this a low-key mention since I hope to blog about it again later this week.)
• Article about chess boxing - 11 rounds alternating between chess and boxing where a contestant wins by checkmate, knockout, or points.

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Installing GNU/Linux on fresh hardware can be challenging. I bought a Medion akoya 10" netbook (MSI Wind U100 platform).

Since then I wanted to install my used distribution, Debian GNU/Linux. After trying the lenny installers, at first I wasn't able to get to it. Kernel 2.6.24 did not support the network card but instead broke the boot process so, after install, I did not have any drives. :(

I reported this install failure and got help so I was able to install a newer, working, kernel.

Thanks to the Debian installer team!

• Proposed changes to India's patent approval manual, along with comments from Redhat, Microsoft, etc.
• The Clipperz project's call for privacy and software freedom in webapps, including input from Stallman
• FreeGIS.org - a site collecting info about free mapping/geographic data projects. I haven't had the time to poke around much, but there's a database page where you can view the projects in their database that match various criteria.
• "It's not the Gates, it's the bars" - article by RMS published by BBC. [UPDATE: Ken Guest sent me a good link where Gates admits that access to source code was needed to make him the hacker he became]
• Steve Yegge's Emacs tips, and Phil Sung's Emacs tips

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

The Nordic Free Software Award is given to Nordic citizens, projects or organizations that have made a prominent contribution to the advancement of Free Software. Nominations for the Free Nordic Software Award 2008 can be submitted at http://fscons.org/award/nominate/ until September 1st. The jury consists of representatives associated with the Free Software Movement in the various Nordic countries.

Emacs 21 had a generic function called iso-accents-mode for writing âççéntèd çhàrâçtërs, but that was removed in Emacs 22. It took me a while, but I found the replacement was to use set-input-method, and then select whichever language you want to be able to type the accented characters of.

The default keybinding for set-input-method is not very convenient (C-x RET C-\), and I almost always use the same input method, so I put this small helper function in my .emacs and bound it to an easy key sequence:

(defun ciaran-toggle-french-input-method ()
  "toggle between French and no input method"
  (interactive)
  (if (string= current-input-method "french-alt-postfix")
      (set-input-method nil)
    (set-input-method "french-alt-postfix")))
(global-set-key [?\C-c ?.] 'ciaran-toggle-french-input-method)

Sometimes I need Dutch characters, but the "dutch" input method contains some completely unnecessary conversion sequences which make it frustrating to use. And sometimes I want the "á" character so I can write my name properly. So what do I do if I want a personalised input method?

About modifying input methods, the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual just says "How to define input methods is not yet documented in this manual". So I went to the Emacs page on sv.gnu.org, checked out a CVS copy of the emacs source, grepped around, and found that the Dutch input is defined in the file /emacs/leim/quail/latin-alt.el. Looking inside, it's not so complicated.

Here's a minimalist example of what you could put in your .emacs to create your own very basic input method:

(quail-define-package
 "ciarans-chars" "MYlanguage" "MY" t
 "Ciaran's personal input method defining only the
 conversion sequence he wants
" nil t nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t)

(quail-define-rules
 ("\"a" ?ä) ;; LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS
 ;; remember to comment your code, if you like :-)
 ("\"e" ?ë) ;; LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH DIAERESIS
 ("a'" ?á) ;; LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE
 )

For more information on those two quail-* functions, you can get help in the usual way with C-h f and then type the name of the function at the prompt. If you want to test the above code, just paste those two code snippets into an Emacs buffer and run M-x eval-last-sexp after each. Then you can select the "ciarans-chars" input method, and you can read about the input method by pressing C-h I and typing "ciarans-chars" at the prompt.

You will also see that, like with the existing input methods, when you type the first character of what could be a conversion sequence (in the above example, this is just " or 'a'), you will see in the minibuffer which characters could follow it to cause both characters to be converted into another character. So with ciarans-chars, when you type " the minibuffer will display: "[ae].

Looking at the source in /emacs/leim/quail/latin-alt.el should give you ideas for what other conversion sequences you'd use, and the other files in that directory contain the conversion code for more complex alphabets.

Me, I'll make a minimal input method for the characters I use from French, Dutch, plus the Irish a-fada "á". I filed a bug report about the current Dutch input method, but seeing how uncomplicated it is, I might be able to fix it and submit a patch now.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

During a chat about the pros and cons of gmail, a colleague told me that he especially likes how gmail inserts your sent messages into the same thread as the one you're replying to.

The idea that a webmailer should be more useable than my beloved mutt simply didn't fit my view of the world. I'm allergic to webmail.

A bit of web search soon brought me this nugget for insertion into my .muttrc:

set record = "^"

Got it from here, and it works like a charm. You'll need mutt version > 1.5.10 or the current_folders patch.

I'm probably the last person on earth to find out about this.

Bye bye, "sent" folder. 

I was impressed recently by the progress of OpenStreetMap (OSM). The maps of most big cities (in Europe at least) are already very complete, e.g. Dublin and Brussels. Many smaller cities and cities in less developed countries are still in need of work, but the current status clearly proves that the project's aims are practical.

Why is having freely reusable maps important? For one thing, they can be used by other community projects such as Wikipedia. Another advantage is that rather than trying to make it difficult to copy their data (like the corporate map providers do), the OSM website provides lots of features to export their maps. (If you want to link to an OSM map instead of exporting an image, use the "Permalink" link in the bottom right-hand corner.)

When you export an image from OSM, there's no copyright notice or attribution info (which seems like a mistake to me), so when you use OSM maps, consider adding a link or some text to tell people where you got the map from.

The current licence used for the mapping data is the Creative Commons by-sa-2.0 licence. There are constant discussions about changing the licence - not because people disagree with the ideals of that licence, but because there is debate among legal experts as to whether that licence is valid for mapping data and would work worldwide. For people intrested in that sort of thing, there's a very good summary written by Richard Fairhurst in January 2008.

To get involved, there's info on their Beginner's Guide. You might also find an existing OSM group in your area by checking the Mapping projects page on their wiki. I've recently borrowed a GPS handset, so I'm hoping to be able to post more info in the future about how it all works.

On the Event Calendar on their wiki, there's a list of upcoming events including their annual conference which will take place in Limerick, Ireland on the weekend of July 12th and 13th.

According to their software licensing policy and the FAQ, all OSM software is free software, using the GNU GPL by default.

In other news, the OpenMoko Neo Freerunner is heading for large scale production. I've heard it's far from being ready for daily use, and you should be comfortable with installing and upgrading software. So this version is mostly for hackers, but if you're interested in mobile phones powered by free software, OpenMoko is the free-est available. There's a group discount when people in one region order 10 phones. Because it has built-in GPS and all the software is free software, I'm hoping it will increase the number of OpenStreetMap contributors.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Looking carefully at the posts from GNU Classpath members you realize that a lot of them play an instrument. Years ago I took (acoustic) guitar lessons but did not continue this after moving.

One thing that bothered me over the years is that when I heard a nice song and started finding out how the (guitar) melody is played either I was not skilled enough or it just does not sound good on the acoustic guitar.

Three weeks ago I put and end to this situation and decided to take guitar lessons again. This time I will learn to play the electric guitar which I think is the instrument I like more. I am a big fan of indie rock and brit pop music. Listening to Johnossi and the Blood Red Shoes as well as visiting the Immergut festival (where both bands played) certainly had a great impact on my latest decision.

Just one note: If deep in your mind the idea that one day you start learning to play an instrument is buried, do not wait any longer and start learning today! I think the worst thing that can happen is that you realize that you have a little bit of talent since this means you wasted time and could have started earlier ...

After a week of practicing the pick I got with OpenMoko's Neo1973 broke :-)

 

Will try harder! 

Last week was critical. Due to some problems with our Freifunk mesh network I was offline for some days. Well, not really offline. If I urgently needed Internet connection I had to take my girlfriend's laptop (mine is still unable to deal with ad-hoc mode), walk to the Traveplatz park and start the OLSR daemon. Still this does not really help updating the various SVN, Mercurial and Monotone repositories on my desktop computer. :-)

On the other hand I worked on the JIT Cache which is thanks to Twisti and Andreas Krall, now my diploma thesis topic. I wanted to fix the issues it had before LinuxTag and was successfull doing so: The JIT Cache is now working on ARM!

What massively helped me achieving this goal was the good old GNU Debugger. It cannot tell you when you forgot to flush the system's instruction and data caches (this was the final issue) but for everything else GDB was just great. Being an (x86) assembler addict in my young years I really enjoyed single stepping through JIT compiled code and watching the codegenerator emiting machine instructions.

I find it interesting to see how working on the Cacao virtual machine brings two of my otherwise quite unrelated interests together: Namely playing around with assembler stuff and working with a high-level programming language like Java. :-)

On related news: I committed MIDPath 0.3RC1 recipes to OpenEmbedded. These provide a fully configured and correctly set up installation of MIDPath. That means if your repo contains the binaries (I hope OpenMoko adopts those quickly) you just need to tell your package manager to install 'midpath' and that will install all of the mandatory packages and provides a suitable configuration (screen size, button mapping, GUI/sound provider, ...) that lets you start MIDlets right through MIDPath's SuiteManager.

Hint: Install 'midpath-demos' instead and you get everything from above plus a bunch of demo midlets to try out the platform.

MIDPath 0.3RC1 still has some rough edges but it is definitely maturing well. I hope that with the recipes more people will get to know about it.

Adriaan from KDE - the man I personally blame for all bugs ever encountered in programs written in the C++ language [1] - has written a blog post suggesting that it's a good idea not to send abusive emails to Free Software developers who don't offer professional support services at zero cost for their code.

He has got a point. While the low barriers of access and hierarchy in Free Software often provide easy access to the developer in question, the developer's personal provision of support is likely to receive a far lower priority than development work. This is hardly surprising.

Few people expect to speak directly with the developer of a proprietary application when the application misbehaves. Support is instead provided by a department inside the production company or an accredited partner. Free Software takes this abstraction a little further. One of the key innovations in this paradigm is that third parties can provide professional top tier support regardless of their relationship with the original developer of the application.

It is important to remember that the word "Free" in Free Software does not refer to the software having zero cost either in production or in adoption. It refers solely to the freedoms the software offers everyone who receives a copy.

There is a cost of production, delivery and support with Free Software. This cost may include personnel hours, hardware and electricity on the production side and it may include training, integration and maintenance on the support side. Such cost calculations do not disappear because Free Software offers more freedom than proprietary software.

Free Software is often developed by people and organisations who offset their cost of production because they get something else in return. What they receive may be kudos, the ability to play with other people's innovations or a solution delivered to users. The situation and cost benefit analysis differs for each individual or organisation.

In the post delivery of a solution different dynamics are at play. A developer who creates a technology with a cost offset might not wish to also offer service level agreements to users. It might just not fit into their reason for making the software or it might have too high a cost.

Everyone can get the code, everyone can distribute it, everyone can offer support for it. It's more flexible and encourages more competition over delivery of solutions. Those solutions can be technical, integrative or support based.

Many developers are happy to answer some questions and even respond to requests for features, but it's not reasonable to expect that they are obliged to do so. We should be nice and bear in mind that we have no entitlement when it comes to obtaining support unless the creator has promised such support explicitly.

[1] KDE is written in C++. There is a connection.

After a bit of tweaking, I'm now happily using the the It's All Text! plugin to let me to edit webpage text boxes with Emacs. It also works with other text editors. [UPDATE: Actually, my browser is Iceweasel, not Firefox. See the Mozilla software rebranding article on Wikipedia, and the IceCat project]

To configure it, go to Tools->It's All Text!->Preferences in Firefox's menu bar. In the editor field, when I added some command line options to make Emacs start quickly, it gave me the error "Unable to open your editor". So I made a "quickmacs.sh" file and told It's All Text that that that was my editor. In quickmacs.sh, I put:

#!/bin/sh
gnome-terminal -t "QM $1" -e "emacs -nw -Q --load ~/software/tb.el $1"

The second "$1" is essential. I want Emacs in non-gui mode, so it has to be launched by a terminal program because It's All Text! doesn't run the given editor command in a terminal. tb.el is a a cut down version of my emacs.el. It just contains the minimal convenience settings I want for editing textboxes:

(transient-mark-mode t)
(show-paren-mode t)
(menu-bar-mode 0)
(defun ciaran-turn-on-french-input-method ()
   "set the input method to French"
   (interactive)
   (set-input-method "french-alt-postfix"))
(global-set-key [?\C-c ?.] 'ciaran-turn-on-french-input-method)
(longlines-mode t)

There were two other interesting plugins. The first is EmbeddedEditor 0.1, but you have to make an account and log in if you want to download it, so I ignored it. The second is Firemacs, but that's adding some Emacs features to Firefox - I prefer to have a full Emacs.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Germany has always prided itself on being a nation of engineers. So it's not surprising that unlike the British, who prefer to leave their confidential data on trains or lose it in the post, Germans opt for the technologically more advanced solution of making it available online to all comers (DE):

Bei Einwohnermeldeämtern in Deutschland ist es nach einem Bericht des ARD-Magazins "Report München"
zu einer schweren Panne gekommen: Den Recherchen zufolge waren die
Daten von Bürgern aus rund 200 Städten und Gemeinden über Jahre hinweg
frei im Internet zugänglich.

Die verantwortliche Softwarefirma habe die Zugangscodes auf ihrer eigenen Homepage veröffentlicht,
berichtete das Magazin vorab. Die Passwörter seien erst am vergangenen
Freitag geändert worden.<<>>>

Markus has proposed publishing a magazine called "Data Loss Quarterly", and is looking for contributors.