restricting growth

Short Story or A Tall Tale

2009-10-25T11:02:00.002Z

Ok, so I abandoned this little blog for a long time and told people I didn't "Blog", after all blogging is just telling a story regularly imo. (nothing humble)

It has been over a year since I last posted, perhaps not a lot has changed. Perhaps, perhaps I make more sense now than I did then. My attitudes seem clearer to me, the quest is not over, it is just interesting.

A lot has been going on so perhaps now that I have seen the past maybe I will feel happier to write more going forward. For how big an audience, who knows?

Matthew Garrett for some kind of award

2008-07-27T17:21:00.003+01:00

The man is brilliant, and likes cloud berry drink.

His talk at Lugradiolive 2008 was very useful in that it got some people to thinking. Then again anything that gets people thinking, is good in my books. Even if people are wrong at least they have sparks jumping neurons for want of a metaphor.

It seems funny that the idea of inclusive seems to leave some people choking on the idea that some people want the GNU/Linux community to be a clique. Too late, IBM use the stuff as do several other companies.

Build a bridge, get over it.

We can include those who will be included, and those who reject being included can stand in the dust storm raised by the herd of cats moving away!

Pens

2007-11-03T00:09:00.000Z

Sat in greasy spoon that wanted to be so much more, my observation was that, the place had a lot of tables and mine seemed to be the only one with only one person at it. For it's efforts the place gets to be very busy. A gentleman came over to serve me. He was shocked by the fact that I use a pen with a nib, not a biro. I love the feel of them. What can I say.

Queuing for a living the amazing amazon

2007-11-02T23:54:00.000Z

Recently I saw something I was ambivalent about seeing. When I came away I saw with some insight what the Amazon tale really tells. It is a most unusual story. It is not about getting your latest book from your least or most favourite author, or some music you heard years ago on a CD.

It is a rather simple story. Mike Culver has been telling a tale around the planet for EC2 and S3 Services. Mike is telling the story of two very different new businesses that Amazon is now offering.

So if I tell you one of them is hosting the other is cpus for rent I would not be doing Mike's talk justice. If I told you they are well worth looking up and checking out if you wanted to plan tests for programs and load sharing, rule writing when you need to work out security model which Amazon would like you to really host with them, however you can do almost what you want. You get a choice of GNU/Linux Distros, both "official Amazon" and "community" based.

ENOUGH ALREADY - THE REAL STORY!

It is simple, it is so simple it is perverse.
Business is a set of queues, and in their business these queues are the steps in their process from site visit, through sale.
In fact the queuing is so pervasive they have a technical phylosophy, everything is broken all the time, from a technical perspective. Now to make this work. You must have a "safe and secure hand over" each step, and if something fails then you fix that by not wiping the information from the queue until the next level in the process says it has the "job".

Simple, nice, works.

Information Dealerships, or how I learnt to hurt society!

2007-09-25T20:16:00.000+01:00

Take from others what you can, the maxim of the middleman. So what is it I see today, I see Bruce Byfield's article in linux.com on the subject of a lobby group who seem to be there just for a segment of the people in the publishing world. I note that this rebuttal contains one group who wish to dissociate themselves from this group. PRISMs let us remind ourselves are things that bend light and don't appear to be telling the story as was told them.

I wonder. ;-)

Enterprising the gnuniverse, a story about business.

2007-09-23T00:13:00.000+01:00

There I was with a friend of mine, we were chatting about people developing software. Our focus turned onto small companies, and their needs, and the edge cases for selling into them, either in philosophy, or service, the "FLOSS" software solution.

We thought about it and working on the basis that backups are interesting, and they are seen as a necessary evil, how could FLOSS get that sale?

This created a conversation around the what it is that a business wants.

They want to spend as little as possible for as much as possible.
We discussed File and Print services, there are several ways to do that, samba if you have a non GNU/Linux network, and CUPS and NFS if you do have one, you can also use samba there.

What is it that the business wants. It wants as little pain as possible, religion is a pain, you are in love with an idea if it is there for it's own sake, that does not sell. What sells is if the people using it benefit from it, mostly by having an easier life as a result of this.

With this in mind if you are going to build a small business server here are a few things to think about.

Plan a basic model, , a mid range box, and then a top of the range box, each offering should build on the one below.
Sample offerings:
A bronze offering, perhaps a basic file and print server, capable of doing samba, with some file sharing for the office network.

Then plan a silver offering which offers the above and might also offer a wiki.

Then perhaps the gold offering would be a single sign on solution, again something in the domain area, using LDAP or yellow pages depending on the business.

Each version should allow you to easily move to it, and revert back to whatever business process that the business had before. This allows for testing, and reversion if something does not work out for the company trying this implementation.

It is vital to the success that the business can pick and choose any or all of the parts of the gold offering.

Consider also off site incremental backups, they cost power and some kind of broad band on the remote site, a directors home perhaps. What, not how it is done is of interest to us here, this is only suggested as one possible way. OpenVPN, being used and the box doing an incremental backup. Those who would decry this might suggest that there is too much data to start out with. Part of the process here could be to backup onsite first before deploying the offsite box.

Now you are offering things that make sense to business.

However the easy thing is to say, we can do this with tools X or Y and Z.

Well the hard thing is to say we do it with X, and allow people use Y or Z themselves. This is why you see "supported methods or software" from some companies. The fact you can do "it" whatever "it" is, twenty ways other than the supported way is the way forward here.

I want to sing to myself.

2007-09-18T16:35:00.000+01:00

Trust is mutual, it can't be enforced, it can only be gained. So the computer industry tells you they can't trust you. Not only that but they don't trust you not just on their own behalf but on the behalf of other industries, such as the entertainment business.

Nice, if you like that kind of thing, I actually don't. Somewhere in the back of my mind there is a little voice, that says things such as, how dare they, I am not buying into your version of reality. In fact I reject you and your business out of hand. When I was a few years younger I used to go to the cinema with friends once a week. Get that people, a film once a week, and that was not too many years ago. Then came the age of the super cinema, multiplexes and so forth. These came and removed some of the huxter selling a warm fizzy drink, and the bar of chocolate and so forth, now they come with supersized mountains of butter not poured but drizzled on many flavoured popcorn, over priced, along with the overpriced candy water, which I may talk about that another day.

Then you are ushered to a seat for your experience.

What are you greeted with straight away.

In one case I was assaulted, well at least in legal terms. Remember the printed word, the verbal word and their ilk can amount to assault. I was going to be entertained and not only was I sitting there but I got so annoyed I shouted out my objection in the cinema and I could see that there were some who didn't get it, and some who did.

I was told that if I had certain things on me such as a camera I would have it taken off me, I would be detained and having this was enough for them to eject me from the cinema and level criminal charges. Excuse me, but that is RUBBISH you can't make up the law, and who got together and issued that warning, but a threat of physical violence is a crime in most jurisdictions who is to be charged with this, the editor of the piece, or the cinema manager?

This extension of copyright to the level of bullying is crazy, I am incensed. Further more I would like to help the copyright extremists what this kind of thing does to me. Not only to I complain here, and tell my friends. I also write about it here, and I will go out of my way to let more people know that the "entertainment" industry wants to own their time, and money and for what so they can abuse their customers. Hint people have a look at SCO in the USA to see what happens when you sue your customers. Just because you are big and the customers are small customer rejection is the way forward here.

Anyway this may seem a long way from the title of this piece, so after my "vent" above I thought I would say we have a strange piece of reality out there now.

We have the strange set up where the entertainment industry is basically marketing the work of others. It appears to me that it wants to own it forever.

Are they are restricting your access to choice in the fields of endeavour?

Ever wonder why you can't get a book or CD when the marginal cost of production is so low? If you knew what you wanted yourself you might actually choose works that are not available or controlled making the big buck.

Recently I was in a big book shop, and I got a surprise, you can't get books that are a couple of years old, you can't even order them on computer, there is no market for that sort of thing it appears. Well let me shine a little light on this subject for you.

Authors contracts are not to make the author rich. They are to make the publishing house rich. A couple of years ago I ventured to write a book with a friend of mine, the subject would have been hard enough but we had a disaster which I won't document at this time, we withdrew from the contract before it got to happening.

Strange stuff, very strange stuff. The best advice if you are ever going to approach a writing contract is to put by a month to research book contracts. There are many good resources on the Internet, and some of them will advise you about how to get more out of such a contract.

Anyway where was I, ohh yes the title of this entry, well it is there for a reason. ;-)

If I wrote a song myself and recorded it onto CD I am forbidden from playing that CD in public, without written permission from me to play it so.

The written permission must be from the publisher. Do you see a pattern here?

Is the producer (not publisher, this is the singer, author or actor) indentured, and the customer ignored.

Are both told by the person in the middle, "You'll take what your given".

The GNU and the Penguin free software but not as you know it

2007-09-17T17:24:00.002+01:00

Perhaps you come home from work and you plug in the PC or it is already on. You want to send a mail or you want to do something and your machine is slow, slower than yesterday, slower than last week, and if compared with your machine when you bought it, it seems to be at a standstill.
Welcome to the world of the PC, with its spy ware, its virus problems, designed by Microsoft, build by Microsoft, and the problems get worse year on year. You are fed up doing a reinstall, your getting good at it, you think "There must be a better way to use your computer, right?". Perhaps there is. There are most certainly alternatives. They don't involve black magic, visiting stores where some one has the answer it is always a new version or something. So you are thinking to yourself "There is something wrong with this model, I don't know what, but this does not feel right."

Well you have options, they are best kept secrets on the Internet but they exist. They are free, while using them you learn enough about your machine that you suddenly are able to do new stuff and it is not a trauma.

These options don't have a need for anti virus or anti spy ware software. They do have a requirement that you are willing to stop existing and start living at the keyboard. This entire blog was written at such a computer. It is not a MAC or some other strange beast. It is actually a PC the difference is that the software that it is running is not windows. It is in fact a form of GNU/Linux.

There are many varieties of this software. There are many versions, so unlike the Model T Ford only in black, there are many names to essentially similar products and most of the skills you learn on any computer can be translated to a GNU/Linux system.

So rather than thinking I want to use "Word" you don't want to use the word, word, you should be thinking I want write a document, or I want to print something.

This I want to use "Product Name" is broken thinking. Think about it, it convinces you there is only one way to do something, a certain fallacy. There is not. It is not something you should be thinking but those nice people in the marketing department have you talking that way. You want do do work with numbers, you want a spreadsheet. There are lots of offerings out there even for Windows, did you know that? Just go to http://www.openoffice.org check it out. Guess what it is free to download, and to use. A full office package. It can open and close .doc format documents, and with some add ins it can even read .docx.

What a digression, now back to the core. You find the application that lets you edit and format documents and you use it. You find the application that lets you edit and format spreadsheets, presentations, it is all in one. Fun!

So what has this to do with GNU/Linux, well imagine you turn on your computer and you want to use the computer. It offers a complete system that you can use from door to door. It looks after all sorts of things, scanners, printers, monitors, mice keyboards. Most any off the shelf equipment will work straight away with GNU/Linux.

Gamers, they have choices but mostly they want to play their games so they have this program called "wine", it provides an environment similar to the environment that windows provides in a native way and allows you to run (most) windows programs.

However to get back the to the core point, what is it about GNU/Linux you want to do. Browse the web, order a book or CD, a flight or holiday, you can do that with your system. You can send email.

What might startle you to know is that most spam comes from virus software that takes over computers and makes them part of a weapon on the Internet. While you may get spam, you won't be sending it with GNU/Linux the spammers don't have the tools to make the bot nets [compromised windows machines, sending spam around the planet, if your computer likes being on the Internet is it part of one?], with the different versions. It is kind of like the Model T problem impacts all car owners, but a fault in one car part today will impact maybe one or two models on a couple of ranges at most.

So apart from removing spam from the Internet what else is good?
Well people not having problems with their machines getting slower for no apparent reason.

So at this point I tell you about three links you should check out.

http://www.debian.org
(deb ian)

http://www.ubuntu.com
(ooobuntu)

http://www.gnewsense.org
(gnu sense)

The one in the middle is the most popular desktop. The top one is the most popular server, and the one on the bottom is the most radical, it is here more so as a curiosity.

So enough about me, in another post I will tell you how to get support, for these versions of GNU/Linux.

If it all looks a bit daunting I will help people get up and running via some pointers to docs, and with some really simplified help. No substitute for the real thing.

The GNU and the Penguin

2007-09-17T17:24:00.001+01:00

What is in the news today

2007-09-17T16:46:00.001+01:00

Over on the register dot co dot UK (say it like it reads ;-)), they are talking about PC World a UK chain who sell computers. Well, one of their staff refused to repair a machine that that had GNU/Linux installed on it. Of course when contacted by the hacks (in the journalistic sense), from el reg the nice people in the Dixons HQ said they would fix it. However in my opinion they owe this person a lot more now.
The free advertising, the fact that we all now know Dixons will do their duty under the sale of goods act or whatever it is now called, is great for them. What about the core issue. The sad fact that people don't know about their options surprises me.

For instance I had dealings with a person this morning, a professional woman in her fifties I would guess. Well educated, and good at what she does I referred to the news as we heard it this morning. Microsoft had managed to be convicted by the European Court of First Instance, and the fines stood.
Cost wise that is not a big issue to Microsoft, no in fact every day they did not publish the specification that the court called upon them to do was another day that they managed to keep their customers though the methods of monopoly.

For a moment, let us also consider the damaging material that has come to light about their involvement, or to be more politically correct one of their staff whom they hinted was behaving in an ultra vires fashion. This person had put pressure on people to join the ISO standards bodies to swing a vote on OOXML to create a method for document presentation that would have allowed Microsoft defeat a standard that is already in existence by offering the ludicrous concept of "Competition in Standards". The whole idea of a standard is that you have something you can measure up against and it works. Round car wheels and square wheels come to mind.

What was really annoying about this is that there has been a standard in XML and documentation around for a while now. ODF is it's name. It is ISO approved and obviously sticking to standards was not the game of Bill and Steve.

As a friend of mine would say, "Gaaaaa it's just nuts!!".

Here you have the biggest company in the software world, doing things that are not software. They are debasing the marketplace by being a monopoly (convicted again, the first time was over the inclusion of the internet explorer with windows 95). Then they are doing things in many countries that adds up to an attempt to prevent competition by messing with the ISO and how it works.

As a result of the latter it appears that several senior people around the ISO are now looking at how their organisation works. It took a big company to corrupt their world view, of far from everything in the garden being rosy, the topsoil and drainage were in deep trouble, but work will begin to prevent that happening again.

So going forward what are your options if you are a consumer?

Microsoft will still be installed on a PC if you try to buy it from PC World or their ilk anywhere on planet earth. However you have a choice.
You can get a GNU/Linux system. More about your choices later!
Search for Debian, Ubuntu, gNewSense, Redhat, Mandriva, SuSE online. I'll discuss this in my next post.

and I heard a bang it was nothing

2007-09-17T16:36:00.000+01:00

I was sitting there wondering why it was I had not blogged before and decided to give it a whirl. Who am I, it does not matter. What might happen is you might be mildly informed or amused by some of my thoughts. That for me would be good enough.

All the best.

Your author!