StuartYeates's blog

At OSS Watch we've been focusing on community development recently, that is getting people up to speed on how to build a community around a project (usually a software project, standardisation effort or similar).

We've started a Community Development mailing list, the discussions have mainly focused, so far, on RSS and on the use of Google Analytics in education.

I've also written an extensive piece on how to improve a page on Wikipedia.

I've been blogging on the connect.educause.edu site for almost two years and three hundred posts. I'm now shifting my efforts to the new JISC site and the OSS Watch blog within that.

I'll leave my archives up on the educause site, but won't be updating it or fixing links.

http://involve.jisc.ac.uk/wpmu/oss-watch/

cheers stuart

M. Tim Jones has written an excellent article on virtualisation for IBM.

If you've ever wondered what VMware was, how it worked and why some people rave about it, this is you chance to get to grips with it.

cheers stuart

In the New Year the UK Government (alongside other British Commonwealth governments) issues a list of honours, giving official recognition of work in the public sphere. The guardian has two articles, on the teachers and scientists honoured this year.

 

cheers

stuart

I've been away for just over a week in London. I'm now back and straight into work.

cheers
stuart

BECTA (the body responsible for IT in compulsory education in the UK) has come under attack over their approach to open source on two fronts.

An early day motion in the commons, supported by 1 in 5 backbench MPs said:

That this House [...] expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source software and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market.

A report by Sirius found that:

Becta cannot account for over £200m of taxpayer's money spent on software for schools

Sirius is hardly an independent third party in this, but their figures are based on FOI act requests and seem to add up. What Sirius want is a change in the way IT money is allocated so that more open source gets used.

A whole range of geek websites have run christmas lists, and if get it quick there's a chance they'll be delivered before christmas: linux.com, red hat, make and even MSN

A lecture on Kant by award-winner lecturer Susan Stuart has hit the top of the download charts. It probably helps that who research areas (and thus presumably her spin on Kant) are on the boundary of philosophy, cognition and computing—geeks have always loved that kind of thing.

cheers, stuart

While at a small IT trade show I was surprised to come across an open source CMS: squiz.net. Under the slogan "Open Source. Own It. Squiz.net" They were very big on open source, one of their case studies saying:

...the use of open source software means that 100% of the resulting system is owned by [the client] including the valuable intellectual property that's been build whilst creating it—such as documentation, processes and the resulting web site code itself

All excellent sounding stuff. Unfortunately, further investigation of their licence shows that:

2.1 You agree that Squiz.Net controls all intellectual property rights (including copyright) in every aspect of the Software, including source code and related documentation.

Which hardly gels with the client owning 100% of the "web site code." Even worse:

2.8 You must Notify Squiz.Net within 30 days of making any Modifications even if You do not intend to distribute those Modifications. Notify is defined in Clause 4.2 below. If Your Modifications are incomplete, You must still Notify Squiz of the status of your progress not less frequently than once every 30 days. If You do not Notify Squiz.Net of Modifications You have made (complete or not) within 30 days, Squiz.Net may deem that you have opted to limit your obligations in accordance with Clause 3 and as such Squiz.Net may reasonably charge You the consideration indicated in Clause 3.

This clause is in conflict with Clause 3 of the open source definition which says:

After far too long, it looks like Telecom New Zealand, the incumbent monopoly telecommunications provider in New Zealand, is being forced into local loop unbundling.

Part of the reason it's taken so long is that Telecom is New Zealand's biggest public company and holds a great deal of implicit leverage. Personally I think that splitting the company into three means they'll do far better in the medium term, simply by growing the market, something which local loop unbundling has shown to be very effective at elsewhere.

The dynamic is pretty simple: when companies compete to offer broadband and similar services to consumers, those services become cheaper, easier and better supported, leading to greater take-up. As the numbers of broadband-connected homes and businesses rises, more of those businesses start connecting with more of those homes, and before you know it, e-commerce is really taking off. Most of those businesses don't know one end of an internet from the other, so third parties spring up to help them and before you know there's an entire industry. Entry into that industry is entirely predicated on what Telecom has to sell: high quality Internet connections.

Mayank Sharma writes about some of the features that Red Hat is rolling out to support SELinux on the desktop. SELinux is an NSA-developed security system for locking down Linux. The new tools are GUI tools which allow end-users to configure, examine and analyse an SELinux system. SELinux is unlikely to be suited to non-technical users and still looks to be a significant administration burden even with the new tools, but it's a must-have for the security conscious.

The benefit of SELinux is twofold. First, it replaces the user-based model with a policy-centric model. Every action, like running an application or reading and modifying data, is controlled by a security policy. Actions that violate the policy are denied. Additionally, SELinux compartmentalizes the various applications and processes running on the system. This not only helps in isolating a break-in, but also confines the damage caused by one compromised service. SELinux plugs into the Linux distribution through the Linux Security Module (LSM) hooks, which are available in the 2.6.x kernel series.

Last night myself and other flickr users got together in Oxford to compare notes and share a jar or two. One or two of us took photos too. This one is of Garrett Coakley (http://www.flickr.com/photos/garrettc/)

cheers, stuart

A number of news agencies are reporting a new legislative effort in the US to make registered sex offenders register their email addresses.

Whatever you may think of the ethics of continuing to punish people after they've "done their time," I serious doubt the efficacy of the effort. The gist is simple: require all registered sex offenders to list their email addresses along with their street address that they already give. The problem, of course, is ensuring that offenders register all the email addresses and don't acquire any more that are unknown.

Given that there are at least three major Internet companies competing to offer users free email accounts (Gmail, AOL and Yahoo) which make little or no attempt to check that people are who they say they are, registering an email account anonymously is easy. One method is to use a high-turn over Internet cafe which doesn't clear the browser settings between users; hire a machine near the end of the day and the machine comes already logged into half a dozen different web-based email accounts belong to previous uses. Any of these email accounts can be used to receive the "verification email" for setting up your own new account, without being traceable. Smarter offenders will delete and purge the verification email after replying to it as well, so the owner of the account has no idea their account has been borrowed to set up a fake email address.

Wired is running an article on the increasing Linux-friendliness of European territorial authorities, which are switching to Linux and OpenOffice solutions for a whole range of reasons, including ease of customisation, translation and localisation. Linux and OpenOffice aren't a silver bullet, of course, there are no silver bullets in IT.

A Gendarme contacted by Wired News who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that while he was optimistic about the prospects of the Linux operating system and noted how his unit had a capable IT support staff, he was not too happy with OpenOffice. He said he missed MS Office, even though it is designed by a company run by people he considers to be "thieves."

Linux.com is reporting that the recent release of a Kurdish localisation of Ubuntu is causing tensions in Turkey.

CRN has a series of stories on the increasing use of Linux in Indiana, under a program called Affordable Classroom Computers for Every Secondary Student (ACCESS).

"The amazing part of this is, with everything we're doing in the classroom, teachers don't bring up Linux," he said. "They don't bring up open source. They bring up curriculum. You don't want the focus to be on Linux or open source."

As usual there Microsoft are trying to spin this, but it's very hard to spin curriculum-based arguments.