Coffs Computer Club

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. I've missed the day by a good few days which, in a real stretch of credibility, I'll try to make out was a deliberate effort to highlight the importance of the work of the woman I've chosen to blog about.

Drupal is a free software content management system (or content management framework, depending on who you talk to), which has been my bread and butter for nearly five years now. If you were to ask somebody in the Drupal community to think of a significant female member of the community, most could instantly rattle off a couple of names, and many could name half a dozen with ease, but I'd hazard a guess that it would not be that often that Karen Stevenson would be the first name that came to mind. Karen's "Drupal rock star" ranking has to date been much lower than her contributions would warrant.

So why does KarenS, as she is known on drupal.org top my list of Drupalchix?

One reason I find her achievements impressive is that she's more or less my age. Coming into a free software community as a more mature (or in my case, just old) participant can make you feel rather like you're Walter Matthau wandering onto the set of Beverly Hills 90210. Finding so many people with body piercings, Apple Macintoshes, and no memory of life pre-Internet can be a bit of a culture shock, so to see somebody who's come to software development as a second career becoming such a key member of the Drupal community is quite inspiring.

Well, online at least.

ourcoffs.org.au is a domain I registered for a couple of hobby projects I hope to launch later this year and early next year, and it also seemed like a good online home for the Coffs Computer Club (and indeed any other non-profit community group that needs a home on the Web). So reset your bookmarks to http://computerclub.ourcoffs.org.au

The next meeting of the computer club has been postponed to Saturday the 20th, in order to roll it into the Software Freedom Day festivities. See the details on the ClubLinux website.

I'll be putting in an order for some Software Freedom Day 2008 t-shirts, so if you'd like to save on freight, let me know within the next day or so if you want any, and I'll add your order to mine. They're priced at 15 North American Pesos, which works out to roughly $AU20 (and rapidly falling).

The shirts are available in S, M, L, XL, XXL, and IT professional (XXXL) sizes, and you can see the design here, and the finished article here.

As Paul mentioned at our last meeting, the ABC has followed the BBC in crippling their programs with Digital Restrictions Management. The ABC, which has until recently been pretty good at digital distribution, is now selling us copies of programs we already paid for in a form which restricts how we can use these recordings.

Purchasing and viewing these videos requires the "integrated ABC Shop Media Player and its Downloads Manager", which only works on Windows and Internet Explorer. The videos cannot be played on any other software or device. The software is proprietary, so you have no way of knowing what it is actually doing, but among the features the manufacturer boasts of are:

• "Peer assisted content delivery technology". That is, P2P file-sharing technology like BitTorrent, only in this case the sharing is not under your control, and you can't opt out. The ABC Shop's customers are paying to receive this data, but they are not necessarily receiving the data from the ABC Shop; more likely from other ABC Shop customers. You are paying the ABC Shop for a service, even though you are just as much the provider of that service as they are.
• "PDF and Windows Media file control features." You don't have control over the files you pay for, the ABC Shop does. You may have paid for it, but they still own it.
• "A rich reporting and analytics tool that shows downloads as well as advanced metrics such as who has viewed which content, when, and for how long." Big Brother is watching you watching your videos.
  

DefectiveByDesign.org has the full story, and advice on what you can do about it.

For the second time, I've sent an email to the IT manager of the club enquiring about the possible causes and solutions for the recurring network connectivity outages in the club board room, and for the second time I've received no reply. (Being familiar with the level of in-house technological expertise at the Ex-Services Club, perhaps I should have sent a fax, or a telegram.)

So I thought that unless we prepare to do something at this meeting that doesn't require Internet access, we will probably be wasting our time, and this made me think of the many ways that computers can facilitate time-wasting. I've talked about this before, but I've recently aquired a few new favourites:

• Aisleriot 
• Crack Attack
• Gweled
• GNOME Sudoku
• and an old, but recurring favourite: Battle for Wesnoth

What are your favourite computer-related activities for those times when you really should be doing something more important?

Just to show I wasn't kidding at our last meeting when I said VirtualBox runs just about any operating system from within just about any operating system, here's a short video demonstration of VirtualBox running OpenSolaris and Windows on a Mac from the MacWorld video blog.

Usual late notice again this month. Usual apologies.

As always, we'll be in the board room of the Coffs Ex-Services Club, and as always who knows what will happen? I can guarantee at least a moderate amount of genial chat about computer-related topics; anything else is up to the whims of the fates, and that's part of the fun.

Software Freedom Day is coming up in a month, and as I've been saying all year, Allison and I aren't going to have the time to organise an event this year, but we would certainly to our best to contribute to anything anybody else wanted to organise. So far nobody's stepped forward, but it's still not too late. Take a look at what some of the other SFD teams around the world are doing, and if you have a brilliant idea for spreading free software goodness amongst the people of Coffs Harbour, all it takes is a little time and commitment to make it happen.

Matthew.

The big news of the week is Bill Gates leaving his day job at Microsoft (but retaining his office to reassure Microsoft shareholders), and the disappearence of Windows XP from retail shelves. It's a time for reminiscences, retrospectives, getting teary over old photographs, and speculation about the future. I think it might be appropriate to do some of these things ourselves at our next meeting (7:00pm Wednesday, 2nd July,  in the Ex-Services Club board room as usual).

My predictions for the future of Microsoft (not that anybody asked, and hardly very original), are as follows. Microsoft has a few years to radically revise it's business model. If it doesn't do that, the only option left open to them will be an undignified demise, struggling vainly to maintin it's share price by claiming to own virtually every useful idea ever implemented as software, and suing every competitor they can find with deep pockets. We've seen this play out before on a smaller scale; it's a scam that doesn't work.

The long term survival of Microsoft depends on getting rid of the last of the old guard who will never accept change, enabling new boss Ray Ozzie, who is a smart guy, to make the necessary tough decisions. Microsoft did very well out of pioneering the strategy of raising funds by restricting what computer users can do with their software, and using that capital to get the jump on their competitors. However in the long run this business model fails to produce software people actually want to use, and the quality of more ethically-produced software will eventually catch up. Microsoft's management and owners may not want to hear that the future will inevitably be less lucrative than the past, but Microsoft needs to find new revenue streams that don't involve making enemies of their users and producing software that is deliberately less useful than it could be. It'll be Microsoft, but not as we know it. The opportunities to leverage their current dominance to do this successfully are only going to diminish over time. I'll go out on a limb and say that if they don't change direction in the next couple of years, Microsoft will be a shadow of it's former self in five years (that's a safe prediction, as that's the case now - it's just that not many people know it), and practically gone in ten.

I've been using Firefox 3 for the past few weeks, and today it's officially released. I've found most of the new features to be unobtrusive and generally useful, so I'd recommend it to anyone. The folks at Spread Firefox are calling today "Download Day", and are attempting to set a Guiness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. You've got till 5:00pm UTC (2:00 am tomorrow morning our time), so get downloading!

Now I did say at the end of last meeting that I had an idea for a prepared, semi-formal presentation which I'd be able to deliver at this meeting if I had time. As it turns out, I didn't have time, so you've all had a reprieve. Be warned that I might get my act together in time for July. So it will be a general free-for-all as usual, andas usual in the Board Room of the Ex-Services Club at 7:00pm on Wednesday.

There should be plenty to talk about. Many people have been observing lately that Windows XP has become the Energiser bunny of operating systems, due in no small part to the rise of small, light, low-cost computers incapable of running WIndows Vista. This brings the total number of incredibly popular technology phenomena which Microsoft utterly failed to predict up to, well, all of them actually.

One thing that Microsoft can do well is predicting the past, and as they scramble to buy themselves into the (for the moment at least) lucrative yet utterly boring and ludicrously over-valued business of classified advertising, one possible future is rising in the shape of Jimmy (Wikipedia) Wales' new(ish) venture Wikia Search, which has recently undergone a much-lauded revamp. I've had a play with this, and it's got something of the compelling quality of Wikipedia, but where Wikipedia is a non-profit project, Wikia Search is a business venture. I love a good wild prediction, so I'm willing to bet that historians of the future will point to Google's IPO as the start of their decline and fall. However whether Wikia Search will inevitably have it's usefulness and it's commitment to "transparency, community, quality, [and] privacy" compromised by business pressures is a bet I'm not willing to take.

ZDNet's Rupert Goodwins has compiled an amusingly cranky rogues gallery of annoying software, which is right on the money. Complaining about the unwanted extras RealPlayer foists on you, he says "If this software turned up at your door, you'd call the police." I will go further and say that even the software's primary function is a crime. "Streaming" is something that eyes, noses, and wounds do when you're not well, it's not something you should do to music or the spoken word; just let us download the file and play it back in our own time rather than forcing us to listen to two or three seconds at a time in between "buffering".

What's you're most resented software? Share your least favourites with us on Wednesday. A good rant can be therapeutic.