Apologies if I've played this tune before -- I was surprised that I hadn't. More than once I've tried to point folks to my paper on software freedom. It is part of a book that is well worth a read (that'd be Organic Internet), but I wrote that ...
I won't be around on June 10, but this will be interesting. Promise: Please join Not An Alternative, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, and Upgrade NY! this Thursday, June 10 for the opening of Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus, an exhibition which examines models of participation and participation as a model in art and activism.
Next task: make a bootable USB thumb/stick/drive/thing to rescue a busted machine (In this case, little old Brahms). dkg, as ever, knows what's what and gave me great advice: Bootable USB sticks are just like bootable hard drives for modern computers. Partition them with parted, use mkfs to create a filesystem on them, use grub-install to give them a bootloader, put a kernel and an initial ramfs on them, configure the bootloader to load them, and away you go. He even offered me his filesystem rescue debirf image with the latest 686 kernel from debian unstable.
My new friend Jen lured me to a panel last night. Part of LMCC's Access Restricted series. Worth checking out, though I wanted a lot more from Intellectual Property in the Age of Reproduction. We barely touched on the very interesting questions of copyright transgression, copying and fair use. Which is really too bad. Two quick observations before I get back to work.
Okay, lazyweb: Why can't I play DVDs and why, when I have installed in my computer two RAM modules of 2GiB each, does my computer have 2.9 GiB of the RAMS? Why? On the DVD end, I have installed one million things and gotten from an error in Totem ("no uri handler implemented for dvd") to Totem quietly crashing when I try to play a DVD. VLC spins the disk and then stops. /var/log/messages shows this after trying to run VLC: Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.901791] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Media region code is mismatched to logical unit region Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.906376] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.906386] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.906397] Info fld=0x98d0 Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.906402] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Media region code is mismatched to logical unit region
I haven't been following the Google Books lawsuit and settlement proposal too closely because I don't often think of myself as a book author. Not in the sense that Google Books or the settlement will impact my livelihood. It hadn't actually occurred to me that the settlement might impact my freedom. But a press release from the Software Freedom Law Center caught my eye: Today SFLC filed a letter with the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York objecting to the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement. In the letter, filed on behalf of the FSF and author Karl Fogel, SFLC asks the court to consider the impact of the settlement upon members of the class who have distributed their works under Free licenses. I'm embarrassed to confess I had been thinking that this lawsuit (You are of course familiar with the lawsuit. Right?) was more academic than all that. I was thinking about what it means that Yahoo, Amazon and Google get to go sit in a darkened room somewhere (an expansive board room with a fine catered lunch, more likely) and rewrite copyright law all by themselves. I wasn't thinking about freedom.
We've got two packages running, OpenX and Phorum, that seem to make a lot of database connections. Sometimes so many that the whole database runs out of connections. Phorum gets hammered by bots looking to exploit vulnerabilities in the code (and sometimes finds them). OpenX is just greedy. Or ...
The Frankenserver must go. Today we were having a little bit of woah with the old Phorum installation. Does seem to get derailed, that one. More on that later: the net result was that Apache was choking to the point where I couldn't even ssh into the machine. I phoned Ye Olde Rackspace, who confirmed Franken's unresponsiveness and had the data center reboot it. And for a split second I was able to get in and run top, which showed me a whole lot of apache processes. More than I've ever seen before. I quit top and tried to stop apache: sudo /etc/init.d/httpd stop That failed the first time but being a persistent sort of woman I tried it again. And then I called Rackspace to find out what they were doing. We have a support contract with them, you see, and I realized that ... 1) I don't want to work at cross purposes with their esteemed technical whiz-kids, and 2) I don't want to do work someone else is already doing. I've got other things to do. Blogs to read. That was a joke, by the way. I don't read blogs at work. Ever. So I get them on the phone and whiz kid one says to me "well, I'm just going to restart apache here and see what that tells us." What restarting apache tells us. And before I could say "hang on" he did. Just in time to snarl my request for the tail of apache's error logs. It just went down hill from there, the upshot being that I mostly resolved the problem despite Rackspace. I'm done paying $350+/month for Rackspace. They aren't earning it. I've been moaning about this server for eons. When last we left off I was contemplating life without a service contract. I can see now that I don't need this service contract. Liberating revelation, that one. Elastic clouds scare me because I don't understand them. Also because I don't think I can have a static IP on a cloud. VPS I understand. So now I'm sketching my new server and workplan. Here's what I think I'm installing:
Eventually: my promised report back on the Pirate Bay talk, which was great, and after which Mister Mux Tape explained that commercial software is, by its very nature, better than free and open source software and then asked me if I worked for the FSF when I called him on that bizarre and baseless assertion. I'm not even talking about Apache here. Or I am, but at the present moment, Open Office is better documented than the MS Office suite. And calc's financial functions are just plain better. I didn't point out that I don't think that the Free Software Foundation really has the staff resources to travel the Eastern seaboard heckling speakers at community arts talks. I also didn't point out that there are people in this world (no really, there are!) who hold opinions they aren't paid to hold and expertise on subjects they are not professional lobbyists on behalf of. Actually, I could kind of wrap that one up and repeat what we already know which is that the Bureau of Piracy is great, you should take a look at the links on the original post and (this is the part I hope you already know) that the real problem with the prosecution of the buccaneers is about free speech. Not about my right to swap music willy-nilly, copyright be damned (another thing I didn't say to Mux Man: there is, I think, a big difference between software and music) but about whether a file sharing platform should be held accountable for the files shared over it. Particularly in a world where some musicians do want to make large files (their own) available free of charge and politically significant data sets can be a difficult thing to host on your own little server. Fundamentally, neither the laws nor the recording industry have kept up with the modern world and it is worth asking why that is really the fault of the Pirate Bureau. That was rough. I might come back and try to make it sound a little coherent.
Forget for a moment that I'm trying to play like I'm more than a tech. Or recall Joanne this morning in the rain in the garden after Lucia and I collected coconut shells to mark out an area to plant her onions in, "so funny, computers seem like the last thing I'd imagine you working on. You're someone who should be working outside! I can't imagine you not working with plants!" If only she knew. So I have a PDF. PDFedit will convert it to a pretty crappy XML document. A round of non-greedy vim searches: :%s:<font .\{-}>::g :%s:</font>::g :%s: bbox=".\{-}"::g Followed by some attention to the numbers: :%s:period:. :g :%s:comma:,:g :%s:zero:0:g :%s:one:8:g :%s:two:2:g :%s:three:3:g :%s:four:4:g :%s:five:5:g :%s:six:6:g :%s:seven:7:g :%s:eight:8:g :%s:nine:9:g (and a bonus to anyone who can tell me how I totally borked my data with the series above ...) got me a really, really simple XML file of "lines" and "words".
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