Archive for January, 2007

Top Tips for EMail Productivity

Published by Ross Gardler on January 30, 2007 in Community. 5 Comments

Email can get in the way of productivity.

Constant interruptions break your concentration and prevent you focusing on the task in hand. I once read that it takes around 15 minutes to get full concentration back on a task after dealing with an email. Given that email clients often check for new mail every 10 minutes a busy email day will result in very little concentration time.

Here are my top tips for managing your email effectively:

  1. Install a truly effective mail client. I use Thunderbird (here is a useful tutorial for the non-techies), the rest of these tips are for Thunderbird, but most good clients have equivalent features.
  2. Use the “Junk” button to mark spam, pretty soon you will be able to set up rules to automatically filter out spam
  3. Filter messages according to their importance to you – mails from some people are considered important, whilst mails from unknown people are probably less important.
  4. If a mail cannot be dealt with immediately then use labels to mark actions required on emails (such as “reply later”, “Important” etc.)
  5. Use “search folders” to dynamically categorise inbox mail according to priority and labeling
  6. Filter related messages into relevant folders so you can process related mails at the same time
  7. Set a sensible frequency of mail checking. Your important mail accounts/folders need be checked no more frequently than once an hour. Less important accounts/folders only need to be checked once in the morning and once in the afternoon, or even less frequently. Note the default is to check mail every 10 minutes or so – far too frequent.
  8. Turn off new mail notifications – you don’t need them, you are only going to read mail every hour or so anyway (rules can be set up to notify you if certain key people mail you)
  9. Learn the keyboard shortcuts – it’s amazing how much faster you can work if you don’t have to keep grabbing the mouse.
  10. Turn on “Threads” view and use the thread management key shortcuts to quickly work through groups of related messages, e.g. you can delete a complete thread with one command if it is not of interest to you. To turn on threads view click the speech bubble on the left of the column headings of your list of mails
  11. Be aware of email etiquette (at the very least know the ten most important email rules)

I’m sure there are other useful tips you can share with us, please let us know via the comments.

The Freedom to edit Wikipedia

Published by Ross Gardler on January 26, 2007 in Community and Standards. 5 Comments

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, prides itself on the fact that articles are unbiased. This is achieved by allowing any non-biased user to edit a Wikipedia article. The theory is that many eyes on an article will ensure the accuracy of that article. It seems to work too, research published in Nature showed that wikipedia is comparable in accuracy to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The Wikipedia team have created a set of guidelines to help ensure that articles are written from a neutral point of view (NPOV). For example, edits from contributors deemed to have a conflict of interest with the central requirement for impartiality will be blocked or removed. So, it is not acceptable for Microsoft to employ a contractor to correct a Wikipedia articles relating to Microsoft’s OpenXML format, yet that is exactly what they have recently done.

Perhaps predictably, Wikipedia have expressed their concern about this move. Apparently the preferred approach would have been to use the discussion page for the article to describe any errors and to encourage an impartial author to correct them.

Microsoft claim that they have tried to flag the errors to volunteer editors, but changes were not made. As a result they felt the need to seek an independent expert to determine what changes were necessary and enter them on Wikipedia.

What I find interesting about this particular case is that Microsoft appear to have approached this in what I consider to be acceptable way. They sought an independent expert and asked them to edit the articles without interference from Microsoft staff. The email to Rick Jelliffe said:

“Wikipedia has an entry on Open XML that has a lot of slanted language, and we’d like for them to make it more objective but we feel that it would be best if a non-Microsoft person were the source of any corrections… Your reputation as a leading voice in the XML community would carry a lot of credibility, so your name came up in a discussion of the Wikipedia situation today.”

The e-mail also encouraged Jeliffe to post details of the agreement on his blog at oreillynet.com, which he did. Furthermore, Microsoft also reassured Jelliffe that they did not require approval rights for any edits to the article.

So just what is wrong with this transparent arrangement?

Perhaps Jeliffe is biased towards Microsoft and therefore not an impartial editor. Well, according to his blog, Jeliffe is a Linux user, a Java programmer and dabbles in open source development. He supported the Massachusetts government’s adoption of the OpenDocument format, a competitor to Microsoft’s OpenXML. He also participates in a number of ISO standards, often finding himself taking a counter view to the larger organisations when it comes to standards.

He certainly doesn’t sound biased, yet he is the person that Microsoft chose to employ, and he wants to accept, saying “FUD enrages me and MS certainly are not hiring me to add any pro-MS FUD, just to correct any errors I see.”

This whole episode worries me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m far from a big fan of Microsoft, but like Jeliffe I get enraged at misinformation, wherever it comes from.

Is it really so wrong for Microsoft (or anyone else) to pay an independent writer to correct errors without interference from the sponsor?

Open Document Format (ODF) Toolkit Project

Published by Ross Gardler on January 25, 2007 in Community, Development, Software and Standards. 0 Comments

The Open Document Format (ODF) frees the user from vendor lock-in that comes with proprietary formats. The new ODF Toolkit Project will facilitate the creation of tools that allow users to break away from the legacy constraints office suites.

The ODF Toolkit Project, aims to enhance the ability of OpenOffice.org to be used as a programming framework as opposed to a desktop application. That is it will provide a means for developers to reuse OpenOffice.org code to enable their own applications to create and process Open Document (ODF) documents.

It gets better too, thanks to OpenOffice.orgs use of Universal Network Objects (UNO). UNO offers interoperability between programming languages, object models and hardware architectures, thus developers will not be limited to any particular language or hardware for their own projects.

So what will you be able to do with the ODF Toolkit? The ODF website outlines a number of target case studies, these include:

  • Semi-Automatic and Automatic Document Creation
  • Collaborative editing
  • Format converters to/from ODF
  • ODF Workflow Modelling

It’s early days, for this project, but there are solid foundations from the start. I currently use the OpenOffice.org suite to allow integration of proprietary formats in Apache Forrest. It works really well, but having to use the complete office suite is a bit cumbersome. This toolkit project should solve that issue.

So, if your current project needs to produce, manipulate or consume office documents head over to the ODF Toolkit Project and help make it a success.

Social contracts for personal projects

Published by Sebastian Rahtz on January 21, 2007 in Community and Development. 3 Comments

I have been writing bits of code, large and small, for nearly 20 years now, and many of them are available somewhere on the web under more-or-less free licences. In recent years, especially since OSS Watch started, I have increasingly tried to get to grips with proper licensing and ownership, and now regard myself as “clean” as regards the licences. However, a lot of what I have produced has been in TiLi (Take it or Leave it) mode, under which I worked on changes at my own pace and in my own way. I know that in a proper open source project I will work according to a roadmap and to standards, but for my off-hand, part-time, work?

I have been using Operator recently; this is a brilliant Firefox extension which trawls each web page for microformats and shows you what it finds. It is written by Michael Kaply; he works for IBM, but it is fairly clear that this is a fun project he does on the side. You’d expect a TiLi mode of development for this type of work. Earlier this year, however, Michael published his personal Social Contract, which lays down the constraints he will impose on himself for Operator. For example, he says “I will modify the method I use to debug Operator to ensure that I do not accidentally leave debug messages in the extension when I ship”, and “I will not commit to any specific day to release an update to Operator” as well as the, perhaps expected, “I will take all bug reports seriously and attempt to solve them”. Marvellous. Precise rules which we users can understand, and which he can realistically stick to.

Read more about Kaply’s Social Contract at
http://www.kaply.com/weblog/2007/01/10/extension-development-and-social-contracts/

I think I too will write such a contract next time I publish some code.

Google Open Source Jam 01

Published by Stuart Yeates on January 19, 2007 in Community and Software. 1 Comment

Google hosted a get together of random open source people at their Buckingham Palace Road London headquarters. The fifty invitees were sadly diminished by the vulgarities of the English public transport system, but a good range of people did turn up for pizza, beer and energy drinks, courtesy of everyone’s favourite search engine. In true open source style, when offered the choice between imported beers and energy drinks, most of us were on energy drinks after their first.

A range of people were there, talking about the projects, the ones that struck a cord with me include:

Grash. A bash(1)-like shell navigating a JavaVM rather than a filesystem; think ls(1), pipes and method invocation. Still rather a long way from anything even approaching POSIX compliance.
OpenStreetMap. A project of people mapping the things they care about; think footpaths, canals and neolithic sites rather than motorways and roundabouts.

Selenium and webdriver. People finding better ways to test web applications. Webdriver is more developer oriented and Selenium is more end-user oriented. Webdriver offers the possibility of true cross-platform, cross-broswer testing, while Selenium offers to possibility of end-users (or at least advanced non-developers) submitting tests.

Fortress. Sun trying to wean engineers and physical scientists off their fortan addiction. Pros: mathematical syntax using standard mathematical notation in Unicode; functional style; designed by Java originator James Gosling; easily parallelisable. Cons: Unicode maths (notoriously tricky and hard to implement); not even a working prototype yet; unclear whether it will ever gain the requisite momentum. Fortress is portentially huge in physical sciences and engineering departments as well as in modelling heavy specialisms (climate modelling, bio-medical modelling, etc.).

FreeBSD releases version 6.2

Published by Stuart Yeates on January 15, 2007 in Software. 0 Comments

FreeBSD has released version 6.2.

Kernel updates include the obligatory bug fixes as well as improved networking and file systems. Userland updates include new command line options to a striking number of everyday commands, mainly to improve their coverage of new functionality or produce cleaner output.

For those not already familiar with FreeBSD, Wikipedia says:

FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4.4BSD operating systems. It runs on Intel x86 family (IA-32) PC compatible systems (including the Microsoft Xbox), and also DEC Alpha, Sun UltraSPARC, IA-64, AMD64, PowerPC and NEC PC-98 architectures. Support for the ARM and MIPS architectures are under development.

FreeBSD is developed as a complete operating system. The kernel, device drivers and all of the userland utilities, such as the shell, are held in the same source code revision tracking tree (CVS). This is in contrast to Linux, a similar but better-known operating system, in which the kernel is developed by one set of developers; userland utilities and applications by others, such as the GNU project; and all are packaged together by other groups and published as Linux distributions.

As an operating system, FreeBSD is generally regarded as quite reliable and robust, and of the operating systems that accurately report uptime remotely, FreeBSD is the most common free operating system listed in Netcraft’s list of the 50 web servers with the longest uptime (uptime on some operating systems such as some versions of Linux can’t be calculated). A long uptime also indicates that no kernel updates have been deemed necessary, as installing a new kernel requires a reboot and resets the uptime counter of the system.

UKSFN fund Andrew Price

Published by Stuart Yeates on January 12, 2007 in Community, Development and Discussion. 1 Comment

UKSFN, a UK broadband provider set up to raise funds for open source software, have given their first significant grant to Andrew Price, the welsh developer of PyBackPack, a python backup tool.

More from Ping Wales.

Launching for web 2.0

Published by Stuart Yeates on January 10, 2007 in Discussion. 0 Comments

After a suggestion from Brian Kelly, I’ve added this blog to Technorati, ma.gnolia and del.icio.us

This should make it easier for people to find us in the world of Web 2.0.

Licensing problem with BSD-derived distributions

Published by Stuart Yeates on January 10, 2007 in Legal. 2 Comments

A licensing problem has been found which may affect many open source BSD-derived distributions, including the highly-secure OpenBSD. The problem does not affect Linux, which has a similar kernel but which was re-written from scratch rather than being derived from the BSD code.

The problem relates to the change in the BSD licence in 1999 to remove the advertising clause. Minor software contributors should have been tracked down to sign off on the licensing change but were not.

There are two typical approaches to overcoming such a licensing problem. The first is to track down the original contributors and get them to sign off on the change. This is likely to be largely an exercise in paperwork: trawling through old version control changes and checking mailing lists for contributed patches. The second is to re-write the problematic sections of code. I’m not familiar enough with the BSD kernels to know how much effort this is likely to involve, but it could be the matter of hours, or a matter of years.

In this specific case it may also be possible to follow the advertising clause (which was removed in the relicensing), but this is incompatible with the GPL, leading to a new set of problems for some software which links against GPL code (which the relicensing was meant to solve).

Most end-users of BSD-derived distributions should be able to switch relatively easily to Linux if this problem becomes a significant drama.

I’m reassured that this problem was found using internal checks, it suggests that at least some people in the open source world are doing due diligence.

Complaint to the European Commission over BECTA procurement process

Published by Stuart Yeates on January 9, 2007 in Standards. 1 Comment

Alpha Learning has complained about the procurement process for the BECTA eLearning platform to the European Commission Competition Commission. Unlike other complaints I’ve written about previously, this appears to be from a proprietary rather than open source vendor.

The gist of the complaint appears to be that BECTA treated some “mandatory” interoperability requirements as optional but other “mandatory” requirements as compulsory. The interoperability requirements in this case relate to the SCORM open standard. Open standards such as SCORM are, of course, central to fostering a genuinely open market in eLearning area, both for the software platforms and the educational content they contain. Without open standards, open source and open content are likely to be restricted in this area by vendor lock-in.

We can expect to see more eLearning news during the BETT Show, which starts tomorrow.