The Open Sourcerer

OT: The Chilli Planting Begins

It’s that time already. Gosh how the time flies when you’re having fun.

This morning, following the great success with last year’s germinations, I have sown the seeds for this year’s Chilli harvest.

This year I had to be a bit ruthless. I have more varieties to choose from than this but limited greenhouse capacity so I’ve gone for a mix of strengths, sizes and tastes. There’s (clockwise from the top left):

• Portugal, a Jumbo Cayenne type that sounds great,
• the now [in]famous Dorset Naga, probably the hottest Chilli in the world,
• a Jalapeño which my wife bought for me, and as these are quite mild will be good for the family,
• Thai Mound, a very hot and tiny birds-eye type,
• Fatalii which are a yellow Habanero style that has a good reputation for flavour (citrus) and also for overwintering well,
• and finally a regular Cayenne chilli which my Sister-in-law very kindly gave to me at Christmas with a copy of the Grow Your Own garden magazine.

I used the same technique as last year. That is take a small plastic tub (the kind we get Indian and Chinese Takeaways in round here), lay a sheet of absorbent kitchen paper (we use recycled, non-perfumed and unbleached paper) in the bottom and then dampen liberally with tepid water. When I say liberally, the paper is pretty much saturated and there is small amount of water that will collect in the corner of the tub if you tip it up a bit. I then write on the side of the tray the two varieties I will sow in the box and then just lay the seeds on the moist paper keeping a decent distance between them.

Here’s one I prepared earlier

I repeated this exercise with the other chillies, and some tomato seeds to try and give them a head start too. Once the seeds are sown, I put the lids on the tubs and put them in our airing cupboard. Last year germination was really quick compared to the more traditional pot sown seeds I’d done in the past. The tubs need to be checked every day and as soon as the seed starts to sprout I cut a small section of the paper that the seed is on and place that in a small (3″) pot with some some good seed compost. Then they stay on our south-facing window sill in the lounge until the weather warms up enough for them to go outside.

UK Gov Updates Open Source Policy

Remember the Cabinet Office Open Source, Open Standards Re-Use: Action Plan that came out last February?

Well, they’ve updated it. And the bits that they have changed are most welcome:

4. This Strategy does not represent a wholesale change to the Open Source Open Standards Reuse Strategy published in February 2009. It has been updated to take account of comments posted on www.writetoreply.org. The key changes to policy are:

• We will require our suppliers to provide evidence of consideration of open source solutions during procurement exercises – if this evidence is not provided, bidders are likely to be disqualified from the procurement.
• Where a ‘perpetual licence’ has been purchased from a proprietary supplier (which gives the appearance of zero cost to that project), we will require procurement teams to apply a ‘shadow’ licence price to ensure a fair price
  comparison of total cost of ownership. We have also defined the shadow licence cost as either:
  1. the list price of that licence from the supplier with no discounts applied, or
  2. the public sector price that has been agreed through a ‘Crown’ agreement.
• We have clarified that we expect all software licences to be purchased on the basis of reuse across the public sector, regardless of the service environment it is operating within. This means that when we launch the Government Cloud, there will be no additional cost to the public sector of transferring licences into the Cloud.

Which is nice

But unfortunately, as has been said widely before and again with this update, this is an action plan without any teeth. There is no enforcement, there is no monitoring and there are no penalties for not implementing the plan.

It’s all been said already so this is a short post. Until the Cabinet Office can get this implemented at a departmental level across the government and enforced, it remains essentially a "nice-to-have" objective but not much more.

The Cabinet Office have an Open Source aggregation service that collects various commentary from around the world based on various tags. This one needs the #ukgovOSS tag if you want to write your own piece or even tweet/dent about it.

PS: We have also made a remark or two about this update on our recently started (admittedly rather quietly) and more business-centric Open Source blog that’s on our main web site. We’ve called the blog The Way Out. Please feel free to drop by or add to your feed readers.

BETT 2010 Review

It’s that time of year when around 30,000 educationalists from all over the world descend on Olympia in London for the annual edu-geek-out that is BETT.

I’ve been going to BETT now for 3 or 4 years as an exhibitor or just helping to promote Open Source and Free Software with other like minded members of our amazing community.

This year we helped our friends and colleagues at Open Source Schools and Open Forum Europe on the Open Source Café. The simple objective of the show was to inform the education sector about Open Source and where to find help, advice and common ground with peers who’ve “been there” and “done that” already.

This year was, frankly, quite exceptional.

The stand received financial sponsorship from Red Hat, Linux IT, University of London Computing Centre and The Learning
Machine (Ingots) for which everyone is very grateful. Canonical, the commercial entity behind Ubuntu very kindly provided us with 600 Ubuntu 9.10 CDs (500 Desktop and 100 Server) to give away (thanks Larry) and there were a similar number of CDs containing a great collection of Education-centric Open Source desktop applications for Windows from Free Software for Students that was compiled and produced by Peter Kemp and David Wilmut. That’s around 1200 CDs in total full of completely Free goodness and fun. We encouraged all the recipients to copy, share and pass them on too! At the end of the show we had only a few (quite literally) of each remaining.

An interesting sum was carried out: The value of equivalent proprietary software was estimated to be over £4000 for the pair of CDs – I actually think that is rather low considering the volume of stuff in the Ubuntu repos including several real Enterprise grade applications such as OpenERP and Alfresco – so we have potentially delivered a net saving to the education sector of at least £2.5m. And of course this does not include all the free copies that will be made and passed around!

I noticed a real sea-change between this show and last year’s. I don’t actually recall speaking to one school or Local Authority this show that had no-idea of, or that wasn’t aware that they were using, Open Source Software. Most were really proud of their achievements, many were rolling out or had completed roll outs of OpenOffice.org rather than waste many thousands of pounds on unnecessary & proprietary Office Application Suite Licenses. Many more used and raved about Audacity – the ubiquitous audio capture and editing tool. No one I spoke with was reticent toward Open Source and many were keen to talk and share their experiences. This is what the Open Source Schools project is all about: using the principles of FOSS; of community, collaboration and sharing, and providing a location for this to happen. If you are involved in education and have any interest in Open Source, or even better are an expert, get involved and share your experience and knowledge gained.

We also found time to meet up with friends and colleagues from Sirius, Mark Taylor and John Spencer. Sirius has been very successful in the education sector, they are the only Open Source vendor to be on Becta’s “approved supplier list”, and were nominated for an award this year for the work they and North West Learning Grid put in to the National Digital Resource Bank.

The national digital resource bank will deliver a vast range of publicly funded resources under a creative commons licence and populate your learning platforms, preparing them for effective use.

It will also create a sharing community of educators who will identify, review and improve a common set of national digital assets.

The world is really changing very fast. I go to parties and find people in all walks of life (i.e. not IT professionals) who are aware of Open Source, Governments are (some faster than others admittedly) waking up to the reality that FOSS provides significant benefits over proprietary software in many ways more than just money, and Enterprises are adopting not just Open Source Software but the principles behind it too to make their own businesses better.

BETT 2010 confirmed this trend in spades. Roll on BETT 2011.

Miles from Open Source Schools and one of the organisers of the event has also posted a review of the show that you can read here.

Miserware Energy Saving Software now cross-platform

Perhaps you will recall the Miserware power saving software I blogged about last year?

I’m still running it on all of my machines here and it has been great – I really don’t notice it at all. It just sits in the background and according to the logs is saving between ~20% & ~60% power consumption by my various CPUs. And that’s just what it should do.

Miserware have just (18th Jan 2010) started a new trial programme to celebrate the introduction of the first Beta of the power saving software for that [ahem] other OS, Windows. The trial itself and entry into a competition to win iPod Nanos or Asus PCs is open from today and the Micromiser software is available for: Vista, Windows 7, Windows XP, Debian 4.0, 5.0, unstable, Fedora 8, 9, 10, 11, RHEL 4.7, 5.3, SLES 10 and Ubuntu 7.04, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10.

If you want to try it out and join in the trial and competition just follow this link to sign up.

Note: Do please note that (on Linux at least – am not sure about Windows as I don’t use it) there is a script you should run after installation called mw-feedback. It sends back textual information about your hardware. This is a plain text file of mine for Lobsang so you can see what it contains. The purpose is so they can identify any hardware issues with the beta software and also verify the widest range of solutions for which the product is suitable.

Another EIF 2 response from an MEP

I was very pleased yesterday to get another response to add to my collection in relation to my letter to my MEPs about the European Interoperability Framework. Now if you missed the fuss in the first place the interoperability framework is a document outlining an EU approach to software that avoids being locked in to particular suppliers, promotes free choice of member states, and protects tax payers from being ripped off by predatory monopolistic practices. Good stuff in other words. It had a few rough edges so EIF 2 was proposed. A draft was written, and public comments from interested parties were submitted. Microsoft and the BSA (which has been accused of being a Microsoft sock puppet at times) were perhaps the most critical, but their comments were generally welcoming and constructive, the BSA in particular pointed to some areas where the proposed EIF2 went impractically far on issues relating to patents. I was, in short, totally fine with these public comments. Some time later a second draft was leaked and this did cause concern. It was nothing like the first draft and after careful reading of every submitted comment I could not see how you could start at the first draft, and by implementing the public comments arrive anywhere near the second. The original letter has a few more details of specific problems, but here is what my Conservative MEP has to say on the matter. (Responses from Conservative, Green and Lib-Dem so far)

Dear Mr Bell,

Thank you for your letter.

I was both concerned and delighted to read your comments. Concerned as to
the matter you highlight, yet delighted to see someone taking such an active
role scrutinising legislation; it is to your credit that you take such an
undertaking upon yourself.

With regard to the’ European Interoperability Framework version 2′ it is my
understanding that although it remains in the drafting stage (the current
version of the draft and more information are available from
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7728) it will be submitted to the
European Parliament and Council soon. When it is presented to the
parliament I will do my best to raise the issues you highlight with the
relevant members and ensure that the specific points you raise are
appropriately addressed.

However, as you are no doubt aware that most of this process is highly
secretive. It is sadly endemic of the EU legislative procedure that it is
formulated and discussed behind closed doors, with deals and compromises
made in circumstances that are often totally unaccountable. You can rest
assured that I share your frustrations with this and will do all I can over
the course of my time as an MEP (as I have until now) to change this.

I am happy to tell you that we are making progress. For the first time
there is an opposition to the existing way of doing business in Brussels.
My Conservative colleagues and our allies in the European Conservative and
Reformist Grouping are doing all we can make the EU accountable and to
expose the process to the full light of public scrutiny. Free to ask the
awkward questions we are fighting to ensure that when laws are passed they
represent the best possible, rather than the just the least bad choice.

I will of course keep you up to date with any and all developments. In the
meantime if I can be of any further assistance please do not hesitate to
contact me.

Best Regards,

Nirj Deva MEP

If you are wondering who Nirj Deva is then take a look at this:

Choo Choo! Beer, Steam and Free Software

One of my actions from the recent Ubuntu UK team meeting was to organise a evening out on the Real Ale Train.

The Watercress Line is a small steam powered railway line in Hampshire. It runs from Alton Station to Alresford. Alton is the end of the line for scheduled services from Waterloo. Every few weeks or so they run an evening special, the Real Ale Train, or RAT.

Basically the train turns into a very very long bar for the evening. There are several converted bar carriages and plenty of seating (comfy old seating in groups of 4). Steam, Beer and Software Freedom seems an irresistible combination so it sounds like an ideal evening out for the Ubuntu UK community.

Firstly we need to decide on a date, we have created a poll to find the most popular date from the dates far enough ahead to be organised, and skipping the date when the next Ubuntu Developer Summit is likely to be happening. Please vote on the poll and we will announce the most popular date on IRC, the wiki page and on the Ubuntu UK mailing list on January 24th. When the date is announced you will need to book your ticket, tickets can be booked online and cost £10 each. This includes a voucher for your first pint. Beer is not “Free as in Beer”, but it is just £2/pint. Don’t hang about and try to book late, they sell out months in advance.

Beards are strictly optional – it may sound like a male dominated event (and to be fair, it is) but it has a very friendly atmosphere and all are welcome.

Other alcoholic and soft drinks as well as snacks are on sale at the on-board buffet. Hot food can be purchased on board the train with vegetarian alternatives available. You have to be 18+ to buy beer, but there is no age limit (at either end of the scale) for joining in.

The RAT starts from Alton at 19.20 and tootles gently up and down the line a couple of times, returning to Alton in time for the 22:44 train back to Waterloo. (This is a connecting service, if the RAT is late, the mainline train will wait for it)

Dress – something Ubuntu related.