mount.nfs: Remote I/O error

In order to be able to mount the NFS shares I had to add -o vers=3 to my mount command.

I understand that with the state of the economy, the deficit, Afghanistan the Digital Economy Bill might not be the top priority in this election. Apparently however, it’s important enough to railroad into the statue book with controversial amendments being added days before becoming law. Watching the passage of the bill was an eye-opening experience….

Everyone should watch a parliamentary debate on something they know about, finance, shipbuilding whatever. See how gvt “works”. #debill

This law was not made the way I expected law to be passed. What I expected was neatly summed up by Cameron Neylon:

Representative democracy bases its existence on the assumption that the full community can not be effectively involved in an informed and considered criticism of proposed bills and that it is therefore of value to both place some buffer between raw, and probably ill informed public opinion, and actual decision making. This presumes that MPs, particularly party spokespersons take the time to become expert on the matter of bills they represent.

Instead what I witnessed in debates in the House of Commons was a scarily ill-informed, rushed mess which was typified when it emerged that the “Minister for Digital Britain”, who is in charge of this travesty thought that the IP in “IP address” stands for Intellectual Property

There were MPs who “got it” from all parties, exemplified by the Labour back-bencher Tom Watson but only the Lib Dems voted against the bill as a party and even then, many did not turn up to vote!

I am not angry because I file-share illegal files. I do not. Copyright violation is already an offence. As that well-known bastion of communist hippies, the Telegraph, says:

In the past the lawyers had to go after the infringers, with actual proof. Remember being innocent until proven guilty? That’s out now. Now, the holder of the internet account (Mum, Dad, Granny and the small business that can’t afford the legal fees) will be held to account for what happens over their connection.

Aside from the eye-watering insight into how law is made, I’m cross for a number of reasons:

• It won’t do what it tries to do, The Telegraph again:

  ” In April last year, Sweden’s internet traffic took a dramatic 30 per cent dip as the country’s new anti-file sharing law came into effect. Before this, Sweden, the home of the Pirate Bay, had been a hotbed of illegal trade in movies and music.

  But several months later traffic levels started to surpass the old levels. Consultancy firm Mediavision found that the accessing of illegally shared movies, TV shows and music simply recovered. But there was one crucial difference. Much of the internet traffic was now encrypted.”

• It will make running a wifi hotspot a massive headache Small cafes have to decide whether to try to be ISPs or be responsible for copyright infringement on their hotspots and use technological measures to prevent abuse. Good luck finding workable “technological measures” that don’t massively restrict legal use of the internet!
• It will have a chilling effect on free speech The Bill has a clause that will allow “the secretary of state for business to order the blocking of “a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright” (via The Guardian). It has some safe-guards but there is concern that sites like WikiLeaks (which recently broadcast leaked video footage of American Pilots firing on innocent people including Reuters journalists) could be banned. ISPs will be worried about court costs which means even the threat of a ban will often get pages removed.

So if you’ve made it through this far, I’m hoping you agree with some of what I’m saying. So what can we do? A number of things:

1. Join the Open Rights Group who campaigned against this fiasco.
2. Find out about your local candidates. For example, which way did they vote on the Digital Economy Bill or did they not even bother to show up for work?
3. Share info about the candidates with other people who care about internet freedom.
4. What else? I’m not sure – I’m half tempted to wander down my local high street (Winchester) handing out leaflets summarising this blog entry and pointing out what one of the local candidates (Martin Tod) is a founder member of ORG.

If you have better ideas, let me know in the comments….

When you upload a photo, Wordpress automatically make smaller versions of the image (of configurable size). Unfortunately it doesn’t tell the client what the URLs to these resized images are. I’ve created a patch to Wordpress that returns the URLs but it has missed the cut off for 3.0 so it’ll be some time before it gets included. In the mean time, I’ve created a tiny plugin that does the same thing.

This plugin is not useful to you at all unless you use a blogging client that makes use of it. The only client I intend to alter is MaStory so I’m imagining this plugin will not be used by a lot of people.

To use the plugin:

1. Download the plugin (It’s now available from its plugin page on wordpress.org as well)
2. Upload `ImageURLReturner.php` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
3. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
4. Use a blogging client that makes use of the plugin – this is the hard bit – there is no such client at the moment. I have created a patch for MaStory though.

Eventually I’ll use it with my daughter, Katie. At the moment, she’s a bit young for it though we have had fun pointing out the names of the objects she already knows.

Let me know if you have comments or suggestions.

The application languished unloved for a few years, every now and again I’d spend an evening looking at it but all I would achieve each time was to learn my way around the code again.

For a few months now the application has been basic but usable and I’ve now registered a domain for it: WhenShallWe.com. You give it a few details about the thing that you’re organising, a little of possible dates and a guest list. It then email each guest a link to a web page where they can say which days they can make. It can make finding a suitable day much easier.

Try it out.

It’s taken me ages to find the solution, I’d read that VMWare Server 2 didn’t work well with SELinux but I’d assumed that couldn’t affect me as the boxes I’d tried it on (32 and 64 bit) both had SELinux in permissive mode. It turns out that permissive mode isn’t enough – to make it work you have to disable SELinux entirely.

I don’t understand it – in my limited understanding of SELinux I thought that it wouldn’t block anything in permissive mode but I’ve tried disabling SELinux and it works; so for now that’s what I’m going to do.

Today I’ve made some updates to the blog – I’ve stopped the Twitter digests (and added a Twitter sidebar to the blog). The digests were inhibiting my Twittering as I didn’t want to create lots of posts with a single tweet in them

Geekery aside it’s been a good couple of days – yesterday Em’s mum came to visit and today we had a walk along the beach at Lepe…..the concept of actual work seems so foreign yet in a short time I’ll be back.

With 1.2 million copies sold and an average price of about £4 (according to one survey) that has to be classed as a success. iTunes, with the majority of the music in DRM-format, has never appealed but if a model like this takes off then it seems a lot of us (me included) will be buying music via the internet (in the meantime I buy most of my music on CD).

If the model does take off then there will probably be alterations; I can’t see the big labels allowing a variable price that goes all the way to zero and the charts will have to adapt or die – as other people have pointed out people have been talking about the last.fm chart. I’m much more cheerful about the future of music distribution now than I was a year ago.

Enough about the distribution – what about the music? I have a few Radiohead albums – I tend to listen to them a lot when I first get them and then rarely play them later. It’s too early to tell whether that’ll happen to this one but I think it won’t, I’ve listened to it a lot and it has really grown on me.

….and if you want to support (in multiple senses of the word) a band that has been pioneering internet music (and you have recording equipment) then check out Brad’s request

Unfortunately, we only seem to be able to get the older models in the UK at the moment and the official UK distributor’s web site isn’t the most confidence inspiring thing in the world so I think I’ll wait for a bit

Hackable robotic hoovers….. woo!