Why Not?

The Hague declaration and now a UK PM petition...

From a news story on http://www.digistan.org/:

UK petition on Hague Declaration

OpenOffice.org's John McCreesh tells us that the UK Prime Minister s
Office has accepted an e-petition: "We the undersigned petition the
Prime Minister to adopt the Hague Declaration of the Digital Standards
Organisation."

John says, "please encourage any of your supporters who are British
citizens or residents to support this petition by voting online before
6th July at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/digistan"

Thanks to Pieter for circulating this! Go sign...http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/digistan

Posted at 04:39PM Jun 04, 2008 by Chris Puttick in Open Standards  | 

Twice the fun?

Maybe. But certainly twice the objections. Following South Africa's appeal against the recent ISO "approving" of a version of Microsoft's OOXML format, Brazil have appealed as well... Andy Updegrove has more information on his blog.

And rumours of a further two appeals on their way...

Posted at 09:05AM May 30, 2008 by Chris Puttick in Open Standards  |  Comments[1]

Gosh, what fun!

Almost unheard of, but in this particular case it always seemed unavoidable. South Africa national standards body, a "P" member (P is for Participatory and is the highest level of membership) in the ISO committee responsible for allowing Microsoft's much maligned Office Open XML format for office documents to be approved have appealed against the approval decision. It is widely expected that other national bodies will now follow suit.

The appeal is on the basis of clear breaches of the ISO's procedures for handling the approval process. No mention is made of the highly dubious activities, intended to force an approval vote, that have gone on behind the scenes at a number of national standards bodies...

More detail here:

http://topicmaps.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/support-south-africas-appeal-against-ooxml/

and here:

http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/05/the-south-afric.html

Posted at 12:28PM May 23, 2008 by Chris Puttick in Open Standards  |  Comments[1]

To blog or not to blog, that is one of the questions...

Hints on tips on whether to blog, what to blog and when to blog.

Posted at 08:34AM May 23, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  |  Comments[2]

Standard for what, standards for why, standards for everyone...

So, I wrote an email to a list, asking them to review and (hopefully!) sign the Hague Declaration:

http://www.digistan.org/hague-declaration:en

In summary the Hague Declaration calls for there to be digital standards, open to all, and that governments are mandated to use them.

Among various responses (most, thankfully, in favour) was someone who asked

"Standard for what?"

Having gone to the trouble of answering at some length, it seems sensible to reproduce the response, suitable edited to make sense out of the email context (insofar as that is possible!).

So my response to the question "Standard for what?"

Standards for everything that matters.

A physical example: in the UK we have a standard for electrical plugs and sockets and for the supply. This means that I can buy a lamp or a fridge and be sure it will be able to plug into my home electrical socket and it just work and I don't risk death by using it.

It is my choice to have switched sockets or unswitched. The plug can be black or white or chrome (hopefully not chrome...); it can be rubberised and curvy or hard plastic and square. The sockets can be sunk into the wall or surface mounted or in trunking and also any colour/material (mine are black nickel, which is nice without being too much, but I digress...). It doesn't matter i.e. these factors are not part of the standard, because what matters is that the socket has 3 specifically sized rectangular pins, positioned just so, with the right pin "live" and fused appropriately, the left pin neutral and the top pin earth. The socket needs to have the equivalent sized and placed holes and wired appropriately and if switched the switch needs to meet certain specifications. The UK electrical supply is legally required to be 50Hz AC at 230V +/- 10%.

That's it. That's the bits that need to be standardised. And not only are supply and sockets and plugs standardised but mandated to be so. This means I can buy my sockets from whomever made by whomever and my plugs are sourced by the manufacturers of my electrical equipment from whomever. Bring it all together with my power supply from yet another supplier and it all works fine.

If you travel from the US or Europe to the UK you need an adapter (in software terms a translator. And your translator might be big and expensive, if for example, you moved from the US to here and brought your white goods with you. I have a US-market breadmaker which needs 700W at 110v; that needs a significant transformer, not just a simple shape-shift. But in the end home electrical needs are simple and the differences between the different plug and supply standards well documented and well understood, because all are standardised in their home nation. Now consider a power adapter that works for all domestic appliances anywhere in the world e.g. a 1.2kW vacuum cleaner from the UK in France, Switzerland, the US and Australia, or one from the US everywhere else, etc.; you would need a transformer that can step up or down, plus 5 or 6 plug adapters, plus maybe several power cables. Just for the simple problem of switching power supplies between two voltages and a few different shape plugs/sockets... Imagine doing that for undocumented, unstandardised binary data formats.

So the short answer to the question: standards for the digital plugs and sockets and standards for the digital power supply. The plugs and sockets are the APIs and the protocols; lots of that is already sorted (think http for the web, TCP/IP for the networking, etc.). The digital power supply is the information that flows, the stuff that is important in this information age we are entering. It is there we are short of standards. I don't want to dictate to anyone what software they should use. I do think I should be able to demand that they provide information in a standardised format and this not be an issue because they don't a specific software package. Where there are no available standards we have to be pragmatic initially, but we must move towards a position where there are standards for those interchanges i.e. develop them either from existing formats or by starting clean.

It's not about control or restrictions, it's about real choice. You get to choose which applications you use and do so without concerns about operating systems or the applications being used by others, because the information will flow as a standard all can read without issue or artificial restriction.

This is particularly an issue for governments and the file formats they use to exchange and provide information, which is where we started from with the Hague Declaration. So if you haven't already, go read it and hopefully sign it!

Posted at 10:42AM May 16, 2008 by Chris Puttick in Open Standards  | 

A case of the general for the specific and for not getting it at all...

So I just read this article about the AbiSource project in the Google Summer of Code. The article as a whole was neither here nor there, but the joke headline:

"AbiWord developers show strong support for OOXML"

and closing paragraph:

"Interestingly, we did receive quite a few applications about improving OOXML support, while we got zero OpenDocument related proposals. Apparently the support for the OpenDocument ISO standard isn't strong enough in the F/OSS community to actually make an effort to improve support for it. Even when paid. Food for thought."

between them annoyed me greatly...

I could go on about the difference between OpenDocument (the widely supported standard ISO26300) and OOXML (the not supported standard - note MS Office 2007 does not support the proposed standard version of OOXML, and in particular nothing like the strict version. which is the one you should use for new documents as opposed to importing legacy ones).

I feel unable to avoid mentioning that the fact there are already a number of F/OSS (Free/Open Source Software) implementations of OpenDocument, like OpenOffice and KOffice, which may blunt demand for an AbiWord one.

But mostly I was annoyed because someone had made the mistake of slipping from the specific case to the general; actually it would be more accurate to say

"...the support for the OpenDocument ISO standard isn't strong enough in the AbiSource community to actually make an effort to improve support for it. Even when paid. Food for thought."

And this is a criticism of the AbiSource community. Without open standards the rest will be history; AbiSource developers need to have excellent support for the word processor portions of ODF and strongly consider making it the default format. Not doing so perpetuates the "you must be able to read the file, it's .doc" mentality that is currently the norm.

NB: the author of the news article has my utmost respect as one of the main developers of libwpd which allows a number of packages to happily open WordPerfect files...

Posted at 04:17PM May 12, 2008 by Chris Puttick in Open Archaeology  |  Comments[3]

How stupid are these phishers...

Phishing: The act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. (courtesy of the Webopedia Computer Dictionary)

So phishing emails arrive all the time. Some are works of art, beautifully crafted to look and feel like they come from the company they claim to, use real URLs throughout except one carefully masked one which is the hook. Many are pretty dire and basically depend on a mix of greed, stupidity and/or an over-trusting nature on the part of the recipient.

I just got one which must be in the running for "stupidest phish of the year"... From the top:

It arrives from a German (.de) email address, claiming to be from the "Microsoft Word Lottery, UK".

The office address is in Liverpool and they are emailing from Germany?

I have of course won £1m and I'm one of 25 lucky "international winne(Addresses) who have won in this category". Just one example of many garbaged bits of English. Oh, and another, which implies its not a £1m prize, actually it's a staggering "GBP 1,000,000.00M"!

Their website is apparently "still under construction, as we are updating our site." A £25+m e-lottery fund without a website?

My email address was selected from their Microsoft Word user lists. Odd, given that like many computer users (most?) I've never actually owned a copy of Microsoft Word...

Then there's the "Non resident claims form" I am required to "completely fill with your correct information". I am a resident...

And my favourite, just for the geeks: my email address was apparently randomly selected by "our new java-based software". Microsoft? Use Java? And tell people about it? Get away...

Just goes to show some phishers are dumber than their victims

Posted at 01:59PM May 01, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

A little help for those just adopting Linux

Actually not a huge amount of help, but rather entertaining:

The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons

Courtesy of The Register.

Posted at 04:27PM Apr 15, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

Found: one small, fast, muddy spotty dog

Bob turned up. Or to be precise, a dog rescue near Bicester called to say they had him. Said dog rescue is about 11km away from where he was last seen, so for a moment I thought he had achieved all the previous posting had suggested he might. But no, he'd been found in our village and taken there. Evidence suggests that after his normal mud "seek and splash", he had been distracted from returning by a lady Boxer on her morning walk and didn't hear the whistles for his return due to mud in his ears. At least that's Bob's excuse...

Posted at 03:57PM Mar 25, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

Lost: one small, fast spotty dog

A Springer by the name of Bob.

Far too fast for his own good. So on his usual morning walk he ups and goes after something or nothing, which is normal; only this time he didn't come back. A blog is not a common place to notify people of a lost dog, but Bob is very, very fast, entirely single-minded and, while unlikely to leave the country, is all too capable of running flat-out for hours, which could put him in one of three or four counties.

So if you see him, tell him to go home. Fast.

Posted at 02:50PM Mar 25, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

SOX...

No, I've not a closet baseball follower, a fan of a certain New England team; nor am I a follower of any of the bands of that name; and do I not have a predilection for ensuring my frozen desserts remain cold in a stylish, colour-matched way; no, I'm afraid nothing so "cool"...

SOX is "Save Our XP", a campaign by InfoWorld to ensure Windows XP continues to be available after the impending deadline of June 30. As there are no sound commercial reasons for them to stop, and it seems deeply inappropriate for the supplier to be forcing the customer to make high impact changes to their business for zero gain to anyone. Except Microsoft, of course. Join the 96,424 people (as of Feb. 25) who have signed InfoWorld's petition to demand that Microsoft not stop OEM and shrinkwrapped sales of Windows XP as planned on June 30, 2008, but instead keep it available indefinitely. Go on, go sign!

Posted at 09:29AM Feb 28, 2008 by Chris Puttick in Technology  | 

A question of trowels

More a fable, maybe, for archaeologists; a series of questions about trowel choice, what makes one good or bad, and what guides the final choice.

Suppose you were working on an away site, or more precisely a site, far, far, away; maybe in a country unfamiliar to you and the rest of the excavation team. Let's say Ghana.

Then through an unfortunate incident you suffer a loss of trowels and have to venture out to purchase some new ones. After looking around a few hardware shops, you find one that will do the job. It isn't the same as the preferred trowel you and the team have been using for years, but you cannot find anywhere to purchase an identical replacement, so money changes hands and back you go to the excavation with your new trowels.

Using this new trowel is initially uncomfortable – the handle is a different shape, the blade angles are different, and so is the weight and balance. These differences are enough to start making your hand feel sore, maybe even causing a blister, and it is different enough to slow you down and even to force a few mistakes. That said, after a few hours it doesn't feel so bad; after a few days the new trowel feels OK and allows you to do a reasonable job.

Let's call this replacement trowel “The Ghana Trowel”.

Now on another dig far, far away, you again suffer an unfortunate loss of trowels. This time you are in Malaysia, and the only trowel you can find is quite different, downright unusual in appearance and feel. But someone on the team knows how to use this particular trowel well. It turns out to be adjustable with a bit of effort, in fact so adjustable that with time and the help of the expert in the group and a few people she knows, this Malaysian trowel can be customised to the point that it encompasses all the best aspects of any trowel you ever used, with no drawbacks; it promises to become more or less the platonic ideal of trowels.

Let's call this one “Trowel of Malaysia”.

Yet another far far away dig, yet another unfortunate loss of trowels (this repeated loss of trowels is starting to sound a little careless...). Trowels available here, Washington State in the USA, are the same make as your preferred trowel but are a new, very shiny, replacement model and come in terribly stylish boxes. A pretty good trowel in use, a step forward from its predecessor, the old preferred trowel, but the handle design is so very, very shiny the trowel can only be used in conjunction with a special glove, only available from the same manufacturer.

Let's call this “Trowel USA”.

Now let's suppose that the preferred trowel costs £12, and The Ghana Trowel costs £10. Would you decide that from that point on you would only buy the new trowel?

What if the preferred trowels cost £12 and Trowel of Malaysia costs £12. Would you consider changing?

Trowel USA costs £12, the glove another £2. A worthwhile option?

What if the preferred trowels cost £100, its successor, Trowel USA (including glove) £200, The Ghana Trowel £80 and Trowel of Malaysia was completely free. Which would you choose then?

Now substitute any given software package for the trowels...

Posted at 10:18AM Feb 21, 2008 by Chris Puttick in Open Archaeology  |  Comments[2]

If this doesn't make you cynical, nothing will...

Or if you are already cynical, it might be enough to get angry. The article unearths some evidence from an anti-trust trial in the US - it is an email chain from 2000 with a document attached, written in 1997, that might as well be called "Ensuring victory; the art of war in under-informed markets". Enjoy:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071023002351958

Posted at 08:57AM Feb 19, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  | 

That says something, that does...

Although I'm not entirely sure what, this recent summation of employee contributions to various candidates in the US Primary elections (as covered by wired.com) might shed some light on the cultural differences between Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! - and suggests further reasons why Microsoft's aggressive takeover offer for Yahoo! is likely doomed to failure.

So this is the breakdown of contributions by candidate and company (excuse the enormous whitespace that may follow, no idea how to get rid of it! Fixed...):

Note some variation will come from the relative size and international distribution of the employees; while Microsoft has 79,000 staff, Google has 16,800 and Yahoo! 13,600 (with ~1000 projected layoffs in the offing). All three have the bulk of their employees in the USA, with Microsoft the largest proportion overseas.

Overall the contribution figures suggest while all three companies favour Democrats Google and Yahoo! staff are far more aligned with youth and each other than with Microsoft. Microsoft employees favour Clinton, the mainstream Democratic candidate, while Google and Yahoo! favour the alternative and broad-base populist choice of Obama. The backing on the other hand of Republican candidates by all three companies appears to be well off the beaten track!

Interestingly, rumour has it that Yahoo!'s ex-CEO and very recently ex-chairman, Terry Semel was in favour of a deal with Microsoft. Terry Semel made the maximum allowed contribution to Clinton's campaign...

Posted at 02:58PM Feb 06, 2008 by Chris Puttick in Politics  | 

Zigackly, Obelix, ferpectly right

Well, not Obelix, but Dana Blankenhorn, a blogger on ZDnet (for the record I'm don't think I'm Asterix either!).

He writes in this entry, a comment on HP's increasingly vocal open source strategy, that successfully using open source software in your organisation is as much about changing the company as it is about changing software. He writes that:

" * They need an internal network of engineers and programmers who know the tools and the rules.
* They need to network with others in the open source community to stay on top of trends and get things fixed.
* They need to open their use of the Internet.
... The whole idea of open source is that you become independent, that your people become independent, that you open up to the world."

Yeah, like what he said...

Posted at 12:24PM Jan 29, 2008 by Chris Puttick in General  |