There's a rather depressing article in Ars Technica (UK ISPs playing Grinch with P2P throttling, surf data, video?)about ISP attitudes to the service they provide (or not) in the UK.  AT focusses on  three areas in which the ISPs want to maximise their profits, in some cases by restricting costs (throttling P2P services), selling our data (by deep packet inspection, such as the vile Phorm system), and by demanding payments from broadcasters such as the BBC (because they have the temerity to introduce a very popular service such as iPlayer).

I'm not a BitTorrent user, but I feel rather anxious that a legal application like BitTorrent, which can of course be used for entirely legal activities such as legal downloading of videos, games, and software can be throttled back on the basis (or rather the explanation used to deflect criticism) that some people abuse it for illegal activities.  Of course this is a bit weasly, the real situation is that the ISPs have pitched their services at a price that doesn't cover the bandwidth people use.  Their solution seems to be to throttle back P2P services under the guise of copyright protection.

I've spent a fair bit of time lately modifying websites.  I run several websites: Flies and Bikes (which you're reading now), my cycling club's website, the Oriel Cell Senescence conference website, and a simpler html-based website for the defunct cycling club Northwood Wheelers. 

The first three sites use the Joomla!* content management system, which I find to be very flexible and with plenty of useful add-ons.

Well, of the three machines upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 that I blogged about the other week, I've been mostly using the Sony Vaio notebook.  Some issues have come to light (some good, some bad):

The new Network Manager (see the previous post for getting it to work) is brilliant, it's so easy to switch between wireless networks, and between wired, wireless and 3G networking.  It's a joy after previous versions.  So, definitely a huge improvement over 8.04.

This is my third posting on my upgrade experiences with Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' (see Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' upgrades and Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' update.  In the second of those postings, I reported that an attempt to project from my laptop borked all my nice Compiz desktop effects. 

This morning I made one last ditch attempt to resolve this before reinstalling 8.10 - and succeeded. This was in part due to advice in this thread at ubuntuforums.org.

Yesterday I succumbed to temptation and bought a 32Gb iPod Touch to replace my venerable 2Gb iPod Nano. I realised before this purchase that my limited Windows resource would be a challenge: my library of music files is held on a fileserver running Ubuntu 8.10, and my sole XP machine is a small partition on an IBM laptop (I had decided I'd rather not fanny around jailbreaking the iPod, unless absoutely necessary).  Still, there was enough disk space to get iTunes installed and to sync some music to the iPod.

The iPod is everything I'd expected, a terrific UI, effective touch screen, easy to set up wireless comms.  But oh dear, it does show the fingerprints!

Just thought I'd plug the new release of Ubuntu Linux: Version 8.10, Intrepid Ibex.  Ubuntu Linux is the linux distribution that I use on my work laptop and three PCs at home.  In my view it's a fully featured and fully functional operating system, and well worth investigating. The press release is here.

I choose Ubuntu for a number of reasons, including ease of installation, software installation and upgrades. And of course it's open source and a free download  I'm well aware of the numerous alternative versions of Linux out there, and that some of those may better suit other users.  check out the distrowatch site for more information.   Many thanks to all the developers that together enable the distribution of so many flavours of Linux.

As I posted the other day, the latest version of Ubuntu GNU/Linux has been released.  Ubuntu's schedule sees a new release every six months, and this is reflected in the release numbering: 7.10 was released in October 2007, 8.04 in April 2008 and 8.10 in October 2008.  Each release has a nickname - 8.10 is also known as 'Intrepid Ibex', hence the image of an ibex to the left.

I usually avoid fresh installs of Ubuntu, preferring to go the route of upgrading via synaptic.  This involves considerable file downloading, which can be a fairly lengthy affair, particularly soon after release date when the Ubuntu servers and their mirrors are presumably havily loaded.   I have four computers running Ubuntu, and in light of the usual comments and complaints in the Ubuntu forums, I thought I'd note my upgrade experiences here.

Slide:ology

The art and science of creating great presentations

Here's a report concerning file formats, Microsoft and MS Office 2003. In a slightly under-publicised move, it turns out that Service Pack 3 for MS Office 2003 removed the opyion of opening older file formats. These file formats include Word 6.0 and Word 97 for Windows, Word 2004 for Macintosh, along with older versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Lotus Notes, Corel Quattro spreadsheet, and the Corel Draw graphics package.

It's a pretty good example of why MS cannot be allowed to control a supposedly open standard for office file formats - witness the dubious shenanigans as MS attempts to have OOXML certified as a standard. It's just not in MS' nature to be open about proprietary formats, especially where these are key to the market dominance of their premier product.

Fortunately, we have an alternative: OpenOffice.org - a full-featured suite of office applications, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It supports the genuinely open standard, open document, and furthermore has the capacity to deal with the older MS Office file formats that MS don't want you to work with.

Microsoft feels the heat from Linux...again - A report on Ars Technica about MS striving to gain a foothold in the flash-based laptop market - typified by the OLPC project, and by the remarkable Asus Eee (but what a silly name!). It's difficult for me to see the merits of XP on these small capacity systems, particularly since MS schedule ending support for XP next year.

Presentations, software and design

Over the last few months, I've read several books and articles that concern the graphical presentation of data and information using presentation software, such as PowerPoint and OpenOffice.org Impress (both of which I have used a lot) and Keynote (which I have never used. I am approaching the problem of presentation from the angle of making scientific presentations, often with considerable quantities of complex data.

Edward Tufte on the cognitive style of PowerPoint

The GNU General Public Licence (GPL) is one of the most (if not the most) widely used licence under which open source software is released. There's a Wikipedia page on the GPL (but be cautious as with all Wikipedia pages on contentious topics). Recently the author of two software packages (atscap and pchdtvr) has announced that he has revoked their licensing under the GPL. This has predictably released a storm of comment on the internet. As usual, the best coverage is over at Groklaw, where PJ has provided a clear analysis of whether the software author can indeed take such an act, and many of the regular contributors add observations.

It's not clear whether the author of the software and the author of the announcement are indeed one and the same, and on the basis of PJ's article it doesn't look as though he can actually revoke the GPL. It is possible that some attempt to challenge the GPL is being made (but this has been tried before in several jurisdictions, without success).

It isn't clear why the software author is taking this step. A change of heart regarding FOSS? Patent infringement (in which case the problems lie only in those jurisdictions where software patents are permitted)? Perhaps over the next few days, these issues will be clarified.

XO Laptop: It's the Software, Stupid! - A nice post about how the OLPC empowers kids creatively. A riposte to a number of rather scurrilously negative posts circulating on the web.

Groklaw has a story linking the current MSOOXML deliberations to a Microsoft strategy document that's in the public domain thanks to at least one anti-trust case. (Note that it's a big pdf file, and that the groklaw story has it as text). The Groklaw story has many comments, and is worth reading. Is this normal behaviour for a company, or am I just naive?

Having looked at that document, this news story (Gates to tap young minds) sent shivers down my spine.