July 28, 2010
--> Young Rewired State Manchester :: 2nd-6th August
Young Rewired State 2009
What is Young Rewired State?
Young Rewired State (YRS) is a initiative that aims to support young developers and coders in using public data to build apps, websites and anything else that people may use. It is about mashing up and getting out there with data people may not have seen or experienced before.
Who can take part?
Anyone aged between 15-18.
When is it?
YRS will take place *next week* between Monday 2nd August and Friday 6th August 2010
Where is it taking place?
YRS is taking place at centres across the country - there are centres in Brighton, London, Norwich, Oxford, Birmingham and Manchester.
In Manchester we will be based at the MadLab - a space well-known for digital collaboration in the city centre.
What will happen?
We will meet on the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at the MadLab and work together on ideas and developments. On Friday 6th August we will take the train down to London to meet the other teams, show & tell our work and perhaps win a prize!
Do I need to have skills?
The nature of Young Rewired State means that people will get quite technical however we are looking more for a mindset rather than simply technical skills.
If you have programming experience then you are very welcome and if you are interested in developing apps, websites or good uses of public data, then by all means come along.
Basically, we want you to have 'tinkered' with computers in your own time and of your own accord.
What time will it be each day?
We can meet at MadLab at 10.30am each day, and try and finish around 5pm or so.
Who else is involved?
In Manchester we are supported by the MadLab and staff from Substance, Blackpool Council and Digital Freedom in Education and Youth. All support staff will be CRB checked and we will always be in a group.
How much does the whole week cost to attend?
It's free to attend. Nada. Nothing. £0.00.
All we ask is that you commit to turning up on time each day. :)
Do I need to register?
Yes - there is a central registration form at YRS (http://events.osmosoft.com/recipes/yrs/tiddlers.wiki ), but if you would be as kind to email us to let us know that you've registered we can pass information straight over to you!
What else do I need to do?
We need to know that you've told an responsible adult as to where you'll be - particularly if you come to London. By all means, put them in contact with us, if there is anything not clear?
So, why should I do this?
YRS is the great opportunity to develop the next killer app whilst getting a headstart into IT and meeting people at the cutting edge of technology!
It's been a long time since I was 18 but this sounds rather exciting, is there any way I can lend a hand?
Yes!
Can you forward this email to anyone who would be interested in attending? Please do pass it on!
We are looking for extra sponsors and mentors.
Donations of developer time, money or prizes would be very gratefully recieved.
Contact the organisers:
Tim Dobson/Steven Flower: yrs[at]tdobson.net
July 26, 2010
--> é .ÞjwCy«a
I'm heading down to London for the latter half of this week, probably returning to Manchester on Friday lunchtime. I'm busy Wednesday afternoon and evening, but otherwise would be interested in doing cultural, social and generally awesome stuff with people. Let me know what you would be up for and when.
July 25, 2010
--> ORGCon 2010
This weekend has been a kinda crazy hectic for me one, for various reasons, not all of which I will go into here. But one of the big ones was spending Saturday in London at ORGCon – the Open Rights Group’s first conference. It was great to be able to see people such as Cory Doctorow, Tom Watson and Julian Huppert (who will soon be my MP) speak for the first time. There were many interesting points raised by people at the conference, and I thought I’d discuss a few of these here.
There was much discussion in the first keynote about publishers use of copyright and DRM to restrict people. One point I thought was made well related to the possibility of using anti trust law to stop large content vendors (such as Amazon or iTunes) abusing their position. However, these firms are not actually monopolies, but rather laws such as those criminalising DRM circumvention give the power to abuse the market, to companies below monoply level, by allowing them to lock customers into their walled gardens. Thus, it is these laws that are the problem, rather than the nature of these companies.
One thing that struck me was how depressingly idiotic decisions relating to copyright law have been. Apparently, courts have suggested that resampling as few as 3/4 notes could constitute a copyright violation. The biggie that struck me was the stupidity of retroactive copyright grants. As late as 1978 the copyright term was 28 years (plus an optional extra 28 years, which quite a low number of people opted for) – which means absent this legal change, these works would now be open to us. But, as it is, we now as individuals have little access to the works created within our lifetimes. An even worse case is orphan works, who’s copyright owners can not be found, so no-one can use, and because copyright has strict liability, good faith assumptions are not good enough! Of course, copyright was originally meant to inspire creativity, so giving copyright extensions to people who are already dead, as happen with much of the retroactive extension, makes no sense at all.
“The odds of copyright extensions incentivising dead authors are relatively low.” — James Boyle
“Don’t they know the difference between composing and decomposing.” — Jennifer Jenkins
Its rather bitterly ironic, when you think about it, that in today’s time we have the technology for the mass dissemination of our shared culture and creativity, but we have legal barriers to doing so.
“Before the 19th century, musicians just needed to play, in the 19th century you also needed to be able to play and be literate. In the 20th century you needed to be an be able to play, be literate, and be a sound engineer.
In the 20th century you need to be able to play, be literate, be a techie, and be a laywer.
Is this a good progression?”
(Pirated from PPUK)
One of the of the other major issues were the two big horrible legal documents at the moment – the DEA and ACTA.
The Digital Economy Act (DEA) as the bill has now unfortunately become was a major point of discussion of the panel with the MPs. Apparently a cross party group is being formed to help seek the repeal of the bill, and some of the bills its measures do require Super Affirmative Resolutions (further consultation with the Commons, although maybe just in committee) before they can be enacted. There is also all the rhetoric around Nick Clegg’s Freedom Bill and Your Freedom website, but I still remain quite skeptical.
Also, some of the issues of the bill have gone to an OFCOM consultation which ends this coming Friday the 30th. I’m going to see how easy it is to respond to these consultations, and try to lend my voice to the discussion. I don’t know how much effect it will have, but I think as many people should try this as possible to send a very clear message.
Meanwhile, the issue with ACTA – Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement by name, but actually a treaty on “Intellectual Property” enforcement measures – is that its hard to follow exactly what is happening since the whole procedure is so secretive. Countries are deciding on issues that will strongly influence future law without any real democratic input or observance. One draft copy of the agreement was released a few weeks ago, but it is only the leaked copies that have the information on what entity is trying to add what conditions.
The interesting thing I learnt yesterday is that ACTA will make stipulations about criminal sanctions on copyright infringement. This could include things as broad as aiding and abetting infringement – which is very concerning about its possible use in squashing speech about file sharing. However, the criminal sanctions provide a weak point to attack, since some degree of proper democratic process must happen within the EU for such things to become law.
A last point about ACTA is that it is not just the text of the agreement that matters. Even if the text of it improves, it will set a precedent for agreements on other issues to be pushed through without proper democratic scrutiny.
However, despite all this, there was much optimism at the event (James Boyle had apparently hoarded some during the dot-com era). It was suggested that, people will migrate away from closed platforms such as the iPad, but such shifts will happen at a slow pace, so we may not realise it. Similarily it was said that the movie industry’s new Ultra-violet DRM standard, is simply the last gasp of DRM in an arena where it just isn’t working (people aren’t bothering buying DRMed movie downloads).
So, that concludes my little summary of the event. If you care about these issues I hope you will consider joining (if you haven’t already) the Open Rights Group, as I have done recently. They were kind enough to let me into ORGCON for free, as well as sending me a copy of Silent State. Hopefully I’ll get chance to read that soon and possibly post a review here.
--> My Triffid
I live in a flat, not a particularly exciting flat, in the centre of Manchester. It's nice enough, but a world away from what I grew up with in Glossop.
I thought getting some sort of plant might make things a bit more homely..
My new triffid:
July 24, 2010
--> Type O Negative - "I Know You're Fucking Someone Else"
Here's a list of things I'd like to do with my Nokia N900 as and when I get time...
- Find the applet that lets me do wifi tethering to 3G
- Patch the mail app to support multiple From: addresses per account
- Find / write a halfway decent Jabber client - possibly including one that lives on my server
- Install the panoramic photo app
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
thefalken showed me - Look into something that lets me upload photos as soon as they're taken, and publish them online somewhere, for demos etc.
- Pick up a memory card for the phone to experiment with Meego builds
July 23, 2010
--> Bess in the sun
It's been quite hot over the last few days...
On a quick trip back to Glossop, my dog Bess thought it was a bit too hot and flopped out on the lawn.
I got these photos on my phone...
When your fir is black, it gets hot in the sun.
--> Techrights
or no apparent reason, I rarely discuss Techrights in my personal Web site. This is not intentional. The thing is, Techrights is the reason I hardly ever update schestowitz.com anymore. I spend a high number of hours sharing my thoughts over at Techrights, so if you are already subscribed to my personal blog, please consider subscribing [...]
--> Dear Lazyweb…
I am wanting to monitor what processes perform IO on a couple of files. Unfortunately there appears to be a big lack of ability to do this under Linux.
There’s inotify which I can use to watch the files and see when IN_OPEN and IN_ACCESS (read) events occur, but inotify doesn’t tell me who (PID) did them.
There’s debugfs which I can use to monitor the open operations (do_sys_open) but not the read events, so I can see who opens it, but not how often or how much they read.
Is there any way to join this all up, and get the info I want, or is Linux not currently capable of that level of tracing?
Yours frustratedly,
Daniel.
Update: SystemTap was a nice idea, but it needs a custom kernel. I need this to work on “stock” kernels ideally.
July 22, 2010
--> Some London Photos (July 2010)
--> Barcamp Blackpool video
A few weeks back I went to Barcamp Blackpool which was pretty awesome.
Rick Quick made a video of it with a slightly embarrassing few clips of me it.
Shout out to Keri Sholicar for the awesome T-shirt design!
Big thanks to Gemma Cameron for putting the leg work in to make it happen. I know what it's like - it's certainly not easy - but Gemma pulled it off - Well Done! :)
July 21, 2010
--> Back From London
I still need to sort out the many photos and upload them at some stage.
July 20, 2010
--> Nine Inch Nails - "We're In This Together"
greyeyedeve and I were thinking of going to see Inception either Wednesday or Thursday evening, either at a city-centre cinema or down at Parrs Wood. Who's interested in coming along, and when / where works best for people?
July 18, 2010
--> Open Source Enterprise Community
Recently been thinking, that if there is one thing that Open Source Community do really well is collaboration, and building community. Something that very few ‘Enterprise’ places do really well.
Considering why can’t an Enterprise do that, why can’t they? Is the question I am asking.
If I was starting a Open Source Project outside of work, I would be working the online community, frequenting IRC Channels, Mailing Lists, and Blogs of related projects. Announcing my new project and gathering a team around that.
Things like that just don’t seem to happen in Enterprise, sure there are no IRC Channels, or Mailing Lists. I guess the equivalent are teams, both support and project specific. To but in on those would be difficult.
Why can’t we do it?
July 16, 2010
--> FAO: Lib Dem Free Software people
I suspect this will be relevant to rodneyorpheus and maulkin among others...
The Federal Policy Committee is setting up a Policy Working Group on these issues, to be chaired by Dr Julian Huppert MP.I've already applied; I'm hoping I can get people to start talking about free software and the freedoms that go with it, why DRM hinders innovation without stopping piracy and why software patents should be outlawed across Europe.
The working group will review all aspects of policy on IT and the internet. It will be necessary to give significant attention to intellectual property issues, with particular attention to their application to the digital economy.
The group will take forward the issues raised by the conference motion Freedom, Creativity and the Internet adopted by the Spring Conference 2010.
Party members interested in joining the group should contact Debbie Enever on d.enever@libdems.org.uk for more details. The final deadline for applications is 6 August 2010.
--> Sleepy
My insomnia's not gotten any better, so I've started taking sleeping pills. They're helping in that I'm now sleeping for about 10 hours a night instead of 5, but they're not helping me feel rested yet. Still, I suspect it'll take me a long while to catch up. On the plus side, these don't seem to be giving me night terrors and sleep paralysis like the last ones I took, about 8 years ago.
I'm still not getting to bed before midnight, which means I'm not getting up until about 10/11am. I'm taking advantage of my newfound work flexibility to work from home today, which is saving me a bit of time and energy on the commute and means I can stop work slightly earlier having achieved more.