Ciarán's free software notes

EU states to discuss Internet filtering

Mer, 08 Ott 2008 14:56:21 +0200

The French government is likely to lobby the other EU member states to support disconnecting people from the Internet without a court case. The French government first tried to convince the European Parliament (EP), but that backfired and the EP adopted a text (amendments 138, 166) stating that a judicial process should always be necessary (Sept 24th). Then Sarkozy sent a letter (Oct 3rd, page 2 paragraph 1) to the European Commission asking them to reject the EP's amendment, but the Commission has rejected Sarkozy's request (Oct 7th).

So the remaining option is for Sarkozy to convince the other EU member states to oppose the European Parliament's amendments. The EU member states form the European Council, and they have the power during the current stage of the EU legislative process. So letters will have to be sent to the relevent minister in each national government regarding this issue.

This isn't a direct threat to free software, but Sarkozy's proposal is to give control over Internet connections to the Music industry. Internet connections are important for free software users and developers, and the Music industry is practically always our opponent on legislative issues.

More information can be found at:

EUwiki.org
LaQuadrature.net
Or search the Internet (while you still have a connection) for "Telecoms package"

--

Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Links: Rockbox, GNU releases, and FFII's petition

Mar, 07 Ott 2008 01:20:56 +0200

Rockbox 3.0 is out! - I've installed it and it's working well. The default theme is nice, and radio seems to work on my iRiver H10. On the downloads page you can see what pocket music players are supported.
GIMP 2.6 is out too! The user-interface has been improved so that the toolboxes shouldn't get lost under image windows anymore, all toolboxes are dockable in the toolbox window now, and the menubar now appears in the image window(s) instead of the toolbox window.
FFII's new anti-swpat petition is still in draft, so comments should still be made
More release announcements: GnuTLS 2.6.0 and coreutils 7.0
...and Nick Clifton has started a series of blogs describing monthly changes in the GNU Toolchain (gcc, binutils, newlib and possibly gdb as well), which I hope he continues.

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

New monthly feature: Fellowship interviews

Mer, 01 Ott 2008 13:31:21 +0200

We've started a series of monthly Fellowship interviews, as many probably noticed (thanks to LWN, FSDaily, GNUvox, Linux.com, and Groklaw).

There's an RSS feed and a permanent URL:

Any Fellow of FSFE can be nominated to be interviewed. In fact, we need nominations: we don't know every Fellow, so to find good candidates, we need suggestions from you. Let me know, or send suggestions to fellowship [a] fsfeurope dot org.

--

Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

3 articles with RMS

Mer, 01 Ott 2008 00:10:26 +0200

There's a new essay on gnu.org about Avoiding Ruinous Compromises. I guess the main point is that if we want the freedoms of free software to eventually come as standard, we need people to take freedom into consideration when choosing software. Or as Stallman puts it, we need to change people's mindset, rather than looking for short-term gains by appealing to people's existing mindset.

The second is an interview looking back at 25 years of GNU. He's asked at the end if he's discouraged by the rate of progress of the free software movement, but he replies: "It's a strange thing, but at least in the area of free software, we're making progress, whereas in all other areas of human rights, the world is getting worse".

And there's one on guardian.co.uk, denouncing cloud computing. This generated quite a discussion on reddit.com. (Thanks to Matthias for hightlighting this one)

Update 2008-10-06: RMS's cloud comments have made quite a stir, getting on Linux Journal, Slashdot, Computer world, and many others.

--

Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

What organisations not to join

Mar, 23 Set 2008 15:02:32 +0200

(Post publication note: I hoped to come back and finish this, but haven't found time yet. As a software freedom lobbyist in Brussels, I'm worried by the prospect of anti-free-software corporations being able to claim to represent the free software community. Funding software development is fine, but we need to make clear that, politically, these corporations don't represent us. I'll try to explain my point further in the coming weeks. 2008-10-06)

Some organisations need your support. Others don't. Most people can guess what organisation I recommend supporting, but this blog entry is about how I rule the organisations that don't need my support.

Take an example organisation whose annual budget is about $5 million, and who gets almost 80% of it's funding from these nine companies: Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, and Oracle.

This looks like a Who's Who of pro-software patent campaigners - they're only missing Microsoft. So this consortium is working for companies that lobbied against FSFE, FFII, and all the SMEs, national organisations, and individuals who gave their time and money to keep Europe free from software patents. (I know the example organisation has some projects related to software patents, but they're not what anti-swpat organisations have asked for.)

It's also clear that almost all of them earn more money from proprietary software than they do from free software. It's safe to say that individual $50 members will never have any financial say in this consortium's work.

So who makes the decisions? The board: Larry Augustin, Alan Clark (Novell), Wim Coekaerts (Oracle), Masahiro Date (Fujitsu), Frank Fanzilli, Doug Fisher (Intel), Dan Frye (IBM), Hisashi Hashimoto (Hitachi), Randy Hergett (HP), Brian Pawlowski (NetApp), Chris Schlaeger (AMD), Tsugikazu Shibata (NEC), Mark Shuttleworth, Eric Thomas (Texas Instruments), Christy Wyatt (Motorola).

When I see this, I ask myself if there's anything that is useful for free software that could get majority support among them. They do fund useful software development, but the market value of free software has already lead corporations who don't share our values to employ thousands of free software developers.

Organisations with massive corporate funding, with motivations contrary to those of the GNU/Linux using community anyway, should be content with their millions and should not be asking individuals to dig into their own pockets.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Links: GNU, OSM, gNewSense, Bangalore

Lun, 25 Ago 2008 12:48:58 +0200

A GNU Hackers Meeting recently took place in the UK. Videos are now online, and there is a mailing list for future meetings.
How to contribute to OpenStreetMap, even if you don't have a GPS logger
gNewSense 2.1 is released
Photos of the candle light vigil against software patent, in Bangalore

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Japanese PDFs part 2: XeTeX

Gio, 14 Ago 2008 15:29:22 +0200

(Last month's article: Using LaTeX to make PDF documents with Japanese characters)

I've found a better TeX tool for making Japanese PDFs: XeTeX. Below are first the technical advantages, and then an analysis of community and sustainability.

XeTeX is a version of Tex that has been modified to use Unicode (UTF-8) encoding internally. It is also configured to work with modern font tools such as FreeType and fontconfig. With XeTeX, the minimal example from my last article becomes:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\setmainfont{Sazanami Mincho}

\begin{document}

\section{What I learned today}
I can write this 私はキランです in Japanese.

\end{document}

This is converted to a PDF with the command line tool xelatex. XeTeX has been part of the very common TeX Live bundle since TeX-Live-2007. So if LaTeX is available for your GNU/Linux distro, I'm sure TeX Live is too, and thus XeTeX. (TeX-Live-2008 will be released soon.)

(For a more complex example, see jlesson002.tex, and the output jlesson002.pdf.)

One improvement in this example is that I wrote the file in the very common UTF-8 encoding. This means I don't have to tell my applications to use the JP-EUC format that LaTeX+CJK would have required, and it means I'm less likely to have compatibility problems with other text processing tools. (This article was actually supposed to be about converting Japanese TeX to plain text, but an application's lack of support for JP-EUC encoding led me to research UTF-8 versions of TeX.)

A second improvement is that I could use the standard "article" document class. When using CJK, you can only use document classes that have been specifically written to work with CJK. There is a CJK-enabled equivalent for "article", called "scrartcl", but for some others classes, there's no equivalent that works with CJK.

Another improvement is that the font is specified in a much more readable way ("Sazanami Mincho"), and if I want to use another font, I can use this fontconfig command at the shell to find all fonts on my system that include Japanese characters:

fc-list :lang=ja

On my system, this finds six fonts. The differences between Gothic and Mincho are roughly equivalent to sans-serif and serif fonts in Western scripts.

It's hard to find a list of free Japanese fonts. It seems that many Japanese font developers have invented their own licences. Two free fonts available are Kochi and Sazanami, of which some say the latter is slightly better, but I can't see any difference. There is also a font called "UmePlus", which seems to be free, but is missing from some distributions (such as Debian) because the licence is somewhat unclear (but it looks fine to me). When I say "free", I mean it in the free software sense, e.g. that everyone can use, copy, modify, and redistribute (modified or unmodified).

Note: I set the default font to a Japanese font because my documents are wholly/mostly in Japanese. If you just wanted to add some Japanese to a mostly English document, XeTeX is still a good option, but I won't go into how to do that (it involves defining a Japanese environment and beginning the environment, entering Japanese, then ending the environment).

A last, minor technical improvement is output file size. For a one-line test file, pdflatex made a file of 19.6kb, and xelatex made one of only 7.5kb. For a more complex 1-page file (jlesson002.tex), the XeTeX output was 15.1kb, and when I converted it to LaTeX-CJK, pdflatex made a file of 65.2kb.

What about community support and sustainability?

Is it safe to move from the old reliable LaTeX+CJK package to this new XeTeX thing? Will XeTeX still have a developer community in the future? Will developers of other TeX tools take care to ensure their packages work with XeTex? What do Japanese TeX users use?

My searches suggest that Japanese TeX users are using a mix of tools. Some use pTeX, which is a version of TeX modified specifically to work with Japanese. Others use LaTeX+CJK. But there seems to be consensus that these are tools of the past and that Unicode is the future. So change is coming.

Japanese top Tex expert Haruhiko Okumura said in April 2007: "Since pTeX for Unicode is now being developed and XeTeX is acquiring pTeX-like versatility, next year I'll be using either the new pTeX or XeTeX."

The pTeX for Unicode project he's referring to is uptex. It exists, but seems to be still in alpha (early testing) stage. It isn't available in the Debian archives, but someone has made Debian uptex packages. (I haven't tested them.)

If Mr. Okumura has now adopted upTeX or XeTeX, I bet he chose XeTeX.

Next, I got really scientific. I put a few combinations of words into search engines, each time including "2008", a Japanese word, and either "uptex" or "xetex". Each time, XeTeX won by miles. So I guess Japanese people are not currently using uptex. I think XeTeX is winning the battle for Unicode TeX in Japan.

XeTeX being accepted into the TeX Live bundle is also a strong endorsement that XeTeX's future is safe, and the mainainer of LaTeX-CJK is discussing if it and XeTeX can be merged.

The only bad sign I saw about XeTeX is that the maintainer has recently resigned his job, but, he says this shouldn't affect his ability to maintain XeTeX.

Ok, so that's this month's TeX wisdom from a newbie :-) Hopefully next month's article will be about generating plain text files from the same Japanese TeX source files used for generating PDFs. Final note: I'm pretty sure all these tips work for Chinese, Korean, and other foreign characters, but I haven't tried that yet.

For more info and links about computers, free software, and Japanese, see my Learning Japanese page.

UPDATE: I just found Dave Crossland's summary of the recent 4-day TeX Users Group conference: day 1 day 2, day 3, and day 4. There are also videos of the event

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Links: translation, BSOD, Orwell, releases

Mer, 13 Ago 2008 12:26:34 +0200

The Chinese Translation Server Error shop
Microsoft Windows crashes with BSOD during Olympic opening ceremony
George Orwell's 1938 diaries being serialised as a blog
July's GNU releases, by Henrik Sandklef

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

FSFE meeting tonight in Brussels, Thurs 7th

Gio, 07 Ago 2008 13:58:33 +0200

Sorry for this short notice, but since I've just been added to the planet.grep.be blog aggregation, I decided it's worth a quick mention.

Tonight's meeting is a small, informal one at 20:00 in Café Walvis, 209 Antoine Dansaertstraat. We hope to soon launch larger meetings which will be held on Sunday afternoons every 3 months. Tonight's meetings will help set the details for that.

There's not much of a fixed agenda. We'll mostly chat about whatever the people there are interested in.

We'll also being trying the quarterly model in Ireland, starting with a joint-meeting in September on Software Freedom Day (organised by Ubuntu Ireland). Monthly pub meetings have already been working in Dublin since late 2003 (organised by IFSO on the 3rd Tuesday of each month).

Anyone interested in free software is welcome, as always. It's not limited to Fellows of FSFE.

If anyone needs details on where we are, you can email me (ciaran at fsfe dot org) or phone me on +32 477 36 44 19

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Links: FaceBook, Snooping, Consultation, Theora, Treacherous

Ven, 01 Ago 2008 14:43:05 +0200

Logged in or out, Facebook is watching you. (discussed on Slashdot)
A campaign site against "Deep Packet Inspection" - snooping by your ISP.
An EC consultation about European Interoperability Framework (EIF) - they've previously discussed removing their support for open standards and free software, so we should comment on the importance of these things.
Firefox 3.1 looks likely to include Ogg Theora support, which pleases WikiMedia since they use it as their default format.
MS Vista Sp1 won't install if you're dual-booting another operating system - it seems Microsoft has decided to use its monopoly to bully people away from trying alternatives.

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Using LaTeX to make PDF documents with Japanese characters

Mar, 15 Lug 2008 19:39:06 +0200

Even if you know nothing about LaTeX, you can make your first Japanese PDF document by taking a copy of this example file JIS.tex, going to a shell command line and typing "pdflatex JIS.tex". That should produce this output: JIS.pdf.

If that doesn't work for you, then you need to install some LaTeX software or Japanese fonts. On my Debian GNU/Linux system, I think I just installed texlive-latex-base and latex-cjk-japanese, and the package manager automatically installed the other packages needed by those two. I don't remember if I also had to install a fonts package.

Once you've got that working, you can start modifying and removing lines from that example file to see what you really need. I trimmed it down to eight lines:

\documentclass[12pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{CJK}

\begin{document}
\begin{CJK*}[dnp]{JIS}{min}

\section{What I learned today}
I can write this 私はキランです in Japanese.

\end{CJK*}
\end{document}

%%% Local Variables:
%%% coding: euc-japan

Ok ok, that's ten lines since I included two commands at the end to tell Emacs which character encoding to use when saving the file. This seems important since when I saved it as utf-8, the pdflatex program failed. Because these two lines start with percent signs, they will be ignored by LaTeX processors such as pdflatex, so it's safe to leave them there even if you're not using Emacs.

In the sixth line of my small example you should see seven mostly-simple Japanese characters. If that's not what you see, try setting your browser's character encoding to EUC-JP or maybe UTF-8. (This might be in [menu-bar]->View->Character Encoding->...)

Once you have this working, you should look at the other examples that came with the LaTeX CJK package. On my system, the examples are installed in the directory /usr/share/doc/latex-cjk-japanese/examples/ (Thanks for the tip, LUK ShunTim) This is probably also the best way to get started with other complex fonts such as Chinese and Korean.

It took me four hours to figure out how to use LaTeX to make a PDF document with Japanese characters. At one point, I became so frustrated with the LaTeX documentation that I gave up and decided to use DocBook instead. Unfortunately, DocBook's documentation was just as bad.

I think I learned something from all this about what makes a good tutorial: get the user to a working example as quickly as possible. Once you have something working, then you can experiment and learning becomes fun.

For a start, I think I'll put the "ruby" commands from JIS.tex back in since they're a pretty useful reading aid for learners. "Ruby" here refers to the little superscript phonetic kana characters, usually called furigana. It has no relation to the Ruby programming language, which was developed by a Japanese guy.

To write Japanese hirigana, katakana, and kanji, in Emacs you just use the function M-x set-input-method and then type japanese at the prompt. The usual command (C-h I) will show the documentation for how the input method works. While using the japanese input method, typing qq will put you into the japanese-ascii input method, which you'll need for typing LaTeX commands and symbols "\{}". And qq again will bring you from the japanese-ascii input method back to the normal japanese input method.

If you want to use other applications, then you'll need to install some separate input method software. I installed the packages "anthy", "scim", and "scim-canna" and then was able to write Japanese in GNOME applications by right clicking in a text box and from the "Input Methods" submenu, choosing "SCIM Input Method". It's annoying that SCIM uses Ctrl+Space as it's activation sequence. You can change this by going to "Show command menu->SCIM Setup->Global Setup" I wasn't able to get OpenOffice.org to work. From looking around, it seems OpenOffice only supports "IIIMP", but I can't see any package that provides IIIMP.

You might find useful info on these pages:

How to create Japanese language documents under GNU/Linux using LaTeX
related discussion on an Ubuntu bug forum
Inputting Japanese text in [GNU/]Linux and some BSDs
On my Learning Japanese page I've added some links about computing and Japanese and that's where I'll add more in the future.

Hope that helps!

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Links: Sean Daly, KDE, swpat, chessboxing

Mer, 09 Lug 2008 02:47:22 +0200

Groklaw now has a page of Sean Daly's interviews - I've been asking for this for a while.
Old article about privacy problems with Google's desktop software - I started looking into this because I read an article about the new version of KDE boasting that Google's desktop software could now be integrated into KDE. That's bad, not only because Google's desktop software is proprietary, but also because it gives Google complete access to your data and their privacy policy is strongly criticised by Privacy International.
Free as in Free Champagne! - Erik Josefsson notes the 3rd anniversary of our massive software patent victory in his usual style. Erik played the lead lobbying role in that campaign and must have lots of great stories to tell, so I always find his short, infrequent, casual blog entries bemusing. (I'm giving this a low-key mention since I hope to blog about it again later this week.)
Article about chess boxing - 11 rounds alternating between chess and boxing where a contestant wins by checkmate, knockout, or points.

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Links: India-pats, Clipperz, FreeGIS, RMS, Emacs

Ven, 04 Lug 2008 11:37:35 +0200

Proposed changes to India's patent approval manual, along with comments from Redhat, Microsoft, etc.
The Clipperz project's call for privacy and software freedom in webapps, including input from Stallman
FreeGIS.org - a site collecting info about free mapping/geographic data projects. I haven't had the time to poke around much, but there's a database page where you can view the projects in their database that match various criteria.
"It's not the Gates, it's the bars" - article by RMS published by BBC. [UPDATE: Ken Guest sent me a good link where Gates admits that access to source code was needed to make him the hacker he became]
Steve Yegge's Emacs tips, and Phil Sung's Emacs tips

See also: Yesterday's links - the archive of my Links posts.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

Using and writing Emacs 22 input methods

Gio, 03 Lug 2008 13:32:57 +0200

Emacs 21 had a generic function called iso-accents-mode for writing âççéntèd çhàrâçtërs, but that was removed in Emacs 22. It took me a while, but I found the replacement was to use set-input-method, and then select whichever language you want to be able to type the accented characters of.

The default keybinding for set-input-method is not very convenient (C-x RET C-\), and I almost always use the same input method, so I put this small helper function in my .emacs and bound it to an easy key sequence:

(defun ciaran-toggle-french-input-method () "toggle between French and no input method" (interactive) (if (string= current-input-method "french-alt-postfix") (set-input-method nil) (set-input-method "french-alt-postfix"))) (global-set-key [?\C-c ?.] 'ciaran-toggle-french-input-method)

Sometimes I need Dutch characters, but the "dutch" input method contains some completely unnecessary conversion sequences which make it frustrating to use. And sometimes I want the "á" character so I can write my name properly. So what do I do if I want a personalised input method?

About modifying input methods, the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual just says "How to define input methods is not yet documented in this manual". So I went to the Emacs page on sv.gnu.org, checked out a CVS copy of the emacs source, grepped around, and found that the Dutch input is defined in the file /emacs/leim/quail/latin-alt.el. Looking inside, it's not so complicated.

Here's a minimalist example of what you could put in your .emacs to create your own very basic input method:

(quail-define-package
"ciarans-chars" "MYlanguage" "MY" t
"Ciaran's personal input method defining only the
conversion sequence he wants
" nil t nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t)

(quail-define-rules
("\"a" ?ä) ;; LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS
;; remember to comment your code, if you like :-)
("\"e" ?ë) ;; LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH DIAERESIS
("a'" ?á) ;; LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE
)

For more information on those two quail-* functions, you can get help in the usual way with C-h f and then type the name of the function at the prompt. If you want to test the above code, just paste those two code snippets into an Emacs buffer and run M-x eval-last-sexp after each. Then you can select the "ciarans-chars" input method, and you can read about the input method by pressing C-h I and typing "ciarans-chars" at the prompt.

You will also see that, like with the existing input methods, when you type the first character of what could be a conversion sequence (in the above example, this is just " or 'a'), you will see in the minibuffer which characters could follow it to cause both characters to be converted into another character. So with ciarans-chars, when you type " the minibuffer will display: "[ae].

Looking at the source in /emacs/leim/quail/latin-alt.el should give you ideas for what other conversion sequences you'd use, and the other files in that directory contain the conversion code for more complex alphabets.

Me, I'll make a minimal input method for the characters I use from French, Dutch, plus the Irish a-fada "á". I filed a bug report about the current Dutch input method, but seeing how uncomplicated it is, I might be able to fix it and submit a patch now.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship

OpenStreetMap is doing great

Lun, 30 Giu 2008 14:56:44 +0200

I was impressed recently by the progress of OpenStreetMap (OSM). The maps of most big cities (in Europe at least) are already very complete, e.g. Dublin and Brussels. Many smaller cities and cities in less developed countries are still in need of work, but the current status clearly proves that the project's aims are practical.

Why is having freely reusable maps important? For one thing, they can be used by other community projects such as Wikipedia. Another advantage is that rather than trying to make it difficult to copy their data (like the corporate map providers do), the OSM website provides lots of features to export their maps. (If you want to link to an OSM map instead of exporting an image, use the "Permalink" link in the bottom right-hand corner.)

When you export an image from OSM, there's no copyright notice or attribution info (which seems like a mistake to me), so when you use OSM maps, consider adding a link or some text to tell people where you got the map from.

The current licence used for the mapping data is the Creative Commons by-sa-2.0 licence. There are constant discussions about changing the licence - not because people disagree with the ideals of that licence, but because there is debate among legal experts as to whether that licence is valid for mapping data and would work worldwide. For people intrested in that sort of thing, there's a very good summary written by Richard Fairhurst in January 2008.

To get involved, there's info on their Beginner's Guide. You might also find an existing OSM group in your area by checking the Mapping projects page on their wiki. I've recently borrowed a GPS handset, so I'm hoping to be able to post more info in the future about how it all works.

On the Event Calendar on their wiki, there's a list of upcoming events including their annual conference which will take place in Limerick, Ireland on the weekend of July 12th and 13th.

According to their software licensing policy and the FAQ, all OSM software is free software, using the GNU GPL by default.

In other news, the OpenMoko Neo Freerunner is heading for large scale production. I've heard it's far from being ready for daily use, and you should be comfortable with installing and upgrading software. So this version is mostly for hackers, but if you're interested in mobile phones powered by free software, OpenMoko is the free-est available. There's a group discount when people in one region order 10 phones. Because it has built-in GPS and all the software is free software, I'm hoping it will increase the number of OpenStreetMap contributors.

--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
Support free software: Join FSFE's Fellowship