freetard.net

Dictionary lookup command for ERC

2012-06-11T00:00:00+02:00

Due to some discussion on the irc-channel about having a dictionary bot for the convinience to have dictionary definitions without having to use a web browser i quickly hacked together this simple erc-command which should give you a nice ability to spam any irc-channel with a dictionary definition.

Dependecies

For the erc-command to work you’ll need two dependencies (except a working OS and emacs)

dictionary.el
dict

For trisquel users i have included the following line which should install all dependencies needed.

sudo aptitude install dictionary-el dict

To load dictionary-el you will have to ad it to your .emacs and evaluate it

(require 'dictionary)

Code

To get the command to work you can simply put this in your .emacs and evaluate it.

;; Dictionary look up command for ERC 
(defun erc-cmd-DICT (word)
  "Looks up given words in a dictionary and sends the result to he current channel"
  (let ((definition
          (concat "Definition of "
                  (dictionary-do-search word
                                        "wn"
                                        'dictionary-read-definition))))
   (if (< (length definition) 400)
       (erc-send-message (mapconcat 'identity (split-string definition "\n") " "))
     (if (y-or-n-p "Definition is long would you like to send it anyway?")
         (erc-send-message (mapconcat 'identity (split-string definition "\n") " "))
         (message "Do you know any dictionary with more concise definitions?")))))

Usage

To use the dict command all you have to do is type /dict word in an erc buffer.

/dict word

The value of recorded music

2012-04-03T00:00:00+02:00

Below are some more of my thoughts on the continuing debate on recorded music and commodity value. I’m a traditional folk musician so I follow these debates with interest. Though I would say that we all should!

As many philosophers have noted, the only constant is change, and that includes human society.

With this post I’m sure that I’m not going to make myself popular with some people who will insist that I’m preaching “theft” and the destruction of civilisation as we know it. OK. They should probably be informed that I’m not particularly attached to the supposed greatness of much of our civilisation anyway :-P

It’s interesting that some people think that the lack of a commodity transaction devalues recorded music. That it means removing something of substance from it that devalues its state as music.

Geoff Taylor from the BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) would say that it does. He spent the whole of his speech to the 2008 BPI annual general meeting talking about the “role of the BPI in promoting the value of music”. If you read his speech you’ll see that he’s very worried about how to “monetise content streams”. At one point I thought that he was going to address the nature of innovation in art … it turned out that he just referred to (whined about) the lack of incentives to create “innovative income streams”. For him, value means income streams for the music industry.

Talk from the “music industry” is that this exchange value of digital music is something that is decent, honest and natural. It is such a natural thing that to reproduce the music yourself is a reprehensible act, an act of vandalism that destroys the true value of the music.

Except, that doesn’t quite work does it? What is the natural value of a commodity? What is value? Can you weigh it? Does it exist in any natural state? Well … no, it’s a human invention that is used to imbue things with special powers. An exchange value means that objects become measurable in terms of commerce and exchange. You can also speculate with them and have all sorts of emotional attachments to them that go way beyond their natural physical properties.

In Capital, Marx pointed out that there are essentially two things that make up the exchange value of a commodity. These are use value and the average amount of socially useful work power that is put into its manufacture … heck, am I going to try to rewrite Capital? No, sorry, read Capital. It’s brilliant and very useful in better understanding the world, and of course Marx explains all this better than I can.

The term “average amount of socially useful work power” is a long and strange phrase. As I say, looking at Capital is immensely illuminating, but in this instance we only need to realise that this element of the value of a commodity is related to the amount of work power used in its reproduction and distribution.

It was ever thus for music?

Well, no, not really. Before the 1880s there was no technology that congealed the playing of musicians into a musical rendition that could be placed upon a medium and then mass reproduced and listened to by consumers.

Music is ephemeral by nature. The note starts, exists for a while and then dies. Music only really existed in its enactment. It’s an interesting concept that advances in technology enabled the capture of that moment in time so that it can be reenacted (cheaply) at will by people who are not musicians.

It took some technological advances to do this, but, they did not invent the concept of the commodity and they were really doing nothing innovative economically. Recordings were mass manufactured on shelac, and later plastic, and sold. The unique supply source of the commodity was ensured by the technical difficulties around reproduction, but also concentrated by the development of copyright. However, the copyright issue did not really concern the consumer, it was a mechanism to protect markets in particular recordings (or any recording of particular peices of music) from other manufacturers.

Another complication and cost was in distribution. Round pieces of plastic needed to moved about and placed in the hands of consumers.

But, this is changing. For many consumers there is no need for plastic any more, and for them the distribution costs are disapearing too. What happens to the commodity value of digital files in an age when the cost of reproducing and distributing small chunks of digital information is so close to zero that it is utterly trivial? The commodity value has been lost.

Does this mean that the recorded music has become valuless? No. It still has use value. A commodity after all is a combination of use value and that phrase about socially useful work power.

Geoff Taylor from the BPI gave the opinion that music is as necessary to people as breathing. By that analogy he unwittingly and rather ironically made a valuable point. The air that we breath has no commodity value (as used in the ordinary, everyday act of breathing), but has an extremely high use value. Having no commodity value has not decreased its use value or its ubiquity.

So what happens when something loses its commodity value, but keeps its high use value and is ubiquitous? Surely markets collapse since they only operate on commodity exchange value.

We know that this has not happened yet with the recorded music market, and I think that is for various practical and cultural reasons. The practical reason being that not everybody uses computers and media playing devices to same extent. This is both in the industrialised world and considering the billions of people around the world who exist with very little computer technology. The cultural one is that there is an attachment to the ideology of the commodity. It is not surprising since commodity value is not a thing that can be measured in any natural way and is imbued by custom.

However, in the same way that rates of return on capital in different industries always move to the average, the reality of the disappearing commodity value of recorded music is making its mark and will increasingly do so.

The response from the music (and “media”) industry? We all know it. Lock em up, close it down, artificially restrict what people are allowed to do with their computers and watch them carefully.

On the internet there is a battle going on between different capitalist interests, the “music industry” and some civil rights groups. It, for instance, surfaces occasionally as part of the debate on network neutrality.

You see, companies like Google know that things have changed. They know that the commodity value of “content” has shifted and for its business interests it needs network neutrality. The likes of the music industry do not like this. They wish to clamp down on network neutrality, to be able to watch packets, reroute, prioritise or block certain types of traffic according to their business needs. They wish wide powers to monitor and close down parts of the net, to criminalise activities and more powers to control the activities of organisations like Google and ordinary internet users.

This is what it comes down to. To maintain the fictional exchange value of certain digital files over others, society needs to be reforged. Rights and privileges need to taken away from the population. This was essentially what the recent debate in the US over SOPA (Stop online piracy act) was about.

Do you really wish to live under constant surveillance in a police state so that the commodity value of digital music is maintained? Would that be a price worth paying?

My answer is no.

But, having been told that the commodity is the natural state of affairs. That it is the decent, honest and honourable state of affairs for decent, honest and honourable people; it becomes difficult to accept that it is illusory and shifting, a state of mind as much as an economic reality.

People look at these commodity transactions and imbue them with moral certitudes and some folk artists will now be cursing me. Sorry, but this changing economic reality cannot be held off by wishful thinking. You may be seeking economic security, but, honestly, do you really wish this to be enforced by a Police State? A type of enforcement that after many battles and much heartache I think will inevitably be lost in any case.

The existence of a commodity value is like Scotch mist. One moment its there and the next its gone, and it’s no use pining for it or waving your arms around wishing you could blow it back into existence.

You want to see artists being paid for their work? So do I. That is for the work that they do. However, as I wrote above, unless you really want a police surveillance state to enforce it, then you’d better come up with some other ideas.

We must realise that supporting artists and the arts has never really been the aim of the “music industry”. Its aim has always been return on capital, and the whole music recording as commodity game has merely been a means to this end. Yes, I know that there are the small labels and folk labels. But lets be honest, these are tiny, and again, do we really wish to see them throw in their lot with an industry that has never given a stuff about art over money?

Top ten GNU/Linux text editors

2011-10-08T00:00:00+02:00

I’ve seen a few “Top 10 text editors” type articles lately and thought that I’d have a go.

After a lot of thinking here are the top ten text editors ever.

GNU Emacs
GNU Emacs
GNU Emacs
GNU Emacs
GNU Emacs
GNU Emacs
GNU Emacs
GNU Emacs
GNU Emacs
Zile

What’s the matter??!!! These are the best text editors ever!

Oh, I see, what you actually wanted was a bit of real advice rather than a bad joke?

In my defence, the above list is about as useful as many of the so-called “top 10 editors” lists and more useful than most.

These lists usually purport to give you the “low down” on the best text editors, but in reality seem just to be a list of a few editors that the author might have heard of (or found in a web search) along with a sentence or two saying things like “extensible, syntax highlighting”.

Like these authors, reading the web page dedicated to a text editor is something you can do, but in the end, you need to get down and try them out.

In the GNU/Linux world most people use the GNOME or KDE desktop environments, so here is my first thought. Use the default text editors for those desktops, gedit and Kate. Well, apart from the appearances by Kwrite on some KDE desktops, but you are really better off in Kate.

This means that you can use them in your “clicky desktop system” (TM) for some occasional light text editing and they’ll run generally in the way that programmes do in those environments. By which I mean, you’ll just be able to guess at how they work according to experience in other GNOME or KDE programmes.

Though gedit and Kate start off as nice simple editors, they can also be revved up to be very capable text editors with lots of features. This is done by discovering the surprising amount of stuff hidden away in their menus and with plugins.

Really don’t want to stick a GNOME or KDE application onto your ultra-cool lightweight installation. Try Geany in that case.

If you are going to be doing a lot of text editing then I’d really, really recommend that you have a look at Emacs and VIM. Many dismiss these as archaic; often people who haven’t actually tried them or to actually learn to use them. But consider the fact that these have been used and developed over decades (yes, decades!) by people who spend large parts of their lives editing text files. They are very powerful and much easier to get started with than is often claimed. Emacs even comes with a built-in tutorial.

I well remember sessions using Kate or gedit with a mass of tabs, screen clutter, hand moving erratically back and forth to the mouse and menus whilst getting lost and bogged down in it all. I can have my moments in Emacs of course, but it really is a revelation for serious text editing.

NOTES: On GNU/Linux you do not need to download these programmes from their websites; use the package manager that comes with your GNU/Linux distribution.

You may notice that all of these are installable on Microsoft Windows (though with rather more difficulty in the case of Kate).

gedit is installable on Apple’s OSX as are GNU Emacs and VIM.

One way of starting to move over to Free Software is to gain confidence by using the same applications on your present desktop before moving to a free distribution such as Trisquel.

Skip Skype

2011-08-20T00:00:00+02:00

Suppose you went into a mobile telephone shop for a new deal. After looking you decide which call-price package to go for, then the sales person excitedly picks up a "Skip Inc" telephone and says that you really should go for this handset because you can use it to call other Skip telephones for free!

"Really? Free calls?" you say. "Oh, yes", says the sales person, "just use it on the call plan and Skip Inc won't charge you extra for calling other Skip handset users!".

"So, I'm still paying for the calls through my call plan?", you say.

The sales person gives you a puzzled look, "of course, but Skip Inc won't charge you for calls to other Skip handsets".

"What if I don't want to call a Skip user? What if I want to phone my friend who uses a another manufacturers handset?" you ask.

"Oh, no", says the sales person, "you can't do that. Skip is special, you can only call other Skip handsets".

Do you think you that you would have bought that handset? No, I thought not.

Skype Limited is a company that you may have heard of that claims to give you free voice and video calls. However, Skype uses the internet service that you already pay for but artificially restricts your connexion using their secret software.

Lets ram this point home. Skype is not a telephone network. It is Voice over IP (VOIP), a technology that has been around for a long time and runs over the Internet. "IP" stands for Internet Protocol. Skype did not invent VOIP (not even close) and there's lots of software that provides VOIP. There is no really legitimate reason that one VOIP programme cannot call another, in the way that one mobile telephone can call another over the mobile telephone network.

So, what special things does Skype offer? I mean it must be doing something right ... right?

It offers secret software. That means that absolutely no-one other than Skype Limited has any idea what it is really doing on your computer and how it is communicating. Is that really a good idea for you?
It offers lock-in. If you use Skype then your friends can only call you using Skype VOIP software. You are locking your friends and then their network of friends into Skype.
You get a lovely marketing campaign that has pushed the idea that Skype is unique and is giving you something special "for free".
Because you use Skype you can pay to use Skype's gateway to the real telephone system ... and only theirs. This is at the heart of why Skype Limited use secrets and lockin to gain customers. There are lots of gateways from the Internet to the telephone system, with other software you can choose which one you wish to use.

Is there an alternative to Skype?

Well, since Skype didn't invent VOIP I don't think we should generally talk of an "alternative to Skype". There are quite a few programmes out there, but I'll mostly mention just the one that I've used; Ekiga. On their website you can download a version that will run on MS Windows. GNU/Linux users should use the package manager for their distribution and install it in the usual way. Ekiga is provided by all the major GNU/Linux distributions. If you are on an Apple Mac system then have a look at Jitsi or XMeeting.

Ekiga, Jitsi and XMeeting are Free Software (free as is in free beer and free speech) so they do not use secret software, protocols or lockins and are developed and shared with you by communities of people who also use the software.

F-Droid - Highlighting Free Software for Mobile

2011-04-14T00:00:00+02:00

Recklessly ignoring any risk involved in feeding these freetarded flames, it”s time I produced some content!

If you have a smart phone or tablet with any freedom running through its veins (meaning it runs Android or Replicant ), then definitely check out F-Droid. The project aims to make finding free software for Android easier by only including it in its listings. You can install F-Droid the app if your device is rooted or can install non-Market apks OR you can still use it to find apps and go to whatever Market your app does include to do installation.

I”m not going to get into all the great apps(and there are many free software ones even outside F-Droid) but do yourself a favor and install Cubed (or superscript 3 as the author oddly named it) since it brings some class and easy-album-queueing to listening to music on your Android device. I was lucky enough to use F-Droid on my rooted nook color and have since loaded most of the apps I played with there on the Motorola Atrix! Somehow all this doesn”t seem that freetarded…just correct.

Installing Freetard.net's Dependencies on your Distro

2011-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

Let’s see how we can install environment dependencies of freetard.net’s Jekyll setup on specific GNU/Linux distributions.

Parabola and ArchLinux

Install needed packages:

sudo pacman -S ruby python-pygments

Trisquel

Trisquel 4.0 Taranis

The RubyGems in the Taranis repo is too old for Jekyll, so we will use a PPA that provides a newer version of RubyGems.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maco.m/ruby

However, this makes Trisquel to search for taranis binaries in the PPA which doesn’t support it. So, we will need to replace it with Ubuntu’s lucid which is binary compatible with Trisquel Taranis.

sudo sed -i s/taranis/lucid/ /etc/apt/sources.list.d/maco.m-ruby-taranis.list

Now, we just need to install everything we need:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ruby ruby-dev rubygems python-pygments

And make sure that binaries (such as jekyll) will be in our execution PATH by adding the following line to ~/.bashrc:

export PATH=/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH

Trisquel 4.5 Slaine

Install needed packages:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ruby ruby-dev rubygems python-pygments

And make sure that binaries (such as jekyll) will be in our execution PATH by adding the following line to ~/.bashrc:

export PATH=/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH

Ubuntu

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

The RubyGems in the Lucid repo is too old for Jekyll, so we will use a PPA that provides a newer version of RubyGems.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maco.m/ruby

Now, we just need to install everything we need:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ruby ruby-dev rubygems python-pygments

And make sure that binaries (such as jekyll) will be in our execution PATH by adding the following line to ~/.bashrc:

export PATH=/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and 11.04 Natty Narwhal

Install needed packages:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ruby ruby-dev rubygems python-pygments

And make sure that binaries (such as jekyll) will be in our execution PATH by adding the following line to ~/.bashrc:

export PATH=/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH

How to Replicate Freetard.net Setup Locally

2011-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

You can recreate freetard.net on your computer and try out how your post looks before publishing it.

Freetard.net is run on Jekyll. You can find freetard.net’s Jekyll configuration files here and content files here.

To be able to replicate from those files, you need to have a working Jekyll environment similar to freetard.net’s. First, make sure you have a Ruby environment installed along with developer headers and RubyGems and the Pygments Python library. Read this for some distro-specific solutions we came up with for this setup.

We need to install Jekyll itself along with the RedCloth, the Textile markup parser:

sudo gem install jekyll RedCloth

Now, we have everything ready to simply get the config and content files from their respective git repositories and run our own freetard.net instance:

git clone git@github.com:gnufs/freetard-jekyll.git
cd freetard-jekyll/
git clone git@gitorious.org:freetardnet-jekyll-content/freetardnet-jekyll-content.git

Let’s run Jekyll in server mode in the same freetard-jekyll directory:

jekyll --auto --server 4242

and browse http://localhost:4242 in a web browser. Note that, as long as jekyll command is kept running, the local instance will update itself as you add or change files.

The Register and Ubuntu Unity

2011-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

You can file this one under "rants".

I really despair at the level of the writing at the so-called top tech news sites. In this case it's The Register.

This is a review of a beta release of a GNU/Linux distribution. It's the worst ever apparently, though the metric isn't given and the author doesn't seem to understand the purpose of a beta release.

Anyhow, the writer drops an epic clanger in talking about Ubuntu's Unity desktop as a replacement for Gnome. The people commenting also don't understand that it's not, but that's more forgivable since they are not tech journalists paid to get basic stuff like this correct.

For the record, even Wikipedia gets it right. Unity runs on Gnome and is a replacement for Gnome shell which Canonical (backers of Ubuntu) don't like. We can argue about who might have the right approach to Gnome's shell, but a tech journalist ought to know the basics. We all get things wrong sometimes, but this is basic, right!

Furthermore, Unity may be the default, but it is not compulsory. The level of idiocy that it takes to think that the defaults on a GNU/Linux installation are all there is is breathtaking.

Why am I mentioning this? After all Ubuntu is not a Free Software GNU/Linux distribution. Well, it's just that it's another marker for the uphill battle that we still have even with journalists who are supposed to know what they are talking about.

How to Post on Freetard.net

2011-04-01T00:00:00+02:00

We are using a Git repository on Gitorious to push posts into this website. So, the steps to post here are as follows.

Step #1: Introduction

Join us in the #freetard channel on Freenode IRC network and introduce yourself.

Step #2: Setup

Create a user account on Gitorious.org. Add an SSH key to your account using the “Manage SSH keys” interface on your dashboard, so you can push your changes to repositories on Gitorious.

Let us know your username and we will add you to our Gitorious team. Members of this team can push their changes to Freetard.net’s content files repo. The master branch of this repo is pulled to and deployed by the Freetard.net server every 5 minutes.

Step #3: Writing

Create a clone of the repository on your computer:

git clone git@gitorious.org:freetardnet-jekyll-content/freetardnet-jekyll-content.git

Now you have an exact copy of the content files in the freetardnet-jekyll-content directory that appeared. The plan is to commit your posts to it and push it right up to Gitorious, so they appear on freetard.net. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Let’s have a look at freetardnet-jekyll-content directory. We can safely ignore the .git directory and the .gitignore file in there, as we won’t mess with them. What we care about is the posts and files directories. The posts directory obviously contains the posts committed to freetard.net. You will put your post here.

Freetard supports Markdown, Textile and HTML as markup. You can look at the files in posts to get a general idea of them. However, there are two things you should make sure you get right when adding a new post.

File name

The name of post files need to state the date and a name in YYYY-MM-DD-name format. For example, the name of this post is 2011-04-01-intro.md where the .md extension is there to indicate that it’s written in Markdown.

File beginning

Every post needs to state the layout, title and author. Here’s an example:

---
layout: post
title: How to Post to Freetard.net
author: gnufs
---

The layout value will remain the same, but you obviously need to change the title and author value. The title will automatically added to the post, so you don’t need to repeat it below. After these lines, you can start writing the body of your post.

The files directory is for files you want to put up with your post such as images or source code files. Please create a new directory in the files directory with your name to place your files in. They will appear in http://freetard.net/files/. For example, if I created a gnufs directory for my files and put a goatse.jpg in it, the url for the image will be http://freetard.net/files/gnufs/goatse.jpg.

Step #4: Publishing

So, now that you have created your post and maybe a file or two, it’s time to publish. Navigate to the freetardnet-jekyll-content directory that you cloned from Gitorious and commit your changes to the local git repository:

git add .

git commit -m 'added the intro post'

Of course, put in your explanation for your commit in the last command.

Publish with the following command:

git push origin master

If everything goes well, your post will automatically appear in freetard.net in about 5 minutes.

Addendum: Create Local Instance

Read this if you want to run a local freetard.net instance on your machine to test your post before publishing.

Plan 9 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UNIX

2011-04-01T00:00:00+02:00

I’ve been interested in Plan 9 for some time now, though never tinkered with it in a significant depth. It may not be the most practical OS for daily activities, but it always sounded like a system worth studying for all the groundbreaking concepts it introduces and eventually gets adapted by other system. But I haven’t really expected it to be so much simple in source form. After all, it’s a research system; it should be full of incomprehensible coding trickeries, right?

Okay, that was obviously a trick question. But here is what’s made me really interested in Plan 9: Having a first glance in the source code of the cat utility and comparing it with what I’m running on my computer.

apt-get source 9base coreutils && emacs 9base*/cat/cat.c coreutils*/src/cat.c

Elegance and simplicity do go hand in hand.

Now, I have a new reason to learn the ways of Plan 9.

In a great tradition

2011-04-01T00:00:00+02:00

As seems traditional I am going to mention the software that I am using to make this post. This of course risks an ever decreasing circle of posting subjects until the website eats itself.

Anyone posting here using GNU Emacs (what else would you use I ask?) should have a look at magit. In fact anyone using the Git revision system and GNU Emacs ought to give it look.

I've not used Git before, but Magit takes care of just about all of the stuff you need to do in git including staging, committing, pushing, pulling, branching, merging (you get the picture) within Emacs. There's a buffer showing new files and files that need to be committed etc. You can do operations in this buffer and even open up the files to check them.

OK, that's all, lets see whether I can manage get this onto the website now :-D.

I Don't Know Why They Hate Me So Much

2011-04-01T00:00:00+02:00

I sometimes wonder what it is that I do that makes certain people hate me so much out there…

Then I see this* and remember why.

_{*drawn by Don_S}

Introduction to the Freetard.net Community

2011-03-31T00:00:00+02:00

We are a bunch of Free Software enthusiasts who like to hang out online. You can find us on the #freetard IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

Feel free to join us.