Oblomovka

2003-02-04»

I've had a rant building up about this for some time, but Stef's always been better at the nuclear-tipped flame than me.

We've running FaxYourMp.com for two years now, always in the expectation that Parliament would eventually introduce their own system for making representatives more easy to contact. Not only has that not happened - they've now started filtering constituency mails. Their obscenity filter has caught constitutent mails about the upcoming Sexual Offences Act, and a party position paper on - of course - censorship.

Stef has all the facts on faxyourmp.com, and more. It's really worth reading, both as an examination of where e-government is now, how far it has to go. And how easy it could be to get there.

One of the most heartening aspects of the service has been the letters that constituents write. Almost without exception, the letters they send MPs are reasoned, well thought out, not always perfectly spelled, but often insightful engagements in civic society. Far from the image of a disaffected and disengaged electorate, we see a mass of people who've discovered that they can effectively participate in democracy- if artificial and archaic barriers are not put in their way.

I can't be the only one who sees the irony in the fact that in the week that we celebrate 50K faxes served, the people whose job should be doing what we do for free are still trying (feebly) to raise barriers against the citizenry.

There's a dramatic mindset change that needs to happen over there, because, if you will not give us greater democracy, we will simply take it from you.

2003-02-02»

Paul Ford quotes Ullman, on coders endlessly feeling their way forward:

The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else densely unaware of himself.

The BBC News site has gathered together a panel of experts to answer questions on the Iraqi war. They're answering queries that range from straightforward but rarely answered ("Why isn't Saddam called 'Mr Hussein'?") to the slightly tougher ("Can NOT going to war be unethical?", answered by Julian Baggini, humanist moral philosopher).

Looks like WINE, the Windows non-emulator for Linux, is going to have some problems making the shift to glibc2.3. WINE has its own implementation of threads, which glibc doesn't know about. Part of the act of splicing this implementation into the old glibc involved gently pursuading the library to look in a different location for system error result codes. That hack doesn't work in the new glibc.

It looks like the solution may be to port WINE to libc threads, which is a bit terrifying. Previously, it's been out of the question, because there just wasn't a good match between pthreads system and the Windows model. A combination (I think) of the new kernel's thread implementation and improvements in pthreads itself may fix that, but it's still a big leap.

If WINE does make the move, a few other bonuses fall out of the work. Firstly, Mono, the Unix port of .NET, would be able to re-use WINE code for its graphics and UI libraries. And because WINE would no longer be bbolting strangeness onto glibc, the project would be able to use Valgrind, the open-source memory debugger for x86-Linux.

There are political ramifications also. The WINE project is in a curious configuration at the moment, with several groups keeping their own mildly forked versions (either for business reasons, or because of disagreements over licensing). They're all going to have to come together to co-operate with this - and in pretty smart order, because Redhat ships with the new glibc in a few months.

These are the kind of shifts that often utterly devastate private programming projects. They can be pretty stressful for open source endeavours too. If you are at all curious how free software copes with major logistical challenges, this would be a good project to watch.

2003-01-31»

Phil "Samuel Pepys" Gyford has re-animated an old project of his, Byliner. It keeps track of online publications like Salon, the Guardian and the NYT, and mails you when new articles appear by your favourite authors. It's a great resource - can't wait for when Phil implements RSS feeds too. The Daypop stylee most popular stories and authors page is fun.

Looks like there's a reasonable chance they would have been shredded, along with as many as 90,000 other applicants. As Robin says, how many of those INS detainees were held as a result of this, or some less deliberate bureaucratic foul-up?