echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

What is it with me and music sites? First I became a disgruntled ex-emusic customer, and now I’m a refugee from thesixtyone.

How did thesixtyone fall from beginning to fulfill my music wishlist? Not long ago, James and Sam, the guys who run t61, announced that they finally understood the way forward for the site. Last week it launched, and apparently the relaunched site has had positive feedback from sites like TechCrunch. For those on the site, the people in my community, I think the biggest reaction was … WHAT … THE … FUCK?

The biggest attraction of t61, for me at least, turned out to be the community. It was great to chat to people in my group, the Beat Geeks, engage with artists, and talk to other users. On the whole, that was how I found music that I liked. And that’s exactly what I feel that the redesign took away.

This is what the Beat Geeks group page (or channel, as it’s now called) looks like now.

The background image changes, depending on what music is playing. What used to be on that page was the top five songs the group was playing and the discussion that was going on between members. Can you see the group discussion? If you click on the tiny link ‘discussion’ in the box on the bottom right, the discussion turns up in the box. That little tiny box down there is all that’s left of what was one of the most engaging things about t61.

There are other things that drive me mad about the new site. I find it terribly difficult to navigate, with all the links hidden away. The changing pictures are a distraction too; I’m here to listen to music and engage with people, not watch pseudo video clips. You can no longer browse around the site because going to a new page changes the music. And possibly worst of all from my straight user experience point of view, the new site insists on starting the music again after I’ve paused it. Finally, it doesn’t even seem possible to leave a message on an artist’s page any more. That’s not a step towards bringing fans and artists together.

I don’t feel angry at Sam and James, as I did with the dishonest money-grubbers at emusic, but I feel disappointed. I think they’ve made a mistake, that they’ve damaged the thing that made the site engaging and special in the first place. Of course, I may be wrong, and only time will tell, but a whole lot of people I know are abandoning the site, and feeling hurt.

Thankfully, a big bunch of those people have moved to a new place, somewhere that’s equally community driven, and growing fast. You can now find me on uvumi. Once I find my way around, I’ll probably do a write up. Let’s hope my presence doesn’t kill it.

Via Simon, I heard about the Great Australian Internat Blackout. While trying to keep up with the great disaster that Stephen Conroy has been peddling, I've also been hoping it will just go away. Well, it doesn't look like it's going to go away, and Australia might be joining China and Iran in censoring the intarwebs for their citizens.

In protest, this site will be participating in the Great Australian Internet Blackout. What does that mean? Come back sometime between 25 to 29 January to find out.

The Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste millions of dollars and won’t make anyone safer.

1. It won't protect the children
2. We will all pay for this ineffective solution
3. It sets a dangerous precedent

Along with a host of smaller goals for 2010, there are two major things I have to get done this year. In this post, I'll talk about those two goals and look back a bit as well.

Finish my PhD

Yes, this will be the year that I finish my PhD. I first enrolled in 2004, studying part time while working as an academic at RMIT's School of CS and IT. My main role at the time was the operations manager of the delivery of the African Virtual University project. Like all good roles, it was at the edge of my comfort zone when I started, and I spent a lot of time trying to do it well. In hindsight, I might have been able to delegate some of the work, but I think that was part of the learning experience.

Delivery to Africa wrapped up at the end of 2006, and I saw it as an opportunity to focus on my research, which had been terribly neglected for the three years of my enrolment. I quit my job and went full time. It took a few months to make the transition to full time study, something I hadn't done for more than a decade, and by the time I was starting to gain a bit of momentum I realised I had no faith in the direction my research was heading. Painful though it was, I ditched what I'd been doing and took a couple of big steps backwards, resulting in six months of work that won't make it into the main body my thesis.

From there I've battled with all the usual things that PhD candidates battle with; distractions, procrastination, yak shaving, family stuff, a stint back in industry, loss of motivation, what the hell is this all for anyway, et cetera. But now I'm finally within striking distance of the end, so it really must be finished this year.

That means trying to focus more, compartmentalise the worthy distractions, not spend too much time surfing engaging music sites, and writing regularly.

Establish a reliable, enjoyable source of income

And then what? I could spend a lifetime just exploring the stuff that I find interesting, working on Habari and other open source projects, but in and of itself that doesn't put food on the table. The next goal is much more nebulous. How do I turn the stuff I enjoy into an income stream?

While I'm happy to work hard and work long hours, I don't really want to go back to traditional full-time work, a 9-to-5 job. The idea makes me yawn, though I guess I'd do it if the job was awesome in other ways. I definitely don't want to go back into traditional academia. Teaching can be fun, but it can also suck up any amount of available time, and given the amount of bureaucracy that seems to be required, the chances of getting any research done as a junior academic are slim.

My ideal job would allow me to work on web stuff, interesting open source projects, particularly Habari, be engaged with people. I don't need a huge income, but flexibility is important. I don't want to be tied to a physical location, mostly because I want to be able to work from the farm when we're there and I don't want my work to tie down Rachel's job opportunities, wherever they may be.

I would like to continue to collaborate on research work, stuff related to the web and to open source, evaluating the stuff I'm working on so that other people can benefit from it and build upon it. Maybe twofish creative will be re-energised, and we can do web sites for people we like (we're doing a bit of that, but not much). Maybe I'll start another business with like-minded folk. Maybe I'll do some freelance coding. Maybe interesting projects will pop up.

Whatever shape the thing is, I have to wrangle it by the end of the year. Wish me luck (or, when I've submitted the thesis, suggest something or make me an offer).

I've been thinking about diversity in open source communities for a while now. I believe diversity of participants is a real benefit to an open source project, and I think the one community that I'm heavily involved with, Habari, is pretty open and welcoming. For example, you don't have to be a coder to have your contributions recognised in the Habari meritocracy¹.

Right now, we're in the middle of a vote as to whether Habari should adopt a community and diversity statement. Here's the statement in full.

The Habari project is built on the idea that community is more important than code. As such, we, the Habari community, are committed to making you feel welcome.

We welcome people of any ability level, age, gender, race, ethnicity, religious belief, nationality, and sexual orientation. And we welcome ponies.

Members of the community should always treat others with respect, whatever their background or involvement with the project. Everyone is expected to help maintain a welcoming environment. This means not only policing your own actions, but taking responsibility to point out and take action to stop behavior that could be harmful to the community.

Of course, you are free to disagree with opinions and beliefs held by others, but not to be disrespectful towards them because of those opinions and beliefs.

In general, people are in favour, however there have been a couple of dissenters, the gist of the dissent being that such a statement is beyond the scope of an open source project. Several people have responded that when someone does something bad, this sort of statement is a good thing to point to. Rich Bowen has recently written about how open source projects should deal with bad behaviour, and that's worth reading.

But responding to people doing bad things wasn't what prompted me to start (or at least formalise) Habari's discussion on diversity. Rather, I was acting on a feeling that a project that talks about diversity is more likely to attract diverse participants. I don't know of any formal research that supports that feeling, or even much that's informal. If you do know of any, please let me know.²

I'd like to conduct some informal research of my own.

If you're a member of a minority group or a woman (as a minority in IT and FLOSS), are you more likely to become involved in an open source project if there is an upfront statement of diversity?

1. This isn't meant to imply that people in minorities aren't coders, it's just a comparison to some other open source communities that value coding above all else. ↩
2. There has been some investigation of women in IT and FLOSS, but I haven't found anything that measures the outcomes of various approaches to encouraging diversity. ↩

If Blackboard can’t help you fix your problems, you’re out of luck, because nobody understands their code or has the right to look at it. If your Moodle vendor can’t help you, you can go to another vendor, or find another adopting school that knows how to fix the problem. You can also fix it yourself. You don’t have to, but unlike with Blackboard, you can. Likewise, if Blackboard were to go out of business (ask WebCT or ANGEL customers if this sort of thing ever happens), you wouldn’t be able to find somebody else to support and continue to develop your platform. Not true with open source support vendors.

The lack of support argument gets trotted out so often to attack open source, and it really shits me. You generally have one support option if you're using proprietary software, the vendor. With open source you have at least three types of support; fixing it yourself (by which I mean literally yourself or hiring someone to do it), paying a support company to do it, or relying on the community fix it through normal processes.

I recently submitted a patch to Weka to clean up some code formatting. Unfortunately, I didn't think testing the patch was necessary but the maintainer wrote back to tell me it had failed to apply cleanly, with many chunks failing.

I couldn't work out what the issue was. These were incredibly simple changes, changing mixtures of tabs and spaces for indent to spaces, and removing trailing whitespace (two bugbears of mine). Running patch with the verbose switch didn't tell me anything more about why it was failing.

I popped into #habari IRC, where the friendliest and most helpful people I know hang out. Luke from Squareweave suggested that patch might be confused because there were many small changes in one chunk, close together but not contiguous. Investigation showed that the whitespace changes were a red herring, and that any changes would fail. The individual changes would also apply if patched separately. So Luke was right.

To get around the problem, I reduced the context (the number of lines that surround the change) when creating the patch. This forced many of the changes into their own chunks, and the patch applied cleanly.

svn diff --diff-cmd diff -x "-C 1" > whitespace.diff

Subversion's internal diff tool doesn't allow you to change the amount of context, so I use the diff-cmd switch to use the system diff, and the x switch to pass in the necessary diff parameter.

And now the patch has been applied to Weka.

So what does it feel like to be a woman in open source? Jono Bacon, at the Community Leadership Summit on the weekend, said — addressing the guys in the room — that if you want to know what it’s like to be a woman in open source, go and get your nails done at a salon. He did this a week or so back, and when he walked into the salon he realised he was the only man there, and felt kind of out of place.

While I'm on the theme of women in open source, this is from Kirrily Robert’s post about her OSCON keynote, which inspired Rich's observation. It's well worth reading (and doing something about).

Well, apparently, when you're a woman, you have to be amazing just to get past all of the old-boys-club and macho chauvinism that pervades the entire Open Source culture.

Rich Bowen makes an astute observation about the calibre of women in open source.

A bunch of the (astoundingly awesome) electro freaks are based in Vancouver, where I was sinfully not playing shows.

What was the solution to this conundrum? It's the crowdsource age, so work out a budget and ask for donations. Well, not strictly donations, if you give money you become a shareholder and if there are profits, you profit proportionally to your stake.

I think this is so fantastic, and love the fact that thesixtyone has made it easier for Bankai to get something like this off the ground, because he's talking directly to people who love his music. This is the first time I've heard of anything like this. Does anyone know of other instances where fans have paid an artist directly to tour?

Go to the site and become a shareholder.

I'm sitting in the back seat of a taxi in Nicaragua with my beloved beside me. There are five other people in the taxi with us, three of them squashing us, holding us down in the back. A man is reaching around Rachel, jabbing me in the neck with a knife, not hard enough to break the skin but enough to leave a mark and let us know they're willing to hurt us. They're shouting, "solo money", only money, slapping us, pushing our heads back into the seat. They are managing to frighten us.

About half an hour beforehand we jumped on a bus in Granada, heading north to Masaya Market. We only had a couple of days left in Central America, and we planned to buy gifts for family and friends. The local buses have been great so far, friendly people, cheap fares, and a view of what might count as real life in Nicaragua.

A guy behind us tried to make conversation. I'll call him Limpy, since later we see he has a limp. His English is probably worse than our Spanish, which is hard to imagine, but adding in some sign language we managed to communicate a little. He told us that this bus doesn't go straight to the market, but he's going there so he'll show us the way. We were actually on a smaller "Express" bus, a big minivan, a kind we haven't taken before, so this seemed plausible.

The bus dropped us by the side of the road and we caught another, this time one of the more familiar chicken buses. This is a local bus, Limpy said, that will take us close to the market. A big, friendly woman who was already on the bus confirms it, and says she's going as well. The ticket guy couldn't change our 200 cordoba note, and Limpy paid the 5 cordoba fare for each of us. It's very little money but a kind gesture. I had the same thing happen to me when I was in Iran.

Eventually, Limpy asked the driver to stop, and Rachel and I got off with him and Friendly Woman, and a couple of other people. Apparently it's now just a short walk to the market. As we walked, Rachel had a chat with a woman who introduced herself as Helena. They walked ahead of me, and Limpy walked slightly behind me, silently. I tried to listen to Rachel and Helena's conversation.

After a short time, Limpy started excitedly saying that the four of us could share a taxi right to the market for just 5 cordobas each. We'd found some change, and tried to repay him for the bus, but he indicated he'd be happy if we just take the taxi with him. It didn't sound like a terrible idea, so he flagged down a passing taxi and the four of us got in. Driving down the road a bit further, we stopped and Friendly Woman and Knife Guy jumped on top of us and the world erupted in sound and fury.

Anyone who's done much travel would have been shaking their head for at least a couple of paragraphs. Why did we get off the buses? Why didn't we ask a bus driver or ticket guy if this was the right way to the market? Why did we trust these complete strangers? All good questions, and I've asked myself many times since. Besides the fact that there always seemed to be someone else with Limpy confirming what he said, I think we'd been lulled into a false sense of security by a safe couple of weeks in Costa Rica, and the few stops we'd had in Nicaragua; relatively safe places, San Juan del Sur, Ometepe, Granada. We simply let our guard down.

They drove up and down the highway, turning around at what felt like roundabouts, going through our stuff. Shouting, slapping, jabbing with the knife, forcing our eyes shut, a bit more shouting and slapping. Once they found our credit cards the game changed to shouting demands for our PINs. They seemed to believe me when I told them Rachel's card didn't have a PIN, it was just a credit card, so they concentrated on mine. Say it, write it, say it in Spanish, type it into a mobile phone, I suppose to make sure it was the same every time, that I wasn't lying.

Rachel was even more squashed in than me, with Helena sitting on top of her, and Limpy holding a knife at her hand, threatening to cut her if we didn't cooperate. The windows were all wound up, and it was hot. Confined spaces are never great for Rachel and, unsurprisingly, she had a panic attack. They could see something was wrong, and thankfully we knew to word for drugs from warning posters in airports, and we managed to find Rachel's drugs in her bag.

Satisfied I'd told them the right PIN, they dropped Helena off at an ATM and continued driving up and down the road. I actually hoped she'd be able to get money out, as I thought that would increase the chances of them releasing us, but when they picked her up again the shouting and slapping started again in earnest. No money. I suspect the problem was that the card was a MasterCard, which only works in one bank's ATMs, but I didn't think of that at the time. I was saying in English things along the lines of, "I swear that's the right PIN, and there's money in there." Of course, they couldn't understand me at all, but I think they believed I was earnest.

Then things quietened down. They'd given up, time up. We'd been driving up and down for less than half an hour, but it seemed much longer. Not so much slapping and shouting, but still making us close our eyes, they started to drive us down a small dirt road. We were both thinking, either they're going to let us go now, or they're going to kill us. Rachel was convinced it was the latter, I was pretty sure it was the former, and was trying to find out from Friendly Woman what was going on. I caught some of what she was saying. "Camina," I think she said, you walk. "Salida Nicaragua," leave Nicaragua. "Disculpe, nino infirme," sorry, sick baby. She then slipped Rachel enough money to get a bus back to Granada. Maybe Rachel's panic attack had helped.

They stopped the taxi and dumped us out. Of course, they took our cameras and cash, and anything else of real value. Bizarrely, in addition to the cash, they gave us back our bags and Rachel's credit card, but they kept her art materials and a bracelet made of bone Mahjong tiles that we'd bought in Shanghai.

The further away from the incident I get, the more it just seems bizarre. It's good to be alive, and when we have bad travel experiences in the future we can say, "It's not as bad as the Nicaragua Incident."