Category: Technical

Updated “Social” contacts

Given the announcement of Google+ shutdown (for consumer accounts, which mine actually was not), I decided to take some time to clean up my own house and thought it would be good to provide an update of where and why you would find me somewhere.

First of all, you won’t find me on Google+ even during the next few months of transition: I fully deleted the account after using the Takeout interface that Google provides. I have not been using it except for a random rant here and there, or to reach some of my colleagues from the Dublin office.

If you want to follow my daily rants and figure out what I actually complain the most loudly about, you’re welcome to follow me on Twitter. Be warned that a good chunk of it might just be first-world London problems.

The Twitter feed also gets the auto-share of whatever I share on NewsBlur, which is, by the way, what I point everyone to when they keep complaining about Google Reader. Everybody: stop complaining and just feel how much better polished Samuel’s work is.

I have a Facebook account, but I have (particularly in the past couple of years), restricted it to the people I actually interact with heavily, so unless we know each other (online or in person) well enough, it’s unlikely I would accept a friend request. It’s not a matter of privacy, given that I have written about my “privacy policy”, it’s more about wanting to have a safe space I can talk with my family and friends without discussions veering towards nerd-rage.

Also, a few years ago I decided that most of my colleagues, awesome as they are, should rather stay at arms’ length. So with the exception of a handful of people who I do go out with outside the office, I do not add colleagues to Facebook. Former colleagues are more likely.

If you like receiving your news through Facebook (a negative idea for most of tech people I know, but something that the non-tech folks still widely prefer it seems), you can “like” my page, which is just a way for WordPress to be able to share the posts to Facebook (it can share to pages, but not to personal accounts, following what I already complained before about photos). The page also gets the same NewsBlur shared links as Twitter.

Talking about photos, when Facebook removed the APIs, I started focusing on posting only on Flickr. This turned out to be a bit annoying for a few of my friends, so I also set up a page for it. You’re welcome to follow it if you want to have random pictures from my trips, or squirrels, or bees.

One place where you won’t see me is Mastodon or other “distributed social networks” — the main reason for it is that I got already burnt by Identi.ca back in the days, and I’m not looking forward to have a repeat of the absolute filter bubble there, or the fact that, a few years later, all those “dents” got lost. As much as people complain how Twitter is ephemeral, I can still find my first tweet, while identi.ca just disappeared, as I see it, in the middle of nowhere.

And please stop even considering following me on Keybase please.

Passwords, password managers, and family life

Somehow, I always end up spending time writing about passwords when I even breach the subject on Twitter.

In this case, I’ve been asking around about password managers, as after many years with LastPass I want to reconsider if there is a better alternative, particularly as my needs have changed (or rather, are going to, in the not too distant future).

One of the thing that I’m looking for is a password manager that can generate diceware/xkcd-style passwords: a set of words in a certain language that are easy to say on (say) the phone, and type on systems where there is no password manager app. The reason for this is that there are a few places in which I need to be able to give the password to someone else who might not otherwise be trusted with the full password list. For instance the WiFi password for my apartment, or my mother’s house.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that. There are a number of situations where an account is not just an user. Or rather, you may want to allow h multiple users (people) to access the same account. Say for instance my energy provider’s dashboard. Or the phone provider. Or the online grocery shopping…

All of these things expect a single (billing) account, but they may rather be shared with a household than with a single individual. A few services do have a concept of a shared account, but very few do, and that makes less and less sense as the world progresses to such an everything-connected level.

I think it might be easy to figure out from the way I’ve been expressing this just above, but just to make sure not to leave “clues” rather than clear information that can be obviously be taken for public knowledge, I got to think about this because I have (finally, someone might say) found a soulmate. And while we don’t yet live together, I start to see the rough corners of these. We have not gotten to “What’s the Netflix password, again?” but I did end up changing the password to the account for Los Angeles transport card, to give her access, after setting it first with LastPass (we were visiting, and I added both of our TAP cards to the same account).

As I made clear earlier, part of this was a (minor) problem with my mother, too. But significantly less so: she never cared to have access to the power provider, phone company, and so on. Just as long as she had a copy of the invoices from time to time (which I solved by having a mailing list, which only the two of us subscribe to, as the contact address for all the services I use or used for the household in Italy).

Service providers take note: integrating with Google Drive or Dropbox so that the invoices get automatically added to a shared folder would be a lovely feature to have. And not just for households. I would love if it was easier to just have a copy of my invoices automatically added to, and indexed by, Google Drive.

But now, with a partner, it’s different. As the word implies, it’s a partnership, an equal standing. Once we will move in, we’ll share the expenses, and that means sharing the access to the accounts. Which means I don’t want to be the only one having the passwords. So I need a password manager that not only allows me to share the passwords easily, but also that allows her to use the passwords easily — which likely will translate to be able to read them off the phone, and type in a work computer’s incognito window (because she likely won’t be allowed to install the password manager on a work computer).

Which is why I’m looking for a new password manager: LastPass is actually fairly great when it comes to sharing passwords with other accounts. But it’s effectively useless when it comes to “typeable” passwords. Their “Make pronounceable” option is okay to make it easier to spell out, but I don’t want to have to use an eight-letters password to be able to type it easily, when I could just as easily use a three-words combination that is significantly stronger.

And while I could just use xkcdpass on my laptop and generate those shared passwords (which is what I did with my mother’s router), that does not really scale (it still keeps me as the gatekeeper), and it does not make the security usability for my SO. And it wouldn’t be fair to keep the password hygiene for me only.

Similarly, any solution that involves running personal infrastructure (servers, cron, git, whatever) is not an option: not only I’m increasingly not relying on it myself (I even gave up on running my own blog’s webapp!), but most of my family is not even slightly interested in figuring out how to do that. And I don’t blame the least, they have enough of their own things to care about.

If you have any suggestions for a new password manager, please do let me know. I think I may try 1Password next, if nothing else because I think Troy Hunt’s opinion is worth something, and if he backed 1Password, there has to be a reason.

Facebook, desktop apps, and photography

This is an interesting topic, particularly because I had not heard anything about it up to now, despite having many semi-pro and amateur photographer friends (I’m a wannabe). It appears that starting August 1st, Facebook will stop allowing desktop applications to upload photos to albums.

Since I have been uploading all of my Facebook albums through Lightroom, that’s quite a big deal for me. On Jeffrey Friedl’s website, there’s this note:

Warning: this plugin will likely cease to work as of August 1, 2018, because Facebook is revoking photo-upload privileges for all non-browser desktop apps like this.

As of June 2018, Adobe and I are in discussions with Facebook to see whether something might be worked out, but success is uncertain.

This is now less than a month before the deadline, and it appears there’s no update for this. Is it Facebook trying to convince people to just share all their photos as they were shot? Is it Adobe not paying attention trying to get people on their extremely-expensive Adobe CC Cloud products? (I have over 1TB of pictures shot, I can’t use their online service, it would cost me so much more in storage!) I don’t really know, but it clearly seems to be the case that my workflow is being deprecated.

Leaving aside the consideration of the impact of this on me alone, I would expect that most of the pro- and semi-pro-photographers would want to be able to upload their pictures without having to manually drag them with Facebook’s flaky interface. And it feels strange that Facebook wants to stop “owning” those photos altogether.

But there’s a bigger impact in my opinion, which should worry privacy-conscious users (as long as they don’t subscribe to the fantasy ideal of people giving up on sharing pictures): this moves erodes the strict access controls from picture publishing that defined social media up to now, for any of the users who have been relying on offline photo editing.

In my case, the vast majority of the pictures I take are actually landscapes, flowers, animals, or in general not private events. There’s the odd conference or con I bring my camera to (or should I say used to bring it to), or a birthday party or other celebration. Right now, I have been uploading all the non-people pictures as public (and copied to Flickr), and everything that involves people as friends-only (and only rarely uploaded to Flickr with “only me” access). Once the changes go into effect, I lose the ability to make simple access control decisions.

Indeed, if I was to upload the content to Flickr and use friends-only limited access, very few people would be able to see any of the pictures: Flickr has lost all of its pretension to be a social media platform once Yahoo stopped being relevant. And I doubt that the acquisition of SmugMug will change that part, as it would be just a matter of duplicating a social graph that Facebook already has. So I’m fairly sure a very common solution to that is going to be to make the photos public, and maybe the account not discoverable. After all who might be mining the Web for unlisted accounts of vulnerable people? (That’s sarcasm if it wasn’t clear.)

In my case it’s just going to be a matter of not bringing my camera to private events anymore. Not the end of the world, since I’m already not particularly good at portrait photography, and not my particular area of interest. But I do think that there’s going to be quite a bit of problems in the future.

And if you think this is not going to be a big deal at all, because most parties have pictures uploaded by people directly on their mobile phones… I disagree. Weddings, christenings, cons, sport matches, all these events usually have their share of professional photographers, and all these events need to have a way to share the output with not only the people who hired them, but also the friends of those, like the invitees at a wedding.

And I expect that for many professionals, it’s going to be a matter of finding a new service to upload the data to. Mark my words, as I expect we’ll find that there will be, in the future, leaks of wedding pictures used to dox notable people. And those will be due to insecure, or badly-secured, photo sharing websites, meant to replace Facebook after this change in terms.

Amazon, Project Gutenberg, and Italian Literature

This post starts in the strangest of places. The other night, my mother was complaining how few free Italian books are available on the Kindle Store.

Turns out, a friend of the family, who also has a Kindle, has been enjoying reading free English older books on hers. As my mother does not speak or read English, she’d been complaining that the same is not possible in Italian.

The books she’s referring to are older books, the copyright of which expired, and that are available on Project Gutenberg. Indeed, the selection of Italian books on that site is fairly limited, and it is something that I have indeed been sadden about before.

What has Project Gutenberg to do with Kindle? Well, Amazon appears to collect books from Project Gutenberg, convert them to Kindle’s native format, and “sell” them on the Kindle Store. I say “sell” because for the most part, these are available at $0.00, and are thus available for free.

While there is no reference to Project Gutenberg on their store pages, there’s usually a note on the book:

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Another important point is that (again, for the most part), the original language editions are also available! This is how I started reading Jules Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours while trying to brush up my French to workable levels.

Having these works available on the Kindle Store, free of both direct cost and delivery charge, is in my opinion a great step to distribute knowledge and culture. As my nephews (blood-related and otherwise) start reaching reading age, I’m sure that what I will give them as presents is going to be Kindle readers, because between having access to this wide range of free books, and the embedded touch-on dictionary, they feel like something I’d have thoroughly enjoyed using when I was a kid myself.

Unfortunately, this is not all roses. the Kindle Store still georestrict some books, so from my Kindle Store (which is set in the US), I cannot download Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in Italian (though I can download the translation for free, or buy for $0.99 a non-Project Gutenberg version of the original Italian text). And of course there is the problem of coverage for the various languages.

Italian, as I said, appears to be a pretty bad one when it comes to coverage. If I look at Luigi Pirandello’s books there are only seven entries, one of which is in English, and another one being a duplicate. Compare this with the actual list of his works and you can see that it’s very lacking. And since Pirandello died in 1936, his works are already in the public domain.

Since I have not actually being active with Project Gutenberg, I only have second hand knowledge of why this type of problem happens. One of the thing I remember having been told about this, is that most of the books you buy in Italian stores are either annotated editions, or updated for modern Italian, which causes their copyright to be extended do the death of the editor, annotator or translator.

This lack of access to Italian literature is a big bother, and quite a bit of a showstopper to giving a Kindle to my Italian “nephews”. I really wish I could find a way to fix the problem, whether it is by technical or political means.

On the political side, one could expect that, with the focus on culture of the previous Italian government, and the focus of the current government on the free-as-in-beer options, it would be easy to convince them to release all of the Italian literature that is in the public domain for free. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t even know where to start to ask them to do that.

On the technical side, maybe it is well due time that I spend a significant amount of time on my now seven years old project of extracting a copy of the data from the data files of Zanichelli’s Italian literature software (likely developed at least in part with public funds).

The software was developed for Windows 3.1 and can’t be run on any modern computer. I should probably send the ISOs of it to the Internet Archive, and they may be able to keep it running there on DosBox with a real copy of Windows 3.1, since Wine appears to not support the 16-bit OLE interfaces that the software depends on.

If you wonder what would be a neat thing for Microsoft to release as open-source, I would probably suggest the whole Windows 3.1 source code would be a starting point. If nothing else, with the right license it would be possible to replace the half-complete 16-bit DLLs of Wine with official, or nearly-official copies.

I guess it’s time to learn more about Windows 3.1 in my “copious spare time” (h/t Charles Stross), and start digging into this. Maybe Ryan’s 2ine might help, as OS/2 and Windows 3.1 are closer than the latter is to modern Windows.

We need Free Software Co-operatives, but we probably won’t get any

The recent GitHub craze that got a number of Free Software fundamentalists to hurry away from GitHub towards other hosting solutions.

Whether it was GitLab (a fairly natural choice given the nature of the two services), BitBucket, or SourceForge (which is trying to rebuild a reputation as a Free Software friendly hosting company), there are a number of options of new SaaS providers.

At the same time, a number of projects have been boasting (and maybe a bit too smugly, in my opinion) that they self-host their own GitLab or similar software, and suggested other projects to do the same to be “really free”.

A lot of the discourse appears to be missing nuance on the compromises that using SaaS hosting providers, self-hosting for communities and self-hosting for single projects, and so I thought I would gather my thoughts around this in one single post.

First of all, you probably remember my thoughts on self-hosting in general. Any solution that involves self-hosting will require a significant amount of ongoing work. You need to make sure your services keep working, and keep safe and secure. Particularly for FLOSS source code hosting, it’s of primary importance that the integrity and safety of the source code is maintained.

As I already said in the previous post, this style of hosting works well for projects that have a community, in which one or more dedicated people can look after the services. And in particular for bigger communities, such as KDE, GNOME, FreeDesktop, and so on, this is a very effective way to keep stewardship of code and community.

But for one-person projects, such as unpaper or glucometerutils, self-hosting would be quite bad. Even for xine with a single person maintaining just site+bugzilla it got fairly bad. I’m trying to convince the remaining active maintainers to migrate this to VideoLAN, which is now probably the biggest Free Software multimedia project and community.

This is not a new problem. Indeed, before people rushed in to GitHub (or Gitorious), they rushed in to other services that provided similar integrated environments. When I became a FLOSS developer, the biggest of them was SourceForge — which, as I noted earlier, was recently bought by a company trying to rebuild its reputation after a significant loss of trust. These environments don’t only include SCM services, but also issue (bug) trackers, contact email and so on so forth.

Using one of these services is always a compromise: not only they require an account on each service to be able to interact with them, but they also have a level of lock-in, simply because of the nature of URLs. Indeed, as I wrote last year, just going through my old blog posts to identify those referencing dead links had reminded me of just how many project hosting services shut down, sometimes dragging along (Berlios) and sometimes abruptly (RubyForge).

This is a problem that does not only involve services provided by for-profit companies. Sunsite, RubyForge and Berlios didn’t really have companies behind, and that last one is probably one of the closest things to a Free Software co-operative that I’ve seen outside of FSF and friends.

There is of course Savannah, FSF’s own Forge-lookalike system. Unfortunately for one reason or another it has always lagged behind the featureset (particularly around security) of other project management SaaS. My personal guess is that it is due to the political nature of hosting any project over on FSF’s infrastructure, even outside of the GNU project.

So what we need would be a politically-neutral, project-agnostic hosting platform that is a co-operative effort. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening any time soon. The main problem is that project hosting is expensive, whether you use dedicated servers or cloud providers. And it takes full time people to work as system administrators to keep it running smoothly and security. You need professionals, too — or you may end up like lkml.org being down when its one maintainer goes on vacation and something happens.

While there are projects that receive enough donations that they would be able to sustain these costs (see KDE, GNOME, VideoLAN), I’d be skeptical that there would be an unfocused co-operative that would be able to take care of this. Particularly if it does not restrict creation of new projects and repositories, as that requires particular attention to abuse, and to make good guidelines of which content is welcome and which one isn’t.

If you think that that’s an easy task, consider that even SourceForge, with their review process, that used to take a significant amount of time, managed to let joke projects use their service and run on their credentials.

A few years ago, I would have said that SFLC, SFC and SPI would be the right actors to set up something like this. Nowadays? Given their infights I don’t expect them being any useful.

Can you run a brick and mortar store on Free Software?

I have written before about the CRM I wrote for a pizzeria and I am happy to see that even FSFE started looking into Free Software for SME. I also noted the needs for teams to develop healthy projects. Today I want to give an example of why I think these things are not as easy as most people expect them to be, and how many different moving parts exist that are required to align to make Free Software for SME.

As I’m no longer self-employed, and I have no intention of going back to be a MSP in my lifetime, what I’m writing here is more of a set of “homework pointers” if a community of SME-targeted Free Software projects would be formed.

I decided to focus in my thoughts on the need of a brink and mortar store (or high street store if you prefer), mostly because it has a subset of the requirements that I could think of, compared to a restaurant like the pizza place I actually worked with.

These notes are also probably a lot more scattered and incomplete than I would like, because I have only worked retail for a short while, between high school and the two miserable week of university, nearly fifteen years ago, in a bookstore to be precise.

For most of the people who have not worked retail, it might seem like the most important piece of software/hardware for a store is the till, because that is what they interact with most of the time. While the till systems (also called POS) are fairly important, as those are in direct contact with the customer, they are only the tip of the iceberg.

But let’s start with the POS: whether you plan on integrating them directly with a credit card terminal or not, right now there are a number of integrated hardware/software solution for these, that include a touchscreen to input the receipt components and a (usually thermal) printer for the receipts to be printed on, while sometimes allowing the client to be emailed the receipt instead. As far as I know, there’s no Free Software system for this. I do see an increasing number of Clover tills in Europe, and Square in the United States (but these are not the only ones).

The till software is more complicated than one would think, because in addition to the effects that the customers can see (select line items, print receipt, eventually take payment), it has to be able to keep track of the cash flow, whether it is in form of actual cash, or in the form of card payments. Knowing the cash flow is a requisite for any business, as without that information you cannot plan your budgets.

In bigger operations, this would feed into a dedicated ERP system, which would often include an inventory management software — because you need to know how much stock you have and how fast it is moving, to know when to order new stock.

There is also the need to handle invoices, which usually don’t get printed by the till (you don’t want an invoice printed on thermal paper, particularly in countries like Italy, where you’re meant to keep the original of an invoice for over ten years).

And then there is the filing of payable invoices and, well, their payment. This is part of the accounting procedures, and I know of very few systems that allow integration with a bank to the point of automating this part. PSD2 is meant to require financial institutions to provide APIs to make this possible, at least in Europe, but that has been barely received yet, and we’ll have to see what the solution will be.

Different industries have different expected standards, too. When I worked in the bookstore, there was a standard piece of software that was used to consult the online stock of books from various depots, which was required to handle orders of books for people looking for something that was not in the store. While Amazon and other online services have for the most part removed the need for many to custom order books in a store, I know still a few people who do so, simply to make sure the bookstore stays up. And I assume that very similar, yet different, software and systems exist for most other fields of endeavour, such as computer components, watches, and shoes.

Depending on the size of the store, and the amount of employees, and in general the hours of operation, there may also be need for a roster management software, so that the different workers have fair (and legal) shifts, while still being able to manage days off. I don’t know how well solutions like Workday work for small realities, but in general I feel this is likely going to be one area in which Free Software won’t make an easy dent: following all the possible legal frameworks to actually be compliant with the law is the kind of work that requires a full-time staff of people, and unless something changes drastically, I don’t expect any FLOSS project to keep up with that.

You can say that this post is not giving any answer and is just adding more questions. And that’s the case, actually. I don’t have the time or energy of working on this myself, and my job does not involve working with retailers, or even developing user-focused software. I wanted to write this as a starting point of a project if someone is interested in doing so.

In particular, I think that this would be prime territory for a multi-disciplinary university project, starting from asking questions to store owners of their need, and understanding the whole user journey. Which seems to be something that FSFE is now looking into fostering, which I’m very happy about.

Please, help the answer to the question “Can you run a brink and mortar store on Free Software?” be Yes!

Two words about my personal policy on GitHub

I was not planning on posting on the blog until next week, trying to stick on a weekly schedule, but today’s announcement of Microsoft acquiring GitHub is forcing my hand a bit.

So, Microsoft is acquiring GitHub, and a number of Open Source developers are losing their mind, in all possible ways. A significant proportion of comments on this that I have seen on my social media is sounding doomsday, as if this spells the end of GitHub, because Microsoft is going to ruin it all for them.

Myself, I think that if it spells the end of anything, is the end of the one-stop-shop to work on any project out there, not because of anything Microsoft did or is going to do, but because a number of developers are now leaving the platform in protest (protest of what? One company buying another?)

Most likely, it’ll be the fundamentalists that will drop their projects away to GitHub. And depending on what they decide to do with their projects, it might even not show on anybody’s radar. A lot of people are pushing for GitLab, which is both an open-core self-hosted platform, and a PaaS offering.

That is not bad. Self-hosted GitLab instances already exist for VideoLAN and GNOME. Big, strong communities are in my opinion in the perfect position to dedicate people to support core infrastructure to make open source software development easier. In particular because it’s easier for a community of dozens, if not hundreds of people, to find dedicated people to work on it. For one-person projects, that’s overhead, distracting, and destructive as well, as fragmenting into micro-instances will cause pain to fork projects — and at the same time, allowing any user who just registered to fork the code in any instance is prone to abuse and a recipe for disaster…

But this is all going to be a topic for another time. Let me try to go back to my personal opinions on the matter (to be perfectly clear that these are not the opinions of my employer and yadda yadda).

As of today, what we know is that Microsoft acquired GitHub, and they are putting Nat Friedman of Xamarin fame (the company that stood behind the Mono project after Novell) in charge of it. This choice makes me particularly optimistic about the future, because Nat’s a good guy and I have the utmost respect for him.

This means I have no intention to move any of my public repositories away from GitHub, except if doing so would bring a substantial advantage. For instance, if there was a strong community built around medical devices software, I would consider moving glucometerutils. But this is not the case right now.

And because I still root most of my projects around my own domain, if I did move that, the canonical URL would still be valid. This is a scheme I devised after getting tired of fixing up where unieject ended up with.

Microsoft has not done anything wrong with GitHub yet. I will give them the benefit of the doubt, and not rush out of the door. It would and will be different if they were to change their policies.

Rob’s point is valid, and it would be a disgrace if various governments would push Microsoft to a corner requiring it to purge content that the smaller, independent GitHub would have left alone. But unless that happens, we’re debating hypothetical at the same level of “If I was elected supreme leader of Italy”.

So, as of today, 2018-06-04, I have no intention of moving any of my repositories to other services. I’ll also use a link to this blog with no accompanying comment to anyone who will suggest I should do so without any benefit for my projects.

The importance of teams, and teamwork

Today, on Twitter, I have received a reply with a phrase that, in its own sake and without connecting back with the original topic of the thread, I found significant of the dread I feel with working as a developer, particularly in many opensource communities nowadays.

Most things don’t work the way I think they work. That’s why I’m a programmer, so I can make them work the way I think they should work.

I’m not going to link back to the tweet, or name the author of the phrase. This is not about them in particular, and more about the feeling expressed in this phrase, which I would have agreed with many years ago, but now feels so much off key.

What I feel now is that programmers don’t make things work the way they think they should. And this is not intended as a nod to the various jokes about how bad programming actually is, given APIs and constraints. This is about something that becomes clear when you spend your time trying to change the world, or make a living alone (by running your own company): everybody needs help, in the form of a team.

A lone programmer may be able to write a whole operating system (cough Emacs), but that does not make it a success in and by itself. If you plan on changing the world, and possibly changing it for the better, you need a team that includes not only programmers, but experts in quite a lot of different things.

Whether it is a Free Software project, or a commercial product, if you want to have users, you need to know what they want — and a programmer is not always the most suitable person to go through user stories. Hands up all of us who have, at one point or another, facepalmed at an acquaintance taking a screenshot of a web page to paste it into Word, and tried to teach them how to print the page to PDF. While changing workflows so that they make sense may sound the easiest solution to most tech people, that’s not what people who are trying to just do their job care about. Particularly not if you’re trying to sell them (literally or figuratively) a new product.

And similarly to what users want to do, you need to know what the users need to do. While effectively all of Free Software comes with no warranty attached, even for it (and most definitely for commercial products), it’s important to consider the legal framework the software has to be used on. Except for the more anarchists of the developers out there, I don’t think anyone would feel particularly interested in breaching laws for the sake of breaching them, for instance by providing a ledger product that allows “black book accounting” as an encrypted parallel file. Or, to reprise my recent example, to provide a software solution that does not comply with GDPR.

This is not just about pure software products. You may remember, from last year, the teardown of Juicero. In this case the problems appeared to step by the lack of control over the BOM. While electronics is by far not my speciality, I have heard more expert friends and colleagues cringe at seeing the spec of projects that tried to actually become mainstream, with a BOM easily twice as expensive as the minimum.

Aside here, before someone starts shouting about that. Minimising the BOM for an electronic project may not always be the main target. If it’s a DIY project, making it easier to assemble could be an objective, so choosing more bulky, more expensive parts might be warranted. Similarly if it’s being done for prototyping, using more expensive but widely available components is generally a win too. I have worked on devices that used multi-GB SSDs for a firmware less than 64MB — but asking for on-board flash for the firmware would have costed more than the extremely overprovisioned SSDs.

And in my opinion, if you want to have your own company, and are in for the long run (i.e. not with startup mentality of getting VC capital and get acquired before even shipping), you definitely need someone to follow up the business plan and the accounting.

So no, I don’t think that any one programmer, or a group of sole programmers, can change the world. There’s a lot more than writing code, to build software. And a lot more than building software, to change society.

Consider this the reason why I will plonk-file any recruitment email that is looking for “rockstars” or “ninjas”. Not that I’m looking for a new gig as I type this, but I would at least give thought if someone was looking for a software mechanic (h/t @sysadmin1138).

Comixology for Android: bad engineering, and an exemplary tale against DRM

I grew up as a huge fan of comic books. Not only Italian Disney comics, which are something in by themselves, but also of US comics from Marvel. You could say that I grew up on Spider-Man and Duck Avenger. Unfortunately actually holding physical comic books nowadays is getting harder, simply because I’m travelling all the time, and I also try to keep as little physical media as I manage to, given the constraint of space of my apartment.

Digital comics are, thus, a big incentive for me to keep reading. And in particular, a few years ago I started buying my comics from Comixology, which was later bought by Amazon. The reason why I chose this particular service over others is that it allowed me to buy, and read, through a single service, the comics from Marvel, Dark Horse, Viz and a number of independent publishers. All of this sounded good to me.

I have not been reading a lot over the past few years, but as I moved to London, I found that the tube rides have the perfect span of time to catch up on the latest Spider-Man or finish up those Dresden Files graphic novels. So at some point last year I decided to get myself a second tablet, one that is easier to bring on the Tube than my neat but massive Samsung Tab A.

While Comixology is available for the Fire Tablet (being an Amazon property), I settled for the Lenovo Tab 4 8 Plus (what a mouthful!), which is a pretty neat “stock” Android tablet. Indeed, Lenovo customization of the tablet is fairly limited, and beside some clearly broken settings in the base firmware (which insisted on setting up Hangouts as SMS app, despite the tablet not having a baseband), it works quite neatly, and it has a positively long lasting battery.

The only real problem with that device is that it has very limited storage. It’s advertised as a 16GB device, but the truth is that only about half of it is available to the user. And that’s only after effectively uninstalling most of the pre-installed apps, most of which are thankfully not marked as system apps (which means you can fully uninstall them, instead of just keeping them disabled). Indeed, the more firmware updates, the fewer apps that are marked as system apps it seems — in my tablet the only three apps currently disabled are the File Manager, Gmail and Hangouts (this is a reading device, not a communication device). I can (and should) probably disable Maps, Calendar, and Photos as well, but that’s going to be for later.

Thankfully, this is not a big problem nowadays, as Android 6 introduced adoptable storage which allows you to use an additional SD cards for storage, transparently for both the system and the apps. It can be a bit slow depending on the card and the usage you make of the device, but as a reading device it works just great.

You were able to move apps to the SD card in older Android versions too, but in those cases you would end up with non-encrypted apps that would still store their data on the device’s main storage. For those cases, a number of applications, including for instance Audible (also an Amazon offering) allow you to select an external storage device to store their data files.

When I bought the tablet, SD card and installed Comixology on it, I didn’t know much about this part of Android to be honest. Indeed, I only checked if Comixology allowed storing the comics on the SD card, and since I found that was the case, I was all happy. I had adopted the SD card though, without realizing what that actually meant, though, and that was the first problem. Because then the documentation from Comixology didn’t actually match my experience: the setting to choose the SD card for storage didn’t appear, and I contacted tech support, who kept asking me questions about the device and what I was trying to do, but provided me no solution.

Instead, I noticed that everything was alright: as I adopted the SD card before installing the app, it got automatically installed on it, and it started using the card itself for storage, which allowed me to download as many comicbooks as I wanted, and not bother me at all.

Until some time earlier this year, I couldn’t update the app anymore. It kept failing with a strange Play Store error. So I decided to uninstall and reinstall it… at which point I had no way to move it back to the SD card! They disabled the option to allow the application to be moved in their manifest, and that’s why Play Store was unable to update it.

Over a month ago I contacted Comixology tech support, telling them what was going on, assuming that this was an oversight. Instead I kept getting stubborn responses that moving the app to the SD card didn’t move the comics (wrong), or insinuating I was using a rooted device (also wrong). I still haven’t managed to get them to reintroduce the movable app, even though the Kindle app, also from Amazon, moves to the SD card just fine. Ironically, you can read comics bought on Kindle Store with the Comixology app but, for some reason, not vice-versa. If I could just use the Kindle app I wouldn’t even bother with installing the Comixology app.

Now I cancelled my Comixology Unlimited subscription, cancelled my subscription to new issues of Spider-Man, Bleach, and a few other series, and am pondering what’s the best solution to my problems. I could use non-adopted storage for the tablet if I effectively dedicate it to Comixology — unfortunately in that case I won’t be able to download Google Play Books or Kindle content to the SD card as they don’t support the external storage mode. I could just read a few issues at a time, using the ~7GB storage space that I have available on the internal storage, but that’s also fairly annoying. More likely I’ll start buying the comics from another service that has a better understanding of the Android ecosystem.

Of course the issue remains that I have a lot of content on Comixology, and just a very limited subset of comics are DRM-free. This is not strictly speaking Comixology’s fault: the publishers are the one deciding whether to DRM their content or not. But it definitely shows an issue that many publishers don’t seem to grasp: in front of technical problems like this, the consumer will have better “protection” if they would have just pirated the comics!

For the moment, I can only hope that someone reading this post happens to work for, or know someone working for, Comixology or Amazon (in the product teams — I know a number of people in the Amazon production environment, but I know they are far away from the people who would be able to fix this), and they can update the Comixology app to be able to work with modern Android, so that I can resume reading all my comics easily.

Or if Amazon feels like that, I’d be okay with them giving me a Fire tablet to use in place of the Lenovo. Though I somewhat doubt that’s something they would be happy on doing.

We Need More Practical, Business-Oriented Open Source — Case Study: The Pizzeria CRM

I’m an open source developer, because I think that open source makes for safer, better software for the whole community of users. I also think that, by making more software available to a wider audience, we improve the quality, safety and security of every user out there, and as such I will always push for more, and more open, software. This is why I support the Public Money, Public Code campaign by the FSFE for opening up the software developed explicitly for public administrations.

But there is one space that I found is quite lacking when it comes with open source: business-oriented software. The first obvious thing is the lack of good accounting software, as Jonathan has written extensively about, but there is more. When I was consulting as a roaming sysadmin (or with a more buzzwordy, and marketing-friendly term, a Managed Services Provider — MSP), a number of my customers relied heavily on nearly off-the-shelf software to actually run their business. And in at least a couple of cases, they commissioned me custom-tailored software for that.

In a lot of cases, there isn’t really a good reason not to open-source this software: while it is required to run certain businesses, it is clearly not enough to run them. And yet there are very few examples of such software in the open, and that includes from me: my customers didn’t really like the idea of releasing the software to others, even after I offered a discount on the development price.

I want to show the details of an example of one such custom software, something that, to give a name to it, would be a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager), that I built for a pizzeria in Italy. I won’t be opening the source code for it (though I wish I could do so), and I won’t be showing screenshots or provide the name of the actual place, instead referring to it as Pizza Planet.

This CRM (although the name sounds more professional than what it really was), was custom-designed to suit the work environment of the pizzeria — that is to say, I did whatever they asked me, despite it disagreeing with my sense of aesthetics and engineering. The basic idea was very simple: when a customer calls, they wanted to know who the customer was even before picking up the phone — effectively inspecting the caller ID, and connecting it with the easiest database editing facility I could write, so that they could give it a name and a freeform text box to write down addresses, notes, and preferences.

The reason why they called me to write this is that they originally bought a hardware PBX (for a single room pizzeria!) just so that a laptop could connect to it and use the Address Book functionality of the vendor. Except this functionality kept crashing, and after many weeks of back-and-forth with the headquarters in Japan, the integrator could not figure out how to get it to work.

As the pizzeria was wired with ISDN (legacy technology, heh), to be able to take at least two calls at the same time, the solution I came up with was building a simple “industrial” PC, with an ISDN line card and Asterisk, get them a standard SIP phone, and write the “CRM” so that it would initiate a SIP connection to the same Asterisk server (but never answer it). Once an inbound call arrived, it would look up if there was an entry in a simple storage layer for the phone number and display it with very large fonts, to be easily readable while around the kitchen.

As things moved and changed, a second pizzeria was opened and it required a similar setup. Except that, as ISDN are legacy technology, the provider was going to charge up to the nose for connecting a new line. Instead we decided to set up a VoIP account instead, and instead of a PC to connect the software, Asterisk ran on a server (in close proximity to the VoIP provider). And since at that point the limitation of an ISDN line on open calls is limited, the scope of the project expanded.

First of all, up to four calls could be queued, “your call is very important to us”-style. We briefly discussed allowing for reserving a spot and calling back, but at the time calls to mobile phones would still be expensive enough they wanted to avoid that. Instead the calls would get a simple message telling them to wait in line to contact the pizzeria. The CRM started showing the length of the queue (in a very clunky way), although it never showed the “next call” like the customer wanted (the relationship between the customer and the VoIP provider went South, and all of us had to end up withdrawing from the engagement).

Another feature we ended up implementing was opening hours: when call would arrive outside of the advertised opening hours, an announcement would play (recorded by a paid friend, who used to act in theatre, and thus had a good pronunciation).

I’m fairly sure that none of this would actually comply with the new GDPR requirements. At the very least, the customers should be advised that their data (phone number, address) will be saved.

But why am I talking about this in the context of Open Source software? Well, while a lot of the components used in this set up were open source, or even Free Software, it still requires a lot of integration to become usable. There’s no “turnkey pizzeria setup” — you can build up the system from components, but you need not just an integrator, you need a full developer (or development team) to make sure all the components fit together.

I honestly wish I had opensourced more of this. If I was to design this again right now, I would probably make sure that there was a direct, real-time API between Asterisk and a Web-based CRM. It would definitely make it easier to secure the data for GDPR compliance. But there is more than just that: having an actual integrated, isolated system where you can make configuration changes give the user (customer) the ability to set up things without having to know how the configuration files are structured.

To set up the Asterisk, it took me a week or two reading through documentation, books on the topic, and a significant amount of experimentation with a VoIP number and a battery of testing SIM cards at home. To make the recordings work I had to fight with converting the files to G.729 beforehand, or the playback would use a significant amount of CPU.

But these are not unknown needs. There are plenty of restaurants (who don’t have to be pizza places) out there that probably need something like this. And indeed services such as Deliveroo appear to now provide a similar all-in-one solution… which is good for restaurants in cities big enough to sustain Deliveroo, but probably not grate for the smaller restaurants in smaller cities, who probably would not have much of a chance of hiring developers to make such a system themselves.

So, rambling asides, I really wish we had more ready-to-install Open Source solutions for businesses (restaurants, hotels, … — I would like to add banks to that but I know regulatory compliance is hard). I think these would actually have a very good social impact on all those towns and cities that don’t have a critical mass of tech influence, that they come with their own collection of mobile apps, for instance.

If you’re the kind of person who complains that startups only appear to want to solve problems in San Francisco, maybe think of what problems you can solve in and around your town or city.