Consilience

And my email configuration addiction continues. As you may recall, I did an extensive (now out-dated) post about my email setup. I’m still using the basic configuration outlined there (all of the same programs) just some of my settings have changed a little. I tend to make little changes every now and then which I think will save me a tiny amount of time wet-ware processing my email. Below I outline how I am making the transition to new machines/installs easier for my email setup.

Restore Config Files

With the purchase of a new laptop, I have to re-setup my email’s (and other applications’) configuration. Luckily, I keep all of my configuration files in version control which is synced between 3 computers; my old laptop, my desktop, and my webserver (for mostly backup purposes, but also for imapfilter). All I had to do was run the following very basic commands:

mkdir src
cd src
bzr branch greg@my.server.net:/home/greg/src/dotfiles .
bzr branch greg@my.server.net:/home/greg/src/scripts .
cd scripts
./restore_email_apps.sh
./restore_symlinks_desktop.sh

The first 5 things are pretty self-explanatory: make a directory called “src,” go in there, then create 2 branches of the bzr repos for dotfiles and scripts.

Then, lets run two of the scripts in ~/src/scripts/.

restore_email_apps.sh is really just an easy way for me to remember which applications I use for email and its supported functions. The contents of that shell script is merely:
sudo aptitude install mutt-patched offlineimap msmtp abook
Yep, thats it.

The restore_symlinks_desktop.sh file is a little more involved. Basically, since I keep all of my dotfiles in a bzr repo called ~/src/dotfiles I need to tell the associated applications where to find those files. Well, I don’t really tell the applications, I trick them. I create symbolic links from where they are expecting the file to where I actually keep it. This is a common trick for these types of setups. In fact, if you didn’t want to use a traditional version control system to handle the versioning/syncing between computers you could store your dotfiles in your Ubuntu One folder and then they will be synced automatically. So, restore_symlinks_desktop.sh goes and creates all of those symlinks for me.

offlineimap

Now, you may have noticed that I use offlineimap with my email system. I won’t go into all of the benefits of offlineimap here, but the main ones that I enjoy are: local really fast storage of my mail (vs online) and brain-less email backups (its already backed up already).

However, using offlineimap creates one speed bump in this email setup; you need to redownload all of your email again, which, if you are like me and don’t delete anything (just put it in an Archive folder) then this can take a long time depending on your mail server. And, if you use gmail’s servers, they can lock you out of IMAP access if you download too much. Luckily, offlineimap is pretty robust and allows you to get around that problem fairly easily.

Note: I have only done this with offlineimap using the MailDir format so I don’t know what would be different for the other formats. Also, I haven’t seen any other guides like this online which is A) why I wrote this out and B) makes me wonder if this is bad for some reason [I did this over 5 days ago and haven't lost any email yet].

Anyway, here is what I did:

1) copy my .maildb folder from one computer which had a recent sync to my new laptop using a local LAN. I did this using rsync so it would compress during transit, because even at 10 megs a second, 6 gigs is a lot to transfer.
rsync -e 'ssh -ax' -auhvz --progress greg@192.168.1.102:/home/greg/.maildb/ /home/greg/.maildb/

2) rename the MailDir format email files to reflect the new computer’s hostname. The files look like this:
1264133355_0.24102.alexandria,U=3422,FMD5=e727b00944f81e1d0a95c12886ac4641:2,S
That “alexandria” part is the hostname of my desktop. So, I need to change that to “zen” so it looks like this:
1264133355_0.24102.zen,U=3422,FMD5=e727b00944f81e1d0a95c12886ac4641:2,S
But I need to do that for ALL of my email. find and xargs to the rescue!
find . -name '*' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rename -v 's/alexandria/zen/'

3) setup offlineimap; ie: install and configure your email accounts. This is already done for me by running those two scripts above. Note: Make sure your ~/.offlineimap folder is empty (ie: don’t copy it over from your old computer).

3b) A big change from my last email setup is that I am now checking one of my mail account (grossmeier.net) over ssh. Basically, offlineimap ssh’s to the server, then runs an imap server (in my case, rimap). I followed the instructions set out here: http://eagain.net/blog/2007/02/09/imap-over-ssh.html (changing the pertinent parts about the imap service on the server, of course).

4) run offlineimap. You should see it SCREAM through your email archive as it adds the metadata to its .offlineimap folder from the local maildir you just copied to the machine.

There ya go. Now when you get a new machine and you use offlineimap to sync your email you don’t need to re-download all of your email again.

I finally broke down and purchased a new laptop.

My old trusty companion was a System76 Darter Ultra (revision 2). It was a great little machine with a 12.1″ screen, as much processor and RAM (4gig after purchase) as I need, and Ubuntu pre-installed. I can’t say enough about the people at System76; a small company out of Denver, Colorado where you know pretty much the whole company by first name. Carl is the owner; Tom is the guy answering your support questions; Erik is in charge of sales; and one of their daughters or nieces helps stuff envelopes on the weekends. I’m sure there are more people involved, but those three people I have had personal communication with via email and/or phone and every time it was great.

Why am I telling you how much I love System76? Because I feel bad not sticking with them for my latest purchase. I now have a Lenovo X200s. Another 12.1″ screen machine that is really light and works great.

Why did I switch my supplier? Honestly, because I wanted a machine that had a little better structural build quality (my Darter was a MSI barebones and started having structural issues near its 3rd year of life) and the X200s is just a little “better” (lighter and higher resolution).

So far, everything is working great out of the box*! The best part is I had a 160gig Intel SSD waiting to be put in it when it arrived. As soon as I replaced the harddrive I installed Lucid using a USB flash drive which was extremely quick. What that means is I never booted the original drive and thus never even saw the Windows 7 logo. :)

This machine, with the SSD drive, simply just screams. Best upgrade investment I ever made.

Action pics:

writing this blog post at my work office:

* The only thing not working correctly is two finger scrolling using the nipple and third mouse button (there is no trackpad). I tried the adding the hal quirk identified here, but it didn’t work. Haven’t messed with it too much, really.

Release Party Time!

Thats right, the Michigan LoCo Team will be hosting our biannual Ubuntu Release Party on April 25th in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The venue of choice is The Corner Brewery as it provides ample seating and ability to move tables around to have bigger groups. Plus, if you know where to sit there are power outlets!

And you know the Michigan LoCo can throw a party, we even had people come up from OHIO last time because they knew our party was better. I wouldn’t be surprised if this year we even had people from CHICAGO make the drive over. I don’t even see Ohio or Chicago on the list of Release Parties yet.

Important Details:
What: Jaunty Release Party!
Where: Corner Brewery
When: 7pm – ???
Why: Because Ubuntu is awesome! Because we’re awesome! Right on.
How: Need a ride? Join the mailing list.

Be sure to check out what other teams are having parties on the nice JauntyReleaseParties wiki page.

Hope to see you there!

There is a great event coming up at the University of Michigan, sponsored and coordinated by a great team of librarians: Open Access Week 2009.

Molly Kleinman, one of those great librarians, puts it into context for us:

I’m struck by how timely these events are, and how much we could conceivably do under the umbrella of discussing open access and the future of scholarship. … The confluence of circumstances nationally has made this the perfect moment to discuss what’s wrong with existing modes of academic publishing, and to start getting aggressive about making change.

You really should read the rest of Molly’s post for a wonderful explanation of why the current scholarly publishing system is failing for everyone except the Elseviers of the world.

Along with presentations focused on faculty and scholarly publishing models, there is also going to be a talk by my current boss, Nathan Yergler, CTO of Creative Commons. Nathan will be talking about the impact of Creative Commons (CC) licenses on Open Access, what challenges still exist for Open Access, and what the Creative Commons is doing to build and support an ecosystem of openness. Everyone is welcome to join this event, and all the events during Open Access Week. For the details about Nathan’s talk, check out the announcement on the OPEN:Michigan blog.

If you are in the South East Michigan area and are interested in what Michigan is doing to promote Open Access and make it really work, come by for any of the events; there should be a wide enough range to accommodate most interests.

I’ve been triaging bugs for Ubuntu for a while and I have always wanted an easy way for bug reporters to give me all the relevant information that is needed to help with finding out the problem. The way I usually did this was to add copy/paste-able requests to the Debugging Procedures Ubuntu wiki page. This was a pain for a few reasons: sometimes those copy/paste segments weren’t there and I had to add them and it also necessitated I have those wiki pages open (and wasting valuable tab-space in Firefox).

But now, thanks to the work of Matin Pitt, you no longer need to do anything as complicated! If the package already has some Apport Hooks then all you need the bug reporter to do is to run the command: “apport-collect 12345″ (substituting 12345 with the bug number in question, obviously).

apport-collect will then go find all the open tasks for that bug (just in case it is assigned to more than one package), run all of the apport-hooks for those packages, and attach that information to the bug report. It does all of this with out any other interaction with the reporter. To see which packages already have apport hooks available for them, see the Apport wiki page. Now, we all need to start adding more apport hooks so this is even more useful.

Be sure to check out Martin’s original announcement on the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list.

First, a review of a neat new tool that provides a cool function for many academics:

GPeerReview is a very simple Open Source tool that lets you write a review of a work, embed a hash of the work in your review, and sign that review with your digital signature (using your GPG key). The last two things are pretty neat. The hash allows you to be sure that people know which version of a paper you reviewed. Or at least, they will know if the version they have matches the version you had. This would be useful in the case where major changes are made to the paper that contradict your review.

Then, signing your review so that the author (and their publisher/advisor/dean/what have you) knows it is actually from you is pretty neat, and an obvious use of gpg. In fact, GPeerReview is essentially just a wrapper around the GnuPG command-line tool (see the FAQ).

I think this is a pretty interesting tool that could have some great uses, especially if we integrate it with the work-flow of academics (somehow). Step one of that implementation would be to move it from the CLI to some sort of Word/OpenOffice.org plugin. Or, even better, would be to provide a web-based service for this.

Crazy Idea
Launchpad for Scholarly Articles and GPeerReview

Going back to my crazy idea of a Launchpad for Scholarly Articles: basically a service that provides users the ability to link published articles, whether open access or not, with pre-prints or author deposited versions in Institutional Repositories. The killer feature of this service would be to provide a way for people who DON’T have access to the expensive scholarly journals a way to read and be informed via the pre-prints written by the authors that are not restricted by the overzealous journal publishers.

Then, add on the ability for readers of those articles to make comments on and provide useful reviews of the material. Even adding this ability to places like arxiv.org would be great; it provides a mechanism to build community. And as we all know, the community is what makes any service an important resource for people. Without community the service is just a collection of tools.

But, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know all of the various web-based services out there for scholarly communication; maybe someone has already implemented something like this. Leave a comment if you know of anything out there like this.

So, I’ve spent a little over a week setting up my new email consumption/creation system. As you can see from the title of this blog post, there are a few parts to it. Why would I do something crazy like edit config files for 4 different apps JUST to read and write email? Well, I wasn’t happy with Thunderbird (yes, I’ll try 3.0 when it hits the repos) and Evolution wasn’t at all what I wanted. I do have gmail so why not just stick with the web interface? Because I am wanting to do more self-hosted solutions for web apps. Also, since I have more than one account, I want different messages to be sorted different and archived differently.

In Thunderbird I had an extension that allowed me to press “y” and the current message would be “archived” to the gmail All Mail folder. This was great, but it only supported one account. If I was reading my work email in Thunderbird (which is also hosted by gmail) and I hit “y” the message would go to my personal gmail account’s All Mail folder, not the work account one. Not good (and a dumb limitation).

So, what email program allows you to have complete control over those types of settings? Mutt. And yes, (Al)pine also. But, I have friends local to me who use mutt so exchanging .muttrc files and such is easier and we can meet in person to share tips.

What I want to do with this blog post, though, is not convince you that Mutt is the best solution for you. I do want to, however, share what I did to set everything up for use with Mutt. In fact, all the rest of the pieces of this setup can work equally well with some like Alpine or even Thunderbird.

(since it is a long post, I didn’t want to spam your reader, click for the rest of it)
More… »

So, a part of being a domain-owning, server-space-using, web-software-running, open-source-promoting person one needs to periodically update software to latest versions and change software to meet ever changing situations and goals.

In short: I’ve made some changes around here that hopefully you have not noticed[0].

First – I finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 (yes, a bit late).  What caused me to take so long? I wanted to change my installation method to using svn so I can just “svn sw” when  a new version is released. In doing so I ran into a minor permissions issue that was preventing me from completing the switch over, but thanks to my buddy (and sysadmin) Asheesh, all is better now. Do you want to have easy upgrades of wordpress via svn, check out this guide. It is a bit wordy and I never have liked their banner, but it outlines things in language for everyone.

Second – Blog Spam. Or more correctly BlogSpam. Since I do try to use Open Source solutions for my all of my needs (see my post on TinyTinyRSS) the use of Akismet was a little, well, sad. But, thanks to an Autonomo.us blog post I found out about BlogSpam.net (I love straight forward software names).

Basically it is a drop-in replacement for Akismet but it is Open Source and even complies with the Open Software Service Definition. So if you are looking to remove one more piece of proprietary software from your webpresence, check out BlogSpam.net. And for those of you who use Drupal there is even a BlogSpam.net plugin for that: check out the plugins page.

[0] – I had a minor hickup that most likely lasted from Jan 16th 3am to 3pm EST. During the re-install process I failed to copy back my .htaccess and thus none of the post were showing up since I use “pretty urls.” Sorry if you were trying to reach a post and couldn’t.

I am now safely back from the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View after a long week of planning the next 6 months for Ubuntu.

As I said in an identi.ca message: “I am just now realizing how crazy this past week was. You don’t notice it when you are in the middle.”

But now that I am back and able to reflect on what happened I have this to say: WOW! I am really excited about what will be happening in Jaunty and beyond. I am sure that because this was my first UDS I am, on average, more excited than some. It is always inspiring to be in groups of highly productive and intelligent people all working towards the same (or similar) goals. Now that I have this inspiration it is time to see what I can do with it.

First: My personal/work project (I work for Creative Commons): Content producing/playing applications should be “license aware.” WHAT? By that I mean that applications that play media (songs, videos, images) could display the license for the currently playing item. A good example is Banshee. There could be an additional column that shows which license a song is licensed under. Words don’t describe it well, how about a picture:

The really cool part about the above image is that Gabriel Burt added that functionality after the discussion on Monday at UDS about this very topic. He saw my dent that it was being discussed and decided to code it up for Banshee. It apparently only took him 40 minutes (!) to do it. Gabriel is a rock star, pure and simple.

Gabriel also wrote all of the license detection code himself, which he didn’t need to. Creative Commons provides a LGPL licensed library (liblicense) that can read and write license metadata for a variety of file formats (ogg, mp3, pdf, jpg, png, mov, etc). But, Gabriel would have needed to write Mono bindings for liblicense as it is written in C and only has python and ruby bindings right now.

Second: The Jams that various LoCos have been putting on are always a winner. Whenever you get a group of people together who want to learn something new with each other good things tend to happen. The Michigan Team has done Packaging Jams and Bug Jams. There are even thoughts of expanding the idea to other activities (Answer Jams, Translation Jams [wouldn't work too well for US State teams], and such).

Third: Now that we are getting good at putting on events like Jams and release parties we should let others know how we do it! The various LoCo teams are going to start producing some Best Practices when it comes to hosting events and such. Basically, we want every team to know how Mr. 4k and the French LoCo were able to host a release party for FOUR THOUSAND people. Granted, not every team will be able to do something like that in April, but learning how the French LoCo performed marketing would help us all.

Fourth: The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is a great opportunity for artists to get their works on MILLIONS of computers worldwide; how can we get more participation in this contest? This is one project which I will be working on with Jono. Ideas: get the news out to other venues that we didn’t get to last time (ie: ccMixter).

I think that should be enough to keep me busy for the next few months. How about you: what projects/ideas really caught your attention at UDS?

This is old news now since it happened over a week ago, however, the continued discussion of this settlement is needed and hopefully welcomed.

I have been silent on this settlement on this site due to a few reasons (full disclosure):

• I was at the Open Content Alliance’s (OCA) yearly meeting in the Presidio of San Francisco when the settlement was announced. As such, I was privy to the private discussions between members of the OCA and others. I didn’t want to say anything I learned there before they had a chance to say it themselves.
• I work with a very high level administrator at the University of Michigan Libraries. The UofM Libraries are one of the Google Book “Fully Participating Libraries” and as such have a special relationship with Google. This relationship may cause members of the UofM libraries opinions’ of this settlement to be influenced in one direction or another.
• I have a personal moral preference to the methods of the Open Content Alliance and feel that some of Google’s Terms Of Use (in the contracts signed with libraries) are less than good.
• There have been many people saying contradictory things about this settlement; everyone couldn’t be right in their analysis. Just like sunlight is the best disinfectant, time is the best producer of truth.
• The settlement is one-hundred and forty-one (141!) pages long. This doesn’t include the fifteen (15!) attachments to the settlement. This is part of why so many were making false claims, they just didn’t get to the part that explained what would happen in the situation they were talking about.
• Plus, I was going to be giving a presentation on the Google Library Project for my class on Intellectual Property and Information Law (PubPol 688/SI 519). I decided to wait until after the presentation to post my views. I could have posted a draft of my presentation before to see what sorts of comments I would receive but to be honest, I wasn’t thinking that far in the future. Graduate School does that to me.

Here is the presentation I gave yesterday (2008-11-7):

(.odp, .pdf, .ppt)
Unfortunately, for you, my slides don’t contain all of the information I conveyed (because that presentation style sucks). Fortunately, for the students in the class, my slides didn’t contain all of the information I conveyed.

You will notice that my presentation takes a very hard look at the Settlement; I’m not one to see something like this and think it is the best outcome we could have had. Yes, there are some really great things to the settlement but that doesn’t mean I can’t critique the parts that are bad.

A quick example of one of the really great things the Settlement provides: All “Fully Participating Libraries,” libraries that have signed scanning agreements with Google and have had a sizable percentage of their libraries scanned, will have free access to the entire corpus of books Google has scanned. Not just the books that were scanned at that specific library, but the books scanned at all libraries. So, if you are a student at the University of Michigan, University of California, Stanford, or any of the libraries listed in Settlement Attachment G “Approved Libraries” you can be happy about that.

If, however, you are a student at any other university or college you won’t be as happy. Your school, unless it pays the subscription fee (not yet disclosed), will only be able to have a limited number of “terminals” that can be connected to the Google Library; a more correct term would be the Google Bookstore. Even the UofM’s own Paul Courant said this settlement will create the “Universal Bookstore;” he didn’t say “Universal Library.” But I digress….

These other libraries will have a set number of virtual terminals based on the size of their school (1 per 10,000 students or 1 per 4,000 students, depending on the type of school). These are virtual terminals because the access is restricted to a physical computer. The number of computers which have access to the service is a set number, but the computers with access could vary based on demand to any computer within the library.

Issues that I didn’t go into depth in my class presentation that are none-the-less important include:

• The effective monopoly on the materials that Google now has. Sure, others could join the game, at the $145 million price tag, but since this was a settlement not a legal decision there isn’t a lot of incentive for groups such as the OCA to go into talks with the AAP and Authors Guild.
• To continue my digression from above: the fact that this is going to be a “Universal Bookstore” not a “Universal Library” is slightly saddening.
  • I don’t have a legal reason to feel sad; the copyright holders have every right to charge for these materials. But I feel like everyone other than Google, the authors, and the publishers are being scammed. Again, not for a legal reason, but for a moral reason:
  • Libraries, through public funding, have been keeping these books safe for the last 70 years. These books, up until the day of the settlement, have had worthless to the publishers and authors. These books are out-of-print and thus all purchases of them have been paid to individuals base don the first-sale doctrine. Now, Google, through its Universal Bookstore, will sell you these books and pay the authors for them. Google will not pay the Libraries who were the ones who made this whole endeavor possible. Sure, the libraries agreed to only get the digital copies back as part of their agreements with Google, but that was before anyone had thought about this possibility. Should those contracts be renegotiated?<end_rant>
• What Happened to Fair Use?
  • This could possibly be one of my biggest critiques of this settlement: the pure fact that there is a settlement. This was a copyright infringement case brought against Google by two associations, the Associate of American Publishers and the Authors Guild. Google had a fairly good Fair Use argument and may have indeed won the case based on it. This would have been a GREAT THING (most likely). Others would have the same rights as Google as it pertains to the scanning and displaying of books.
  • Now, however, Google is a “special citizen” in this arena; they have “rights” others do not. Is that fair? No. Is that was is best for our future, and the future of libraries? No.

Hopefully I don’t sound too negative towards this settlement. Ok, lets be honest, I am pretty darn negative towards it. But hey, that is my job, at least what I see my job being. There are plenty of people out there being paid a large sum of money to tell you how good this settlement is. The ones who are out there telling you how bad it is are most likely not being paid to do so; I’m not.

If you have read this far and are still interested in this topic, you should check out what the rest of the world has been saying about this settlement. A good place to start would be TechDirt’s opinion on the matter. And, the Open Access News blog has posts that summarize others’ opinions in four parts (1, 2, 3, and 4).

EDIT:
Full Disclosure (thanks to Jon for reminding me): I am employed by Creative Commons and through that work have been involved with the OpenLibrary Project. Also, I am employed by Paul Courant, the Dean of Libraries for the University of Michigan. As thus, there may been some conflicting influences on my opinions. I am in a special dual position.