Safe as Milk

European parliamentary elections

Warning: politics post

Since moving to France, the only elections I get to vote in here are the European and municipal elections – so on Sunday I blew the dust off my voter card & trotted down to my local “bureau de vote” as one of the 40% of the French electorate who voted. I had a chance to think about why the European elections inspire people so little.

In the past couple of weeks, debate about European issues has been mostly absent from newspapers and TV. What little we hear is more like celeb news – “he said, she said” or “the sworn enemies unite and appear on stage together pretending they like each other”. But to me, the fundamental questions about what we expect from Europe, and how a vote for one party or another will move towards that vision, are absent.

There are a few reasons for this – the political groupings in the EU parliament are detached from the local political landscape in France. Even the major groupings like EPP, PES, the Liberals and the Greens don’t have an identity in the election camaign. There is no European platform of note. Very little appears to be spent spent on advertising. In brief, the European election appears to the public to be nothing more than a mid-term popularity contest with little impact on people.

That is not to say that the EU has no impact. But the European parliament is quite hamstrung by the European law-making process, as we saw with the vote for the EUCD: in that case, the EU parliament was unhappy with the law proposed by the commission, and proposed many amendments which improved the law, only to see the majority of these reversed by the council of ministers. When the law came back to the parliament, there were three options available: accept the law, reject it outright (requiring an absolute majority of MEPs, difficult to obtain), or reject it by a majority (by proposing amendments) and send it into a commission, made up 50% of nominees from the council of ministers and 50% from the EU parliament.

The process is weighted toward the commission (which writes the law in the first place) and the council of ministers, who have veto power at every stage, and against the parliament, due to the requirement of an absolute majority for rejection in second reading. The commission and the council of ministers are both nominated by the governments of the member countries. I would argue that because of this, they don’t represent the European population, so much as they represent a cross-section of European political parties.

On other occasions, a stand-off between the governments and the EP is possible – as with the nomination of the Barroso commission in 2004. And when people are asked their opinion on the direction of Europe, as in the first referendum on the Nice treaty in Ireland, the French and Dutch referenda on the European constitution, and now the referendum on the Lisbon treaty in Ireland, if the result doesn’t match with what is supported by the member governments, a way is found to work around the result. In the case of a small country like Ireland, a couple of special case amendments, and you rerun the referendum. For the bigger countries like France, you renegotiate the form of the agreement so that it’s a treaty, not a single document (which, by the way, makes it harder to read and understand), so that you can ratify it with a working majority in parliament.

And so Europeans are slowly but surely distancing themselves from Europe. Fringe parties and independents representing a protest vote get very good scores, like the UKIP in the UK, or NPA and (until recently) the Front National in France. The European parliament is becoming less representative of European opinion, rather than more representative. Only 4 in 10 registered voters go to the polls. I would be willing to bet that Lisbon will not pass the second time around in Ireland, plunging Europe into another institutional crisis.

These are the twin problems facing Europe: the national governments in Europe are not representing the views of their citizens, and the only representative body we have is pretty ineffectual, even when they try to do something.

The solutions in my opinion: Elect commissioners and members of the council of ministers. Create Europe-wide political parties with Europe-wide campaigns, like in the US. Let the voters know what they’re voting for in the parliament, and allow them to vote the executive branch of the European government. The path to greater voter activity in Europe is greater voter inclusion in the electoral process.

Trial by fire: distro upgrade

I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 and in the process “cleaned up” the distro using the very useful option to “make my system as close as possible to a new install” (I don’t remember if that’s the exact text, but that was the gist of it). Last night, I tried to use the printer in my office for the first time since upgrading, an Epson Stylus Office BX300F (all in one scanner/printer/copier/fax).

With 8.10, I finally got printing working – I don’t remember the details, but I do recall that I had to install pipslite and generate a new PPD file to get a working driver for the printer, which I found through the very useful OpenPrinting.org website. It’s a fairly new printer, on the market since September 2008 as far as I can tell, cheap, and part of a long-running series from Epson (the Linux driver available for download on the Epson site is dated early 2007).

Nonetheless I was reassured by OpenPrinting’s assurance that the printer and scanner “work perfectly”, and I wasn’t expecting to have to download a source package, install some development packages, and compile myself a new Ubuntu package to get it working. And then discover that there was a package available already that I just hadn’t found. But anyway, that was then…

When I upgrade my OS, I have a fairly simple expectation, that changes I have to make to the previous version to “fix” things don’t get broken post-upgrade. There are some scenarios where I can almost accept an exception – a few releases ago, I had problems with Xrandr because changes I had previously had to make to get my Intel hardware working properly were no longer necessary as X.org integrated and improved the driver – but it took me a while to figure out what was happening, and revert my Xorg config to the distro version.

Yesterday, when I had to print some documents, I got a nice error message in the properties of the printer that let me know I had a problem: “Printer requires the ‘pipslite-wrapper’ program but it is not currently installed. Please install it before using this printer.” And thus began the yak-shaving session that people could follow on twitter yesterday.

• Search in synaptic for pipslite – found – but: “Package pipslite has no available version, but exists in the database.” Gah!
• Try to find an alternative driver for the Epson installed on the system: no luck. Hit the forums.
  
• Noticed that libsane-backends-extra wasn’t installed, installed it to get the epkowa sane back-end, and “scanimage -L” as root worked (for the first time) – so went on a side-track to get the scanner working as a normal user
• Figure out what USB node the scanner is, chgrp scanner, scanning works!
• Then figure out how the group gets set on the node on plugging, found the appropriate udev rules file (/lib/udev/rules.d/40-libsane-extras), copied it to /etc/udev/rules.d, added a new line to get the scanner recognised (don’t forget to restart udev!) scanning works!
• Re-download a driver from the website linked to in OpenPrinting’s page for the printer – they have a .deb for Ubuntu 9.04! Rock!
• Install driver, error message has changed, but still no printing: “/usr/lib/cups/filter/pipslite-wrapper failed”. Forums again.
• Tried to regenerate a PPD file: pipslite-install: libltdl.so.3 not found. ls -l /usr/lib/*ltdl*: libltdl.so.7 – Bingo! The pre-built “Ubuntu” binaries don’t link to the right versions of some dependencies.
• Download the source code, compile a new .deb (dpkg-buildpackage works perfectly), install, regenerate .ppd file, (don’t forget to restart CUPS), and we have a working printer!

4 hours lost.

Someone will doubtless follow up in comments telling me how stupid I was not to [insert some “easy” way of getting the printer working] which didn’t involved downloading source code and compiling my own binary package, or fiddling about in udev to add new rules, or sullying my pristine upgrade with an unofficial package. Please do! I’m eager to learn. And perhaps someone else with the same problems will find this blog entry when they look for “Ubuntu Epson Stylus Office BX300F” and won’t have to figure things out the hard way like I did.

Please bear in mind when you do that I’m not a neophyte, that I’ve got some pretty good Google-fu, and that I’ve been using Linux for many many years – and it took me 4 hours to re-do something I’d already done once 6 months ago, and wasn’t expecting to have to do again. How much harder is it for a first timer when he buys a USB headset & mic, or printer/scanner, or webcam?

Update: After fixing the problem, I have discovered that the Gutenprint driver mentioned on the OpenPrinting page (using CUPS+Gutenprint) does work with my printer. It seems that if I had done a fresh install, rather than an upgrade, I would not have had this existing printer using a no longer installed “recommended” driver – as John Mark suggested to me on twitter, pipslite is no longer necessary. In addition, when I tested both drivers with the same image, there is a noticeable difference in the results – the gutenprint driver appears to use a higher alpha, resulting in colours being much lighter in mid-tones. The differences are quite remarkable.

Community governance links

As promised during my presentation yesterday, here are the various publications I linked to for information on evaluating community governance patterns (and anti-patterns):

• Pia Waugh: The Foundations of Openness
• Simon Phipps: The Zen of Free
• West & O’Mahoney: Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities (pdf)
• Karl Fogel: Producing Open Source Software

And, for French speakers, a bonus link (although the language is dense academic):

• François Druel: Evaluation de la valeur à l’ère du web : proposition de modèle de valorisation des projets non marchands (pdf)

Healthcare in the US

For a European travelling in the US, one of the things that jumps out at you when you turn on the TV is the number of ads for prescription drugs you get in the US.

These 30 or 60 second ads are all very similar: 5 to 10 seconds presenting the medication, followed by 20 to 25 seconds of disclaimers and disclosure of secondary effects, with a warning to consult with your physician and ask him about the drug in question.

It’s symptomatic of the approach to healthcare in the US, which says that the patient is responsible for his care – your doctor’s role is to advise you what medications are available, and let you decide what you use to medicate yourself. Thus, drug companies market their drugs directly to the public, rather than to doctors.

Like Bary Schwartz in “The Paradox of Choice” I don’t think this is a healthy state of affairs. Excessive choice creates stress, and asking someone to make a decision they are not sufficiently informed to make is asking for trouble. You might as well ask me to fix the financial crisis – it doesn’t matter how good my advisors are, I’m not equipped to make decisions in the area.

Where I live, patience go to their doctors for expert advice. The doctor decides what medication, if any, is appropriate for your condition, and gives you a prescription. Of course, it is your choice if you fill that prescription afterwards, and if you’re like me, you ask the doctor lots of questions during your visit, but the chain of responsibility is substantially different. There is no point marketing prescription medication to the general public, because the doctor is the one who decides what prescription medication you use.

Gran Canaria: Registration & call for participation open

For those who missed the next last week, the Gran Canaria Dasktop Summit website got updated last week – and with it, we opened registration for the conference. This is the organiser’s way of knowing who’s coming, and the way for attendees to reserve accommodation and request, if they need it, travel assistance.

We also concurrently opened the call for participation. Since we’re already a little late organising content this year, we’re going to have a pretty short call – please send abstracts for GNOME-related and cross-desktop content to guadec-papers at gnome.org before April 10th (midnight on the date line, I guess).

The procedure is going to be a little unusual this year because of the co-hosting of GUADEC with Akademy – a GNOME papers committee headed up by Behdad will be choosing GNOME-specific content, and a KDE equivalent will be choosing Akademy content, and we are co-ordinating on the invitation of keynote speakers and choice of cross-desktop content.

The thing that got me excited about this conference last yearn and the reason I was so enthusiastic about combining the conferences, is that cross-desktop content. The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit has the potential to be the meeting place for free software desktop application developers and platform developers, as well as embedded and mobile Linux application developers. We will have the people behind the two most popular free software development platforms coming together.

The conference is an opportunity to plan the future together for developers working on the kernel, X.org, alternative desktop environments like XFCE, application platforms like XUL, Eclipse’s SWT, desktop application developers and desktop-oriented distributions. I’m looking forward to seeing proposals for presentations from all over the mobile and desktop Linux (and Solaris) map.

So to your plumes! We’re not expecting abstracts to be works of art, but we are looking for thought to be given to your target audience and what you want them to get from your presentation. Compelling, entertaining and thought-provoking content will be preferred over “state of…” presentations, or other types of presentation better suited to blog posts. Knock yourselves out!

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

Today’s xkcd made my inner mathematician giggle.

Parse error

Coworker (n): Person who orks cows.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2009: community fundraising campaign

After the successful community fundraising campaign last year, the Libre Graphics Meeting will be back in Montreal again this year, and once again the organisers need your help to make the event a success.

In fact, this year we need your help more than ever. With the crisis/recession/slow-down/depression upon us, companies are puckering up tighter than a snare drum (to borrow a quote from the Shawshank Redemption) when asked for sponsorship this year.

Support the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

It’s true, the Libre Graphics Meeting lives on the margins of the business cases people can make right now. There are not millions to be made in appealing to graphic designers working on Linux. And yet, as a community event driving co-operation and development of creative applications on Linux, the Libre Graphics Meeting is valuable, and unique to the free software community.

We need the help of the people to whom it’s valuable to make it happen. And that’s why we’re asking the community to give what they can to support the conference. To allow us to bring people together to share ideas and hack on code. To make better Free graphics software for everyone.

List of Free Software non-profits

Michael Dexter of Linux Fund spent some time last week putting together a list of non-profit corporations which exist to support free software, free software projects, or free culture worldwide. It’s an impressive list of 68 non-profits from around the world, with varied goals and focuses, but with the common theme of wanting to improve the world through the sharing of information. He published the list on the FLOSS Foundations site, which is appropriate, since that group brings together representatives of almost all of these organisations, sharing information useful to everyone.

Some of them have, in my opinion, a more tenuous link than others to projects – such as regional satellites of the FSF for example, or the organisers of SCALE – but the list does show the breadth & depth of the domains where free software has made an impact in the past couple of decades.

Think you should have a vote?

For those of you who believe that you should have a vote, but have not yet received ballots for the Maemo community council referenda please let me know. A reminder of the criteria for eligibility: all those who have had a maemo.org account for longer than 3 months from the election end date (the account was created on or before the 23rd of November 2008), and who had 25 karma or more on Sunday evening, have a vote. That makes 600 of you.

Hopefully, there is no-one in this situation, but if you feel that you should have a ballot, please drop me a line with your maemo.org account name, and I’ll look into it.