Safe as Milk

The GIMP usability

Over the years, the GIMP has taken a lot of stick about its usability – there’s even a mini-fork to work around some of the most common complaints.

But fairly quietly, without any huge fanfare, Sven Neumann, the GIMP’s co-maintainer along with Mitch Natterer, has been working on making usability part of the GIMP’s DNA. First, he started working with Ellen Reitmeyer from KDE and OpenUsability, implementing techniques like paper prototyping. We brought Peter Sikking to the Libre Graphics Meeting in Lyon in March to discuss usability with the GIMP developers. And recently, we co-announced that OpenUsability would be funding work for a student on the GIMP.

In the past I’ve been critical of Sven, sometimes he can come across as abrupt, and there is no room for interpretation when he disagrees with you. But I have been very impressed with his management of the project and in particular with respect to usability, and I think that we’re going in the right direction as a community.

So – I know we don’t say it often enough – thanks Sven. Your leadership and example have kept the GIMP alive over the past few years.

Rob Levin, RIP

I have know Rob Levin through OPN and Freenode for nearly 10 years. He was committed to his vision of freenode as a place for free software projects to interract, and provided a valuable service to many projects. I know that his efforts to fundraise by broadcasting on the network annoyed some people, but so be it. Rob gave so much to the cause of free software, his influence will be felt for years.

The last thing I want to have to do on a Monday morning is read of the death of someone I knew and respected, so it was a shock to read this morning that Rob died over the weekend after being seriously injured in a road acident last week. My thoughts go out to his family. Goodbye Rob.

Common (?) use-case

Our computer is primarily a home machine – there’s myself, my wife, and now my son who use the computer regularly.

We want to keep some information (documents, bookmarks, email, saved passwords) separate, but we want to share a certain number of resources (family photos, music) across all accounts.

Ideally in this use-case, if Anne imports photos from the camera’s memory card, I should have read/write access to the photos afterwards and they should automagically appear in f-spot. Likewise, if I import tracks from a CD into my rhythmbox repository, Anne would like to have those tracks appear automatically when she starts it up.

I know this is possible with some trickiness – I add all users on the machine to the same group, and set up /home/photos, /home/music and so on to have permissions ug+rwx with the gid bit set on the directories, and then set up symlinks to the relevant directories for each user so that things Just Work, but I imagine that this kind of usage (share some stuff, don’t share other stuff, in a small household) is something that comes up quite a lot – most people probably solve the problem by just having everyone use the same account, and storing documents in different directories.

Is there a better way to solve this problem in fspot/gthumb/rhythmbox/…? A preference to let someone point to a shared repository of music/photos?

Mike Milinkovich, come on down

Mike, if you hear about this, your eclipse.org address is blocking my mail with a blacklist.

Can you mail me from an address that doesn’t use them, so that I can ask you a question, please?

Away from email (mostly)

I’m without email and internet outside work hours (and heavily restricted during work hours) for the next few days, because of some problems getting ADSL in the new apartment. Anyone who is trying to contact me, please be patient – I’ll be on emergency-only duty for the next few days.

GNOME 2.16 press coverage

Sometime today, GNOME 2.16 will be released. Since each GNOME release is newsworthy, and this one is no different, we can expect a flood of press coverage over the next few days.

I have started collecting GNOME 2.16 articles in del.icio.us with the tag gnome216. It would be great if others could do the same to help us collect a database of feedback on the release (local language articles, complementary articles, critical articles, anything) – when we get a CRM system in place, it will also allow us to collect a list of journalists writing about GNOME.

So, go forth and bookmark with impunity, your marketing team needs you. Thank you!

L’immobilier en France

Je suis un expert en très peu de choses, mais je suis souvent étonné par le ton d’expert qui est adopté par les gens quand ils parlent de l’immobilier. Et je suis également souvent étonné au nombre de français qui sont ultra-pessimiste par rapport à l’immobilier en France.

Peut être c’est parce que, en Irlande, j’ai vécu une hausse des loyers de 200% en 5 ans pendant mes années universitaires, ou une hausse continue des prix de l’immobilier résidentiel à Dublin qui dure maintenant depuis 1992, et qui ne donne pas de signes de mort, mais les gens qui disent “c’est impossible d’acheter un appart sans apport, avec une seul salaire de €35K, donc forcément la demande à l’achat, et donc les prix, vont se stabiliser et baisser” ne comprennent pas les dynamiques du marché d’immobilier.

Il y a plusieurs choses que ces gens oublient.

Un krach immobilier peut se passer que par une hausse importante des ventes forcées. Sans vente forcée, un propriétaire préfère ne pas vendre que vendre à perte.

Les banques, par moyen des prêts immobiliers, décident les conditions du marché, en décidant combien de personnes peuvent acheter et à quels prix. Les banques ont besoin de prêter de l’argent pour faire de l’argent. Donc, si les prix montent, et il y a toujours les demandeurs de prêts immobiliers, les banques prêtent de plus en plus facilement de l’argent (ce qui encourage la hausse des prix). La hausse des prêts de durée de 25 et 30 ans en France témoigne ce phénomène. Il y a 3 ans, le plupart des banques ne proposait pas de prêts immobiliers supérieurs à 20 ans. Dans l’avenir proche, les français vont aller de plus en plus vers les taux variables, la sous-location des pièces dans leur résidence, l’achat à deux, et les banques vont suivre cette tendance par besoin.

La France, en matière de prix d’immobilier, était bien moins cher que ses voisins. L’argent se déplace librement en Europe maintenant. Donc, la tendance naturel des prix est de converger. (Il suffit de voir combien d’anglais, Belges, Suisses et autres achètent maintenant les logements en France).

Les salaires vont augmenter.

Paris est cher, et de plus en plus de gens cherchent à s’installer en province, ou ils peuvent acheter bien moins cher – résultat, une hausse des prix en province.

Dans les périodes ou les marchés sont instables (comme maintenant) l’argent des investisseurs se repose dans les briques, qui donnent un retour relativement sûr. Il n’y a rien qui indique que les appartements d’investissement sont plus sur le marché maintenant.

Et dernièrement, si on paye un loyer plutôt qu’un crédit, on fait que payer le crédit de quelqu’un d’autre. Par contre, si on paye un crédit, même si c’est un peu plus cher qu’un loyer, on est en train de rembourser un emprunt de capital, c’est à dire d’économiser.

Je suis optimiste – la hausse des prix qu’on vit actuellement en France n’est pas une aberration, mais est symptomatique de plusieurs choses – les taux sont bas, les banques sont obliger de devenir moins conservateur, les gens ont plus d’argent par mois, et en générale, les gens préfèrent être propriétaire que locataire. En finale, les prix (au moins dans les villes en dehors de Paris) vont continuer de voir une hausse des prix proche des 10% par an pour encore 5 ans.

Spam stuff

The most interesting thing for me of the responses I’ve gotten to the “I am a false positive” blog entry I wrote earlier is the defense of the blacklist system by a number of people.

It seems the theory goes “your ISP is doing bad stuff that’s hurting the internet. We’re only hurting you so that you can make them stop.” That might be “not doing good stuff to help the internet” instead of actively being bad, but you get the point.

But this is a hugely flawed logic. It’s the same logic that says that economic sanctions work because the people actually affected by the sanctions, that is, the less well off, will rise up and force their government, who aren’t affected by the sanctions, to change their ways. Blocking France doesn’t hurt spammers – they have lots of zombie PCs – it hurts me.

There are lots of ways to avoid false positives – greylisting, temporary blacklists based on who is actually sending out spam, bayesian filters like bogofilter, and so on. A case study in spam filtering without blocking real mail is here – this guy gets a million spams a day, and filters 99.999% of them automatically. Now if only everyone did this at the mail server level, I could pretend like spam didn’t exist and get on with my life.

In his Hall of Shame, he includes DNS-RBLs, and has this to say about them:

Well, I don’t know why, but in practice every single DNS-RBL eventually comes under the control of power-hungry weenies. They start listing sites unreliably, and if you complain you find yourself listed. And there’s usually no way to get off the list.
…
If the lists you use have not yet descended into corruption and chaos, consider yourself temporarily lucky.

Do not use DNS-RBLs.

My life as a false positive

I feel a rant coming on.

More and more these days the email I send is bouncing back from third-party blacklist sites. Paul Graham has written about why blacklist based filters were so bad.

I am subscribed to one of the biggest ISPs in France (free.fr) at home. At work, my company is subscribed to the biggest ISP in France, Orange, formerly Wanadoo. I do not send spam from either work or home.

And yet, when I send mail to some people, it will come back with “Undelivered mail returned to sender”, with the painful message “550 receiving service provider policy blocks mail from dneary@xxxxx” in the reply.

This has happened to me so often, with so many people, that I really can’t quantify how much damage has been done. The worst part is, since email is pretty much the only way I have to communicate to these people, I can’t even let them know that they can’t receive my mail.

I have recently found out that one person I was trying to mail was behind a blacklist which was banning all email from France. That’s right, and entire country. That is antisocial behaviour of the highest order.

So, as an innocent victim in the (cue dramatic music) War on Spam, what can I do? Change ISPs? Raise my hand and say “Not I” to the blacklisters every time I get one of these? Complain to my ISPs that they aren’t doing enough to be part of the Coalition for a Spamless Web? Move out of France?

Joshorn

So Jono got shaved at LRL – and now he needs a new hackergochi.

Before the shaving, I was anticipating the event, and with my reknowned GIMP skillz, decided to see what he’d look like afterwards. So now I give you the Jono shaved hackergochi.