Jonathan Riddells Diary

Time 2020-12-19 09:03:47

Web Name: Jonathan Riddells Diary

WebSite: http://jriddell.org

ID:139094

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Edinburgh tenements have stair lighting which used to be provided by the council but a few years ago they stopped doing replacements on it and now owners need to replace broken bulbs and lights themselves. Of course most landlords are self entitled people who couldn t change a light bulb if it was their job (which it is) so chances are they won t know how.OpenUK is looking for two charismatic and diligent individuals to be judges in the 2021 OpenUK Awards. After a successful first edition in 2020, OpenUK are looking to find two judges from the Community to judge the Awards with Katie Gamanji, our head Judge for 2021.You will be someone who knows at least one of the Open Source Software, Open Data or Open Hardware spaces well, enjoys engaging with the communities and wants to see good projects, people and organisations recognised, andYou will be willing to spend some time reviewing circa 100 applications and to make a fair assessment of the applications, be able to present your decision to your fellow judges and then to present during the Awards ceremony charismatically.The Judges’ work requires a dive deep into the nominations and diligent investigation of all of the applications to come to a well informed and balanced decision.Nomination form is open now if you d like to help or you can think of someone who would be suitable.The KDE release service will make another bundle of releases next month on Dec 10th. If you have an app in KDE released as part of this please add in new feature on this wiki page so we can make an announcementFor those who don t follow KDE s instagram feed, get with the programme chicos!Rohan has he first talk about graphics on Linux. Rohan is an elite Linux graphics dev.This is a reel. I m not sure what a reel is but it s a moving image on the Instagram.Greg K-H had a keynote where he said KDE does it right, keeping libraries stable is hard (KF5 now 6 years in). Evolve you App.Alexis (not to be confused with Aleix) talking about AppImage Builder, which magically works out how to make an AppImage package from your running app.Just now we are enjoying a tour of Amalfi, a comune in the province of Salerno, in the region of Campania, Italy, We are learning about the Lemons of Salerno and because it s 2020 making limonchello.The Linux App Summit runs this Thursday to Saturday. Like Akademy it s scheduled on a Hispanic friendly time which gives sessions in the European morning (08:00UTC) good for out eastern friends and sessions in the European afternoons (15:30UTC) good for our western friends.As well as updates on Snaps, Flathub and Appimage there s talks on AppStream, libcamera and very exciting is CGroups. Register now to turn up on Thursday. Viewers on Planet Ubuntu can see the videos on my original post.Akademy 2020 launched in style with this video starring moi and many other good looking contributors..We re online now, streaming onto YouTube at room 1 and room 2 or register for the event to get involved.I gave the first KDE talk of the conference talking about the KDE is All About the Apps goalAnd after the Consistency and Wayland talks we had a panel session.Talks are going on for the next three hours this European early evening.  And start again tomorrow (Sunday). KDE s annual conference starts tomorrow with a day of tutorials.  There s two days of talks at the weekend and the rest of the week with meetings and BoFs.Register now.Tomorrow European morning you can learn about QML, Debugging or speed up dev workflows.  In the evening a choice of QML, Multithreading and Implicit Bias training.Saturday morning the talks start with a Keynote at 09:00UTC and then I m up talking about the All About the Apps Goal.  There s an overview of the Wayland and Consistency goals too plus we have a panel to discuss them.Saturday early evening I m looking forward to some talks about Qt 6 updates and Integrating Hollywood Open Source with KDE Applications sounds intriguing.On Sunday European morning I m scared but excited to learn more elite C++ from Ivan, but I hear Linux is being rewritten in Rust so that s worth learning about next.  And it doesn t get much more exciting than the Wag Company tails.In the afternoon those of us who care about licences will enjoy Open Source Compliance and an early win for Kubuntu was switching to System Settings so it ll be good to get an update Behind the Scene.On Monday join us for some tutorial on getting your apps to the users with talks on Snaps, Flatpak, neon and Appimage.Mon, Tue and Wednesday has escape room puzzles.  You need to register for these in advance separately, so sign up now.There s a pub quiz on Thursday.It s going to be a fun week, and no need to travel so sign up now! The Scotland Open Source Podcast by Ashley Nicolson of Scotland OSUM is a new listen available on all the Podcast services which interviews devs and contributors in Scotland.  It s had hacker spaces in Aberdeen with FreeBSD spod Tom Jones, Ensuring longevity after unfortunate circumstances in OSS Projects with Chocolatey dude Gary Ewan Park, Greg Sutcluiffe of Red Hat and Ansible on Education and PR and most recently me chatting about Quaker geek collectives.Add it to your subscribed podcasts for more coming soon. We last heard from Fineholm and Geoffrey Mckay in a grumpy blog post from 2018 when I wrote about the incomplete unauthorised repair their had done to our communal tenement.   In the last 12 months we ve had the exact same issue with the exact same problems.  I got an e-mail last year saying they were doing repairs and we d be sent the bill.  No indication of what the repairs were or any attempt to follow the correct process of meeting with neighbours and discussing and having a vote to approve.  I asked for more details and eventually got some description but no indication they had been to look at the property or attempted to meet with anyone else.  When I went to look at the property there were still leaks in the roof and more work needing done.  Fortunately a contractor sent by Fineholm turned up at the same time so we could look together along with another owner and discuss.I did run a vote of owners along with a full description and photos of the works needed and the works were approved and done once lockdown allowed.  In completing the task that Fineholm and Geoffrey Mckay chose not to do I didn t hear anything from them.  Once the works were done and we d had a chance to look and everyone had paid up except this owner I did get an e-mail from Geoffrey saying he hadn t paid me because not everyone had paid him for his unilateral, incomplete, undocumented, unverified works done earlier.  When I said I d take him to court in a week he left it another week and paid some of the money I was due but not all.The culture here is self entitled people running a business who do not understand they are running a business and doing a job.  There is no enforcement and no regulation so they know they can get away with just ignoring their neighbours, not communicating, working illegally, not visiting the property and leaving people annoyed and out of pocket.The solution is simple enough, if landlords (and I m one of them now) can t show they have visited their property and had a look around including attic and roof every six months and discussed it with their neighbours they shouldn t be allowed on the Scottish Landlord Register and they should be blocked from running a business they are incapable of doing.  This goes for agents too, Fineholm shouldn t be allowed to agent for rented property if they are not able to visit the property and discuss works.   It probably doesn t need new legislation, just the council to use the powers they have. Four years after the referendum and with only five months to go until Brexit takes effect we are finally starting to see what the UK government is proposing that to mean.The UK gov wrote a post about it today with the petty line“That is why we continue to look for a deal with, at its core, a free trade agreement similar to the one the EU already has with Canada – that is, an agreement based on existing precedents. We remain unclear why this is so difficult for the EU, but we will continue to negotiate with this in mind. So gone is the talk of a custom red white and blue Brexit and in is the talk of copying CETA.  This means vast new bureaucracy and taking away our freedoms, something the UK gov is openly paying money and boasting about.CETA is the EU and Canada trade deal.  It has quotss on how much goods can be traded, tariffs on many of the goods and does sod all for services.  It s more generous than basic WTO rules but it s no single market.  It s not what the political declaration says which as agreed by the UK gov along with the transition withdrawal agreement last year.Our media (either from London or Scotland) doesn t usually cover the EU side when politicians put out statements, but the EU one is here and of course it lists the problems which the UK one dismisses.On two important subjects, transport and energy, we had intense and useful discussions. However, the UK continued to request single market-like benefits.In addition, there is still no progress on two essential topics of our economic partnership.First, there must be robust guarantees for a level playing field – including on State aid and standards – to ensure open and fair competition among our businesses, also over time. This is a core interest for all 27 Member States – and in my view also for the UK.Second, we have to agree on a balanced, sustainable and long-term solution for fisheries, with the interests of all Member States concerned in mind, and not least the many men and women whose livelihoods depend on it on both sides.So it s a lie to say they want the same as CETA, they want single market style access despite having left the single market.None of this was ever mentioned during the EU referendum by the leave campaigns who just lied when is was suggested there would be massive bureaucratic lorry parks costing billions.The only change is that the UK gov says they won t impose any import taxes for the first six months.  This going against WTO agreements but they are slow to pick up so will allowed to be waved for six months.  Presumably the EU will impose taxes on imports of course, putting UK business at a massive disadvantage.  But at least we shouldn t be short of food or medicine or other stuff we need to import for six months, it ll just cost more.Join Yes for EU to help the campaign to support an independent Scotland rejoining the EU to be a normal international country without bureaucracy. The Ubuntu Podcast did a review in their new edition of the KDE s Applications site.  Listen from 14 minutes in.  You can hear such quotes as It s pretty neat, It shows the breadth of applications in the KDE universe, tonnes of stuff in here A big green button to install the thing KDE applications are broad and useful They publish a tonne of applications in the Snap store and they are hugely popular Valuable software that people want to install and use irrespective of the desktop they are on They make high quality and useful applications Well done KDE, always very mindful of user experience They did suggest adding a featured app, which is a task we also want to do for Discover which has featured apps but they don t currently change. That feels like an interesting wee task for anyone who wants to help out KDE.But more easy would be the task of going over all the apps and checking the info on them is up to date, including going over the various app stores we publish on like the Microsoft Store and making sure those links are in the Appstream meta-data files.Finally, the main task of All About the Apps is getting the apps onto the stores so we need people who can get the apps running on Windows etc and put them on the relevant Stores.  I did an interview asking for this for Flathub in the most recent monthly apps update.We re here to help on our Matrix room and my contact is always open. KDE is All About the Apps as I hope everyone knows, we have top quality apps that we are pushing out to all channels to spread freedom and goodness.As part of promoting our apps we updated the kde.org/applications pages so folks can find out what we make.  Today we ve added some important new features:Here on the KMyMoney page you can see the lovely new release that they made recently along with the source download link.The Install on Linux link has been there for a while and uses the Appstream ID to open Discover which will offer you the install based on any installation source known to Discover: Packagekit, Snap or Flatpak.Here in the Krita page you can see it now offers downloads from the Microsoft Store and from Google Play.Or if you prefer a direct download it links to AppImages, macOS and Windows installs.And here s the KDE connect page where you can see they are true Freedom Lovers and have it on the F-Droid store.All of this needs some attention from people who do the releases.  The KDE Appstream Guidelines has the info on how to add this metadata.  Remember it needs added to master branch as that is what the website scans.  There is some tooling to help, the appstream-metainfo-release-update script and recently versions of appstreamcli.Help needed! If you spot out of date info on the site do let me or another Web team spod know.  Future work includes getting more apps on more stores and also making the release service scripts do more automated additions of this metadata.  And some sort of system that scans the download site or maybe uses debian watch files to check for the latest release and notify someone if it s not in the Appstream file would be super.Thanks to Carl for much of the work on the website, formidable!Individual, young person or open source software, open Hardware or open data project or company The awards are open to individuals resident in the UK in the last year and projects and organisations with notable open source contributions from individuals resident in the UK in the last year. What the hell is the point in shutting down your society and economy due to a virus if you then just open it back up again without improving or solving the situation.This virus can be eradicated from a territory.  Small countries like Isle of Man and Faeroes have done it fine.  Scotland is not a small country and only irresponsible people like Jack McConnell would base Scotland s whole PR campaign on claiming it was.  McConnell now wants schools to go back to functioning normally but without saying what needs to be done to get there.Scotland is an average sized country comparable to New Zealand, Australia and Ireland.  New Zealand have as good as eradicated the disease, Australia made good progress and Ireland have done better than us by any metric.  Even much larger populated countries like Vietnam and South Korea have done well and any outbreak there is localised and headline news and can be controlled.England had the disastrous policy of herd immunity in March which Scotland effectively followed.  The two countries then changed tactics and locked down at the same time.  We don t know many of the figures for England because the government there just lies but based on UK figures they have made no progress in the three months of lock down.https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/The 7-day moving average of deaths in the UK on March 23 at lock down was 42.  It peaked at 940 and is now 130.  New cases 739 at lockdown, now 1205 a day.  Crisis has been averted, but England is not even back to where it was at the start of lock down, nothing has been improved.Scotland has a much better story:https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/658feae0ab1d432f9fdb53aa082e4130145 daily cases at lockdown, now down to 14 daily new cases.  That s progress.Ireland is better still:https://geohive.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/29dc1fec79164c179d18d8e53df82e96219 new cases in R of Ireland when UK went into lockdown on March 23 now down to single figures.We know what is needed to eradicate the virus.  The First Minister is now using the word.  We need to stay at home, test test test and trace and isolate and only allow very limited number of people from outside Scotland into the country.  There s deadlines here.  We want the schools to go back in August and the UK gov will end job support schemes in October.Scotland now needs to make a policy of eradication.  Close the border with England.  Yes it s not nice, yes it s not easy to contemplate.  But it is needed with England being so reckless and giving up attempts to control the virus. The Scottish parliament has powers of health and powers to impose road blocks.  Make flights from abroad really quarantined, keep people in local hotels so they can not leave. There should not be protests with gatherings, this needs strong centrally led government control.  We have seen New Zealand and others do it, we have seen them make mistakes, we know what needs to be done.  Scotland needs to do it and do it now. kde.org/applications now has latest release versions and dates on it.  Finally you can check your app store or distro is up to date

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