But the lead didn’t last long. crip stumbled seriously on the third CD. I live in Japan now, where I buy CDs by Japanese artists who write songs in Japanese. crip couldn’t cope with that, and I couldn’t cope with playlists where all the songs were called "??????". So abcde won. For me its acronym is true: a better CD encoder.

So, I started to reverse engineer the device. I’m not the only one doing this, and I got some hints from ralph.y, Codeka, and someone called “tsuppiduppi” on the iMon user forum. To make it easy to experiment I wrote a quick’n'dirty C program using libusb to allow me to send commands to the device. Now I can do:

• imon-poke 0x02 0x1c 0x02 to initialise the LCD screen
• imon-poke 0x0d 0x0f 0x48 0x45 0x4c 0x4c 0x4f 0x00 0x20 0x57 0x4f 0x52 0x4c 0x44 0x20 to display “HELLO WORLD”

Below is a brief summary (well, random notes) of what I have found so far. The first two bytes select the main command. Subsequent bytes may be used as parameters. The 8th byte should always be zero, and the 16h should always be 2.

          0x02, 0x00: eq graph: 1 byte 1=off 2=on
          0x02, 0x01: eq graph bars (no pattern yet)
          0x09, 0x01: eq graph bars: 16 nybbles, value 0 to 6
          0x0d, 0x01: eq graph bars, seems to match previous 0x09, 0x01
          0x02, 0x09: fan icon bits lsb: F1 F2 F3 LMH
          0x02, 0x0a: fan guage 2 bits lsb: F1 F2 F3
          0x02, 0x0b: 1 byte temp degree c icons
          0x02, 0x0c: 1 byte temp value
          0x02, 0x0d: cpu icons 1 byte on=2 off=1 (or not 2)
          0x02, 0x0e: cpu guage 1 byte value
          0x02, 0x1b: the colon 1=off 2=on
          0x02, 0x1c: whole display: 0=off 1=auto clock 2=on
          0x02, 0x1d: strange xx/yy zzzz; xx = l nibble;
          0x02, 0x26: fan speed
          0x0d, 0x0f: ASCII text

I expected the panel to be a question and answer setup, where the panel members responded to questions from the audience. But that isn’t what happened. Instead the panel chairman talked for 30 minutes, and then handed the mike over to me!

That wasn’t what I was expecting, but it wasn’t a problem either. I spent fifteen minutes saying my bit, then passed the mike on to the next guy.

The following panelists had interesting things to say, and I learnt a few things too. I didn’t know that pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than they do on research, although I wasn’t surprised to hear that. I was amused to hear that all maize (corn) was effectively genetically engineered millennia ago in South America.

But the quote that stood out the most was not a new fact, but it was a nice opinion: “education is not just about skills; it is about building values and building a citizen”. Somebody needs to start repeating that back in the UK.

To get the reader working I started to follow the mail GnuPG smartcard howto, but I soon noticed that the udev rules provided in that document were ugly: the rules called a script that changed group ownership and permissions on the device file; udev can do that without a script. So I made up my own rule that looked like this:

BUS=="usb", SYSFS{product}=="SCR33x USB Smart Card Reader", GROUP="staff"

During our conversations Niibe-san mentioned something that I had almost forgotten: Debian has a non-free section in their distribution.  A lot of people don’t like that, or they are at least surprised to see what looks like a compromise from such devoted Free Software advocates.

But Niibe-san had a different perspective inspired by his Buddist faith: he can accept the existance of evil, and it can be used to highlight goodness. Evil (or non-free software) exists to remind us that more good needs to be done.  If we didn’t have a non-free section we would not notice the programs that need to be liberated.

There are lots of wiki flavours around, all with different features. I wanted one that was simple to install and easy to tinker with. Kwiki was trivial to install, and it’s designed to be easily reconfigured and extended. Also, it happened to use my preferred set of wiki formatting rules.

I liked it so much that I wrote a MovableType Kwiki formatting plugin to use it. If you can read this, it works!

Ironically, wiki words in MT::Kwiki version 0.01 don’t link to anything. The next version will allow you to configure your target wiki.

I presented the "Free Software is the Future" keynote address. Of course, I know nothing about the future. The title was something I said in 1996. The current worldwide Open Source buzz is confirming my predictions, although I hadn’t expected the bizarre name change.

Karen spent most of the day sitting at the combined Kasei and Belfast.pm table. This merged with the BLUG table, where Russell and Scott had setup some demo machines that looked slightly impressive until Macinni put up a real exhibit beside them.

The Northern Ireland Open Source Community is having an open day on Wednesday 16 April, so I’m busy finishing some presentations for that.

After that I have to finish my tutorials for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon

Recently there has been yet another sendmail vulnerability, but I didn’t care because I use Postfix. Wietse Venema, the author of Postfix, did care. He could have said "sendmail sucks; use Postfix", but instead he wrote a patch for Postfix to remove the sendmail exploit from messages before they reach sendmail. Kudos.

The Open Source movement was started to ‘rebrand’ Free Software to make it more acceptable to business and give it a name that was less open to confusion. “‘Free’ is frequently misunderstood to refer to price and not freedom” was their complaint, so they choose what they thought to be a less ambiguous name: “Open Source”. RMS didn’t like this because it stopped people talking about freedom.

“Open Source” has turned out to be much more open to misinterpretation and misuse than “Free Software”: many people, including the authors of the article that sparked this rant, believe that something is open source if you can read the source code. Yes, “Free Software” was slightly ambiguous (in English; the translations in most other languages were not ambiguous at all), but the term could be simply clarified with phrases “Free as in ‘speech’, not ‘beer’”; “Open Source” is much more difficult to explain.

So, again I say “Stallman is right!”. He may be a fanatic, but without him we probably wouldn’t have Free Software by any name. He takes a lot of abuse for wanting us to talk about “Free Software” instead of “Open Source”, and asking us to accurately describe our favourite OS as “GNU/Linux” instead of just “Linux”. If RMS annoys you, good: he’s doing his job. RMS, keep up the good work!

Hopefully those of us who have been working with Free Software from before it was called Open Source will benefit.