Open source at the blunt edge.

Here is an object lesson in why free and open source software is a symbol of good ethics.

The other day, I had a PDF sent to me by the private firm to which the UK government outsources its visa application work in Nepal. The PDF was a list of documents required to apply for a UK Visa. That list is nowhere on the internet, because it asks for documents that very, very few Nepalis could realistically provide; it is, in effect, a challenge to produce impossible documentation. Bear in mind that the average per capita income in Nepal is less than £200, and most are unemployed with little or no property. Nonetheless the document list requires, for example, tax records for three years. I know no one in our village who pays tax save, perhaps, the largest monasteries; how could they? In any case, the institutional corruption involved in the visa industry in Nepal, or Nigeria or pretty much anywhere else, is staggering and a subject of research by a few of my colleagues. Every university who admits foreign students knows this. So that PDF? It was printed using unlicensed software – the header on the document says so. I’d be surprised if they had paid for their copies of Office. Do they care? Why should they? It’s enterprise Britain! ‘We don’t want you unless you can lie about having £6000 so well that we can’t tell.’ Britain is proud to be represented by an outsourced firm operating on such a deep assumption of corruption-within-bounds that they are not embarrassed to send out official documentation using an unlicensed programme.

By contrast, one can get a free Nepali dictionary and clear instructions on how to install it into Open Office from FOSS Nepal. The visa service could run their entire office legally using their distribution of Linux and applications. It wouldn’t cost taxpayers, or visa applicants, a penny. Wouldn’t that be a much better symbol of what Britain stands for?

Stan Freberg to the (sardonic) rescue

In my youngest daughter’s school they celebrated the visit of Green Santa, who was into Repair Reuse Recycle sort of prezzies. I like that. Stan Freberg, 50 years ago, took on the commercialization of Christmas in an astonishing recording called Green Christmas which the US broadcast media did its best to sink. Here’s a link to a page which has both the recording and the album cover. Note Freberg’s discussion of satire (outrage barely concealed with sweetness) and the lineage Voltaire-Swift-Al Capp.

And while we’re on the subject: a bit more satire.

Bad publicity, confused gender.

Well, it had to happen. Here’s the blurb for a film in which a Yeti is the horror interest. Probably a male monster.

Contrast this to Herge’s poignantly misunderstood beast . In Tintin in Tibet, the yeti is shy, lonely, and female. I gather there is a play, with strong ecofeminist leanings, called ‘Betty the Yeti’—to be sought, indeed.

For sheer strangeness, what about ‘Sex Secrets of the Yeti’ (google it yerself!) – which so far as I could determine puts forth (ahem) a male monster.

Best not to take this too seriously.

The Wrong Logo

I was in a supermarket yesterday, on my way back from other errands, buying a few staples. In my hand was a really well made cloth shopping bag from another company, not the sort of thing that chain provides. I noticed the security guard flag and follow me, and indeed, whilst I was checking out there was Mr. Friendly. ‘We provide baskets for our customers, you see, and as that’s a bag from another store, ya ken, then you really shouldn’t use it in our store.’

Sigh.

I suppose it’s a natural extension of the privatization of the bazaar. Herewith the sorrow I felt when reading the Cathedral and the Bazaar: there are few, if any, bazaars in state capitalist countries, only malls where privately hired goons crush all public dissent. Try setting up a stall recruiting for an anarchists’ picnic club in your local shopping mall – even just in the carpark, or on the pavement nearby… A wonderful tactic: walking meditation in a shopping mall. Not useful here, though.

I contemplated a number of responses on the way home. I could ask them to provide decent bags; I could hack the bag so that it carried the name of a nonexistent competitor; I could paint the bag black; I could put two different logos (both false?) on either side of the same bag.

Or I could just get on with setting up the Cunning Plot, about which more later.

Visuals

I talked for a while today to my friend and colleague Trevor Stack’s class on California—or, to be more accurate, I was the exhibit for the day. Very odd to be commodified as a ‘Californian’—I’ve been living in Britain for 15 years now. Doesn’t mean I’m not homesick sometimes.

One question that recurred in the class was that of Diego Rivera’s suppressed murals. I remember believing that there must be other murals hidden somewhere around Los Angeles, waiting to be discovered like gTer.ma.

Here is an article about an amazing piece of public art by Banksy. If the Daily Mail link goes dead, I’m putting one image of it on the post. Wow.

Forward in all directions

While I strongly doubt anyone actually reads this blog, I’ve re-loaded lots of old entries that got lost as a way of marking time today. They date back to March 2007.

I admit, I thought twice—well, seven or eight times—before re/committing to the GoogleBorg. I may yet find another home for all this; the very principle of inserting advertising into your ordinary socialization, as happens on Google searches or Facebook, disgusts me. It is not enough to commodify our own internal, and perfectly ordinary, sufferings and call them neuroses in order to extract payment for their remedy (Freud the bourgeois capitalist!); now our own ‘face’ in cyberspace has been colonized by adverts. But for now there is now choice; I can’t afford to pay for yet another subscription cyber-service.

Do we pay to have a face? Do we subscribe to our clothing? To be able to speak? But we pay for premium online presence, for programming tools, for ringtones. Late capitalism indeed. FOSS it all! Though even that has infelicities…

It’s been a few months since I was at the British Library. They’ve instituted a bag search at the door. Given the recent brouhaha over British Transport police searching Scottish of some other sort, I began to wonder if the BL was being viewed as a target or as a hotbed of dissension. It could go either way, really; the BL of necessity employs a wonderful range of people – over lunch I had a lively conversation with Ramesh Dhungel about the Hodgson archives in Nepali and heard the usual two dozen languages around me in the Africa and Asia reading room. So is it the priceless holdings of the BL, or the suspicious foreigners that hang around there? At this point I am so confused and ashamed by the anti-terrorism mania that I cannot guess.

Now, my university—Aberdeen—has developed a habit of hiring ex-BL staff to major appointments – both the new head of IT and the new head of the library are ex-BL people. Hmm. I will have to watch the security policy at the new library verrrry carefuly indeed.

Frustrating then, to find that of all the books and articles I needed, almost none of them were available, even at the BL!. If anyone out there has issues of Maha Bodhi, the journal of the Maha Bodhi society, from 1955-65, do please let me know. Otherwise I will have to go begging for funds to buy them on microfilm.

anti-fix

Yesterday I finally made my daughter Tanglewest’s birthday cake, nearly a week after it should have been delivered. The fact that no one seems to have been unduly upset by the tardiness of the confection makes me think we have a cheerful and flexible household, but I may simply be crashingly insensitive.

I broke the electric chopper while making the cake. Not surprising: it was the wrong tool, far too small a device. I put hard Belgian cooking chocolate in and, fully aware of the possible devastation, pushed the button. (It’s hard to concentrate on anything here in Yeti Nivas right now as the flies are frantically copulating everywhere, including my trackpad. Is it fun if you’re that small and shortlived? Is it better with wings?) The chopper, already a battered device with worrying cracks in the shaft, splintered and ground to a noisy halt.

Now bear in mind that my obsession with clearing out an old gatepost hole drove me to ruin an old, but still serviceable, power drill last month. That’s two non-recyclables ruined. Not good.

Fortunately they still had bargain food processors in the vast-bin-of-stuff section at the local Lidl. They looked a bit tatty—boxes taped up and crumpled corners—but they were bound to be cheap and if they didn’t work, well, I could struggle to get one that did.

After a wonderful morning walking along the Don with three children and a strumpet-dog (it’s not just the flies; the dog is in heat) I plunged into Lidl and retrieved one of the last two machines. They were cheap, too, only £25. We met Bhavana on the way back and it was a happy expedition that walked back through the door of Yeti Nivas.

After a suitable pause I set about assembling the new machine, which of course didn’t work. I put the bits together in a sensible fashion, but it simply didn’t come on. I tried a different socket, checked the plug, all the usual procedures – nothing. Cheap goods, what do you expect, right? Shifting into justified consumer warrior mode, I emailed a firm message to the support centre and got the details and authorization I needed to contact another repair/replace clearing centre; and then I sent them their own firm printed letter with a crisp image of the receipt. Job done. I sorted out the children, now squabbling, posted the letter, fiddled around on the computer for another few minutes, then went into the kitchen for a coffee. While it was brewing I loitered in the kitchen with a purposeless mind and looked at the broken machine again. I looked at the manual again. I did what the manual said I should do, but this time it all worked perfectly.

How much anger and frustration? How many people’s time wasted? Who can wait for muddy water to clear? It was my expectations that were broken, not the machine.