Blogging to Nowhere

Well it’s been a couple of days since I posted my rant about my bad experience with turnitin.com on Ubuntu and (shock horror!) I’ve had a response (thus defying the title of this blog).

The responder was Stephen Sharon via Twitter, he’s written a paper around some of the legal concerns over turnitin and he sent me the link. It’s good reading and confirms some of the things I had heard surrounding the site. I’d encourage everyone reading this to click through and read Stephen’s paper (it’s 38 pages, but double spaced and with much of each age containing references).

I’m not qualified to give legal comment on tunitin (I’m and Engineer not a Lawyer), but I will give my opinion. Before I do I’d like to give the following disclaimer (in true Software Freedom Law Show style):

WARNING: The following DOES NOT (in any way, shape or form) constitute legal advice, it is only my own (perhaps misguided) opinion. I would urge anyone who has any concerns over how their data may have been used by Turnitin to contact someone who actually knows what they a talking about, in this case A LAWYER!

Basically, I think Turnitin is on pretty shaky legal ground both in terms of Copyright and Privacy (certainly under US law). Here I New Zealand we have different privacy laws, but I’m sure they probably say much the same thing. The copyright issues are also concerning, I don’t want to turn over my rights to Turnitin just so I can submit my paper. What if my assignment gave technical details of an invention which I may in future have some financial interest in. Turnitin would have the right to use that information as they see fit.

Realistically I think it’s only a matter of time before Turnitin is taken to court again to face a hard examination of their user agreement, etc. This whole thing brings be back onto the subject of Free Software. I think it really is important for these tools which have such important uses to be Free (as in speech), it would be great to see a Free Network Service replace Turnitin as the dominant player in this market. I would much rather trust that to be transparent and honest than a company driven by profit and market share.

Anyway that’s just my $0.02. Before I finish I’ll encourage you all again to read Stephen’s paper.

Bye!

Well, this is my second post in as many days. Truth be told I’ve actually  been giving the site a bita lovin’. I’ve had a general tidy up, added ‘more tags’ to some of the longer posts so that they don’t take up as much of the main listing page and I’ve added a new Copyright (CC) notice as well as sorted out some Google adds to try and pay for the hosting of the site (not sure how successful they’ll be though).

I’ve also been working generally on my ‘personal cloud’. I’ve put up a gallery where I can put my photos which is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I’m using Gallery 3 (Beta 3) which is nice. I tried this a while ago with Gallery 2 and it was horibly complicated and overengineered so I gave up in the end.

The new interface is really nice, there’s come nice AJAXy stuff in there which makes it feel nice and polished – kind of like using Flickr or Facebook only with Freedom. As you may have gathered I’m not a huge Facebook fan, although I do have an account, this is mainly because of concerns over privacy and what control they have over your data (including any photos you upload). I’d rather just retain control and ownership of my data.

Anyway if you want to have a look at the gallery, click the gallery link at the top of the page (it currently uses javascript to redirect you – something which I will fix in future). I think that’s about all for now. I’m hopefully going to get back to posting some techy stuff soon, I still have a couple of things lined up I just haven’t had time to write them up yet.

Bye for now!

Sorry about this but I really have to say something about this. We had to submit an assignment yesterday via turnitin.com and it broke on me because I wasn’t using a ‘supported operating system’, I was using Ubuntu.

When I logged in I got a message warning me that it might not work, but I honestly don’t see the reason why. Shouldn’t it just be browser specific, not OS specific? I then proceeded to upload my PDF and it seemed to think it actually wasn’t a PDF! Switching to a Windows XP machine and uploading the same PDF worked fine which is the really random thing.

I don’t even see why our University has to use a third party service for this anyway, I’m sure they have the resources to do this in house. Then there is the whole copyright thing, which I’m not altogether happy with either.

Anyway, at least it seems Ubuntu isn’t alone in this, according to a friend Windows 7 also triggers the same error message (albeit without the PDF fail).

Again, sorry for the rant.

Wow, it’s been three months since I last posted. I know this blog has never exactly been frequent, but that’s bad even for me, however I do have a very good reason. Over the last few months I’ve been incredibly busy working on my 4th year University project.

For anyone that doesn’t know, I’m studying Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Auckland and I’m in my final year of undergraduate. At our university that means working on a year long project (worth 2 times the credit of a regular course) and presenting your progress at the end of it. My project was in the embedded systems arena and involved the development of a real-time embedded speech dialogue system – basically an embedded speech controlled application. I’ll try and post some more details in the future, I have some videos and stuff I want to put up, but I don’t want to focus on it too much because we didn’t really use that much Free Software.

Anyway, it’s pretty much over now – we just have one more component to hand in on Friday and then it’s done. I’ve really enjoyed the experience and learnt a lot. I’m thinking that I may go further into embedded systems – hopefully to do a Masters degree next year. I also want to do some hardware hacking/embedded systems stuff at home and have already been searching out how I can do it using Free Software, I’ve already found Free replacements for some of the components we used which I wish we’d used now! Maybe there will be a few posts on that in the future, but I already have a couple of other posts lined up, so expect to see a flurry of activity here!

That’s it for now though. See ya!

A while ago I covered netbooting/installation on ubuntu, well I’ve now found an even easier way to do this! It’s probably the easiest way to go about this as it really only involves editing one config file. Some of the info here comes from the official Ubuntu documentation on this, though my approach is actually easier, since you don’t need a separate tftp server.

The main piece of software you will need is dnsmasq, which you can install with the command:

sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

I already had this installed as I’m using it as a DNS cache for my network (which is also pretty useful). It turns out that dnsmasq is a bit of a ‘swiss army knife’, it can do DHCP, DNS and TFTP all together and very easily. You should edit the config file:

sudo nano /etc/dnsmasq.conf (continue reading…)