During the keynotes this morning, one of the presenters (who is a part of the GNOME foundation) stated how, in the past, she would bring a laptop running Microsoft Windows into work. It would boot up and make that distinctive noise and everyone would turn to her. They would ask why she was running a proprietary OS, and she would make excuses for it. But not everyone made such excuses. She stated that it is because of those who decided to make such sacrifices – to spend hours getting things to work using free software – that free software is where it is today. She encouraged attendees to use free software themselves. Yet, they sit there typing notes in Microsoft Word. Do the attendees not understand the values of free software? Do they even understand the values of open source? I know some of them do – there are some there that have GNU stickers on their laptops, run GNU/Linux operating systems, etc. But not enough. It is astonishing and shameful.

The conference does little to encourage free software either. Yes, there are some presenters that make the distinction between free software and open source. However, there are also sessions that are essentially advertisements for proprietary solutions! For example, a vendor may have an “open source” or “community” version of their product, which they advertise as a trial. One such phrase I heard in one of the sessions was “we encourage you to at least try the community version”, or to try the community version “first”. They would then go through a list of anti-features in the “open source” version that essentially make it useless in any performance-intensive or enterprise settings, forcing users to upgrade to their “enterprise” versions. This is an excellent example of the distinction between the free software philosophy and simply making your product “open source”. In this instance, it appears to be a sales pitch. The vendor then went on to state that they have patents pending for their software. Let’s not even get me started on that. Why would you have such a session at an open source conference?!

Clearly, while many of the attendees and presenters do recognize software freedom and understand concepts that give the meaning behind the term “open”, there are many that do not. OSCON also meets the needs of business owners. I am willing to bet that the vast majority of those using proprietary devices were there for their companies. Hell, I’m there because my employer funded it – it’s an expensive conference. However, this is also a conference I would love to go to on my own. I understand the core principles behind free software. I understand the open source movement. But if your employer simply sees open source as a benefit to business and sends you there, and you are just an employee…well, of course you’re not going to care. You’re just there to see what new and exciting technologies exist to help your employer or your own business.

I wish during the tutorial sessions the first two days that I took the time to count the number of laptops and devices in each of the areas I entered in order to give an actual figure. Now that the tutorial days are over, there are much less devices. Even still, out of a handful of 20 or so laptops, I’m lucky to see a single one running a free operating system. Even the majority of the presenters used Macs. However, some of those presenters had no idea what they were doing on a Mac, leading me to believe that OSCON supplied them! That is even worse! It left a very bad impression. For those attendees that I did see at OSCON that understood and embodied the spirit of the open source movement (or even better, the free software movement), I was very pleased. For everyone else – very disappointed. I hope that they are able to take something away from those speakers that do mention free software and do explain the values of open source.

This also brings up another thought. Lack of presence from members of the Free Software Foundation. The most I saw of them was a single booth in the Expo hall. Where are the speakers? Where are the sessions? (In their defense, I understand that there were hundreds of session proposals that were unable to make it into the conference. Maybe someone tried. I’ll ask FSF directly.) There are little tags you can put on your badges, such as “Git”, “Desperate Perl Hacker”, etc. Why is there no “Free Software” one? Why isn’t Richard Stallman himself helping to spread the word of free software at such a large conference? Now, don’t get me wrong – I completely understand him not being there. If I were Stallman I’d probably have a heart attack from what I saw there (metaphorically speaking – I almost did). But that is not the point. The point is that there are plenty of people there who have been introduced to this concept – may even be new to the concept – of “open source”. They may not understand what free software is, or why it is important. But they may be interested in it. How often do you see such a large group of software enthusiasts and developers in a single location for a conference focusing on openness in software? This would have been an excellent opportunity for the Free Software Foundation to spread its values. If anything, help combat the vendors that are lacing their “open source” products with proprietary bits. Give out CDs containing free GNU/Linux distributions. Explain our core values. Ask people to join. I was very disappointed by FSF’s presence at that conference. I’ll bring that up in the appropriate channels – I just wanted to mention it publically as well.

Overall, OSCON has been an interesting experience thus far. I’m not trying to recognize it as a free software conference – it clearly isn’t, and I never expected it to be. However, it is an excellent learning experience and there are many free software projects represented there.

Oh, and a last note that just puts the icing on the cake: After the conference, I went on a walking tour of Portland. The tour guide saw an iPhone and stated, “Isn’t this an open source conference? Aren’t iPhones kind of anti-open source?” (I quoted him to the best degree I possibly could, though those may not have been his exact words.) Yeah, that’s just great. A tour guide was able to recognize that. Yet the group of OSCON attendees that were asked that question remained silent. Swell.

Someone took the time to make their theme available under the GPL – that’s an excellent, noble thing. However, the encryption of footer data shows a complete lack of understanding of the philosophy behind Free Software and the GPL.

Freedom #1 states:

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Here is an example footer from one of the themes I found (most of the content has been removed and what remains has been altered to (a) not throw anyone under a bus and (b) reduce the size of this post):

1
2
3
4

eval(gzinflate(base64_decode('gfE8f[...]T8=')));
 
/* WARNING: This file is protected by copyright law. To reverse engineer or decode this file is strictly prohibited. */
$o="ZnvJF[...]Mn=";eval(base64_decode("Xvxsbe0wO2V2YWwoYmFzZT[...]GxsfW9cnw=="));return;

Clearly, this is in violation of Freedom #1 for the following reasons:

1. The only way to gain access to the source code is to decrypt (reverse engineer) the above content. The fact that it is a very simple matter to do so is irrelevant – the source code should be clearly visible.
2. There is a comment in the code that clearly states that any attempt to reverse engineer the code is illegal. This is in direct conflict with the GPL – in fact, it’s completely incompatible. So that statement is actually negated by the license. You’re more than welcome to do so under terms of the GPL.
3. Since you do not have access to the original source code without decrypting the data, you are not free to modify it. Many try to decrypt the data and are unable to do so because they do are familiar with the PHP language or are otherwise unable to figure out how to decrypt it. If you do decrypt the above, you will find that the majority of it is HTML, with one call to wp_footer(). This means that, were it not encrypted, users would need only know HTML to safely modify it.

But those aren’t the only issues. There’s also some other considerations:

1. The encrypted footer is 7743 bytes. Decrypted, it is roughly 996 bytes. That is a huge size difference – a lot of wasted bytes to secure the footer.
2. There are a great number of function calls in order to decrypt the footer. You can see some of them above, but the eval()’d code contains additional methods to decrypt further encrypted and obfuscated code. That’s unnecessary overhead. Not to mention that eval() in itself is very slow. So, not only did the author prevent you from modifying the footer, you’re taking a performance hit because of it!

I can understand why the author would want to encrypt the footer. They probably felt that, if they’re releasing their source code free of charge to the public, they should at least be allowed to keep their copyright notice in tact. And yes, they should be able to. In fact, the copyright notice should never be removed on GPL’d code – it’s a legal requirement to keep it there. It is still the author’s work, and it is a copyrighted work, so the notice must remain in tact. But yes, people do remove it anyway, even though they shouldn’t.

But when an author takes the time to not only prevent me from modifying the source, but in doing so causes me to incur a performance hit, and on top of it licenses the theme under the GPL – I see some very large ethical issues. Especially considering that all I wanted to do was add my own link, and its placement required being able to modify the encrypted HTML.

I propose that all those who support free software boycott such themes and send a notice to the authors when they come by such themes (or send them a link to this post). Furthermore, do not let developers who try to restrict your freedom push you around. I do not propose you remove the copyright notice – in fact, I would never, ever suggest that someone do that; but I do propose that, if the theme is licensed under the GPL, you decrypt the footer regardless of any notices that state you otherwise cannot. The license clearly states you have access to the source code, and if you are not given such access, the code either needs to be relicensed, or the developer needs to comply with its terms.

As there are also many themes out there that encrypt their data and are not licensed under the GPL or other free software licenses, I’m not going to provide any methods of decrypting the data. I do not support proprietary software, but I also do not encourage license violations.

“ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is a proposed enforcement treaty between United States, the European Community, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand and Mexico, with Canada set to join any day now.” – More information here

The name of the treaty sounds innocent enough, but what are they not telling you? This is just another addition to the huge string of laws recently forced upon us by corrupt governments and corporations to take away our liberties. For what? Money, as always.

What makes this law so bad? I just want to highlight a few points. I quote ars technica with the following details with what the treaty may cause:

• Require Internet Service Providers to monitor all consumers’ Internet communications, terminate their customers’ Internet connections based on rights-holders’ repeated allegation of copyright infringement, and divulge the identity of alleged copyright infringers possibly without judicial process
• Interfere with fair use of copyrighted materials
• Criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing
• Interfere with legitimate parallel trade in goods, including the resale of brand-name pharmaceutical products
• Impose liability on manufacturers of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), if those APIs are used to make counterfeits
• Improperly criminalize acts not done for commercial purpose and with no public health consequences
• Improperly divert public resources into enforcement of private rights

What does this mean for the average computer user? Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing will become unlawful, knocking out a huge chunk of collaborative file sharing, including Bittorrent. Some may consider this a good thing – after all, files are often unlawfully distributed using these services. But not always. Venues like bittorrent help reduce costs by allowing for the legal distribution of files, such as free software or your own personal files. Corporations also use it to cut costs of file distribution (let’s take the popular example of Blizzard’s use of bittorrent to distribute World of Warcraft files to their users).

File sharing itself is not illegal! It is how some use it is that is. You should not criminalize an entire right for the sake of hindering pirates, which will simply find another venue. Crackers use computers to steal account information and steal identities – why not make computers illegal? The internet’s being used to download all these illegal files, why not abolish the internet? How soon before they begin taking away additional rights simply so corporations will stop fussing because their multi-billion profits are not enough?

Think of this like prohibition. The law was repealed because you cannot force people to behave. You cannot take away the right to free will – people will do what they want despite the laws. It’s the same with drugs – they’re illegal, yet still used. And what do we do? Waste countless tax dollars putting druggies in prison while that space and money could be put to much better use to catch actual criminals! (I highly recommend reading the lyrics to Prison Song by System of a Down for an excellent demonstration of this point.)

If this law passes – what will happen? The “good guys” will get screwed. We will be down a major, cheap venue for distributing our software when we may not have the money or resources to use other services. Businesses and corporations will also be forced to pay higher distribution costs. What about the pirates? What about those who are actually breaking the law? That won’t stop them. Hell, it may not even hinder them. They’ll come up with another method before the law is even passed. There already are plenty of other methods that are not P2P. You are loosing your right because others do not know how to behave and it’s not even going to stop them!

If you don’t know what DRM is yet (which may be surprising considering how often it is seen all over this website), I encourage you to take a look. Digital Right Management, more appropriately called Digital Restrictions Management, is seen all over, and is growing. With DRM, your computer, your devices, your software tells you what to do. It says, “oh, I don’t want you to do that” or “oh, you can only play this song this many times”. It restricts you. You should tell your computer what to do, not the other way around. It’s just another ploy to further remove our rights – to control our lives.

This treaty would enforce the use of DRM. You would not be able to buy any music that is not encrypted with DRM – meaning you cannot share it with your friends, you can’t transfer it to another device without your computer’s permission, and sometimes if you upgrade your computer you will be denied the right to listen to your own music! You will also only be able to play the music on DRM-compatible devices. Free software cannot play DRM-encrypted music. You will be eating out of the palms of the corporations.

I’m sure many recognize the recent release of the game Spore by EA Games. It was a very controversial release because it incorporated DRM to a ridiculous degree, needing to “call home” every once in a while (it may have been 10 days) to re-activate. This means that in the future, once the activation server was taken down, Spore would no longer be playable. It was as if you were renting the game, not purchasing it. Because EA tried to control its users, they ended up making Spore the most pirated game of 2008 – exactly the opposite effect they had intended. The point – you cannot control people. They will rebel. You need to focus on the problem under the peoples’ own terms or you’ll just make things worse. Now imagine what something like the ACTA will do. Probably make things worse.

Let’s not forget about the mention of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) monitoring their customers’ connections for illegal material. Such plans are already attempting to be forced upon the users of other countries, such as the UK and Australia. What does this mean? Well, putting aside the fact that you are being spied on without a warrant, the software used to track your connection will slow down your connection speeds. This affects everyone – regardless of whether or not you are doing anything illegal. As if the connection monitoring wasn’t bad enough.

The world’s governments need to prioritize and stop taking from us our liberties! Before you know it, they’ll all be gone. You have to help put a stop to it before it’s too late – before you wake up one morning and realize you have nothing left and are powerless to do anything about it. Stop letting your government and your corporations boss you around. Some may not think technology right are such a big deal – but keep in mind. Technology already rules society, and it’s only going to continue to take more control. We’re becoming increasingly dependant on technology and we cannot allow it to enslave us.

Please read more information about this treaty here.

After debating whether or not to return it, I decided to keep it. v2s are out now, so v1 I assume will be discontinued – RockBox will eventually support it. And I’d like to provide aid to the RockBox team however I can. Unfortunately I have not looked into the firmware so I will not be much help in the actual development, however I will provide whatever information I can regarding the player, as the dev team does not own any v2s.

Using the Sansa e200v2 Series on GNU/Linux

So, in deciding to keep it, I ran into a few problems. It was a bit frustrating, and in order to help save you guys some of the frustration, I’ll post some information on how to use it with GNU/Linux. Specifically, Ubuntu Gutsy.

Connecting to your PC

Right when my Sansa arrived, I had a big problem – Ubuntu didn’t seem to recognize it. Depending on your firmware version, there’s a couple ways to solve this. I assume this applies to other distributions as well.

Before you begin, you need to load the necessary module. When it could not recognize my device, I checked dmesg and noticed the following message:

[38018.977087] usb 2-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6

Entering the following command in the terminal should solve the problem of your device not being recognized:

sudo modprobe ehci_hcd

You probably don’t want to run that command every time you restart your computer, so open /etc/modules in your favorite editor (I recommend VIM, but gedit may be easier for some) as root and add “ehci_hcd” to the list. For example:

sudo gedit /etc/modules

Check your firmware version:

1. Start your Sansa e200v2 and navigate to the “Settings” menu
2. Scroll down to “Info” and select it
3. Note your firmware version at the top (ex: V03.01.14A)

Firmware version 03.01.14A:
You must put the device into MSC mode:

1. Go back to the “Settings” menu
2. Select “USB Mode”
3. Select “MSC”
4. Connect your device to the PC with the supplied USB cable

Older v2 firmware versions (03.XX.XX)
You need to place the device into recovery mode:

1. Turn the player off
2. Slide the top button into the lock position (toward the headphone jack)
3. Hold the rewind button (|<<)
4. Plug the USB cable into the player and computer
5. Keep holding the button until your distribution recognizes the device (in Ubuntu Nautilus will display the device after it mounts)

If your device did not mount, please ensure you loaded the ehci_hcd module as discussed above. Run “dmesg” from a terminal to see any errors if it still does not work.

How to correctly disconnect

If you just pull out the USB cable from your device to disconnect from the computer after writing data, chances are you may lose something. If you have written data to the device, unmount the device before disconnecting the cable. Ubuntu users may use the following method:

1. Open Nautilus (if it’s not open you can go to Places – Computer)
2. Either on the left sidebar or, if you’re in “Computer”, in the main area, right-click on your device (it may be labeled “sansa”, “disk”, etc)
3. Select “unmount”
4. Wait until a balloon states it is safe to disconnect the device, then you may remove the USB cable.

You may also use the “umount” command from the terminal.

Upgrading the Firmware

Above I mentioned two types of firmware. If you do not have the newest version, I recommend that you get it (so that the USB Mode menu is available). To upgrade:

1. First download the V03.01.14A firmware from this website
2. Connect your device to your PC and place the firmware file into the root directory of the device (for example, /media/disk). The root directory contains the AUDIBLE, MUSIC, PHOTO, RECORD and VIDEO directories.
3. Disconnect your device from the computer (SEE ABOVE FOR THE CORRECT WAY TO DISCONNECT YOUR DEVICE)

Alas, No OGG support

I was rather annoyed and disappointed to see that SanDisk did not add OGG support in their v2 series. All my music I had converted to OGG format from mp3s and I had deleted the old mp3 files. So, I had to convert all of them back (I still keep them in OGG format on my computer) in order for the Sansa to play them. Once RockBox works, out with the mp3s again.

Copying Music to the Device

Once your music is in MP3 format, you may copy it to your device simply by placing it into the “MUSIC” folder. You may organize the music however you wish – feel free to place them in their own subfolders. As long as they are within the MUSIC directory, Sansa will recognize them.

Note that, for users who use MTP mode (Windows users or Linux users with MTP support), those files are not visible in MSC mode. Similarly, files in MSC mode are not visible in MTP mode.

Deleting Music from the Device

In GNOME (I’m unsure with others), when you delete a file, it places it into a trash folder (unless you delete it with the “rm” command or use the Nautilus delete command rather than “Move to Trash). The files will not be removed from your device if you simply pull the USB cable, but the device will no longer list the music. So, it’ll be taking up space, but will be in a hidden folder (.trash). So, use the above method to properly disconnect from the computer. If you do so, it’ll prompt you to empty the trash on the device.

Music Metadata (Song Title & Track Order Problems)

You may notice that some of your music isn’t properly displayed. The title, artist, etc may be displayed as “Unknown”, or the title may be the filename. This was something that had frustrated me for a while. So, I have a fix for you.

Download EasyTag (below step for Ubuntu users):
sudo apt-get install easytag

Once you have EasyTag installed, run it (for Ubuntu users it’ll be under “Applications – Sound & Video”). Don’t get too carried away yet. This is the part that frustrated me. If you try anything now, you may still have some problems. You’ll be able to save the track titles, artists, etc, however the track number will not properly save. So your tracks will be out of order. This is because the firmware does not support ID3v2.4, which is the default for EasyTag.

1. Go to Settings – Preferences
2. Select the “ID3 Tag Settings” tab
3. Select “ID3v2.3″ for Version
4. Click the “Save” button

Now we can get to work. EasyTag will attempt to get as much information as it can from the filenames and other sources, so you should not have to enter much, if anything, by hand (I didn’t have to).

1. On the left, navigate to your device’s MUSIC folder
2. Wait very patiently while EasyTag retrieves the songs. This may take a while if you have a large number of songs with long filenames.
3. All the songs listed in red have to be saved. Check through the list and make sure EasyTag generated them correctly and make modifications as needed. Or, just skip this step if you’re lazy and trust EasyTag’s skills.
4. Select “File – Save File(s)” or click the corresponding button in the toolbar
5. Don’t forget to unmount before disconnecting the USB cable

Tada! You should now have properly named songs and correct track listings.

Album Art

This one also bugged me. Some other sites suggested using EasyTag to embed the album art in the MP3 file itself, but it never worked for me. So I figured out some alternate solutions. The Sansa was designed to work with Windows Media Player, so I looked at some old folders back from when I used Windows, before I ditched it for GNU/Linux. It would save the album art as “Folder.jpg”. So I copied Folder.jpg to the folder containing the album I wanted art for on the device, and sure enough, it worked!

1. Organize the tracks into folders for their albums
2. Get a hold of the album art for your tracks. I use Exaile as my media player, so I simply went to “.exaile” in my home folder and retrieved the album art from there.
3. Place the album art in the folder containing the tracks for that album, and rename the file to either “Folder.jpg” or “Album Art.jpg”. Case-sensitive.

Enjoy your album art

Playlists

Yes, the v2 series supports M3U playlists! In EasyTag, you can generate a playlist by selecting files and clicking “Write Playlist…” in the toolbar. Save it anywhere in the MUSIC folder – you may also save them in sub-directories.

Rockbox Development Progress

I’ll add more information on the Sansa if I can recall what else I had looked into. However, my true interest is in RockBox. Therefore, you can track the progress via the following links:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/SansaE200v2
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=13961.0
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=14064.0

Good luck!

A few days ago, I received my FSF membership goodies in the mail. Among these things were a bootable GNU/Linux membership card / CD-ROM, utility flash drive, a CD containing the source code for the files contained on the membership card, a small collection of articles and a very generous amount of creative stickers which I could not help but show everyone. Click on the image above to enlarge.

With that said, GNU GPLv3 has been released and has some impressive improvements over version two. All my open source projects, most notably MyCustomBB, will adopt this new license.

I have also made my final decision not to return to developing for Microsoft Windows. All my open source projects will be cross-os / cross-browser, however I will no longer be developing projects exclusively for Windows. After getting Internet Explorer working on Linux (for developing websites to conform to its absence of standards), I have abandoned it completely and now exclusively use Linux (Ubuntu) and open source software.

Finally, on a lesser note, I’ve modified this blog’s theme to be a bit more fitting. Hopefully everyone likes it.

Though open-source, the project’s design has not changed. It will still be the professional, completely customizable bulletin board that I originally intended. My goal is to give it all the features of current bulletin board systems, except make them a tad bit better. This will be an open-source alternative to major competitors such as vBulletin and InvisionBoard. Why do I think it will be better? Well, this is my passion. Those other guys seem to just be out to make money. I’m out to start communities.