Per Bolund trasslar till det

Lyssnade på Miljöpartiets ekonomiska talesperson, Per Bolund idag på P1. Han försöker i Ekots Lördagsintervju förklara hur Miljöpartiet resonerar kring deras förslag till slopat sjuklöneansvar för småföretagare. Bolund pekar på två faktorer, en administrativ börda samt en kostnad. Miljöpartiet vill att företag med färre än 10 anställda ska slippa betala sjuklön de två veckorna som nu gäller.

Jag kan inte förstå dagens fjäskande för företagen? Håller helt med om att vi måste skapa ett konkurrenskraftigt företagsklimat i Sverige om vi ska behålla välfärden. Men, som Saarinen påpekar i P1, så kompenserades företagen för att denna extra bördan lades på dem när den infördes med sänkte arbetsgivaravgift. Alla dessa kringelikrokar handlar bara om nyliberala ideologier där man försöker friställa företagen från varje gnutta samhällsansvar genom att successivt trolla bort krav på företagens deltagande.

Om det nu är så problematiskt för små företag att hantera kraftiga fluktuationer i och med sjukdom hos sina anställda, varför inte ingå en försäkring inom företagarna för detta så att denna "extra" kostnad då kan täckas av en sådan försäkring. Detta är ju vad man vill tvinga anställda till hela tiden t.ex. i olika fackliga inkomstförsäkringar och privat pensionssparande.

Bolund uttrycker att vi vet att dom små företagen är ansträngde idag, men vi har ju den Svenska modellen som trots allt renderat världens rikaste land (mer eller mindre) där vi inte vill ha företag som inte bär sej. Varför ska vi lämna den modellen?

När Saarinen påpekar att en övergång från att arbetsgivaren betalar sjuklön till att försäkringskassan gör det riskerar personer att få lägre ersättning. Då föreslår Bolund att det ska lösas med kollektivavtal, så att t.ex. arbetsgivaren ska betala en liten del trots allt. Så då verkar inte administrationen som har påpekar är så problematisk vara så problematisk helt plötsligt. Och kollektivavtal sedan? Dvs. arbetstagarna får en till punkta att argumentera för i avtalsrörelsen, vilket naturligtvis sänker deras ställning generellt gentemot arbetsgivaren.

Bolund trasslar också in sej när han inte vill kommentera parternas krav i diskussionen i den nuvarande skolbespisningskonflikten men samtidigt tycker det är OK att diktera hur mycket mer lärarna bör få i lön. Inkonsekvent helt enkelt.

Kirkegaard was wrong...

We do no understand either backward or forward. The believed backward understanding is simply a miss-conception about how the actual situation was. We are as unable to imagine out own situation previously as we are understanding any one else's.

Swish - så tog bankerna ännu ett steg mot total kontroll över din ekonomi

I dagarna lanserar svenska storbanker tjänsten Swish för betalningar mellan privatpersoner. Tjänsten ska vara gratis i några månader, men sedan ska gamarna börja ta betalt för tjänsten. Hur mycket vet ingen idag.

Min uppmaning: BOJKOTTA! Bankerna profiterar på hela samhällets produktion, men producerar inget själva. De kontrollerar bara kanalen, och precis som alltid i historien har den som kan ta ut tull och kontrollera flöden ta betalt utan att egentligen göra något.

Det vore finfint om någon ville skriva en app där transaktionen sker med bitcoins, då kan vi utnyttja den digitala världens smidighet utan att behöva lägga all kontroll hos gamarna.

The cloud is just a fly - a prediction

It just occurred to me that the cloud - at least for private persons is a very passing thing. You know, soon we will have mobile phones that have 1 TB of memory and computing powers that are way more than needed in most situations. We will have IP6 and it will be easy to connect a domain to your mobile phone.

There will be apps to write your blog, store you social profile or your documents and media on the "phone". Hence why would anyone want to have this in the cloud? Therefor, all you people who are clouded by all the hot applications Google, Facebook et al. provide: wait and see these will soon be no more!

kulkul...

Denna blir ett bra komplement till julklappenn :-)

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Dreaming about GNOME from a hobby developer point of view

In the latest issue of the GNOME Journal the editor, Jim Hodapp, encourages the GNOME community to start dreaming of GNOME 3. So I decided to take the advantage and do that in this and an upcoming blog post. In this first post I would like to talk about what I believe is an important focus from the hobby developer perspective. In the next post I will take a user perspective.

I have been a GNOME user for some 4 years now and have seen the environment develop through these years. I have never released any software for GNOME, but have spent quite some time with trying to digest the APIs. As a hobby programmer this is the first point I would like to dwell on. Having access to free source code and software is a truly fantastic ting. The amazing development of so many free software projects shows this without a doubt. However I believe there are several points that could be improved on this.

Realising that you as a hobby programmer could write a program that has a nice GUI, can do networking, integrate with a desktop (like the GNOME panel) and so on is really a great way to attract new developers. However, as belonging the this class of people with no formal programming education and no professional connection to software development so far the barrier has proven a little to high. But the point is that it is only a little. I believe that if the part of the GNOME community belonging to a more professional set of people could invest even a little more than is already done, a very large class of new developers could emerge. The things required for this to happen, as I believe is that:

• The web page becomes better structured.


• More tutorials that go through the basics.


• A way to handle autotools.


• An IDE that is easy to use.


• Software mentors!

In the next paragraph I would like to develop on these ideas.

The web page

As a person tries to penetrate the community web pages are really one of the most important paths. However I do not know how many times I have been reading something on one (and there are so many!) GNOME related web page, just to find out via IRC or another web page that was I learned is obsolete. This is extremely discouraging and I believe impede also.

So my point here is that the web system really have to be cleaned. There can be no obsolete information and if something is being obsoleted in the near future be very careful about how this is presented on the web. If there are no options how to progress to the new version/api/library etc, do not write about is just yet. Consistency is central I believe.

Tutorials

Tutorials are great! I guess they are one of the main ways for FOSS people to spread and learn technologies and so on. However there could be so many more of them.

When one have not taken part of the development of a certain piece of software (library etc...) it is not at all clear how to start using that code. An example of this I have experienced is how to work with the GNOME panel. Also in connection to the previous point. There is just so much outdated information around about the GNOME panel. There are insinuations that some parts of the technology is being outdated (e.g. bonobo).

I believe well updated tutorials with a clear focus on how to achieve a certain (limited - the Unix'ish way) task are very needed. The tutorials needs to be fairly short, not mixing things up and digging deeper that required to finish the task.

Autotools, the monster

I am sure autotools is a great piece of software, I have even liked to at short moments. However it is a way to large burden to put on the shoulders of new programmers to lift. Autotools is everything a new programmer/project does not need. It includes everything and aims at exactly what a new programmer does not want to handle. All that caring about different platforms, particular problems with this or that library, l18n and so on completely kills the creative spirit!

I don't have a solution of how to get rid of autotools, probably the next paragraph is the solution, but it must be cloaked from the new user. But it turns out to be very hard to do many things without autotools. An many tutorials introduces in a early stage too. I think tutorials on topics other than autotools it self should not depend on autotools. That will make the tutorial unnecessarily complex and fuzz out the important details of what the tutorial wants to communicated (this is also true about other things, a tutorial should any describe what it is there to describe and not the other things - the tutorials should be "orthogonal").

An IDE

There is some bit of hard core culture in the FOSS developer community. IDEs are for lames. But I as a newbee is lame. And I need things to be simple. I have tried some of the IDE around, but they have all turned out to be more trouble than help. The default projects created does not work out-of-the-box and they, again, include everything. So I as a potential developer end up trying to understand this or that and why my project won't compile. There should be more projects options available in the IDEs so that you can create minimal focused projects without all the lull lull and a full features release project requires.

Software mentors

Now I'm dreaming. But these things are just suggestions, so let's dream. It would be great to have some person to talk to. Someone that you can thrust and that really knows what he/she is talking about (it is not so unusual on IRC that people give you wrong information). To have some well initiated programmer that can give you hints, point to resourced if you'r stuck, and answer questions would just be so great!

To make this structure effective it could be part of the deal the if you as an apprentice enters this game you have to be prepared that your conversation with the mentor is being stored and searchable for future newcomers to use.

The state of Ubuntu

Canonical has been a constantly rising star on the free software scene. I have been a large fan of Debian for a long time and fairly recently decided to switch to Ubuntu on my laptop. Now I would like to give a few reflections on the state of GNU/Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular and how the distribution works on a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook laptop. In this blog Ubuntu 8.10 will be considered.

Booting from the CD works. The installation procedure works fine until GRUB is supposed to be installed. This step fails without and explanation. After reboot the system is not bootable. GRUB gives error 15: file not found. When looking in /boot it turns out there is no /boot/grub, and of course also none of the required files for grub. These can be created manually, there are several posts about this on the web. However for someone not experienced with fiddling with the computer, this will immediately halt them.

After installing GRUB manually the system boots up fine. Aptitude and friends are of course wonderful to work with and everything runs like a charm, so installing software is done in a kick.

There are however a number of programs/projects that does not work completely well. Not surprisingly it is the desktop that shows the largest problems. Red Hat and Novells NetworkManager (NM) unfortunately leaves some aspects to wish for. If one compares to state of the art in this respects, Mac OS X, NM needs to improve. When my laptop is moved between places NM becomes confused and does not understand that there are new networks available. It also does not remember which network it should connect to but this have to be done manually.

Next up is Evolution. This is truly a great mail suit, but there is definitely room for improvement. First of all the calendar connection to Google does not work. I can not change a calendar entry form within Evolution. If I do, the change is switched back at the next Evolution update of the calendar. When logging in to Google on the web the change was never committed.

Further there are small details like if I receive a calendar file in a mail, iCal say, I cannot right-click and choose import into some of the calendars, but I must first save the file and the import it. This seems unnecessary.

I would also like to talk a little about X.org. The new x-server from X.org is wonderful compared to xFree86. It is however still not entirely satisfying. There is a misconfiguration in that when extended desktop is installed (to connect to an external monitor) the OpenGL rendering (and hence the fancy desktop effects) can not be used. This is a well known problem and have been resolved with guides on how to fix it e.g. here. It is however a miss-configuration that should probably be fixed in future releases.

Another issue with Ubuntu is the login screen. When resuming my laptop from a suspension there is a flicker on the screen that makes it possible to see what the screen contains before the login screen appears. This might be considered a small issue, but I would say it is a security miss. It also indicates that it might be a vulnerability to explore further to also gain login access.

In connection to the login screen I would also like to take the opportunity to discuss the suspension feature. As stated above the laptop I use to run Ubunutu on is a Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook. On this machine it is not possible to just fold down the lid, but the computer have to be manually suspended from the System menu (Gnome).

Finally, as I have spoken about in a previous blog, I am a proud owner of a Sony DR-BT50 bluetooth headset which is quite nice. I have however not managed to connect these to the laptop to use sound for playback. This is probably possible, but presently to difficult to achieve for the non-export.

To finalise this blog post it should be pointed that Ubunutu is a really nice distribution and OS, but with some beauty faults that hopefully will to addressed in the near future.