I don’t know how much experience Neil Berkett has of bus lanes—I will gladly credit him with enough of it to speak from a position other than that of the pompous, ignorant millionaire who thinks the only way to use a bus lane is to drive a bus—but in my own universe the bus lane is how buses get into the town centre far faster than private transport. If I were a customer looking at Virgin Media right now, to determine whether or not it was worth signing up with them, I’d scarcely pay more for less: that counts for both connection speed and managerial intelligence.

As I spend the scraps and offcuts of January and February evenings ripping and filing my 2007’s CDs—some of which I won’t listen to very often once they’re fossilized in the collection—I’m aware of a tremendous weight of madeness and invested time and energy on the part of the manufacturers, and of a sort of casual luxuriating in my first-world lifestyle on my own part. You prepare a playlist before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my tapeheads with crude oil; my CD tray overflows. So in 2008 I hope to buy as few CDs as possible (none is the target) while also avoiding DRM-crippled music and staying legal.

To this end I’ve been seeking free and semi-free online music—free as in beer, semi-free as in of limited choice—since the new year. So far, outside of bittorrenting (which is obviously of variable legality, depending on what you’re downloading), I’m having some success with Last.fm. Until recently they offered a sort of customized “radio station”, where your input into the of the next track was limited to an intelligent deduction by Last.fm based on what you told it you enjoyed in the past. Now, alongside this potluck service, they’ve just started offering three free streamings of any explicitly chosen track before requiring you to buy the track from a commercial partner.

I’ve yet to try the former service (I think you might have to subscribe to be on the beta wagon: I’ll look into that later), but the latter has so far provided our house with unlimited, free access to a radio station for our very own target market. While such slightly sinister profiling might make it harder for me to discover truly new music, it does at least permit me to expand the boundaries of my comfort zone slowly, and cast a critical eye over my friends’ music preferences, while at the same time giving artists their due and most importantly avoiding physical recordings unless I really want them.

Most commercial support for Linux distributions still consists of monolithic installations, wrapped up with checksums to prevent you tampering with them, and installing themselves on your computer in whatever location and potentially harmful fashion they fancy. Until upgrading to Gutsy this was largely my experience (painfully and often repeated) with such packages as nVidia and wireless drivers, and interesting software that barely gave a second thought to existing Feisty users.

After a spot of Googling I was expecting to have to go through the same palaver with Last.fm’s client, and crossed my fingers that nothing would go horribly wrong. But I needn’t have worried: the Linux client for Last.fm is

1. free of cost, as in beer
2. free of restrictions, as in open source
3. free of hard work, as in a no-sweat installation utilizing the Debian packages and apt package management that’s core to Ubuntu

To install it on Gutsy, you first want to add the GPG key for the repository for security reasons. At a command line, type:

wget -q http://apt.last.fm/last.fm.repo.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

You’ll be asked by sudo for your password. Then, open Synaptic Package Manager (under “System > Administration” in the GNOME menus); then, via “Settings > Repositories”, add the following new third-party repository:

deb http://apt.last.fm/ debian stable

You can then search for the Last.fm widget’s package in the manager (hint: it’s called lastfm) and install it. When you first run it after installation it’ll ask for your Last.fm account, so best have one of those in advance. And that’s it: you’ve now got Last.fm’s widget on your Ubuntu PC.

All of the above is explained briefly on the very URL of the apt repository. Not only that, but they have a free bonus photo of a very cute bunny in case all the apt stuff bores you rigid. Like a TV licence for the Flash version of the BBC iPlayer, all of this is practically worth a subscription alone. As I type, my mouse sits over the very location of the link to do so in a separate tab. I just need to know first: how many more rabbits do I get when I join?

Certainly marketing genius and total orphan Lily Allen, and internationally renowned cuttinge-edge futurologist Gene Simmonds are pulling the sort of pouts you’d expect from them both, and Guy Hands has a look on him like they just cancelled Christmas. But even in these hilariously gurning faces of criticism, and amid the wafting and intermittent atmospheres of genial misunderstanding of how content works these days from the TV and radio monoliths, Radiohead are keeping chipper. Far more so than I’ve ever seen them before, in fact. And when everyone’s on YouTube for free, letting rip with their Thumbs Down webcast, and accepting its reappearance—syndication, if you like—all over the shop very shortly afterwards, was a refreshing change from everywhere else exercising rigid control at the loss of an audience.

But for those of you (like me) who were thinking of taking part in Radiohead’s distribution revolution, yet weren’t keeping an eye on the time:

• The download-only area of “In Rainbows” closed this morning. I just managed to get a copy of the tracks yesterday: I’m sure if you’ve missed out then you’ll all know someone who’s got a copy they can loan you, right? Loan you until the plain old CD comes out at the start of 2008, right?
• Discboxes (40-quid monstrosities that I was secretly waiting till next year to buy) are actually already out and limited stock. I thought from various reportings of the event that they too weren’t going to be on sale till the new year. Get yours while it’s hot.

If there’s demand I bet there’ll be more discboxes, but frankly if Radiohead don’t stamp “SECOND IMPRESSION” over the next lot then I might sue. Actually, if my discbox doesn’t have “A TOTAL W.A.S.T.E. OF CARBON” scrawled over it then I’ll be terribly disappointed.

They’re great teachers and really highly qualified, as you can tell from the rash of logos on the homepage.

Skip intro - or three types of copy the world will never miss

… Did you think I typed in your URL so I could watch a movie? Duh! I want information and I want it now. Only a fool actively erects barriers between a potential customer and his content…

I have a suggestion for a more user-friendly line of copy on the home page. It reads “Play pointless Flash movie that we paid a fortune for and are now desperate to have you watch.” Then the small children at whom these animations are so clearly aimed could sit there all day watching zebras turning into photocopiers while the rest of us get on with some work.

So writes Andy Maslen of Sunfish, in magazine trade publication InCirculation. I remember when I was doing my physics DPhil that a certain global electronics manufacturer (that also deals in household goods) lost thousands and thousands of pounds of business from us because I could never get past the Flash splash page. Fast forward six or seven years and lots of companies are still making the same mistake.

Wesley-Barrell: the country’s leading maker of classic, quality furniture, built without compromise to last for generations… Wesley-Barrell benefits from being a family business as it provides heritage, continuity and a strong identity.

The site is another Drupal build, like Crude. In this instance, I’m particularly happy with the amount with which we’ve integrated with core on this site—without having to hack it at all. This means that the site is stable and maintainable, and that we can start looking at rolling out multiple Drupal sites under the same standard, easily updated core.

A few banks now ask you for the same three digits, if you guess wrongly. Their idea is that to do otherwise, and just ask for a different three random digits, would make the site look like a phishing site, which is debatable. But by asking repeatedly for the same digits, the banks immediately provide keyloggers with a method of cracking into your account. Every time you get your login wrong once, keylogging software can attempt an automated login to your account in between your two attempts, making a note of the HTML which gives them the position of your numbers. It can then wait for you to get the code right, and it immediately has three of your numbers and their positions.

After around four or five iterations of incorrect-login/keylogger-login/correct-login, the software has pretty much your entire code and can siphon everything out of your accounts. The iterations may be picked up by stochastic anti-fraud technologies at the bank; they might not, of course.

More detail is available in a paper recently published in Computers & Security (preprint). From the URL of the preprint, the customers of one particular bank might want check it out.

(Hat tip to my father-in-law.)

REST plays the same role as open source and open APIs: It eliminates tooling and vendoring as artificial barriers to adoption.

Interestingly, a corollary to this was brought up at Barcamp Brighton this weekend. During Gareth Rushgrove’s talk about REST and Nabaztag, a chap whose name I’ve again forgotten (although I’m sure someone like Fatty will enlighten me) pointed out that much of the push of SOAP is coming from the vendors, because the vendors make their money from selling tools, and REST development needs very few tools, most of which are free.

Undoubtedly there’s a set of problems that REST finds hard, but this truism is extended by SOAP vendors to the hard-to-prove (but also hard-to-contradict) claim that it’s a larger set, or a set more pertinent to enterprise solutions, than the set which SOAP finds hard. It convinces the consumers, because intelligent data mining and storage has always been a difficult problem, and a simple solution like REST feels like underkill for the job in hand. They let you confuse libre and gratis, the vendors point out (I see them sitting on the consumer’s shoulders with tridents at this point): so where’s the hidden cost of this free lunch?

(hat tip to Simon Willison)

Of course, that’s rather glib. Nobody expects Microsoft to distribute anything under an open-source licence any time soon, so they’d never qualify on those grounds, however much effort they put in. And the amount—$5000—is nugatory for a company of Microsoft’s size anyway, so why would they even bother to aim for it? Plus the requirement of implementing OpenID 2.0 rather than 1.1 is a little mean: although there’s almost total backwards compatibility, it’s a heftier infrastructure to have to support, for a gain that some people might not require.

Even considering all those points, the fact remains that three open-source communities have achieved quickly, with minimum outward-facing fuss, what Microsoft is still nodding amiably about; what it probably hasn’t even got beyond the specification stage regarding, if such enormous companies behave in any way like I imagine. Meanwhile the world takes an open step towards OpenID acceptance, and it’s a real achievement by all involved.

(Hat tip to Simon for a potted explanation of OpenID version differences. Any errors or opinions have been entirely introduced by me.)

CRUDE: The new documentary from director Franny Armstrong (McLibel) and Oscar-winning producer John Battsek (One Day In September)

Was programming in Drupal a pleasant experience? Yes and no. Was it the perfect tool for the job? Yes and no. Will I be happy to program in Drupal again? Emphatically, yes.