Despite the Jeremiahs, something wonderful is happening

Welcome, tonight, to the European Union, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta.

So many people are saying about the downsides, economic and otherwise, of expanding the EU to include the accession countries. Well, maybe the whole thing will end in economic disaster. Maybe the EU's slow growth will mean that it becomes a big uncompetitive sludge of regulations and subsidies.

But maybe there are more important things than economic success and streamlined competitiveness on the global stage. Maybe what the world needs, now more than ever, is for nations to pull together, to emphasise community and solidarity, to include not to reject, and to celebrate shared values and neighbourliness.

I'm quite emotional. After a few years settling in and getting used to each other, I hope that a truly democratic and peaceful and strong-spirited Europe can stand up for 21st century values and set a great example to the messed-up corners of the world. After all, in the 20th century there was nowhere quite as messed-up as Europe. But maybe the future will be different.

That's if the bankers don't ruin it all.

online communities after "the end of email"?

How to share information and build online communities after the end of email?

I was shocked when I first heard the thought going round the internet, but now i think it is probably true. Email has pretty much had it (for now... see below).

Even if we could make spam disappear overnight, email would still be pretty rubbish except for certain limited tasks. When I first started using the net, everything was on email or in html documents... ok and there was usenet too, but that was dying the same death as email until google groups came along.

Online petitions, mailing lists, silly jokes and memes, news letters - everything came through email.

I am looking at revamping our Gloucs LUG online community, since it seems to have ground to a bit of a halt in its current form.

We're still using a pretty stagnant mailman list + archives, with some pretty standard and out-of-date web pages that most LUG members have not got involved in contributing to.

What I want to see is a freshly updated webpage which combines the worthwhile features of the email list (newbie queries, tech questions, meeting details) with the updateability and interactivity of a blog or wiki. There are a wealth of tools available which can do this, and give you an Atom feed as well for people who have seen that particular light ;-) , which I am looking at switching us to. At the moment, the favourite is bloxsom.

And where is the main soul of our LUG to be found recently? In our IRC channel, where we can chat directly to each other, fix problems, lark about and be people online together. A totally different experience from email.

Even if they do not suffer too much from spam, clued up people are starting to move beyond the clunkiness and inflexibility of - not email per se - but the whole email interface.

Peter Bowyer says

Email is not a discussion format. It was designed to enable the exchange of information. I prefer to see email as an instant postal service, rather than a textual-chat format. So in general as much thought should go into writing an email as into writing a letter. I think the problem with email is that it's too easy to send a message, so there's no barrier to make you stop and think if a message is necessary.

Ok, so email is useful for people who can't stop by and spend time online, who want to just pick up their mail and go. It's useful for proper messages, GPG signed and properly thought through. It's useful for dashing off a small memo "while I think of it" to someone who might not need to receive it straight away, and which isn't likely to spark off a discussion thread. Reading those is tiresome. Email is just too cheap and easy to be a quality method of communication, mostly.

I'm subscribed to lots of mailing lists - linux-hotplug-devel (at sf), since I'm interested in udev, christians_in_ science (at yahoo) (now that one is a nightmare due to sheer volume, although the signal:noise ratio is high), the LUG list and a few Palm related ones, which are rubbish really. The first list I can cope with, since it's low-volume and you don't get long threads. The second I can sort of cope with when I'm in the right mood, and, although some posts are infuriating, it's ok because it's the same old people and there's a sense of a community communicating through this medium. It works for them.

The LUG and Palm/misc. lists, OTOH, are just useless. There's very little of interest in them to make people want to contribute. No particular sense of community or building a shared body of knowledge or working together on a project.

I hope that a new web+atom interface for our news and increasing use of irc for community chat will liven things up and encourage more people to share their news and stories via a painless interface.

And as people use email less and less, spammers will shift their attention elsewhere - and, you never know, email might become nicer again.

Other things I haven't mentioned...
The curse of comment spam (Sterling Hughes' site is infested!)
Should we use comments or not on the LUG front page?
Why PHPNuke sites make me feel queasy and I won't be using one
Times when email can be quite good really

Linux 2.6, udev and modules

I have been running 2.6.* for about a month now. I had horrendous problems getting it to boot with pure udev, but eventually I worked out what I was doing wrong and that got fixed.

Now I'm having problems with loading modules. I have got up to date module-utils but for some reason I am still having to load modules manually for ALSA (snd-sb16), modem (8250) and even ppp (ppp-generic). Once I get a solution for these problems I will post it here. The problem might be that these devices may not have sysfs support so udev does not know they are there when it scans the /sys tree.

But when I load the modules by hand the device entries appear in /dev (interesting that the modules still do this). So why can't a call to /dev/ppp, for example, load ppp-generic and then create the node devfs-style? Not saying that the devfs way was better than the new way - just that it perhaps should be working as a backup for devices udev doesn't manage to create.