avahi killed my java

After upgrading my mDNS responder from howl to avahi jmDNS died. Well, jmDNS stopped working, and avahi segfaulted to be precise. avahi has become debian’s official mdns responder, due mainly to licensing reasons, but unfortunately it does not allow any other mdns stacks to run, and to register with avahi you need to use dbus, so any java based systems which use mdns are now shafted on debian/gnome systems. I’m not entirely sure how to get past this. howl happily coexisted with other stacks so I don’t know why ahani can’t. We’ll have to follow this one up.

Internet, on the local scale

I can’t help but think that as the cost of transport continues to rise, the importance of the internet in our everyday lives, and interactions within our local communities will increase. We are increasingly shopping online, chatting online and getting up-to-date online. But this is typically with people far away; or at least outside our neighbourhoods. But, as shipping becomes more expensive that ebay item may not be such good value for money, and perhaps it would be better to use the concentrating power of the internet to shop locally.

This is slowly happening in some senses, but locally based internet sites are typically special interest, or splintered into many, many badly run and maintained operations. Currently, in a lot of places there is not the concentration, and therefore the economy of scale to do this properly.

I’m sure the OSS movement will be the one to step in here, as in the community building domains OSS reigns supreme… so eyes open for the next big thing.