It’s been a while since I’ve taken any sort of quiz like this, so when David Farrar from Kiwblog posted his results today it prompted me to give it another go.

My Political Views
I am a center-right moderate social libertarian
Right: 1.33, Libertarian: 1.97

Political Spectrum Quiz

I completed the quiz pretty quickly and felt the need to answer ‘it depends on the specifics’ to many of the questions, so take the results with a grain of salt. I think it is a reasonably accurate description of me though.

Recently, an edit to the VersionControlSystem article on the WLUG wiki drew me in to expand on it. My own work on that edit ended up taking up 4 days (in spurts), in the course of which I would add relevant points, only to notice that the additions revealed some structure trying to emerge, which would then cause me to go back to rearrange the text, which in turn would remind me of more relevant points to add, several times over. It was much more work than I expected, and I was quite tired and wanting to be done by the end.

However, the effort ended up crystallising my conceptualisation of version control systems quite thoroughly. I have long been aware of all the individual points I wrote about, but it was only during this work that I came to understand their relations systematically. In order to make the effort expended more worthwhile, and because I do not know of any other article summarising the evolution in this manner (although of course I may well be ignorant), I thought I should give the article additional exposure by also posting it on my weblog.

Remember that getting from each of step to the next in this sequence took a long time, both because it took time to realise that there was a problem in the first place, and because the respective right solution was not clear from foresight – trivially obvious as it may all seem when you see it laid out like here.

1+1: One Repository, One Working Copy

The design of the earliest systems revolved around versioning a single working copy, directly edited by all users. To prevent attempts at simultaneous modification of a single file, editing was not allowed without checking files out, which only one user at a time could do for any given file.

Having to give each user access to the same machine and file system in order to work on code was natural at the time these systems were designed, in the mainframe era, but today would obviously be a problem. Also, the requirement to check files out was a cause of friction even at the time, since everyone has to wait on one another – not to mention that someone might forget to check a file back in before leaving on vacation.

1+n: One Repository, Many Working Copies

The next evolutionary step was to decouple the repository from the working copy, so that there may then be many working copies. The exemplar in this class of systems, known as centralised VCSs, is CVS. It lifts the obvious restrictions of earlier systems with a design in which the repository is mediated by a server. Multiple users can collaborate by each checking out a private working copy of the project.

Note that in CVS, “checking out” no longer implies locking. (In other centralised VCSs, it may; eg. Visual SourceSafe. In some, such as Perforce, it is optional.) Checking in changes is simply blocked if someone else has already checked in other changes in the meantime. Before the latecomer is allowed to check in their own changes, they have to update their working copy with the upstream changes, resolving any conflicts manually.

This works reasonably well. CVS ended up as the de facto standard for a decade.

However, its single-repository nature, subsequently adopted by most following major systems, perpetuates problems harking back to the earlier model – and adds new ones:

• Checking in changes under such a system requires a network connection, as do most operations related to the project history. Besides the fact that this makes offline work nearly impossible, it also imposes a major performance penalty, since networked operations are inescapably slow. Some systems, like Subversion, try to selectively speed up some of these operations by keeping more data in the working copy, but the benefit of this is uneven across operations. Further, high traffic repositories may require rather beefy servers and connections to sustain.

• Anything checked in is always public; this means one has to be very careful about the state of commits. It also makes it impossible to touch up history (eg. to fix common mistakes like forgetting to include a new file in a commit). Branches become a big deal: all commits are publicly visible, no matter how experimental. Also, branch names are forced into a global namespace so a lot of thought has to be given to choosing them.

• Branching is problematic for more reasons too. Most of these systems do not support branch merging very well: after you do it once, the changes from the merged-in branch are mixed in without any tracking, so later attempts to merge the same branch will result in lots of artificial conflicts. This makes it very difficult to keep branches in synch. But the longer branches go without merging, the more effort it takes to merge them. All this adds up to a large barrier, psychological and otherwise, against branching.

• The single-repository nature means that anyone who wants the safety of revision control needs to have write access to the same repository. And since branching is badly supported, everyone with access to the repository is generally going to be working on the same trunk. This means write access has to be given out selectively, to competent people only, resulting in political headaches within projects, while outsiders are forced to create their patches in an unversioned ghetto.

n+n: Many Working Copies, Paired With Equally Many Repositories

The solution to all this was to not only give each collaborator a separate working copy, but a separate repository also. This class of system, whose pioneering solid implementation was BitKeeper, is known as distributed version control systems. The technical basis that allows this is algorithmic merging: 3-way merging (in the simplest case) allows combining non-overlapping changes automatically, and merge point tracking allows repeatedly merging branches without unnecessary conflicts.

Since each collaborator has their own repository and can make commits, the effect is that everyone has their own private branch, with full versioning for local changes, and these branches can be published at the discretion of their author and can be merged by others easily. Actually, each collaborator often has several local branches – since merging is easy and branches never ”need” be published, it is painless to create short-lived branches for experiments or tests, to use them as a general workflow aspect (eg. start a new branch for every separate bug fix), or for any other purpose, whether intended for public consumption or not.

Everyone has full offline access to the project history, and all repository operations (except pushing or pulling changes, obviously) take place at full local disk speed.

All this immensely accelerates collaborative development and removes the political headaches surrounding commit access.

From the better late than never category… I finally got around to signing keys from the LCA2006 key signing party, the verification sheet from which has travelled with me from NZ to Dublin and then sat on my desk for a few years. I inevitably lost a few of my notes and verifications along the way, so if you were still expecting a signature from me and didn’t get one let me know!

The main hold up for me has been that my previous key signing system, a home grown script, was overly complex and involved me sending an encrypted token to each UID that I waited to receive back before issuing the signature. Lots of work for me, and much hassle for those whose keys I am signing. I’ve reverted back to the more standard method of signing and encrypting the signature to each UID and then throwing my copy of the signature away. Unless the recipient controls the UID and can decrypt the message, the signature will never be released to the world.

I’ve adopted pius as my new signing tool of choice, with a few extra patches to help me maintain my database of signature details and the corresponding verification pages at http://www.mattb.net.nz/pgp/signatures which are linked from the Policy URL packet of each signature I make. I guess I’ll tidy up the patches over the next few days and see if there is any interest in getting them merged.

I see Green Day are touring NZ. The last time they were there was on the American Idiot tour, and it was a fantastic show. Go if you can, I am going to the Hamilton, ON show in three weeks.

The band and their Aus/NZ promoter (Frontier Touring Company) have announced anti scalping measures. This is a topic of personal interest, so I'll mention them here:

• you only get a receipt when you buy a ticket, and you don't get the ticket until 30 days before the date (so you can't sell on Trade Me, which requires you have ticket in hand to sell)
• 300 GA tickets, a maximum of 2 per person, are available from the box office of the venue, in this case Vector Arena in Auckland, the day tickets go on sale.

Lets look at the second measure first.  With a total capacity in the 12,000 range, Vector probably has a GA limit of at least 3,000.   Therefore, this would imply that 10% of the audience - those lucky 150 people who work in downtown Auckland and can justify queuing for the morning - will get tickets through.

Or, professional scalpers will pay a homeless guy $10 to queue and then take their place at 7.59am.

90% of the GA tickets, and presumably the total 11,700 other tickets, will go on the 'tubenet like always before.  Which leads back into the first measure.  Even if you're only sent a receipt, without Trade Me taking an active part, there will be auctions that read "$300 pen with free Green Day ticket receipt".  New Zealand is both blessed and cursed to only really have one public marketplace, and it's one that has expressed no interest in not taking its cut of the auction proceeds in the past.

Compare and contrast with what we have here: all GA tickets and the best seated tickets are pick-up on the night only, with the purchasing credit card.  If this were matched with a facility where you can return unwanted tickets to the retailer for a fair refund (minus handling perhaps), and have them invalidated, and made available to the pool again - yes, this means checking back later could actually have good reason! - I consider this the perfect solution.  Sure, there will be people who try and sell the invalidated tickets, but a number-checking web site could clear that up quickly.

Now, on-street scalping will never stop, but it's probably not a bad thing that it exists.  Fern and I went to see The Police on the strength of people standing outside who wanted to sell their tickets at face value (albeit a young couple, not the regular toothless hobo scalpers at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto). I even sold a ticket for R.E.M. in London to a scalper when we didn't have a fourth person who wanted to go.

A couple of weeks ago, tickets for Game 5 of the Stanley Cup, the NHL ice-hockey finals, were going on the street in host city Detroit for 1/3 face value, owing perhaps to the fantastic economic climate in host city Detroit.  Some friends of mine made the 3 hour drive down for Game 7, the final in the best-of-7, but by that point the scalpers had figured out which way up to hold their calculators and were charging between $500 and $2100.  The game was instead watched from the Windsor Casino.  You have to be prepared to walk away.

Yesturday my favorite GNU/Linux distro released it’s latest version. For the first time in about 3 years I was not able to download and install on release day. This was due to us releasing a new major version of our software at work, and activities around this release took up most of my day. As soon as I’ve had time to get my copy of Fedora 11 installed I’ll blog about the experience with tips and advice as I usually do.
But anyway, thank-you and congratulations to the Fedora Team another bleeding edge GNU/Linux version.

/Roger Sinel

Every now and then I need a DOS bootdisk to flash a BIOS or similar, and I only have linux with which to create it. I can never remember the quickest way to do this, so I’m documenting it here:

Lifted entirely from this webpage. I’m only archiving it here because content disappears over time.

I needed to upgrade the bios of my Computer (Intel).

But how to do it without windows?

In my case, Intel has many options for bios upgrading and one is the plain old DOS method. This is the best and fastest way to upgrade your bios with linux.
Create a FreeDOS based bootable usb-stick

* Download a FreeDOS image, i’ll use Balder for now.
* Prepare the usb-stick
o check partition (e.g cfdisk /dev/sda)
o mkfs.msdos /dev/sda1

Commands

qemu -boot a -fda balder10.img -hda /dev/sda
A:\> sys c:
A:\> xcopy /E /N a: c:

Check with

qemu -hda /dev/sda

There are, of course, many ways to do this. With recent VirtualBox versions supporting USB passthrough, I could do it entirely from a windows VM. Several other websites suggest installing grub onto the USB disk and having it boot a floppy disk image directly, which also seems like it would work. Your FAT-formatted USB drive would appear as C:, and you can just copy whatever content you like straight onto that.

Now that the Legal Māori Archive is live, I thought I'd highlight a couple of my favourite texts from the corpus.

The first is a great example of reinforcing cultural confusion. "The Laws of England, Compiled and translated into the Māori language" by judge Francis Dart Fenton is a bi-lingual compendium of the laws of England, but extraordinarily uses bible quotes as examples.

The second example is actaully a collection of texts, the works of Rev. Henry Hanson Turton, who compiled thousands of pages of land deeds and associated documents into six volumes. I can see these seeing a lot of use by Treaty researchers.

Card catalogs have a long tradition in librarianship, dating back, I'm told, to the book stock-take in the French revolution. Librarians understand card catalogs in a deep way that comes from generations of librarians having used them as a core professional tool all their professional lives. Librarians understand card catalogs in ways that I, as a computer scientist, never will. I still recall on one of my first visits to a university library, I asked a librarian where I might find books by a particular author, they found the work for me arguably as fast as I can now find works with the new wizzy electronic catalog.

It is natural, when faced with something new, to understand it in terms of what we already know and already understand. Unfortunately, understanding the new by analogy to the old can lead to form of the old being assumed in the new. It was true that when libraries digitized their card catalogs in the 1970s and 1980s, they were more or less exactly digital versions of the card catalog predecessors, because their content was limited to old data from the cards and new data from cataloging processes (which were unchanged from the card catalog era) and because librarians and users had come to equate a library catalog with a card catalog---it was what they expected.

MARC is a perfect example of this kind of thing. As a data format to directly replace a card catalog of printed books, it can hardly be faulted.

Unfortunately, digital metadata has capabilities undreamt of at the time of the French revolution, and card catalogs and MARC do a poor job of handling these capabilities.

A whole range of people have come up with criticisms of MARC that involve materials and methodologies not routinely held in libraries at the time of the French revolution (digital journal subscriptions and music, for example), but I view these as postdating card catalogs and thus the criticism as unfair.

So what was held in libraries in 1789 that MARC struggle with? Here's a list:

• Systematically linking discussion of particular works with instances of those works
• Systematically linking discussion of particular instances with those instances ("Was person X the transcriber of manuscript Y?")
• Handling ambiguity ("This play may have been written by Shakespeare. It might also have been a later forgery by Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere")

All of these relate to core questions which have been studed in libraries for centuries. They're well understood issues, which changed little in the hundred years until the invention of the computer (which is when all the usually-cited issues with MARC began).

The real question is why we're still expecting an approach that didn't solve the problems two hundred years ago to solve our problems now? Computers are not magic in this area they just seem to be helping us do the wrong things faster, more reliably and for larger collections.

We need a new approach to bibliographic metadata, one which is not ontologically bound to little slips of paper. There are a whole range of different alternatives out there (including a bevy of RDF vocabularies), but I've yet to run into one which both allowed clear representation of existing data (because lets face it, I'm not going to re-enter worldcat, and neither are you, not in our lifetimes) and admitting non-card-based metadata as first class elements.

</rant>

A colleague of mine just sent me this. Why, I may never know, but it's quite cool.

MMMMMMMWMWMMMMM8BMMM@W@@WMMMW@@@MMMMMMMMMMM@MMM@MMW@MMMMMMMM@WMM@@@WW@W@MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM@M@
MMMMMMWMMWM0BW8BBMMMM@MMMMMM@MMMMMMWWBWMMMMMMM@MMMMMM@MM0@MMMMM@M@MM@MMMMMM@@MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMBMMWMMM8BMMMMMMMMM@0@MM@B0@MMWM@@MMWWMMMM@MB8BB@MB0W@WMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMWMMWM0WWM0BM@8S@MMMMMMMMMMa0W@MMMMWMWMMBMWWBBBMM@@MMMM@M@Z8WMMMMMMM@W@@@MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM@MM
MMMMM@aWM0WMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMB@8X@@8WMMMMM@WBBWX8W@@WBBBM@BM@M@8MMBW8BMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
@MMMMMM0B0ZMM@MB@MB800M@W88WMMMZMMMMMMWZa@MM@MM@WWZaa00MMMM@@@MMMMM@BMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MM@WMMMMMMBZ00WMaZMMMM@2M@MW2MM@MZ7880W8@B0WBWW@@MMMWW8aZW@88ZWMM@MW8W@BMMMMM@MM@MM@@@@@@@M@@@MM@MMM
MM@WMMZMMMMMMMWMMWMM@MMMMM@W@@W@MMMWZXra@MMM0aSX;;SMM8Za2@0ZaZBZZBBM@@@@WW@MMMMMMMM@@MMMMM@MMM@M@@MM
M@M@0M@@MMMM@MMMM0M@MM@MMBZMMMM0MMWMMBS2WZ8Z8BZZZaZ7,0WB8r7SSZWZZ80BWMMM@@MMM@MM@@MMM@@@MM@MMMMMMMMM
WMM@WMMMMMMMMMMWMMMWM@W8Za08a2@WMBSWMMZSZWZ7777SZ8BWBBSaMWaa80Z2a88Z880MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM@MMMMM@@M@M@MM
MM8MMMBMM@BW@@WBWBWW0BWM@M@MMWBZ8S7aaB2S;8ZrS2SS2XXrr7XX78MMBZ2aZZZ88a2a0BMMMM@MM@MMMMMM@M@MMMMM@@MM
@MM@MMMMM@WBB@WW@BB@MMMMMWBZ8MMMB822XXXaa2M22S2SSSS2SSSSXXXXX22aa2aZaZZaZ2Z0@MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
BZ0BM@@@MMMMMM@MM2MM@M8WB00aaWBaSaXXXS2SX7SX222SSS222aaZa22S2a2Za2aaaa2ZZZ808WMMM@M@MMMMMWMMMMMMM@MM
MMMMMMMMMMM@MMMMWaM@MBWMMWB02SBW777S7XS22SSXXSS22S22aa22aaaaaZZ8ZZZZaZZaSZZ880@MMMM@MMBrXSrBMMMMM@MM
M@@W@W@WMMMMMMMMM@W0WW8W2Za7X7ra@B8WSXXS22S2S22222Z222aaaaZZaZZaZ888ZZ8ZZ22ZZa0WMMMMMMBrWa;,ZMMM@@MM
MWMMMWMM@BWW@MB@8BWMWBZ2X2XXS2XX777X7X2XS2S2Sa2S2S2aZaaaZZZZaaZZaZZ8WWWWWWW0aZ28W@MMMMWXM0S;.SMMM@MM
MWB0BMZ@@MBMWMMMMMMMB87SSSS22S222XXXSSSXXS22222aZa2aZZ22a2222aaa2Sa800WMMMMMMM8Z8WMMMM@SB8B2ii:MM@MM
@M@@0MBB0Z8@MMWBBWBMSXXXS02SSSS2S2a22SS2SSSS22S2a2Z222a2SXSXrXXXWM@@@MMWW08WMMMM08WBMMMSBZ@M8r,BM@MM
W@@MMBMMMBWW00W@Z0MM8SSa@BSaSSSSSSS22SSS2S22Sa2a22a2SSXrXSZa7BMMW@MM@8aSX2Z220080@WBWMMMa7XZWMX:MMMM
MMWBW0W0B808WMM@WM@WWMMMaXS2S22a22a222S22222aa2ZS2S2aS2Z@WM0MMMWMM2;iii7S2SSaaZZZ2@WB0MM@07rraMi@MMM
BMMMM@BMWMMZ8XMZXXX7SX;rS22222a22aaS2222a2a222aSaSXSXX0W000Z8WW0X:7aWMMMMM@088ZZ2S8WW8WMMSi22i7BSMMM
@MM@aBW@@WZBMZM222aa2Z8ZaS2aa2SaaZa2aZ8aa2222SSS222a2Z8ZZ00BM8220@MMB80WWMM0ZZ00Z2SZWB0BMWr:;SXX8WMM
MMMMMMMM@8aWB@MBrXX7r2a2a2aaaaaaaa22Sa2222SS2S2SSSX2ZZZ0ZZSXaBB0M0000X,:S8WBB08a2aSS8WW8WMBaXXaXSaMM
MMM@M@@MWMMM0ZWMMM@MMM22ZaZ22aaa2a2Z2Z22SSSS22S7rXSXXXZaS7S0M8@W0M2MMMZ8WW@B8ZaZZ0ZaZ0@B0WMB0aBB0;MM
MWWMBMMWWBW@M@ZZ80B0X7SZa2aaZaaaS2XSXXSX28X7rXXr;email hidden; JavaScript is requiredW@B00Z2SXSSSZaZ8BWWBMa2i:7@XWM
@MMMMWBBM@WB@W808SS222aa2aZZZaa22SX7XXZXXXiSX2S7XXSSXX7S0MWaaB,,;8Z;XZaZ88Z22a2aa222a888@WWWS8SX7BWM
MMMMMMMMMWM@@@0B0ZaZZaaa2aZZa2SS7SS80X8ZX8aXZ7XSXrXSXSS8@Wa20MM@ZaZX8ZZZaaZZa22aaaaa2a2ZaWMMWX7SZZZM
MM@@M@MWMW@@@MBWBaZaaa2ZaZa2aSXSZZ8Z00aZ20Z0Z2aSS77XSZZW@8XaZXX2aZ8ZaaaSXXS22X2a2ZZ888Za2ZW@M8;XZa7M
MMMMMMMMM@W@M@WWBaZZ2aa8Zaaa2XaB@00Z00B08SXS7XXXX22S22a8MWW0aXSaZa22SSXSaaZZZZZZZZaZZZ0BZaZ@MMri7XSM
MMMMMM@@@MMMM@MW0ZaZaaZZa88aZa@MM0@M@0SSaa80BB0ZaZa2SSXSaBW@WW08aa2aaZ8ZZa222222SS22aZa800Z0@MW  XMM
MMMMMMMMM@MMMMM@0ZZ8ZZZ0BWW88WMMW0Z2a80M@WW0880WWZaS2SSS2ZZ8B000Za222a2S2a22222a228222ZZZ8080MMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM@0ZZ888@MM@MMMM8ir70BWWBaa8ZaZ0S8B0ZS2S2S2aZ88ZZ8888Zaa2SSSS22S2Z@a2X2aaaZZ8880MMMMMM
MMMMMM@M@MMMMMMM08aZ88MMM@@ZrirZMMMMWMB2 X0BB878BB8a2SSXS2aZ88Zaa2SXXXXXXX;;rXSXSXS2aa22aaa8Z8BMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM@Z8aZMMWaSXSaBMM2ZMM0MMMBBZ22X2W808082XXSa8Z8WB8aaS;ir7XXXXX7r77SSSS22aaZZZZ2aZ0MMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMWZZSMMM0Z2a@MMa :ZW08r7S2ZaSS0Z08Z88Z22a2aZZ8BWBB@MWaXSXS222SXXXXXSSS222ZZZa2ZZBMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM0a2WWZZZ8ZWMMWBWBBaZaSaZX7a8Z28ZZ80B0aaaaaaZ8WB8880@8SXXXSS22aaa222SSa2aa8ZSaZ8MMM
MMMMMMMMMMM277XMMMM0a8@8a2Z80BBBW0ZaSa8aSSSaZaaa8ZZ8808aZZaa2Za888aSS0WSa2aaXXSS22aaZaSa2SXZZ2aZaBMM
MMMMMMMMMMWrX2aXaMMM8ZB82a2Z000Z8ZZZZ2XS2Z8Za222ZZaZ80ZaSSSr7SS2Z288Z882a22Z2222SSXXSSZ272S2ZZS2a8MM
@MMMM@@MMMM8 S00rXMMMZ0BaSZ088ZaaS22SS2Z8Z2S22SaaaSZ8BBZ2SX:.7Xa8B@XZ0ZaZZ2aZaaaaSS2Z2SZ77XSa8SS2ZMM
@@M@@@@MM@MM; S@0SS@M@880aSaaZ2SSS22a8ZZ22S2SX2XXS2WB008Z22SXXS2aM2a8aaZ28aZZa2XSSZBB2aXX;7X28Z2ZZMM
@@M@@@@MMMMMM. aMZ;,BMMW08aa22a228Z2aS2SS2Z2Sa8X7XZWZSS2Z808a2aaBWaaaZ8BaZSXSXa0W@@M07Sr7rXXXZZ2aa@M
MMMMMMM@@@@MMM ,ZWr;7iaMW88Z2ZaZaa22a222ZaXXX77SSSa0ZXZZSZWW@8BB8SXXSaSXXX2Z8WMMBMM0SX27XSSXSaZ222MM
MMMMMMMMMM@M@MM..WX;2;:8MB88aZa8aZZaaS222S77XXXSS222Z08ZZaXX2Z2X77XX7XXSaZ8MMMW. B@Sr7SXXX7XSaZ22SMM
MMMMMMMMMMMM@MMMai2;S2;78MW82ZZ8Zaaa2aZ2SXX77X22SSXS2aSaZZZaSXSSXXXXXaZaBMMr r2SWMBSX2aSXXXX222aa2MM
MMMMMMMMMMMMM@MMMM8S;2Z2XZMBaZSZZZaa2S2SSX7XSS22SSX22aaZZaa2SX77X2S2a0MMMiir ,8MB0ZXX222XSSXXSaZ2ZMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMM@@MMMMSXZZir8MBZ2aZ0aZa22SaXXSXS2a2SS2aaZZZaSXX22aa8ZZMMSrS: iM0aB8BaS222SS2SXS2aa20MM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMM@MMMMMMSX8i7rZMWZZaZZZa222S222Sa2a222aaZaS2SSZ8ZZWMMM@0   i72S8W0B0Z2SXS2SS22SS22S2MM@
MMMMMMMMMMMMMM@MMMMMMMZ7X22;aMB8aZZZa2S2a222S2aXXSa22SSX2Z8B@@WWS   77iii.X@MB0BZXaa22S2S222S2a2ZMM8
MMMMMMMMMMMMMM@@MMM@MMMM0;Z2i2MBZZZ8Za2S222SSaaZSSXSSXZ80WM2a877Sii:irX:SMMWZZ002S22S22X222a2a22WMZ8
MMMMMMMMMMMMMM@MMMMMMMMMM8S;, .B2ZZ80Z28222aa0S22SS2aZBWB87,  :  :,:,7MMMB27S88S2aaZSSSX22aZZaaZM028
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM@MMMMMMMMMM8Xa280aaZ2XSXZ7SSZ0MMMMM77S2WarMWMMWM@8227SZ0ZSSS2SSSXXX222a88ZMM228
MMMMMMM@MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM822S8822XSXXXXXSS2222ZWMMMMMM@BWB88SXSSZ08a22SXSSS222SX2Za8B8BMSaa8
@MMMMM@@MMMMMM@MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM@MMB22X8Za2aXSXX7XS2X77rrr72Z8BWBWBB08000Za2aZ2SX2SSS22SSX22ZWBMZ2a2Z
MMMMM@MMMMMM@@MMMMMMMMMMMMMM@@MMMMM@2S2aZa222SSXX7XXXXS2SX2XXS22aZZZZZaaaZaa2SSSSS2222SSSSSZ@@B2Zaaa
MMMM@MMMMMMM@MMMMMMMMMMMM@@MMMM@@@MMMaXX2aa2222SXSSSXXSXXS22SSSSSXS2aSSSXXXS2S2SS22Sa2SS22S0M@Zaaaaa
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM@MMMM@@@@W@@@MM8XXS22aa2ZaSXXXS2S2SXSS22SS2aa2XXS22SSSSX2SXXX2SX7SaSWM8aa2aaa
MMM@MMMM@MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM@@M@@WW@MMMMMMaX7XS22aaSS22SSSS22XSSSXS2SX22Za22S2S22XX7r7XXSXS2a@MZ2aaaa2
MMMMMMMZZMMMMM@@MMMMMMMM@@@M@M@M@@MM@@MMMMZaXXXXSS22SS2a22a2SaSXS2XSSSSaa2SSrrr7X77X77X2Sa@@Z2aaa2a2
MMMMMMMBS@MM@@MMM@MM@M@@@MMM@M@@@@MMM@@MMMMMWZaa22SSSSSXS2aZZZaSSSSS22222SSS7rr7X7XX77Xa0@W8a2222aBa
MMMMMMMMaSMMM@@MMMMM@MM@M@@BBBW@M@@@MM@M@@MMM0WM0Zaaaa222SSS2a808a2SSSSSXX77XXXXXXXX20W0008a222a8@2
MMMMMMMMM7aM@MMM@@MMM@W00WWZ@@@BMM@@@MM@W@M@M@ MMB0ZZZaZa22222S2Z0BB0a2aSSXXSSS2SaBB8Za808ZaaaZB@; .
MMMMMMMMMWXWWBBBWBWBBBWWM@W@M@@WW@@@@WWWWWWWMM:.080008Z8ZZZZ2aZ2SSSaZ000B08000008Z2S2888ZZZaa2Z;  ,7

I sent him a link to this in return.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My favourite GNU/Linux distro soon has a new version available.

Fedora 11 feature list

/Roger Sinel
Fedora Ambassador

1. There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
   —Phil Karlton

2. Almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching.
   —Terje Mathisen

This morning, the Library of Congress launched http://id.loc.gov/authorities/, their first serious entry into the semantic web.

The site makes the Library of Congress Subject Headings available as defererenable URLs. For example http://id.loc.gov/authorities/sh90005545.

Dag Ågren:

At this point, I’d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.

If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that these particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement should not be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included. Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD, of course, uses all three, and more.

Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.

Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire. Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch them on a spaceship directly into the sun.

PSD is not my favourite file format.

Matt S. Trout:

But here’s my point: Perl people hang out on mailing lists. We bottom post, carefully interleaved, with 76 character lines. We have signatures that meet the McQ standard for acceptable size. We hang out on IRC servers and bitch, moan, interact and collaborate with the aid of an 80×25 xterm with irssi, BitchX or IrcII in it. Sometimes we sit at home with a beer and do one or more of the above. Forums? Meh. Those are the things the PHPtards like because they can’t figure out how to work a mailing list, right? Blogs? That’s not even a ••••ing word! I mean, in my day, we posted to usenet using Larry Wall’s rn that didn’t even have decent ••••ing threading, and we schlepped the posts about from one bnews spool to another over 1200 baud dialup links, and we liked it!

The rest of the world still thinks that we write a thing called PERL, whose purpose is as a super-awk or to write CGI scripts, they think that this language is designed to be write-only line noise that’s only slightly more legible than brainfuck, and we’re sort of sat here going “meh, well, they’re wrong” and NOT ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT

And. There’s an extra incentive. […] So, if you don’t care about any of the rest of it and just think I’m an uppity annoying profane obnoxious b••••••, maybe getting the chance to help me make a fool out of myself will motivate you instead!

That’s Matt – scarily smart, gratingly profane, infectuously energetic, and gets things done.

I’m finally getting out on my bike again. The spring is here and my sore back is feeling a lot better after a few months of exersises.
So I’m finally out there on the open rode again.

I found an interessting site for bike nerds like myself. A bicycle blog type of thing.

/Roger Sinel

With git, you have a multide of ways to slice and dice commits: the index lets you commit things in bits and pieces as you go; the stash gives you a way to transplant changes between branches or shelve work for a while; the power of rebasing allows you to go back and split large commits sensibly into atomic ones. In other DVCSs, all of this is also possible but requires painstaking busywork using far less powerful tools; in centralised VCSs most of it is for all intents and purposes impossible to do at all.

But lately I’ve seen entries cautioning against the use of this power. To me this seems like a sign that git has arrived – it is pulling in people who don’t subscribe to the philosophy behind its design. Personally, I consider the argument for immutable history a terrible idea, even if it is logically defensible within certain parameters. Why?

In contrast to systems with immutable history, git doesn’t force you into any sort of careful premeditation where you try to anticipate all possible and impossible problems you may or may not realise yet. You go about business as usual, and if you belatedly notice a problem you hadn’t thought of or couldn’t even have been aware of at the time, you just go back and fix it. No sweat. Think of it as the Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo principle, applied to version control.

Git is humane, in the Aza Raskin sense.

Update: Chris Siebenmann makes a good point that rewriting history in git is actually no such thing. Of course, that is why pushing “rewritten” history causes the problems it does. And of course that in turn is actually desirable, and thus very much by design.

John Gruber started a bit of a wave by blocking the DiggBar on his site and explaining how others can do the same.

However, his implementation as it currently stands does not play well with search engines and caching proxies.

• The problem with search engines is easily stated and easily solved: a search engine that comes in via a DiggBar link will index the get-lost page as the regular content for that page.

  To avoid that, simply send the page with a status of 403 Forbidden rather than 200 OK, thus telling the search engine that there’s nothing there for it to see. This is trivial to do – in PHP, just add a line like this to the code:

  header("Status: 403");

  Note that this needs to happen before any output is produced; ie. in John’s example it would go above the echo line.

• Fixing the caching proxy problem is not as nice.

  The issue is what happens when two users request the page through the same caching proxy: the version of the page that’s served to the first visitor will be cached and served to the second visitor as well. But if one of them hits the page via the DiggBar and the other comes in via legitimate venues, then the second visitor will get the wrong version of the page no matter the order in which they hit the site. Of course the worse case is when the DiggBar user was first: then the second, legitimate visitor will be served the get-lost page.

  Just the response status fix above should help a little with that: proxies generally use different expiration rules for such as 403 responses.

  To really fix the problem, however, you need to also send a “Vary: Referer” header. This asks proxies to request a separate copy of the page each time they see a client request it with a different Referer. This ensures that the correct page will be served to everyone, it even ensures that caching remains possible despite the page content possibly varying depending on the source link.

  However, while correct, it is probably hard to stomach: it will increase the volume of proxy reqests by roughly a factor of the number of distinct links to your site. That’s easily an order of magnitude for popular weblogs like Daring Fireball. Then again, not implementing it will penalise some innocent visitors.

  Sending variable pages properly in an infrastructure with caches is not cheap.

  Update: in email, Mark Nottingham suggests simply making the 403 explicitly uncacheable by sending along a “Cache-Control: no-store” header.

Update: Adrian Sutton:

So that’s roughly what has now been deployed to Symphonious.net. The key difference is that the “Vary: Referer” header that Aristotle suggests is only added when the page is blocked. This means it’s possible for someone using the DiggBar to get the real page from a caching proxy, but it shouldn’t be possible for an innocent user to get the blocked page.

That’s a clever trade-off. He compounds this with a Javascript solution to bust the DiggBar frame, because a user might be coming in through a link from another site that in turn has been framed – which isn’t obvious from the referrer. Nice work.

Update: Mark Nottingham remarks that serving responses both with and without a Vary header for the same URI is likely to confuse caches.

At the moment besides working a little to much lately, I’m organizing a meeting for the local Computer Society here in Stockholm Sweden.
The evening will be talks based on FOSS, Free and Open Source software.
Then evening will slowly gain pace as the talks get shorter and shorter. The first talks will be 20 mins, then 10 mins, and the last 4 will be only 5 mins each.
Hopefully this will create and interesting and exiting evening with lots of different topics.
These are the talks that are already booked.

– Daniel Stenberg – Curl/libcurl 20min
– Henrik Nordström – Squid 20min
– Rickard Bondesson – OpenDNSSEC 20min
– David Johansson – Lättanvänd IT 10 min
– Roger Sinel – Bacula 10min
– Monika Orski – Boken om öppen källkod 5min
– Roger Sinel – Fedora 11 Preview 5min

And there are a few more speakers that are not yet confirmed.

I will write a rapport about the evening goes, and if the concept was a success.

/Roger Sinel

In the last couple of days there has been some hubbub about link shortening services, started by a declaration by Joshua Schachter which I fully agree with. To my dismay, it has resulted in a flurry of terrible ideas being devised and marketed via the web equivalent of a flash mob. I consider the whole thing a tempest in a teapot.

People started complaining about link shortening services for no other reason than Twitter, which automatically uses TinyURL for links past a certain length, whether you ask it to do so or not – unless you preempt that by shortening the URI yourself. (Yes, more generally the reason is microblogging, but the platforms other than Twitter are 1) open and 2) do not have significant uptake. So whether you care about them or not, in either case they are not of concern.) And I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that Twitter is not going to implement rev="canonical" or rel="shorturl" or any other of the proposals.

Now, people have suggested that Twitter should simply implement their own shortening service. That way, the availability of links within tweets would be identical to the availability of those tweets themselves. This seems like the blindingly obviously correct solution to me. Nothing else makes any sense. A proliferation of link shortening services is bad for the web as a whole. This is, to my mind, an incontrovertible statement. Therefore, to devise technological solutions to manage increasing proliferation seems like an equally obvious folly – or under ideal outcomes, a waste of time.

People, of course, are eager to paint the link shortening shed. It’s fun to engage the inventor brain, no matter how ill-advised the pursuit – the entire software industry serves as proof of this.

I am convinced that if Twitter were to implement the outlined Twitter-centric approach, the entire debate would evaporate post haste. Conversely, so long as Twitter does nothing about it, it will merrily continue to generate hot air. Hot air I am fairly certain it is because if and when Twitter do in fact do something, it is highly unlikely to involve any of the proposals based on link relations.

This tar pit has sucked up far too much of the creative energies of smart people in just the week or so since it arose.

Bill de hÓra:

I would say always bet on protocols and formats, the web being the prime example. Because as someone who likes Twitter immensely, I like that I don’t have to care too much what Twitter is written in or what it runs on.

Turns out I have some spare time to pull my thoughts together today, so hi!

You are here, or one hours drive away from it

I'm traveling for work again, down in Orange County, CA.  The trip is for three weeks but Fern is coming down for the week in the middle, so the second week will be equal parts debugging and Disneyland, upgrading servers and Universal Studios.

Flying into LAX I had the realisation that everywhere I go is an hour away from a major airport.  I live 1 hour from Toronto Pearson, Hamilton NZ is 1 hour from Auckland International, whenever I go to Houston, it's a 45 min cab ride downtown, etc.   More businesses need to be near airports.

Rental car buddy

To get to rental cars at a large airport you generally get onto a bus or train, which takes you to the off-site lot.  I waited for and got on the Avis bus and sat down in a row of five seats, between two men in business attire, two seats to my left and right.  The guy on my left was a larger gentleman with a briefcase on the seat next to him; the guy on my right was wearing a black turtleneck with suit jacket.

At the next stop a family got on board, including a baby carrier and a small duffel bag.  The driver tried to volunteer to put the duffel bag on the luggage shelf but the woman said "There's a dog in there".  This wasn't a Paris Hilton-esque handbag; it was fully zipped up with no evidence of holes or windows!

Guy On My Right said "They bought the whole family, kids and the dog".  I obviously misheard, as I said "There's a dog in that bag, too."  He said, "That's what I said".  I said "Oh."

At the next stop, another couple got on, and I expected they would want to sit up the front so as not to need to climb over the baby-and-dog show.  However, they chose not to, and found seats down the packed end of the bus.  I made a comment to Guy On My Right to the effect of "Fine, I'll stay sprawled then".  He said, what did you say?  - I said "stay sprawled out over these seats".  He said, "Oh".

We didn't try and speak to each other again.

Hotel

My hotel room is 321, and when I was waiting at the elevator, I saw it was 3:21pm.  I love coincidences.

At 4:30pm the bedside clock radio alarm went off.   Who sets their hotel alarm clock for 4.30pm and leaves it?  Note to self: always check the alarm time first thing on arrival. I set it for 7am.

Then it went off again at 7pm.  Second note to self: make sure the idiot before you got AM and PM the right way around.

I have, however, found a good use for the clock radio - I drove past a big digital billboard advertising 100.3 The Sound, announcing it was playing "One Tree Hill" by U2.  An album track on commercial radio is a bit odd, so I listened further - turns out to be a great music station.  Later that evening I was listening to Chris Cornell presenting "My Turn", rocker-plays-DJ for the evening, and amused to learn that "Ladies of the World" by Flight of the Conchords rates up there in Cornell-world.

The next morning I entered half-asleep-half-awake state at 5am (my body clock's 8am) with a dream I was listening to a Flight of the Conchords interview on the radio.  It felt strangely real.

What's on?

What else to do on a Sunday evening while eating dinner?  Watch TV, of course.

• Hot: Japanese television (and more)
• Not: American television (Sundays on Fox)

It's hilarious when it's highlights and they aren't speaking English.  It's just sad when it's "soccer moms" vs "hip hop dancers".  And that ain't "human tetris".  This is human tetris!

Crap TV redux

Apple founder Steve Wozniak (the larger, bearded Steve) is competing in Dancing With The Stars, and according to the Internet he's woefully bad but puts his heart into it.  Sounds like Rodney Hide!  However, you know how cults of celebrity work, especially ones that can figure out how to ballot-stuf, and he's likely to get the highest audience vote week-to-week.  I watched the first few minutes of the elimination show before realising that I found watching dancing completely boring, and further, this show had aired 3 hours ago on the east cost, so I could just go to the Internet and read the results.  Which I did.  Woz remains, no watching required.

I’m (hopefully) going travelling soon, and I’d like to have ready access to Wikipedia so I can investigate more information about various things, and generally keep up with what I should know while I’m visiting places. So I’ve spent some time trying to figure out how to get data plans for my phone.

This morning I had an epiphany, why not download the Internet before I left? My Nokia e66 can take a MicroSD Card (according to Nokia it only supports up to 8GB cards, although I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t support a 16GB card.)

There are several articles on how to build an offline wikipedia. I like the idea of having the compressed entire English text-only version of Wikipedia (~4.5GB). Maybe using the compressed Open Street Maps data (~5.2GB) to provide some geo-location while offline. And for good measure maybe compressed FreeBase dump (~1.2GB) to provide more links between articles, and provide information on regions (Wikipedia tends to provide a single point representing a region, not useful.)

Hopefully with a bit of hacking, I can end up with something like Mobilizy’s Wikitude, using the GPS for location, and accelerometers to figure out direction and rotation in 3D space (Android has an electric compass which makes this a bit easier for them), using freebase + Wikipedia to annotate the current scene.

What would be really cool would be to have a HUD that overlayed wikipedia articles over your current vision from your phone. Although I suspect no matter what you do, you’ll end up looking like a tool.

It’s scary that the sum of human knowledge (Wikipedia + Open Street Maps + FreeBase) fits in ~11GB (ignoring indexes and the like), and that I can fairly easily fit this onto my cellphone, with heaps of room to spare!

This is an interesting development. “RedHat Patent Pending” . This will be a lively debate worth following.

What ever their real reason is for doing this, I hope the day never comes when this patent portfolio gets used to infringe peoples freedom’s.

/Roger Sinel

With another Fedora release on the horizon it’s time to take a look a closer look at the Fedora 11 feature list.
Some on the high points as far as I am concerned are the following.

- 20 Second Startup
“The goal is to be at the login screen in 20 seconds.”

- Supported Architectures
optimize better for the architectures which fedora support’s, giving better performance to the user.

- Automatic Fonts & Mime Installer
“automatically install applications, fonts, multimedia codecs.”

- DNSSEC
“provides integrity and authenticity of DNS data”

- Firefox 3.1

- gcc 4.4

- ext4 Default file system
“more features and generally better performance than ext3, which is showing its age in the Linux filesystem world.”

- KDE4.2

- DeviceKit
“is a simpler, modular replacement for hal. With a graphical frontend called palimpsest”

- rpm 4.7
“Memory consumption in transactions has been reduced dramatically.”

- Windows Cross-compiler
“Build and test full-featured Windows programs, from the comfort of the Fedora system, without needing to use Windows.”

/Roger Sinel

I just created the Linkedin .com group - Svenska Linuxföreningen, for anyone who is a member of Svenska Linuxföreningen (Swedish Linux Society)

I’ve seen that there are plenty of FOSS groups popping up on Linkedin.com, so I thought it was time for us to have a group there to.

/Roger Sinel

I am proud to announce that I have been accepted as a Fedora Ambassador. I feel very honoured and humble to be accepted and now finally an official member of the Fedora Project.

I’ve used Fedora GNU/Linux since Fedora Core 1 and during this time I’ve followed the development of this amazing project. I followed the people and the projects focus as both have evolved. I will now step up and do my part as I actually have done for year’s, that is to promote Fedora and help people in the way in which I can.
Not all of us can contribute code to this project, but there are people like me for example, a RedHat Enterprise System’s Administrator who can contribute with energy and knowledge to reach out to people and promote this project that I believe in.

I look forward to representing the Fedora Project here in Sweden.

Roger Sinel Fedora Ambassador

/Roger

I’m thinking of going to this, I would be an interesting few days. Just got to see if it’s possible.
FUDcon Berlin 2009

/Roger Sinel

Running while listening to music is so much easier if your pace is the same as the beat of your music. Someone should make a treadmill with an iPod dock that detects the beat of whatever you're listening to, makes it humanly possible to run to (perhaps by halving or doubling it) and then sets the speed to the beat.

Then, your playlist can become your program. Want a hardcore workout, put on some dance music.  Feeling a bit tired, put on "Shine On You Crazy Diamond".

Image uploaded to Flickr by user 'Courosa'.

Last weekend my brother in law and I fled the snowy north and flew south to London England to attend the Ultimate Fighting Championship UFC 95 show in the London O2 arena.
Luckily we weren’t alone as 13,268 people attended what was a very professional and entertaining evening of tops class fights.

There was one Swedish fighter competing, Per Eklund. Sadly Per in what was his third UFC appearance lost to Evan Dunham from Las Vega USA.
After following the UFC off and on for about 10 years it was great to finally see an event live. The sport of MMA has evolved amazingly the past few years, and it’s got a strong fan base. We are now seeing the first generation fighters emerging that have trained MMA from day one. They are fully all rounded and the seniors of the sport are now parsing down there knowledge to the up and coming fighters.

A real surprise was seeing some real UFC stars who were also there in London watching the fights, Dana White, Georges St. Pierre, B.J. Penn, Wanderlei Silva, Rampage Jackson.

/Roger Sinel

I was very pleased to wake up this morning to the news that National has delayed the introduction of S92A via an order-in-council. It’s a nice short-term victory, but I’ll save the champagne until the law is fundamentally rewritten.

The most pleasing aspect of the decision is simply that it was made at all. Within two weeks, a small band of protesters were able to harness the power of the Internet to direct international attention and place enough pressure on a Government, whose Prime Minister admitted to not having read the bill prior, that he then took the time to understand the issues and personally announce the delay in implementation of the law. We owe much thanks to the Creative Freedom Foundation for all the effort they put into co-ordinating the protest and ensuring that a single coherent message was presented. Just a little bit of my cynicism and belief that politicians never listen to public opinion outside of election campaigns was chipped away today.

The reason I’m not breaking out the champagne yet is that we’ve only achieved a temporary reprieve in the commencement of the law. While those present at the press conference seem somewhat confident that John Key didn’t like what he found in the law and would have repealed it if given the chance, all that has actually been done is delay it in the hopes of an agreement between the TCF and the “rights holders” (aka big media companies) on how to implement the still fundamentally broken law. The Government has given until late March for that to occur.

To put this into a more global context. My happiness as I took the bus to work after reading about the decision to delay the law was short lived as the front page of the local paper declared that Eircom (Ireland’s equivalent of Telecom) has “voluntarily” agreed to block sites such as The Pirate Bay upon request by the media companies (this comes a week after they also announced an agreement to, again “voluntarily”, implement a 3-strikes S92A style policy). Now, with the biggest ISP in their pocket (so to speak), the media companies have sent threatening letters to the remaining ISPs in the country demanding they implement the same procedure.

To me, this illustrates one of the fundamental problems with S92. The concept that an ISP is liable for the conduct of its users, or for policing where on the Internet users should and shouldn’t be able to connect to does not belong in our laws. Most ISPs already have provision to disconnect customers for illegal activity in their terms and conditions. If an end-user is doing something illegal, that is an issue between the rights holder and the end-user to take up in the courts just like every other sector of society must do when wronged, at which point the existing ISP terms and conditions can be invoked and access terminated.

The big media companies, having decided that it is too expensive/hard/inconvenient to follow standard legal procedures to resolve their grievances are launching multi-pronged attacks to shift the playing field in their favour. In countries like New Zealand, where our politicians yearn for a Free Trade Agreement with America, they use their lobbyists to ensure that S92 style laws are part of the conditions. In other jurisdictions, like Ireland, they use strong-arm, divide and conquer style bully tactics outside of the political and legal process.

I don’t support copyright infringement. I rely on copyright to protect much of the work I place on the Internet, I want strong laws that protect me when my rights have been infringed. I don’t believe that such laws should come at the expense of due process, our legal tradition and the basic principle of fairness! I don’t believe that copyright infringement is such a heinous crime that it demands punishments stronger than those we deliver to paedophiles, stalkers or any other class of criminal who uses the Internet to enable their crimes.

To me, today’s (yesterday’s – depending on your timezone) decision is only the first step in clawing New Zealand back from the dangerous path that the big media companies have been leading our law makers down. From here we need to press on and demonstrate to the Government over the next month that even if the TCF and rights holders are able to come up with some sort of workable code of practice, the law is still fundamentally flawed. It is based on premise that we are guilty by accusation.

Even if guilt were to be proved by a competent legal body (eg. court or copyright tribunal) we don’t need laws placing further liabilites onto ISPs (and remember the definition of ISP under this amendment act includes businesses who provide Internet access to staff, libraries, schools and hospitals) when their existing terms and conditions already prohibit illegal activity.

Finally, and most importantly of all, we need to remember that laws exist to serve all sectors of society. Yes, copyright infringement is against the law and rights holders are reasonable in expecting the law to protect their content and allow them to make a fair profit. On the other side of the fence, average New Zealanders are not being unreasonable in their desire to have media available electronically, on demand and non-inhibited by DRM following a legal purchase. The failure of the media businesses to adequately cater to this change in market demand and usage of technology is obviously a contributing factor to the widespread copyright problems that they are facing today.

Obviously, I’m not condoning copyright infringement simply because the media companies are failing to address demand. Even stupid laws must be obeyed (and the concept of copyright is far from stupid). What I want to see is the Government acknowledging that the problem is not solely with consumers infringing copyright for malicious purposes, and therefore that the solutions do not lie solely in increasing the enforcement and punishments available.

Copyright has always been a balancing act between the rights of content producers and consumers. S92 and the act it is contained within are taking us far too far down the road of catering to big business and their outdated business models with far too little concern for the rights of the individual consumer.

Despite the many submissions made on this act last year when it was first passing through parliament, there was no comprehensive debate on what copyright means and how it should balance the rights of content producers and consumers in our digital century where copying is a zero-cost, zero-thought activity. Without such a debate we’re doomed to continue wasting time arguing over the symptoms of the problem, like S92.

So, I’m saving my champagne for the day when we as a country address these issues and come up with a fair and workable interpretation of what copyright means today.

If you are seeing this entry in your aggregator, please take a moment to click through to the site. I recently added a few rules to my stylesheet to implement drop caps, and now I can’t stop marvelling at how gorgeous they typically are. Normally I would be the last one to make such a request of my readers, but I have been clicking through my own archives for days now just to see what my writing looks like with a drop cap.

I’m serious.

When I say I’m a typophile – albeit an amateur one –, I really mean it.

As an aside, this feature will only work in browsers that support the :first-child pseudo-class… or to be less (or more, depending on how you see it) passive-aggressive: there is only one browser which couldn’t handle them anyway. Yes, that one. But I only serve my pages as application/xhtml+xml anyway ­ and you know what? To hell with bad browsers.

Assaf Arkin:

So what does that teach us, besides the folly of premature conclusions? That Web design has to be [useful], but there’s no reason it has to be ugly.

[Edited to avoid watering down some punchiness unnecessarily.]

If you’re reading this post via the website rather than a feed/planet then you will notice that the site has gone completely black in support of the Creative Freedom Foundation’s campaign against S92A of the NZ Copyright Amendment Act which is due to come into effect on 28th February 2009. I’ve also joined the wave of people blacking out their “avatar” on Facebook/Jabber/MSN, etc.

S92A introduces “Guilt Upon Accusation” whereby if you are accused of copyright infringement (downloading music and movies, etc) “repeatedly” (likely 3 or more times) you are at risk of being disconnected from the Internet by your ISP. The law does not require any proof or substantiation of the accusations and the entire process would occur outside of the courts and the established legal system. Not only does it place every user at risk, the wording is very unclear on exactly what type of organisation is considered an ISP and there is significant concern that schools, businesses, libraries and hospitals will be placed in the difficult position of determining whether their users have broken the law and require disconnection.

Opposition to the law is not an attack on copyright, or a statement that we should be free to download all the movies and music that we desire. Those sorts of activities are clearly wrong, and I don’t have any issue with copyright holders wanting to enforce their rights when their content is illegally copied. However, disconnecting people upon accusation, with no proof or formal legal process to prove guilt is not the right way to go about it.

The fact that the law does not require proof of guilt is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of problems with it. For further background on the problems it causes for ISPs by placing them as the middle-man in copyright disputes you should refer to the following posts:

• Russel Brown of Public Address, points out that among other faults the law “stipulates a penalty that no court would impose in adjudicating a copyright complaint“
• David Farrar of Kiwiblog, has a guest post at the NZ Center for Political Research explaining how the law affects businesses
• Creative Freedom Foundation Background on S92

Finally, I think it is worth pointing out that S92A was removed from the proposed Amendment at the select committee stage, but was later reintroduced by Judith Tizard during the final reading of the bill. Mark Harris has an excellent post on the history of the amendment which includes facts such as the official report on the amendment also recommended removing S92A as it was unecessary given existing ISP terms and conditions which forbid illegal activity. The fact that the select committee (based on public submissions) recognised the problems with S92A and removed it, only to have it added back in again at the last stage when we no longer had any say on it really hacks me off and I cant’ help but feel the influence of the “big money” American media companies pressuring our politicians to pass a law that they don’t really understand the full consequences of.

So what is to be done? The Blacked Out campaign, being run by the Creative Freedom Foundation is gathering steam and international attention. Peter Dunne of United Future (who originally voted for the amendment) has declared that the amendment is wrong, and doesn’t do what they thought they were voting to