I recently came across two old and unrelated writings about law, both of which are worth reading, especially for people with strong opinions but no formal training. The first is this piece, entitled Seven Ways in Which Code Equals Law (And One in Which It Does Not), by recently-appointed New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann and EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. Several observations are particularly appropriate for the slashdot crowd (and, to a lesser extent, certain members of the Debian community and others who grew up on a diet of BASIC, Pascal, and then C and later perl). I especially like this bit about “hacking the law”:

Some people, seeing this connection, and remembering the values of good code, try to improve the legal system by treating it as a computer. People come to me with ideas for hacking the law. The government says that cryptography is a weapon, they say, but the Bill of Rights says we have the right to bear arms. So that means we have a Constitutional right to use cryptography. But the legal system isn t a computer. If you can t convince a judge that what you re proposing is consistent with the values underlying a law, your argument will go nowhere. People go to jail every year because they think they ve found a way to hack the Sixteenth Amendment. The income tax is illegal, they say, or, The income tax is voluntary, see, it says so right here, and then they get convicted of tax evasion and sent to jail. We did convince several judges about the Constitutional dimension of cryptography, but the claim started from the values of the First Amendment, not a mechanical reading of its words. It s a category mistake to treat the legal system as just another architecture with its own specialized language. Code and law are different ways of regulating; they have different textures. All of those people who are required to make the legal system work leave their mark on its outcomes: they make a certain amount of drift and discretion almost inevitable. Code doesn t have such a limit: it can make perfectly hard-nosed bright-line rules and hold everyone in the world to them. Code is capable of a kind of regulatory clarity and intensity that law can only state, never really achieve.

I don’t entirely agree with the other article, entitled What I Ate For Breakfast and Other Mysteries of Judicial Decision Making by outspoken Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski (unofficial site maintained by Aaron Swartz, wikipedia entry). For example, I think critical legal studies has resulted in some interesting insights, some of which actually have practical applciation. Still, Judge Kozinski makes an important point about the numerous factors that act as a check on discretion in judicial decisionmaking:

It is popular in some circles to suppose that judicial decision making can be explained largely by frivolous factors, perhaps for example the relationship between what judges eat and what they decide. Answering questions about such relationships is quite simple - it is like being asked to write a scholarly essay on the snakes of Ireland: There are none. But as far back as I can remember in law school, the notion was advanced with some vigor that judicial decision making is a farce. Under this theory, what judges do is glance at a case and decide who should win - and they do this on the basis of their digestion (or how they slept the night before or some other variety of personal factors). If the judge has a good breakfast and a good night’s sleep, he might feel lenient and jolly, and sympathize with the downtrodden. If he had indigestion or a bad night’s sleep, he might be a grouch and take it out on the litigants. Of course, even judges can’t make both sides lose; I know, I’ve tried. So a grouchy mood, the theory went, is likely to cause the judge to take it out on the litigant he least identifies with, usually the guy who got run over by the railroad or is being foreclosed on by the bank. This theory immodestly called itself Legal Realism. Just to prove that even the silliest idea can be pursued to its illogical conclusion, Legal Realism spawned Critical Legal Studies. As I understand this so-called theory, the notion is that because legal rules don’t mean much anyway, and judges can reach any result they wish by invoking the right incantation, they should engraft their own political philosophy onto the decision-making process and use their power to change the way our society works. So, if you accept that what a judge has for breakfast affects his decisions that day, judges should be encouraged to have a consistent diet so their decisions will consistently favor one set of litigants over the other. I am here to tell you that this is all horse manure. And, like all horse manure, it contains little seeds of truth from which tiny birds can take intellectual nourishment. The little truths are these: Under our law judges do in fact have considerable discretion in certain of their decisions: making findings of fact, interpreting language in the Constitution, statutes and regulations; determining whether officials of the executive branch have abused their discretion; and, fashioning remedies for violations of the law, including fairly sweeping powers to grant injunctive relief. The larger reality, however, is that judges exercise their powers subject to very significant constraints. They simply can’t do anything they well please.

Finally, I will link, but not embed, this video of the Anna Nicole Smith court order, for an entirely different perspective on the legal process. You almost don’t really want to have to see this stuff.

Phil Wainewright: “So here is a selection of news stories culled from the past few months that allow us to objectively evaluate what happens when users ‘have total control over things like privacy and security’… […] Would any of those laptop thefts made the headlines had the data been stored in Google Apps? No, of course not, because the data would have remained inaccessible on Google’s servers.” Great points. A little closer to home, how many times have you taken a call from an anguished family member who has just lost their data but who hasn’t heeded your advice to back up said data periodically? While we’re at it, how many times have you not heeded your own advice on the same subject? Could the SaaS providers possibly do any worse than we’ve been doing here? Granted, there needs to be a culture change, one that needs to happen on both sides of the transaction, to make this work. But it will eventually happen, because it Just Makes Sense.

Today I was musing about different version control systems and merge algorithms. I've been thinking specifically about how I maintain Debian packages in Darcs. I tend to import upstream tarballs into one branch, and maintain the Debian packages in another, simply merging when a new upstream is released.

Now, there seem to be two prevailing philosophies on how to handle merges in this case. I'm thinking here about merges back to upstream. Say I want to contribute my Debian patches to them.

1. Commit "clean" patches upstream. Don't have a bunch of history -- the fixing typos commits, the fixing bugs commits, or the merging to track new upstream releases. Just something like a series of diffs against the current head.
2. Bring across the full history, warts and all, and keep it around permanently.

git encourages option #1, with its rebase option. Darcs encourages option #2 (though some use its amend-record option to work more like #1).

As I got to thinking about it, it occured to me that git-rebase would be very nice if you are going to use philosophy #1. In short, rebase will remove your local patches from a repo, update it to the latest upstream, then re-apply your local changesets -- aborting to have you fix any conflicts. This is as opposed to a more traditional merge, where you add the upstream changesets to your local branch and then commit new changesets to resolve conflicts. (So a rebase would be totally useless in situation #2)

I got to thinking about this, and started wondering what would happen to people that I'm working with that in turn work off my branches. And sure enough, the git-rebase manpage says, "When you rebase a branch, you are changing its history in a way that will cause problems for anyone who already has a copy of the branch in their repository and tries to pull updates from you."

I maintain, therefore, that git-rebase is evil and should be avoided. It only works for a situation where someone maintains a private branch of a project, never shared in any way except to submit patches to an upstream. Forget it if you have a team maintaining that branch, or want to post that branch online for others to help with (as I do with my Debian darcs package). Even if you keep it private now, do you really want to adopt a work process that forces you to keep it private forever, or else completely change how you work?

And this brings me back to the original question of patch philosophy. Personally, I dislike philosophy #1. I'd much rather have the full history of a change, warts and all. Look at the Linux kernel example: changesets that introduced bugs that made it into the official tree have their fixes documented, but changesets that introduced bugs that were fixed before being merged into the official tree could be lost to the public due to rebasing by submitters. Is that really what we want? I don't think so.

With Darcs, tagging is very cheap and it is quite trivial to write an "apply a changeset bundle" script that makes a before tag, applies a series of patches, and makes an after tag. One could then run a darcs diff between the two tags to see the net effect on the repository, or could still look at the individual patches. (Or, you can avoid tagging and manually specify the "from" and "to" patches.) I find that a much better model: you can have it both ways. I'd think that most modern VCSs ought to support some variant on that, too.

And I think that git-rebase should be removed on the grounds that it encourages poor version tracking practices.

I'm not very good with names. Given names I can manage, but I quite often forget what people's last names are. However, I'm not all that bad in remembering what I know people from. I've taken up the habit of calling people by the project they're known by if I can't immediately come up with their last name. This works, as people usually know who you're talking about if you mention, say, Dries Drupal, Philip Tinymail, Thomas Gstreamer, Guido Python, Theo OpenBSD, etc. It doesn't sound as good when you say Linus Linux, but then usually everyone knows who you talk about when you just use his first name. I do wonder what I'd be known by, though...

Ok, now that was lame. Anyway, I’ve just upgraded perlis to Feisty Fawn at the wake of some 1169 MB worth of packages. An apt-get autoclean is therefore in order. I’ve also yet to test hibernation and resume, but knetworkmanager definitely impressed me. Too bad it doesn’t have ifupdown integration yet (which I’ve just done to wlassistant now, pending testing and REVU.) Just about the only snag I got caught while upgrading was a file overwriting of some .pngs by adept. Since I was upgrading using adept-updater I had to work around using dpkg -i --force-extract and resuming the dist-upgrade using aptitude. I was told in #kubuntu-devel that it will had to be fixed later, and even though I may be able to fix it, it’ll be hard finding a main component sponsor since it’s a weekend. :/ Oh well, life exec()s on. Anyhow I’m too early for upgrade testing (which is on the 8th,) but the outlook for dist-upgrades looks good. And, I’ve other stuff to ponder about, like finishing Philosophy and Procedures 2 of my NM application…

Well, not really, but some people might think so, or feel intruded on... To back up a bit, and put that in context, I'm currently contemplating ways of making Stuff To Do, my web based todo list/time tracker/work organizer more able to track when a user is active. Currently, it marks you as active if you do anything at all in its web page. The reason I adopted this approach is that I want the program to help the user out, not make the user a slave to the program (ok, switching tasks, hit start..stop...stop stop start stop start start...bleagh!). However, even this approach relies on the user keeping the window open, and visiting it every now and then, which is less likely if you get 'in the zone' and are concentrating on your own work. A couple of methods for dealing with this come to mind:

• Platform specific binary that can be installed to keep track of when the user is active. This would be the most accurate way of determining that information, but also the most intrusive, and probably the least convenient for end users, who would have to install something on their machines.
• A reminder. Instead of tracking the user, try and get their attention to come back to the web page and let the app know they're still alive. Not very appealing, because the concept of "bug the user so they pay attention to me", which is not in keeping with the "be unobtrusive" philosophy of the system.
• A small pop-out window with "active?" javascript code embedded in it. On Linux (Gnome's window manager at least), you could even set this little window up to follow you around the desktop in order to register the fact that you're active. Advantages: web based, more accurate than the current system. Cons: annoying window following you is....well, annoying. Having a little window open all the time might be an annoyance as well.

Thoughts? Would you use any of these, or consider any or all of them too high a price to pay to keep track of your hours?

Technology and science are, at times, part of some solution. But once unleashed in the world, they can also perpetuate problems and act as barriers. I just finished two articles that have addressed this conundrum in provocative ways and I recommend both to read just for the sake of reading as they are written stunningly well and if you teach a course related to science, technology, medicine and society, these two would make excellent introductions to the importance of critically dissecting science, technology, and medicine (and I think you could unpack them for hours and hours, which is very helpful if you are looking to fill up some time). One, Happy Meal is by the author of the immensely popular Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan. In the article he starts with the simple suggestion of trashing most fast/junk/processed food in favor of whole foods, notably plants. But then he delves into the much more complicated topic of the science of nutrition, making a pretty sharp critique of the field, especially for 1) its reductionism 2) and the ways in which the food industry mobilizes nutrition data it is favor and often to the detriment of furthering the goals of real nutrition. After I posted the link on an IRC Debian channel, I had a pretty heated conversation with a number of Debian developers about the nature of science and how one goes about critique it (and mobilizing data to make counter-claims). As often is the case, we ended up arguing over the merit of his attack (though everyone agreed that his food suggestions were quite sound, and I find this disjuncture pretty interesting), as some felt like his attack on the science of nutrition went too far. I did not feel like his article was anti-science or alarmist but saw it as attacking a particular configuration of nutrition science (the reductionism, the inability to admit more complexity, and the turning away from common sense principles), which carry with it serious consequences in the so-called real world. He offers a critical edge that I think does not attack the principle of science generally (after all, he is using the techniques of skepticism and he marshals plenty of scientific data, like studies on omega 3s and 6 to make his point, though he does not only employ the rhetoric of science, which I think is key to understand his critique too) but just what is sees as a particularly problematic rendition of it that is especially problematic for nutrition (though I am sure many of his critiques are easily transfered to other domains). Here, for example, is an attack on reductionism:

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

And muses on the effects of this narrow path:

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that s exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

.
But you will see here that he reaches into scientific facts so that he is not throwing out the bathwater with the baby:

Eat less is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. Calorie restriction has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called Hara Hachi Bu : eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the eat less message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.

There is no doubt that the article is advocating, very strongly, a point and he is not being all impassioned and neutral as may happen with a purely scientific rendition of the the topic. This will no doubt cause debate and reaction, which I am sure is what he was aiming for. And whether you end up agreeing or not with his critique, it makes for one fascinating read. Along with this piece is another engrossing, somewhat older one piece by Carl Elliot: A New Way to be Mad that examines the ethical complexities of what seems to be a relatively new phenomenon: Body Integration Identity Disorder (which he may have helped fuel a little via his very article and it is this issue of looping, first discussed by the philosopher of science, Ian Hacking that Carl Elliot nicely captures). Since the article is not available for free, here is another one, also by Carl Elliot, that addresses the same topic Unlike Pollan, Elliot does not have any clear cut answers or a really trenchant critique. More than anything he serves up a tasty meal that will in all likelihood be new to many readers, and the flavors he adds are those that make us confront the many interesting moral quandaries that this case presents.

* I was thinking to attend currently on-going Linux Asia 2007 event before I saw that Microsoft is ‘Interoperability Partner’! Now, I am still thinking what the hell is Interoperability? Can any one let me know? I see clearly that its Money things! Looking at speakers list only Philip (I heard that he is not going!), Dr. Louis, Zaheda Bhorat and Divya Prakash are Only worth attending! Good thing is that ILUG-D is not going to participate this event

I had this planned for over a year, but for whatever reasons, I didn't get around to doing it until last week - Knowing that my Institute was moving to almost the opposite edge of Ciudad Universitaria, and would now be located at over 3Km from home (from around 300m that it was before), I decided to get a bike. And, after having it in my to-buy list, I bought it last Sunday (January 21), and Nadezhda got one for herself as well.
I had had a bike before, over 15 years ago, and we rode a bit when we were in Amsterdam, but that was back in 1996. Since then, I cannot recall using a bike - So, of course, I was quite shaky and afraid to begin with. I must admit, I envied Nadezhda, as she seems to be natural - While I was still trying to get the bike moving without crashing into something, she was literally making circles around me.
On Sunday, we went for a short ride in the main circuit of UNAM. On Monday night, we went most of the way to the gym/running lanes where we go to make our excercises - Yes, mostly uphill, and I managed! (she had already done that road earlier the same Monday). Thursday and Friday, I rolled early to do my excercise, and we basically crossed each other on the way. On Saturday, finally, we came all the way to the new Institute.
Sunday was amazing: We went with her family (two sisters, one brother and five pedalling nephews, plus one nephew in a basket in his mother's bike) along the Ciclopista. The Ciclopista goes on the path that used to be the Mexico-Cuernavaca railroad, and starting at Contreras, it goes uphill to cross the Ajusco/Chichinahutzin ridge. I cannot find a decent map, and I don't have a clue on what distance we rode, but it was just great - We crossed basically all of the Magdalena Contreras part of the Ciclopista and part of Tlalpan, until maybe 500m past the market at Calle 8. Of course, after the ride, we feasted with quesadillas at the market, plus some tacos of a delicious chicharr n prepared by Nadezhda's mother. It was a long ride anyway - I got quite tired, and the way back (fortunately, downhill) was still long. We had promised the four year old nephews to take them to the zoo that same day, although we counted on them being tired by that time - Well, a child's will is stronger than being tired, so we still went to Chapultepec to dive in a sea of people and look at some nice animals ;-)
...Finally, yesterday and today I have come by bike to the Institute. There are a couple of hard parts, and I still have not mastered the techniques for being an effective rider, but the way back is just delicious. Besides, yesterday I made 15 minutes on my way back, today it was 20 minutes coming here - almost the same time that going by car! Oh, and on the way back, I get to enjoy a beautiful view of my beloved volcanos, Popocat petl and Iztacc huatl. And, as Mauricio already pointed out, thanks to the light rains we had in the previous days... They just look amazing, covered in snow from their very bases.
Not much to add to it... But I'm delighted :)

Taiwanese phone manufacturer FIC, recently announced the timeline for the release of the FIC Neo1973 smart phone. It’s shaping up to be a very cool device. The phone is nice to look at, has a completely open software stack via the OpenMoko project and at US$350 it’s actually relatively cheap! Feature wise the Neo1973 is relatively similar to the iPhone, right down to using a touchscreen for the user interface. It will be interesting to see how many of the people who have been complaining about the restrictive and walled-garden iPhone model migrate over to the OpenMoko platform. The Neo1973 will work with any GSM cellular network in the world (as opposed to only Cingular in the states, and other apple partners elsewhere) and will allow you to run essentially any application that you want on the phone itself. The contrast in approach between Apple and FIC is stark, and I hope that FIC wins out in the end, although it will no doubt be an uphill battle for them to get anywhere near the mindshare that Apple receives. The one feature that really drew my eye to the Neo1973 is the built-in GPS chipset. For a while now I’ve been looking for a device that would allow me to reveal my current location (possibly obfuscated to a certain radius) to selected family and friends. Once the source code is released in a week or two I imagine that it won’t be long before someone (maybe me…) whips up an application to make this possible. Here’s hoping that the phone lives up to the expectations set for it and that I can come up with a suitable excuse to purchase one when they become available in early March! Update: Found a linuxdevices.com post with some good technical detail on the hardware

I'm convinced the Web 2.0 bubble will impact soon. Granted, some will survive, some will struggle - but some will just blow up. Time to sell for these. There are several reasons why I believe this will happen "soon":

• Too many clones. How many facebook/linkedin/xing/studivz/... clones can you name? We could make a "Memory" (aka: Concentration, Pairs) type of game from them...
• Too little benefit - did you actually have some benefit from these services except being able to show off how many people you know?
• Many of the web2.0ish stuff is just pretty graphics with no real use. How many of the tag clouds you see are actually useful? On the contrary, how many of these new sites have accessibility issues?
• Privacy issues - you've probably seen the bad press MySpace has recently been getting because of stalking and even paedophiles.
• Content issues - I've heard of child pornography been uploaded to e.g. MyVideo (a YouTube clone popular in Germany, since it's doing huge advertising and is on TV), and them taking multiple days to remove it. I wouldn't be suprised if that happens with YouTube as well, but they probably are faster in reviewing and deleting such contents.
• Licensing issues - there was a lawsuit started agains RapidShare, and they probably are bigger than the P2P filesharing networks by now. They're proud of having 80 GBit bandwidth, and I assume 95% of their traffic is actually violating copyright. They try to get out by claiming of having no control over their users content, but that is bullshit. They make a living of having people download this stuff from them.
  Also when I recently browsed MyVideo a bit, it seemed to have like 95% of videos that either come from some TV or have been on the net somewhere else for years; most definitely violate someones copyright. But so far, noone has been caring enough, apparently.
• Security issues - Javascript and webbrowsers aren't well-suited for writing reliable and secure programs. Face it. We're already seeing the first attacks on the Google API, expect much more of these attacks to surface. I wouldn't be surprised if spammers already make heavy use of such APIs to harvest email addresses.

Many people have been keeping an hungry eye on YouTube, Rapidshare and others. It's just a matter of time until some of these predators goes for the kill. My predictions for the post-web2.0-bubble time:

• User content will be restricted to plain text unless you register and verify your ID, so if you upload copyrighted material, the owners can go right for the user that uploaded.
• Privacy will be a key feature of services, maybe some privacy service providers will surface, that allow you to have a verified ID without exposing it directly to the web service, or having to verify again and again for different services. However phishing will be even more of a threat then.
• More restrictions for unregistered users means lower eyeballs, which in turn means less advertising money and thus less services that can be offered completely for free; however many services do not work as crippleware.
• APIs on the web will largely go away again. A specification for making them safe for scripting will be underway, but only supported in Firefox 3+
• True client applications will come back. Vista with C# and Mono on Linux allow for such applications to be written much easier, and they will not suffer from the browser security restrictions. Why would you write a web-based word processor fighting with HTML limitations, the JavaScript language and browser security when you can do it much easier in C#?

A group of us have been doing the Every Pub In Cambridge challenge for the last year and a bit. There are various lists of the pubs in the City of Cambridge around the Net in various places, and we based ours on the one at www.cambridgepubs.co.uk. Most Thursdays, Phil, Pod, Jon and I picked 3 or 4 pubs from their handy tube-style map and went and visited. The rules are simple:

• All pubs must be visited during the period of the challenge. Earlier visits don't count, but people may catch up later on pubs they may have missed due to being unable to make a week.
• An alcoholic drink must be drunk in each pub (normally beer, but doesn't have to be)

Today, we visited the last 4 pubs and finished after 14 months. We would have finished in under a year, but the football World Cup and Pod's travel-heavy new job slightly dented our schedule. In all, we visited 108 pubs and couldn't make it to 11 due to them being closed. The point of the exercise? We already knew of several good pubs in Cambridge, but expected there to be plenty of others. Plus, it was something fun to do on Thursday nights and a good excuse to drink more beer... :-) In the end, we each found some good new places to go, and some that we'd never go back to by choice. Our choices for best pub vary, but our respective best 5s basically agree. My own are the Live and Let Live, the Kingston Arms, the County Arms, the Castle Inn and the Free Press. Alongside those, there are plenty more I'd be happy to visit again. After more discussion, our other opinions were unanimous: the worst was the Duke of Argyle (nasty!), and without a doubt the most entertaining was the Cross Keys (with an amazingly funny barman). At some point we may get around to writing up reviews and posting them somewhere, but not right now... *grin*

That's why I went to the university today. Fascinating... After working as system administrator for several years I must visit a university course showing me, how a computer works. They started with the very basics (That's a CPU... that's a mother board...) I think we spend the first four weeks to "learn" that if you buy a mother board, you must take care that the CPU works with it. So far we covered hard discs and some peripheries, too. Sigh. If that course wouldn't have compulsory attendance... Well. But at least I can amuse myself about the lecturer. Often he muddles up technical term -- which is quite a achievement when reading the text on the slides. Maybe he's a bit dyslexic, would explain some of his... uhm... strangenesses. But back to topic: Today the topic of the course was Operating System Installation. And to my pleasure, he did not only install an operating system made by a company in Redmond, but he wanted to install a Linux System, too. Well... First he tried to install the new Vista he just got instead of the older Windows Version he should knew better. Bad choice... Often new introduces features seemed to confuse him. After he finished with that, he installed an opensuse system. And sometimes he tried to explain a bit about Unix philosophy. Another bad idea. Those of us, who are familiar with that stuff could see, that didn't know what he was talking about, and those of us who are not familiar with Unix/Linux philosophy didn't learned it from him. For example he choose not to use grub or any other Linux Boot loader but the one shipped with Windows, which means he needs to tell Linux not to install the mbr, to boot later from DVD, to extract the first bytes of the partition via dd, to copy it to a floppy, to reboot to windows and to add it with some commands in the dosbox thingy. When I asked him, why he didn't used the boot loader from Linux, he told me, that in former lilo times, in was quite easy to make the system unbootable. And when I then informed him, that that's the reason, grub has been invented, he said, we use the windows boot loader, because he wants to do so. Oh, and as part of a test, we must install those two system our self. Including the brain dead stuff he does. Sigh. Some times courses, which should be quite easy for you, can turn out to be really depressing... I'm really looking forward for part two of the system administration course, which will try to teach me windows administration and networking. The Unix Course has been cancelled. Don't know why.

Steve Jobs: “You don t want your phone to be an open platform.” More Steve Jobs: “These are devices that need to work, and you can t do that if you load any software on them. That doesn t mean there s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.” It’s widely understood that Microsoft beat Apple in the PC game because Apple was a tightly integrated, closed platform, whereas Microsoft was an open ecosystem where anyone could play (albeit at their own peril). Clearly, the strategy has not adapted well to digital media players. Why? Because people are tired of products that don’t work. Anyone who has ever had to glue a PC back together for a family member knows what I mean. Does “open” have to mean “poorly integrated” though? Clearly, I don’t think so, given how much I’ve invested in Linux over the years and how much I’m investing in the LSB now. And the job the distributions do in the Linux world is nothing short of amazing, if you think about it—taking thousands of moving parts written by thousands of different people and crafting them into what appears, for the most part, to be an orchestrated whole. Personal experience bears this out too—it’s not that the entire Windows Media ecosystem produces bad products (iTunes pales in comparison to Rhapsody), it’s that the integration points are extremely fragile (e.g., I tried Rhapsody To Go with a Plays For Sure device, which was an awful experience). In other words, just like a chain, an open ecosystem is only as strong as its weakest link, because it’s the links where things break. Sure, there are bad products. I’ve owned no less than two MP3 players in the last few years, and they were pretty terrible. It’s the very, very simple things too. For example, I listen to a lot of podcasts. There’s (gasp!) a Podcasts menu on the iPod, whereas on every other device I’ve owned, podcasts are interspersed with the music, making them difficult to find and, adding insult to injury, mixing gobbledygook into my otherwise well organized collection. Furthermore (gasp!), the iPod keeps track of which podcasts I listen to, and in concert with iTunes, automatically deletes the ones I’m done with. Them’s lasers! Ah, iTunes. Despite the fact that anyone in the world can write a podcatcher (it’s just RSS with enclosures, fer godsakes), the only one I’ve ever used that works worth a damn is iTunes. Everything else is just “integrated” with bailing wire—create a Windows Media playlist, drop it in this directory, etc. The situation on Linux is a bit better, but guess what—Rhythmbox, Banshee, etc. didn’t work with either of the open media players I owned, even though the integration point for one of them was the file system. No, the players on Linux support the iPod best because that’s what everyone has, and if I’m going to pay extra for the iPod, aren’t I primarily buying the integrated experience? (On a related note, I’ve never understood why people pay top dollar for Macs and install Linux on them. But I digress..) Once you taste the fruit of the integrated experience, it’s easy to get sucked in all the way. I eventually tired of all the wasted time and money trying to use an open media player and broke down and bought an iPod. Not too long after, I canceled my Rhapsody subscription. Why? Because I couldn’t use it with my iPod. My overall music experience is diminished (I’m a big believer in the celestial jukebox), but I want one music platform, not two. And the iPod is the one with critical mass. Anything else is swimming upstream. Are open platforms doomed then? I think that’s, as they say, throwing the baby out with the bath water. The key is to have open interfaces, and the key to having open interfaces that work is cooperation between the vendors that implement them. Perhaps surprisingly, the iPod is a good example of how it can be done. The biggest reason for my iPod purchase: I can hook it directly into my car stereo instead of using an FM transmitter. Apple isn’t getting into the car business—it’s decided to cooperate with other companies to make this work. And you don’t hear too much about people calling their technophile relatives to come glue their cars back together. (And talk about the importance of not crashing..) The lesson here, it seems to me, is that an ecosystem is never the sum of its parts—it’s either a whole lot more or a whole lot less. Furthermore, it’s the responsibility of the vendors (and community) that make up that ecosystem to ensure the result comes up on the right side of the equation in the final analysis.

(continuing with clearing the blogging backlog) Four days after returning home to the US from the trip to Australia, I was at it again, flying the other way around the world. In hindsight, this was totally insane, but I'd expressed interest in going much earlier in the year, I think before we'd organised to visit Australia. I flew to Madrid, via Philadelphia. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, Philadelphia International is a very nice airport. It's the first time I've flown across the United States, and it really is a long way. Just like Brisbane to Perth, it's a long time on a plane for staying in the same country. Arriving in Madrid, entering the country was extremely straightforward, as I've also said previously, the immigration guy barely looked at my passport long enough to open it and find a page to stamp. It was my first time in a country that didn't speak English and wasn't terribly bilingual. Fortunately the airport was signed in English as well as Spanish, and the information/assistance people all seemed to be able to speak English. I arrived in Terminal 1, and the European contingent were mostly arriving at Terminal 4, which is essentially a completely separate airport, a short shuttle bus ride away. My flight arrived in the morning, and I had about 4 or 5 hours to kill before the first of the European contingent rocked up. It was tempting to get a train or taxi into Madrid and have a bit of an explore, but I really didn't want to risk not getting back in time, so I just loitered around Terminal 4 for the time. The highlight of the waiting was I bumped into Doug Foster, who I used to work with a SecureNet in Canberra, disembarking a flight from London (where he's now working). It really is a small world. After everyone turned up, we got on a bus and headed for Badajoz, a mere 5 hour bus ride away. We didn't get away until about 7pm, so by the time we hit the road, it was dark, so there wasn't a lot to see. We arrived at Badajoz around midnight, and made a short walk to the hotel and had a late dinner and hit the sack. Unfortunately with all my travelling in the three weeks, I'd managed to come down with a cold, which started manifesting itself pretty much from the moment I got to Badajoz, so I started to feel increasingly suboptimal as the week wore on. Badajoz itself is an incredible little city. It's just like what I envisaged an old European city to be: narrow winding streets. It had a funny effect on me. I'd alternate between finding it really quaint, and incredibly claustrophobic (and I'm not usually the claustrophobic type). After doing a bit of self-analysis, I think the problem was the lack of sky. With so many buildings crammed in together and the narrow streets, the amount of sky you got to see was minimal. Definitely no horizon. I felt more comfortable at night, in fact the place looked really awesome at night. Everything was lit up, I think especially so for Christmas, and everyone came out and walked around and did shopping. The other thing that, well, I noticed about the city was that it was wall to wall concrete (or bricks, or bitumen). The buildings all connected up, there were no gaps between them, and the sidewalk basically ran from the front edge of the building, to the kerb, then there was the road, and then the reverse, so it was a real concrete jungle. That said, it was pretty clean. the sidewalks were all swept, there was no rubbish in the gutters. By about the second day, my cold had driven me crazy (my nose was running incessantly) and I just wanted some pseudoephedrine to dry it up. I didn't have a clue how pharmacies operated, but fortunately I was able to get Miriam to tag along with me, who spoke English as well as Spanish. She'd never heard of pseudoephedrine before, but as soon as she said it to the pharmacist, he knew what it was and came back with some form of Nurofen (ibuprofen) that also had pseudoephedrine in it. I didn't really want or need the ibuprofen, but when sick in Spain, beggars can't be choosers, so I took it. I didn't feel that it did a great deal for me anyway. Getting home again was fun. Due to various peoples' flights, the bus was leaving at 6:30am, and that wouldn't get me back to Madrid the ideal 3 hours before departure, so I took a taxi with a few people who needed to be there earlier. It left Badajoz at midnight, and arrived at Madrid at about 4am, where I had to wait for about 5 hours before I could check in for my flight. I had a bit of fun leaving, which I've already written about, and was happy to get home late on Sunday night. My cold had gone to my chest by this stage and I had bronchitis, so I was just glad to get home and see a doctor on Monday. So now I can say I've been to Europe. It was a shame I didn't get to see Madrid itself. Next time. Update Photos from the trip are here

I used to live in Norfolk, so Norwich Evening News: Was top cyclist killed by driver asleep at the wheel? (Updates: EDP: Death crash trial hears of "most viable explanation" and EDP: Driver guilty of causing cyclist's death ) and Norwich Evening News: Cyclist hit by bus on A47 are rather worrying. Weston super Mare Weston Mercury: Town centre havoc reports that Wales and West Utilities will be digging up Orchard Street followed by Alexandra Parade, Regent Street, Walliscote Road, High Street and Knightstone Road over 16 weeks from 8 January, and also

"Three months worth of work to remove the central reservation and add a filter lane to Herluin Way is also due to start on the same day [...] Uphill Road South in Uphill is closing on January 9 for six weeks as Wessex Water repairs the highway's sewer. [...] Winters Lane in Redhill is shutting for two months while a new sewer is put in."

Pipe works seldom seem to take up the full width of the road and the Herluin Way cycle track only crosses Herluin Way at a few points. Will these roads be kept open for cycling? They should be. All of these seem to be starting just before next week's Cycle Forum (7pm Wednesday 10 January at Worle Campus, press release ). Interesting new year present.

Okay, Hanna didn't really tag anyone; but I'm still going to take the bait, since this sounds interesting.

1. My high school carriere included 4 different schools for 6 different options (latin, science, and drama, to name but a few)
2. My boyscouts totem is 'walrus'
3. Although I play the flute today, there was a time when I was dreaming of playing the oboe, and I also followed lessons to play the recorder for a few months
4. I have a bet running against someone since a few years about which of us is going to be the first to buy a Porsche 911
5. I have a minor chocolate addiction (I don't need it every day; however, I can't go a week without this divine substance)

There. Philip, Kris: your turn now.