We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to promote the use of Open Document Format within the UK government.

Government documents must be available for tens if not hundreds of years. Currently much electronic documentation is stored in proprietary formats, such as Microsoft's .doc format. In order to allow future generations access to these documents it is imperative that they be in a fully documented standard. Open Document Format (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) is now the international document standard and as such should be supported by the Government.

The Weston Mercury - News: Council chief probe costs 34k

This happened in North Somerset and I remember something similar happening in West Norfolk. When will councillors stop using expensive lawyers to defend themselves at the taxpayers' expense?

opensource - epetition response

Ambivalent reply from the PM's office.

Town and parish councils

Kewstoke is used as a case study, but the link goes nowhere now...

The Irascible Professor-commentary of the day 02-08-07. Movie star teachers.

I've given up watching hero-teacher films. It's really not like that. I guess the oppressive bureaucracy of state education, with pressure from executive teachers to fiddle the student numbers, wouldn't make a good film.

The Irascible Professor-commentary of the day 03-06-07. Why I hope mhy children won't become educators.

Don't let your children grow up to become salesm^Wteachers.

NO2ID:newsletter 66

"Saturday, 10th March - King's Lynn street stall to advertise forthcoming public meeting, from 10am. Volunteers needed! Contact kings.lynn@no2id.net or text/call James on 07778 966395."

Tories want to free (software) Whitehall

The shadow chancellor gets all over the BBC as a result of his party's latest conversion.

Neighbourhood Fix-It

Another better-than-local-councils system from MySociety.

Concerto for blunt instrument: Ode to the No Longer Active

"We held a place for you // But you were busy // You've been so busy lately."

I was honoured to be on the ETech 07 programme committee. Alas, I can't get there this year due to the very enjoyable reason of recent parenthood. Nevertheless, here are some of the talks I'd earmarked to attend.
Creating Addictive User Experiences (Kathy Sierra)Is it possible to say too many good things about Kathy Sierra? Any project or product built with attention to her advice about empowering users gets a huge head start to popularity and success. I was fortunate enough to spend a day with Kathy last year on a training course, and it was great to see the passion and commitment from her writing runs through her as a person, even behind the scenes.Applied Web Heresies (Avi Bryant)I'd go to this one out of insatiable curiosity. I believe that web conventions enable rapid application design (c.f. REST in Rails) but here's an argument that not following them also reaps rewards. Attend this talk prepared for involvement. I've never met a Squeaker without attitude.
Making Offline Web Applications a Reality (Zimbra)A short product talk, but taking web apps offline is an area to watch. Even if you don't think offline is that important to you, many of the same principles apply to application mobility. Take that key app data off onto your phone, watch or memory stick.Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control (Charles Armstrong)More user-facing stuff. How do you give a user of a large nondeterministic piece of social software the idea that they're in control? This is an important topic to me: note how many pieces of social software fall by the wayside right away. For some, it's lack of utility, but that's influenced too by the degree of engagement and control a user feels.
No Program Left Behind: Liberating TV from the Tyranny of the Ephemeral (Tom Loosemore)There is no good reason not to listen to Tom Loosemore. Especially when he feels strongly about something. The idea of this talk is a "vision of a cheap consumer device sitting under your TV that will capture, store, and share all TV, forever." The TV industry sure needs its visionaries.
Patterns: From Fabrics to Fabrication (Dale Dougherty)Dale was responsible for getting my XML career off the ground, and you can find him at work behind some of the smartest things O'Reilly's done over the years. Make magazine was one of those, and now he's moving on to Craft. Design patterns for, er, real designs.RFID Guardian: A Personal Platform for RFID Privacy Management (Melanie Rieback)
Jamming bad RFIDs. Having just taken delivery of an RFID-enabled passport, this is starting to come home to me.Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers (Marc Hedlund)Despite the cute title, lots of good stuff here. Expectnation is going to end up with a truck load of user registrations, and their privacy is important to me. I imagine there'll be some good debate in the Q&A session for this talk.JavaScript: It's Happening All Over Again! (James A. Duncan)I've recently got the JS bug, thanks to JQuery. It's actually a fun and malleable language to work in. I'd go to this talk looking for fellow travellers and hints, though I'm a bit skeptical about Zimki itself.

• ETech 2007 registration
  

* Finally, I got my new digital camema Samsung DigiMax S700!. Now, my adventure in digital photography is about to start. Thanks Hiral & Atin for this! Some cool/bad features:
+ 7.2 MP, 3x Optical Zoom, 5x Digital Zoom
+ Large 2.5″ LCD
- No Viewfinder, so battery eater! * LDTP Package is fixed now. * I forgot that it was Holi yesterday and couldn’t found any shop open in my native Palanpur. Meet Vinay/Anil/Manish in hurry and back by night bus. Well, bus was jam packed and I had to standup during the whole journey.

Jamendo is a CreativeCommon/Free sharing music plateform more and more famous. Yesterday they released a new tool to discover artist that is quite impressive. It’s called Spiral.

Via Jamie, an interview with an amazing espresso artist. As I’ve wondered before, it would be interesting to know if anyone has ever attempted to protect their copyright in espresso art. On further reflection, I think espresso art should meet the “fixed in a tangible medium” requirement, at least as much as ice sculptures which also tend to lose their form over time. I assume ice sculptures can be protected, although could not find an example in a quick search. I suspect the copyright office would accept a photograph as “identifying material” for the purposes of a registration deposit on a cup of espresso, as in the case of sculptural works. Be sure to check out the embedded video — it eliminates any concern that the espresso art photographs might have been digitally enhanced.

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.

Last weekend (I have a post I'll finish soon about that) was getting up at the crack of dawn, this weekend is getting up at the crack of noon. It's good to get up early :)

I've been in a good mood toward the end of this week as the stuff I've gotten done has reached that critical mass that makes me feel I'm accomplishing something. First, I got a nice new domain for ikiwiki, with an irc channel for good measure, and there's also work on a Google Summer of code application for ikiwiki afoot. Then there was rather a lot of useful feedback and patches on ikiwiki, and a few nights ago a very tricky race condition was discovered. Batting around possible fixes for it on irc for several hours was pretty useful, it's a lot easier to think about locking, deadlock, races, etc, when there are some other minds to share the thinking. I eventually came up with a fix that seems ok, around 5 am that morning. Yes, my sleep schedule has been suffering.. On Thursday I took a digression into RL to fix some cladding that was pulled away from the eves of my house by a badly attached cable. I ended up wandering around Lowe's for over an hour -- when did that become such a fun thing to do? Oh yeah, when I bought a house.. Some kids were playing hide and seek; maybe a bit dangerous there but it has to be the funnest possible place to do it. Anyway, amoung other things I bought a collapsable ladder and had an interesting time on it 2 stories up while avoiding the nearby electric wire. Also fixed a broken latch on my wardrobe. Concurrent with all this, in $DAY_JOB, I've been working on the armel port of Debian, including getting d-i to work with it. Since this is an unofficial port, that is not gpg signed currently, this also gave me a chance to make d-i capable of dealing with an unsigned repository. Earlier this evening, I almost completed my first armel install on an nslu2, and I expect to release images by Monday. Finally, AJ reminded me about an item that'd been on my TODO list for far too long; some way for James to deal with gpg keyrings that doesn't treat them as binary blobs. I'd been meaning to work on that for oh, 2 years? 3? And I must have been thinking about it in the background a bit, because I fairly quickly came up with this gpg changesets idea, which is basically a dedicated revision control system, and a data format that's not too horrible (though it could be much nicer with support in gpg). Quickly followed by a whole working sample implementation that I hope James, or someone, will find useful.

Wow, today is nuts, I've gotten 3.75 invites to parties for only tonight. That's 3 real invites, an invite to crash a games night and critical mass. So 3 events in the city and 2 in mtn view. Well, the christmas tree that's still up and a huge bottle of Jaeger have made my choice. Why did I move to the city again?

I managed to have my first real laundry accident today. I washed a bunch of new orange shirts with everything else and anything white came out beige.