A few years ago we needed to introduce employement contracts for all staff at Catalyst. When we got the example contract back from our HR consultant, she had quite naturally biased it strongly in the employers favour, and as a consequence it had a very anal and lawyerly clause in it regarding the ownership of intellectual property. This clearly wasn't going to work well in our environment so I decided to take the opportunity to try and write a clause which was fair and reasonable, which considered the likely desires of both parties, and which expressed an understanding of the sort of environment which often happens with free open-source software. It seems that many people who are interested in working on open source software are also people who will work on (i.e. fiddle with :-) things in their spare time, but they will not necessarily consider the possible consequences of using conmpany resources to do so. I have heard of situations where employment contracts (or perhaps even government enacted legislation) will give ownership of an individual's work to their employer in such situations, so I also wanted the contract to make it clear where and how this might happen. I would like to hear people's comments on the contract clauses which we use here. Is this fair to both parties? Have I missed something? Is the meaning clear? Also, I need to make it clear that it is OK for people to use this text, so I hereby place the text of the following Intellectual Property clause in the public domain. Intellectual Property

1. All intellectual property, including source code, objects and documentation, relating to work carried out while in the employment of $ COMPANY , remains the property of $ COMPANY , subject to the exceptions outlined below.
2. All intellectual property, including source code, objects and documentation, owned prior to joining $ COMPANY remains your property. If you choose to use such intellectual property, including source and objects during your time at $ COMPANY , $ COMPANY will have the rights to their continued use in perpetuity, including access to the source code of all versions of such software in use at $ COMPANY .
3. If $ COMPANY asks you to do something, then we expect that while you work on that something, you will be being paid by us and we (or our clients) will own the IP. In some cases we may elect to open-source that, and may decide to jointly own the IP or make some other arrangement, but it would be at $ COMPANY s option.
4. If you work on something by your own choice, and on your own time, then you are welcome to own the IP, but if you use the premises or computers of $ COMPANY to do that work then you must license it under a free, open-source license agreed with $ COMPANY .
5. $ COMPANY may choose to fund some part of your time to work on OSS projects in a non-directed way. $ COMPANY will expect to own the IP for such work, and to participate in the choice of license for such code.
6. All of the above is subject to confidentiality of client information, and constraints which clients may specifically request in relation to specific project work from time to time.

Over To You I wrote that because I couldn't find examples around the place of similar things. I guess I still see people looking for that sort of thing so I'm publising it here with the idea of providing a seed which can perhaps grow into something else. A few specific questions I would like you to think about:

• Are there any loopholes in this?
• Does this seem like a fair agreement?
• Is there anything missing?
• Is there any part you would like to see changed?

Then, perhaps, if we can see some general agreement on what would, or would not, be a useful standard we can encourage people to use it in their future contracts. I am hoping that through your collective wisdom I will be changing this clause in Catalyst's standard employment contract.

If I hear one more person complaining about the insanity of a relatively short number being copyrightable, I'm going to become ridiculously upset. You're right, it would be insane for it to be copyrightable. But that's ok, because all the takedown notices refer to the anti-circumvention clauses of the DMCA, not the copyright infringement ones.

Not that it really matters, anyway - having the processing key is helpful for currently released HD-DVDs, but no real use whatsoever for any that are produced after the key has been changed. Yes, there are other mechanisms for obtaining the required keys, but so far none of them are generalisable. Unless AACS is broken in the same way that CSS was, any unauthorised player is going to require a large table of keys. As the market gets bigger, that's going to become less than practical. If people want to make a stand for the freedom to utilise DRMed material, how about waiting until you've actually got some useful code rather than spraying less than useful hex all over my face for the next 3 months until everyone finally gets bored?

A few days ago I wrote my first DMCA take-down notice, I followed the instructions on the Wikipedia page. The reason for this was that someone was mirroring my blog and putting google adverts on the copy. Before I started putting Google adverts on my web sites I wouldn’t have been bothered about this. But now that I’m making a small amount of money from Google advertising I don’t want someone else just mirroring my content and taking the money away from me. The person who managed the site in question took a surprisingly large amount of time to comply with the request (a discussion of several messages plus a couple of reminders over the course of a few days). The most recent news about DMCA abuse is the case of trying to prevent the distribution of a code used for decrypting DVD-HD. It is widely believed that copyright was used to prevent the distribution. Strangely many people who otherwise have a good understanding of technology have been saying “you can’t copyright a number”. What precisely is a program binary if not a long series of numbers (or a single large number depending on how you look at it)? For that matter a JPEG file or the ASCII representation of a book is also either a very large number or a series of small numbers. Also apparently it’s not protected under copyright but under the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA. If it was a matter of copyright it would not be an issue of whether a number can be copyrighted, but what defines such a number. One criteria for copyright is that it has to be on something non-trivial (EG I couldn’t copyright the use of “a few days ago” as an introduction) so length is a criteria. Another is that it has to be a creative expression (so an encryption key can’t be copyright). However in many jurisdictions there are separate laws regarding distributing passwords without permission, such laws are designed for preventing people from granting unauthorised access to computers but I believe that they can be used more generally (I have been advised that such laws exist in the state of Pennsylvania in the US - I’m not sure what the law is in other regions but expect that something so useful would be copied). Another breaking story is that the RIAA has created an organisation with a US government mandate to collect royalties on ALL music that is played over Internet radio. This includes music for which the copyright owner is not an RIAA member and does not consent to have the royalties applied. You can create your own music, grant free access to everyone out of philanthropy, and then have the RIAA tax the music! It’s unfortunate that only the down-side of this dramatic change in copyright law has been discussed. Compulsory licenses have a lot of potential in other areas of copyright material. Recently people have been complaining that government sponsored scientific research is often only published in journals that cost large amounts of money. Why not have a compulsory license for journals at a fair price that everyone can afford? Software is often unreasonably expensive (Windows Vista with the latest version of MS Office can cost up to twice as much as a new PC), let’s have compulsory licenses for software at a reasonable fee! Software vendors often cease selling old versions of software to force customers to upgrade, a compulsory license scheme would permit us to buy MS-DOS 3.30 at a reasonable price regardless of whether MS wants to sell it. Finally there is at least one evil cult that claims it’s “religious” texts are copyright as a way of preventing the public from seeing what a drug-addled second-rate sci-fi author produces. Let’s have a compulsory license for them so everyone can read them! The only thing that’s wrong with the RIAA scheme is that there is no option for copyright owners to directly license their material to the users (including granting a free license if they so desire). The up-side of this is that it proves beyond all doubt that the RIAA is not representing copyright owners. Update: I initially accepted the claims about the DMCA take-down notices being based on copyright rather than anti-circumvention. Since learning of my mistake I modified this post to reflect the fact that it was not a copyright issue.

While we're fixing some network problems, here is a musical interlude^W^Wset of links...

Explaining Debian at parties

'Do not try to convince people to try it out or you will become a support hotline. Instead, tell them about LUGs and mailing lists (and how cool it can be) and put the challenge on them: "if you try it, those are your support channels. Are you up for it?"'

Index of /~joerg/templates

Explanations of some common reasons for getting REJECT from ftp-master.

gravityboy: Politics

"If we're going to make interactions between developers more civil and friendly and less personally hostile then we need a different kind of stick. Maybe a carrot of sorts is in order too?"

Consensus and community review in open source and open standards Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs

'this is quite a stretch with respect to the normal dictionary meaning of "consensus"'

Social Drag

How many Debian Developers are dressed in Social Drag?

debian Gender Research

More research to add to the surveys page

#354950 - ITP: gauche-readline -- A readline-like library for the Gauche Scheme implementation - Debian Bug report logs

Contemplating sponsoring again.

The joys of English cuisine are abomination in God's sight Ted Walther's Private Diary

Blast from debian past: Ted Walther's gullibility for stereotyping is an abomination in God's sight and those foods are hardly typical English. For instance, the only one on his PS list that I've eaten recently is flapjack (not flapjacks, which is something else and not English AFAIK) and I can only remember eating five of the list in the last year. Also, the linked site seems to concentrate on processed pap from multinationals and supermarkets, rather than real trad English food. Example: "Yorkshire puddings are basically a bread type product. You can use them in place of dinner rolls." Why not make 'em a bit harder, cook 'em a bit longer and you can use them for cobbling the street instead? Yorkshire pudding should be a baked batter with a soft middle and a crisp puffy edge. Nothing like bread. And don't get me started about the pasties. Honestly, if you learn about food from such sources, no wonder you'd think it an abomination.

Re: Position Statement to the Dunc-Tanc "experiment"

"had somebody wanted to kill (or inflict maximum damage) to the project, he couldn't have done any better than the current DPL"

Releas-o-meter

Interesting idea - why no cron-run copy on the web?

EUPL v 1.0 revokable ?

One that may appear in a future 'bits from debian-legal' - it seems the EU are popularising a type of termination clause. Yay.

Future of Debian Weekly News

As I hoped, Joey is explicitly calling for sponsorship for DWN production.

DPL 2007, Current Candidates

still don't have a title is keeping a list of DPL candidates, so I won't put one up this year.

#411041 - request for debian-l10n-persian mailing list - Debian Bug report logs

Tell all your persian-speaking friends to show their support!

Interprete I cite, you cite, I rant

Lack of references is a problem on lists like debian-legal where explaining everything again can drive you insane and still not convince some people.

Lucas Nussbaum's Blog State of software for Suspend to RAM/Disk ?

More tips on the "Will I Work Or Not?" suspend problems.

only on debian-devel - she.geek.nz

> Am I mistaken or this is a flame on how to flame ?

While talking about the ICQ transport on jabber.lusc.de... if you're still using ICQ, please take a look at their Acceptable Use Policy, it contains an important clause: You agree that by posting any material or information anywhere on the ICQ Services and Information you surrender your copyright and any other proprietary right in the posted material or information. You further agree that ICQ Inc. is entitled to use at its own discretion any of the posted material or information in any manner it deems fit, including, but not limited to, publishing the material or distributing it. I don't think it's necessary to comment this.

While talking about the ICQ transport on jabber.lusc.de... if you're still using ICQ, please take a look at their Acceptable Use Policy, it contains an important clause: You agree that by posting any material or information anywhere on the ICQ Services and Information you surrender your copyright and any other proprietary right in the posted material or information. You further agree that ICQ Inc. is entitled to use at its own discretion any of the posted material or information in any manner it deems fit, including, but not limited to, publishing the material or distributing it. I don't think it's necessary to comment this.

(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

Dear Lazyweb, dear Santa Claus, One thing I wish for exim is a patch for Exim Bugzilla Issue #66, which will incidentally fix Debian Bug #244724, which has become a recurring issue in various complex ISP configuration schemes. A patch solving this would add an option to an SMTP transport which allows the transport to set the authentication credentials instead of the authenticator. The transport still knows the host name given to it and can look up the right authentication credentials, while the authenticator only knows the IP address that we are connected to and thus needs to rely on reverse DNS information to look up the credentials. Which leads to numerous kinds of confusion regarding CNAMEs and broken reverse DNS on the ISP side. So, please dear Santa, give me a patch for that. It shouldn’t be too hard to do.

Santa Claus arriving early.


My tree. I bet that if i start looking around i will find final Etch, Duke Nukem Forever and Chinese Democracy CD's somewhere. =)

Although you've not behaved very good, Santa Claus has a present for you: the entire GNOME 2.16.2 desktop in experimental. All core applications are here, only some bindings are still missing. Which means it's time for the most courageous to test it. With the experimental APT source configured, it should be a matter of apt-get install -t experimental gnome-desktop-environment. Be warned, it's still rough around the edges:

• GTK+ makes liferea crash repeatedly;
• there are a few glitches in the file chooser;
• there is only one working icon theme (the default one);
• evince seems to crash on some files;
• the keyboard switching stuff doesn't work at all.

But there are also many pleasant speed and UI improvements in most modules. Unfortunately for many, it is currently only available on amd64. Now, if a group of reindeers could rebuild it on i386, the children would be much happier. Otherwise, I will take some time to rebuild them in an i386 chroot in a few days.

I prefer the study of the law over being personally embroiled with the law in the real world, but if indeed Blue Cross Blue Shield does not pony up the money to cover my recent mole surgeries, I think I am going to take them to small claims court, which I know nothing of, except that it is a cheap way to try to get something done when you are getting screwed by a large faceless organization or some facefull twit. So the basic story is that since I had a lapse in my insurance (thanks to good Old Rutgers University!!), when I decided that I should buy my own just in case, I fell into a “pre-existing” clause, which means basically the insurance company can make your life a living bureaucratic hell because they have to review and approve every single procedure or doctor visit for over a year. Super. So of course when I got my mole diagnosis (dysplastic) and then the surgeries (the total cost being almost 3500) they went for review, but of course Blue Cross is taking their sweet time… The derm office has called for me to get involved so I spent the morning talking to a Ms. Flood from Blue Cross/Blue Shield and she explained to me that all the documentation from the doctor’s office was only received November 1st and then they will take 60-90 days to review the case before making the decision. Now, the insurance coordinator at the dermatology office told me that Blue Cross told her that Blue Cross can take up to FIVE years (not months, Years) to make a decision which seems, well just like they type of thing they would do, but somewhat illegal, maybe, no???!!! Anyway, my plan is to wait those 90 days and then if they deny my coverage or keep flip flopping around saying they need more info, I think I am going to proceed to the small claims court option. Honestly I don’t know if this is a realistic option (though I hope my lawyer friends write back soon) and it is a pain in the neck but I refuse refuse refuse to let this go…. because well, my mole condition was not pre-existing! Sure I had them, but they were happy healthy moles… And I even had seen another dermatologist with my Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance about 6 months earlier and all was good!! Yes I am upset Anyone else ever fought the insurance industrial complex along these lines? Or have used small claims courts? This makes me want to stay in Canada… forever.. but actually I am due back in NYC by August for a permanent job but more on that later.

I got an enormous amount out of the just-finished European FooCamp, with lots of thoughts sparking off and interesting things to consider. Jon Mountjoy proposed a theory to me that Web 2.0 and the enterprise weren't in fact as far apart as a naive observe might imagine. He reckons that mashups, tagging and the like do happen within the enterprise, and in fact are often solving harder problems than found in the wilds of the web. There is a lot in common between Web 2.0 and SOA (even aside from buzzword compliance factors). This is a theme I'd like to follow through. Who are the hackers on the inside of companies, and what stories do they have to tell? Gavin Starks from Global Cool really opened our eyes again to the problem of the environment, and introduced the interesting position that Global Cool are taking. If you want to do anything real right now to avoid catastrophic consequences, it's too late to wait for government initiatives to bear fruit. Private citizens must act too. And that's the aim of Global Cool: educating and lobbying the individual, not the government. I was struck, as were others, by the unfortunate irony that conferences have a big environmental cost in the travel involved, as we sat there among people from many countries. I want to now investigate how XTech could be better in this regard, through carbon offsetting and similar schemes. I guess being in Paris is already a good start, as trains are apparently only 25% as polluting as planes, though this still seems like a lot! Claus Dahl led an interesting and wide-ranging discussion about Second Life as a prototyping space for real life invention. Too many themes there to summarise neatly, but we did have an entertaining side discussion about Second Life's potential environmental impact due to CPU consumption and data centers. One suggestion was that objects and activities could be annotated in-world with their environmental cost. Simon Willison energetically explained OpenID, a decentralized identity system proposed by SixApart and already live in systems such as LiveJournal. It attempts to solve the problem of a username and password pair for every site you visit, without the controversy of centralisation suffered by projects such as Microsoft's passport. Simon demonstrated a proof of concept that I think will be a very neat answer to site providers who ask "why should I support OpenID?" (Sneak preview: because if you don't, it's going to be astonishingly easy for a middleman to provide it, and you wouldn't want that.) I also took time to learn about something I'd been interested in but not known much about, 3D printing and "fabbing". Simon Wardley led a great overview of current systems for 3D printing and their various attributes, and indicated where the current trends were going. It doesn't seem so unrealistic that there'll soon be affordable 3D printing bureaux similar to walk-in reprographic facilities like Kinkos. Plenty more went on that I've not got time to transcribe, but I think will flavour my thinking over the months to come. I was fortunate to be among some incredibly intelligent and welcoming people. My thanks to O'Reilly for putting this on, and to everyone else who went for being inspiring companions. Oh, one more thing. Belgians are excellent at confectionery.

In a recent post I mentioned that my scalp is adorned with 14 titanium staples. While some may think that I have them because an odd accident incurred during my recent move, I have them because I live in mole-ville and some of them were causing a small disturbance in the hood. Living here means I have a lot of moles on my body and well, these little masses of brown pigment, while they can be somewhat attractive, and unproblematic, can be unruly creatures that can change on short notice and cause a lot of problems. Now I usually don’t blog about personal things like my moles, but I thought it is worth writing about this as a public service announcement… So if there are any other readers who live in a crowded mole-ville, this is little reminder to check up on your moles, sooner than later. I have never had a problem with my moles and there is no history of problems in my family but I do have more than the average number of them. In fact, anyone who has met me knows this because they are all over my face, and there is one distinct one, under my left eye that is shaped like a tear, and often mistaken for dirt, more graciously as a tattoo, and most oddly as that black stuff that football players smear under their eyes. About a year ago, after one of my friends was diagnosed with melanoma (thankfully he is ok), I started checking my moles more frequently and did a full check at the dermatologist. All was ok and when I went to another dermatologist in February, all looked good. Then this summer, as I was running my hands through my hair, I felt a mole and started obsessing over it. I was pretty sure I did not have it a year ago as it was not on my chart and if was, it was probably flat and since I could feel it, it had changed, which is not a good sign… I was traveling most of the summer and it was first in South Africa where I had it checked in a fancy dermatological office in Durban. They dermatologist took a close look and said, looks fine but have it removed because you can’t track it. That made me feel a lot better so I enjoyed the rest of my time there and then as soon as I got back I saw a RN at a dermatology office in NJ (it is near to impossible to get a derm appointment without a month’s wait in the US but since they had RNs, I could see someone quick.. More on this in a second). This person also confirmed what the dermatologists in SA had said but also decided to remove it because I could not track it. A week later a pathology report came back that showed it was dysplastic and that the cells were changing, and thus considered abnormal. Some dermatologists consider this as pre-cancerous, some don’t, but it seems to be that there is more likelihood that this type of mole can turn into cancer. So the “treatment” is a full excision where they remove 1cm all around the mole. I got word of the report around the 8th of August and the only time they could fit me in for surgery was the 25th, a day after I was supposed to leave for Edmonton, which changed my moving plans (and explains why I arrived here so late, making getting my stuff complicated given school is in session and parking is tight). I then scheduled an appointment for a a full body check and removed another mole that once biposed was confirmed as dysplastic and though not as abnormal as the other, the recommendation was to also remove the surrounding dermis. Now, when I called the surgical coordinators, they could not fit me in another time slot to expand my appointment for 2 surgeries because they were “full” even though I explained I was moving away from the U.S. They said that it was up to the surgeon to decide whether to operate on the second area and since I was leaving to Canada the NEXT day, he would probably agree but no guarantees.
So of course, I wanted the stuff out because I was not sure how to go about getting the procedure done in Canada. My insurance does kick in the second I sign up and there is no Bull-Sh*t pre-existing clause stuff here but because I could not get an appointment in time, I would probably have to go to a medicenter that performed these operations and not all do. Though I was confident I could get it done eventually, it would take a lot of inquiring and after a 7 day drive and all that follows a big move, I decided it was not the thing I wanted to do. So I got to the office early on the 25th and one of the first things that comes out of my mouth when I saw the nurse was that I was leaving the next day to Canada and I did not know when I could get care there. Of course the first phrase that pops to mind for many Americans when you say Canada and health care is “socialized medicine” which most people in the U.S. associate with bad healthcare and long waits. Now on the one hand, I have to admit I, to some degree, share those fears, which is one of the reasons I wanted the extra dermis removed asap. On the other hand, I think that the claim is a big fat red herring because in fact for many Americans, they *do* have to wait a long time for many procedures (dermatology is classic for this, and even my first procedure took a 3 week wait and if I wanted to schedule the second one, it would have taken 5 weeks) or worse, they have no insurance, which KEEPS many people from going to a doctor in the first place. So American medicine is not necessarily “fast track” and in a dual sense: in the literal sense because HMO healthcare is like socialized medicine with capitalist prices, and because many people without insurance also probably avoid the doctors until they are in bad shape… And even though I have insurance, they would not pre-approve anything as I am in some awful pre-existing clauses because my insurance had lapsed for 2 months this year. And even though I have never had a problem with a mole in my life and did not even see one doctor in the 6 months before I got my insurance (which is when the pre-existing diagnosis would pertain to) and even saw a dermatologist in my HMO network in February who found nothing wrong, the insurance wants to make sure to add as many roadblocks as possible in the hopes of never paying up. Great. Now I am very grateful the nurse at the derm office proceeded to get the doctor to perform the 2nd surgery and he also was more than ok to do it. I wanted to give them big fat hugs after the procedure but you know, you just don’t do that type of move in your blue robe after the surgery. Before the surgery I naturally “hit” the net to gather a lot of information on moles, cancer etc… I join the millions around the world who–for better or for worse–use the Internet to supplement (some I am sure supplant) their doctor’s medical advice. In fact, a key part of my second project on psychiatric survivors looks at how patient communities are building a sphere of amateur but expert medical knowledge exchange. It is an enormous sphere of vibrant peer-to-peer knowledge production but one that many are uncomfortable portraying as such because it involves a lot more risks and ambiguities than exchange knowledge about, you know, how to get your blue tooth working…. But if we bracket the realm of alternative remedies (which admittedly is a HUGE part of this type of exchange), I think in fact, patients are pretty savvy and are engaging in risk-averse behavior by going on the net and illness forums. A lot of what is exchanged are warnings about side-effects, detailed accounts of experiences with procedures, and yet a lot of red flag raising that one’s experience may not match another persons but may be still helpful. It is a lot of information that often may be missed during the exchange with the doctor and derives from what is another type of expert knowledge: one’s bodily experiences with medicine, illness, and other related procedures. But I have to say that when researching melanoma and moles on the Internet, I was somewhat stumped. There is just too much variation out there to make informed judgments and abnormal but non-malignant moles have the same characteristics as melanomas. The Internet, in this case, seemed helpful to provide some baseline information and then just served to freak me out more than necessary so I turned away for the time being. For now I am just adjusting to the staples, which come out in another week. The procedure did not hurt much but the first week after the removal my head was much more sore than I had expected. Not so fun when on a marathon road trip, which is finally over!

FAT32 code has a different license to other parts.In addition to usual BSD clauses, it is restricted from use outside of EFI.This is bad.Fortunately, it seems like Mactels supporthfs+ filesystems. Which is good.Source to efi-shell is available.

Last night's CC Salon in Montreal went extremely well. I spent the time haranguing Marcus and Tina Pipers (the co-director of Creative Commons Canada) about the evils of anti-DRM clauses in licenses. (See Free content and DRM for my opinionated take on this matter.) Apparently there was a lot of talk about this at the iCommons summit in Brazil. Amita June enjoyed the noise and attention and spent an inordinate amount of time patting one hacker's very long beard. We'll see what kind of psychological symptoms that develops into later. tags: cc cc salon montreal marcus bornfreund tina pipers cc ca drm

Ben Macintyre on Wiki It was kind of tiring to see Ben Macintyre's note on How wiki-wiki can get sticky in The Times Online.

• Many years ago, I wrote a book about a Victorian crook called Adam Worth, a subject so obscure that no one had ever written a book about him before, or since. When I found an entry for Worth on Wikipedia, I was at first astonished, then flattered to find the book cited in the references, and then slightly infuriated: whoever had written the entry had plainly read my book and summarised it, but added several small but irritating errors.

Wikipedia isn't perfect and contains some errors? Oh, really? Boo hoo hoo. Yawn, turn the page. Wait, though; what's that last paragraph say?

• At first, I ignored the mistakes. This was only Wikipedia, after all. But the landscape of knowledge has changed since then, and I have joined the club. Wikipedia should always be taken with a pinch of salt. But the more we contribute and revise, the less salt we will need. We are all Wikipedists now.

Huh. A mainstream journalist who realized the way to deal with errors in Wikipedia is to fix them? Am I dreamin'? tags: wikipedia wiki media ben macintyre adam worth