Argh! It was a busy blog day (sort of catching up after the double-holiday weekend) and now a second late-notice item. (Don't get used to it - I'll be back to my usual slow rate soon.) I think someone mentioned this before:

"Open Source BBC Radio 4: Wed 11 Apr, 21:00 - 21:30 30 mins Paul Bennun finds out how Free and Open Source software is making its impact felt across the world, fuelling development and saving businesses millions of pounds. [...]"

Frequencies and more blurb are on the BBC site It's not on Long Wave unless the Cricket World Cup match finishes extraordinarily early. So, what do you think of it? Post comments to my site or to fsfe-uk.

Until September 2006, I lived in King's Lynn, so I still have friends there and look out for some topics to do with it. I'm also still helping to update some community websites for that area. On Wednesday 11 April, Friends of the Walks will meet in St John's Church at 6pm. Topics for discussion include the group's future role after the heavy work has finished. There will be more updates to the website in the next few weeks. (Apologies for late notice - I only got the letter second-class cross-country.)

Ofcom publishes research on media literacy

Analysis of a research report: "Certainly a useful document to have on hand, if only to deconstruct."

Karen Bremner - The Apprentice Series 2

A new art form: go on a reality TV show, start blogging to raise profile, get hired by Old Media, then leave the site to bit-rot. How many of these "reality TV star headstones" sites are there now?

predicts problems and confusion for consumers

If anyone doubts how much big media gets bad PR from trying to use their big influence to direct the market (such as making their films only available in their format), check the first comment: "I'm waiting for the corporate idiots to decide"

xmltv, was: [Debian-uk] Getting wired in Manchester

Another thing on my "must try that when I get my DVR built" list.

theLargePrint.com The New Media Landscape and the BBC's Lost Horizon

Nice criticism of BBC's link-up with anti-competitors. I recently wrote about the BBC-Google link, which raises some similar problems.

BBC NEWS Business Fewer charges for website content

Figures from 2006 (I'll do media linkposts more often in future).

Time to read the papers?

I only get time to read one paper per week, unless I'm travelling.

Number 10: Tony Blair Interview with Stephen Fry

Fantasy TV shows number 10: A bit of Fry and Blairie.

BBC NEWS Technology Broadband switching set to ease

They say new rules came in on 14 February, but sites like moneySavingExpert.com are still full of tales of woe.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ban tv competitions/quizzes which charge extortionate caller rates (eg The Mint).

Sign this to clear UK digital TV of all these scam quizzes. I see that after just a taste of humble pie, itv play is back on air overnight on itv1.

Via BBLUG I've heard about

"a monthly public demonstration of Free Open Source Software (FOSS), aimed primarily at beginners. It's not specifically for Linux, as the software will be demoed on a WinXP system to lure people in ;) -- however, I will make some live linux distro CDs for the event. Here's the details: Title: Introduction to Free Software
Date: Wednesday 18th April
Time: Lunchtime 1-2pm
Place: Cube Cinema, Dove Street South, Bristol BS2 8JS
Map
Price: Free
The website"

Anyone going?

Yesterday I was happy about SUN, because I saw an announcement that WTK 2.5.1 was released. And it includes a Linux version. The versions 2.3 and 2.5 were Windows only. The only available Linux version was 2.2. It worked nice but missed some features and had an annoying bug that signing of midlets were not possible. This bug was introduced in WTK 1.1 and fixed in WTK 2.5. Today I download WTK 2.5.1 for Linux and installed it. I tried to run a first midlet and got this error message:

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /home/mkoch/local/WTK2.5.1/bin/sublime.so: /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6: version  GLIBC_2.4' not found (required by /home/mkoch/local/WTK2.5.1/bin/sublime.so)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1751)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1647)
        at java.lang.Runtime.load0(Runtime.java:770)
        at java.lang.System.load(System.java:1005)
        at com.sun.kvem.Sublime.(Unknown Source)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
        at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:513)
        at java.lang.Class.newInstance0(Class.java:355)
        at java.lang.Class.newInstance(Class.java:308)
        at com.sun.kvem.Lime.createLime(Unknown Source)
        at com.sun.kvem.KVMBridge.(Unknown Source)
        at com.sun.kvem.KVMBridge.getBridge(Unknown Source)
        at com.sun.kvem.midp.MIDP.run(Unknown Source)
        at com.sun.kvem.environment.EmulatorInvoker.runEmulatorImpl(Unknown Source)
        at com.sun.kvem.environment.EmulatorInvoker.main(Unknown Source)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
        at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
        at com.sun.kvem.environment.JVM.main(Unknown Source)

I run a pure Debian Etch system as my desktop. So its not too old. I know there are releasons for etch not to include Glibc 2.4. Thats really okay. But I really wonder why builds against Glibc 2.4? What feature introduced in Glibc 2.4 is needed? I guess none.
They are just stupid and built against a new, shiny Glibc without caring about their users. SUN: Please care about your users and release a new build against Glibc 2.3 soon. Not everyone will update his/her development machine just to be able to run WTK. When you release proprietary software, do it right. If you are not able to, make it open source, so the community can fix it.

I sufferred a disk failure today involving the /home partion of my main communication/development system. Fortunately, I keep my home directory in subversion, so I didn't loose any files that I keep updated in my respository. This, however, does not include my email files. Normally, this would not be a problem at all since all my systems are backed up nightly on a network backup server. Unfortunately, the partition that backs up my failed drive filled to 100% in mid-Februrary, so my email was restored to only mid-February. The main reason for this post is to give notification that if you sent any email to me over the last 2 months, it's been lost, so please do resend. Especially, resending of patches would be appreciated.

The old testing release is now Debian 4.0:

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.

That last bit needs to be proven, which I’ll be doing this week.

James Dumay writes about Theo's latest flame-war.

One interesting part of the debate was Theo's response to this comment:
> We can dual license our code though and that is an
> acceptable license for Linux, the kernel.

Theo:
We? Sure, you can. But Reyk will not dual license his code, and most of the other people in the BSD community won't either, because then they receive the occasional patch from a GPL-believer which is ONLY under the GPL license, and then they are no less screwed than they would be from the code granted totally freely to companies.

The difference of course is that when you give code to companies under the BSD license you will never know what is done to it, but GPL-only patches can still be used as inspiration for new code development. Sure GPL-only code can't be copied into BSD-only code, but once you know where the bugs are they are easy to fix.

Towards the end of the debate Theo asks the following question:
David, if you found a piece of your code in some other tree, under a different license, would your first point of engatement be a public or private mail?

I can't speak for David, but after reading the discussion I would probably start by blogging about such an issue.

Ingo Juergensmann has blogged in detail about the new release and the new DPL.

Sam Hocevar ran for DPL on a platform based on some significant new changes. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next year.

The release of Etch is an exciting milestone in Debian development. Among other things it has SE Linux working!

I'm going to try and arrange a party in Melbourne, Australia to celebrate. We also have a mailing list for Debian people in Melbourne, to subscribe send a message to debian-melb-request@taz.net.au with the subject subscribe. I'll use that list for arranging the party, send me private email if you are not subscribed but want to attend.

Today - as many of you have already noticed - is/was a big day for Debian:

• Sam Hocevar won the DPL election


• Debian (old)stable 3.1 released a new version


• Debian Etch 4.0 was released

Well, I could add another topic:

• Debian is no longer Debian for me because not all of my archs are supported anymore

In a more detailed view:
Sam Hocevar won the DPL election
Congrats to Sam! I can agree with most of the points he made in his DPL platform, e.g. a sexier website, sexier distribution, remaing the universal OS, etc.
sexier website: Really, the current design of Debians website is awful. It's really something back from the 90s. Bad look, bad design and stuff you're looking for is difficult to find, because it's badly structured and stuff is spread all over the place. I think, it would be good to have some decent CMS and some good designers/graphic artists - a good package maintainier doesn't make a good webdesigner.
sexier distribution: Many people are using Ubuntu because they're desktop users. The current release cycles are way too long and drive people away from Debian. It's a different matter, of course, for servers or managed systems like Terminal Servers or such. Those are fine with longer release cycles. Splitting up the release in some core and sub releases is a quite common proposal. Yes, this split is difficult, but I think it's the way to go.
remaing the universal OS: As of the release of Etch, Debian became the no-more-universal OS - just because m68k wasn't released for obscure reasons. I'm a great m68k user and now I'm left behind by Debian with the problem that my pet arch is not supported anymore. Running testing/unstable is not an option for m68k IMHO. Because the m68k porters didn't come up with an alternative release plan so far, I think it's the best to shutdown my 3 m68k machines - all of them are m68k buildds - within the next weeks or months. They're producing (well, some little) heat, some disturbing noise and consume a lot of power of course. Currently I accept those drawbacks in order to help the m68k port by donating CPU power running some buildds for about 7 years now. I've spent much more money on this purpose - not only for paying the electricity bills - for phone calls to get crashed remote machines rebooted, sending replacement parts for other buildds or even driving by car to bring machines or other parts to other persons (like crest.debian.org to Michael Schmitz or accel boards to the Netherlands for porting stuff. Anyway, I will happily reactivate the machines when it's up to make a new release for the m68k architecture again! :)

Some other point Sam mentioned in his platform is this:

There are very useful services around, such as http://www.buildd.net/, http://bts.turmzimmer.net/ or http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/. I cannot understand why they are not Debian services.

I already had a conversation with Sam about this in which I expressed my general intention to develop at least Buildd.Net beyond its current state - it's quite frustrating for me to see Buildd.Net being stuck in development just because I've no more time and skill to develop Buildd.Net further. Sadly, my call for help wasn't as successful as I wanted. Only two persons wanted to help: faw and joey - and both are quite busy with other stuff.
Apparently, Buildd.Net will most likely suffer from shutting down my m68ks due to the missing m68k Etch release as well, because it was always a frontend to my m68k buildds in my eyes. All other stuff on Buildd.Net is just a nice addition to that. And when I don't operate m68k buildds on a daily basis, it's obvious that I won't invest much more time into the development of Buildd.Net. This is already true for the past year where I haven't found the time to fix some serious problems in the backend scripts and database of Buildd.Net, which basically breaks store_packages2.py (source and therefor ptracker.cgi(example) as well. I even haven't found the time to setup trac and svn again after the move to the new server during last autumn.
Erm, anyway.. back to the topic: I wish Sam the best for his period - but I don't think that he can make a big change. I doubt in general that any DPL is able to push big changes in Debian. One reason for this is the short period of just one year. Another reason is that many DDs won't let big changes to be made.

Note: This article is part of my Testing stuff with QEMU series.

From Wikipedia:

MenuetOS is an operating system with a monolithic preemptive, real-time kernel, including video drivers, all written in FASM assembly language, for 64-bit and 32-bit x86 architecture computers, by Ville Mikael Turjanmaa. MenuetOS development has focused on fast, simple, efficient implementation. It has a graphical desktop, games, and networking abilities (TCP/IP stack), yet still fits on one 1.44MB floppy disk. It also facilitates easy, full-featured assembly language programming. This stands in marked contrast to the (as of 2007) widespread view that assembly languages are useful mainly for old and embedded systems.

Testing (the GPL'd) MenuetOS in QEMU is easy:

wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/menuet/M32-084.ZIP
unzip M32-084.ZIP
qemu -fda M32-084.IMG -m 384
There's also Menuet 64, written in 64-bit assembly, but that's not open source'd for some strange reason I don't understand. But you can try that one, too (the binary images, that is), using QEMU:

wget 'http://www.menuetos.be/download.php?CurrentMenuetOS'
unzip M64-059.ZIP\?3.1
qemu-system-x86_64 -fda M64-059.IMG


13:55 -!- aba changed the topic of #debian-release to: Done. Thanks to everyone - the DDs, the release team, the ftpmaster, the CD testers, Joey, Frans and everybody else. Time to P-A-R-T-Y!

As I've posted before, I recently read Lawrence Rosen's Open Source Licensing Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law. And I'm sure many of you will recognize the enormous constructive value of early-morning cavilations. Well, today I woke up thinking about strengths and weaknesses in th different Free Software licenses, and I decided to add my grain to the world of license proliferation. So, here goes version 3.14 of the CoPL. I wonder how long will it take before it reaches /usr/share/common-licenses on Debian systems ;-)

		       CONFUSING PUBLIC LICENSE
		       ========================
	This is version 3.14 of the Confusing Public License (referred to from
now on as "CoPL"). Copyright (c) 2007 Transnational
Republic. Additional copies of this license can be purchased at no
cost from any Transnational Republic citizen at any of its recognized
outposts, or freely copied. 
	Any legal claims regarding Original works or any of their Standard
versions licensed under the CoPL Should not abide by and be carried
out according to the current law of the Transnational Republic. The
Original author to pay for any attorney and other legal fees of any
dispute regarding said Original author.
	This license text is designed to protect all the Technology covered
under it under a thick layer of incomprehension. No technical,
professional or social measures might be used to subvert the intent of
this license. This license Must be carefully or professionally
reviewed by a lawyer or attorney, under any jurisdiction. Any serious
attempt to understand this license will immediatly terminate your
rights to keep reading this license. Original works licensed under the CoPL
will not be affected by this provision, you will still have permission
to use them.
	Redistributions of source code Should not retain the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 
	0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a
   notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed
   under the terms of this Confusing Public License. The Original work
   below refers to any such program or work or Standard version.
	1. You desire to license the Technology to a
   large community to facilitate research, innovation and product
   development while maintaining compatibility of such products with
   the Technology as delivered by You
	2. Original author desires to license the Technology from You on
   the terms and conditions specified in this License.
	3. Redistributions in binary form Should not reproduce the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
   documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
	4. The names "Joe", "Curly", "Moe" and "The Three Stooges Foundation"
   May be used to endorse or promote products derived from this
   Original work without prior written permission, as they are in no way
   related. 
	5. There is no number 5. Seriously. In all Original works licensed under the
   CoPL, all necessary technical and social steps May be taken not
   to include, in any explicit way, the number 5.
	6. Original author Must make and give away verbatim copies of the
   source form of this Package
   without restriction, provided that Original Author duplicates all of
   the original copyright notices and associated disclaimers.
	7. Original author Must apply bug fixes, portability fixes and other
   modifications derived from the Public Domain or from
   the Copyright Holder. A Package modified in such a
   way shall still be considered the Standard Version.
	8. No Standard versions of the Original work Must be protected by this
   license. Original authors Should not choose a different, saner
   licensing model for the distribution of any modifications they
   make. The CoPL should be taken as a retroviral license.
	THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL YOU BE
LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
				     Definitions
	"You" means the original author of the work covered under the CoPL.
	"Original author" means you.
	"Thou" means God almighty.
	"May" means "Should not, no matter what".
	"Must" means "May".
	"Should not" means "Must".
	"Reasonable copying fee" means nothing.
	"Standard version" means a modified version of the Original work.
				      DISCLAIMER
	The CoPL text, from the words "This is version" and up to and
including this paragraph, is to be taken as a preamble, and will not
be effective under any circumstances. 
	All work licensed under the CoPL should be considered as licensed
under the GNU General Public License version 2 or (at your option) any
later version. It is not the task of this license to point you on
where to get hold of said license.

As usual, Ed Felten offers a well-conceived analysis of the Cablevision decision from a technologist’s perspective (for a lawyer’s perspective, see William Patry). The money quote:

The question, in other words, was who was recording the programming. Was Cablevision doing the recording, or were its customers doing the recording? The customers, by using their remote controls to navigate through on-screen menus, directed the technology to record certain programs, and controlled the playback. But the equipment that carried out those commands was owned by Cablevision and (mostly) located in Cablevision buildings. So who was doing the recording? The question doesn t have a simple answer that I can see. This general issue of who is responsible for the actions of complex computer systems crops up surprisingly often in law and policy disputes. There doesn t seem to be a coherent theory about it, which is too bad, because it will only become more important as systems get more complicated and more tightly intereconnected.

Agency, intent/scienter, and responsibility are indeed tricky issues with software and the law. I’ve experienced the problem in my own practice. Although it arises particularly frequently in copyright disputes, it is also common in patent and trademark cases (and of course contract disputes inasmuch as clickwrap-type agreements are implicated). I don’t have any coherent theory to propose, but a more uniform framework would certainly introduce some predictability into these sorts of cases (and thus perhaps avoid litigation). Update: Mike Madison also has some interesting comments on the case.

These days I picked up the Debtags AI topic again (so yes, development is alive, not the AI). Some people will remember this topic, it was a Google Summer of Code project. The project didn't really complete back then. Since my thesis isn't coming along too well (I don't know how to explain to my professor what I'm trying to achieve...), I've been playing around with different stuff. So I've picked up the Debtags AI again. Back at the end of the GSoC or sometime later last summer, I had started a rewrite of the Debtags AI stuff in C++ for performance reasons. I also had some ideas on how to make it scale better and on how to improve the results. I think I've reached an interesting state now; training time of the AI is down to a few minutes (remember it was a few days when the GSoC started?), so I managed to cut off another order of magnitude. Evaluation of a text against the database (i.e. for every tag) happens in the fraction of a second. This AI is turning out quite well now. I have one more idea for a trick that could improve the results from an algorithm side, and one from the data side. Enrico is already looking at how to integrate it with the web apps. :-) And I also want to scale it up further. How about using it to classify web pages by their text content? I already have an idea on how to get some good training data... maybe I should consider writing a business plan instead of a diploma thesis...

Russell blogs about his new 22" cheap TFT monitor. You lucky bastard.
I use a 17" Dell LCD monitor at work (sorry, cannot recall the model), and I've been quite pleased with it. Granted, 1280x1024 isn't what I had gotten used to (1400x1050 on my previous laptop and previous work machine), but it does the trick - And for my current laptop, I went for a smaller machine, with a 12" wide-screen 1280x800 monitor. I still find the monitor somewhat small, and the missing 224 pixels _are_ noticeable - but the size is well worth it.
But what I've been playing at work with is changing the monitor orientation - This 17" Dell monitor can be set up vertically (1024x1280), and xrandr will merrily change the orientation. So far, I'm happy with this setup. I still feel there are some video-related quirks, and maybe the pixels are a bit off (i.e. black letters in a white background have a bit of a shadow), maybe it was visible as well in the regular configuration, but not as noticeable. But well, I feel it easier to work with for most of my work cases - For having a full-screen browser, each row is smaller and more rows fit on screen - It's quite pleasant. For doing Web development, having a horizontally split screen (one above of the other) between Emacs and the browser is quite natural. And when I use more than two frames (i.e. for following logfiles or debugging multi-factored breakages on servers ;-) ), well, they are small enough that it's similar to having the ol' regular layout.
I'd still like to get a second video card and monitor. I remember working that way in the job I left four years ago, and it was very comfortable.
BTW, Russell, for your needs I suggest you to try Ion. After all, who really needs to have a root window/background after all? :-)

Okay, so firstly, I thought the whole David Hicks situation (mainly the fact that it was starting to become a bit of a political hot-potato near an election so they got his trial hurried up) was a bit fishy (particularly the bit about how he's gagged until after the next election), but this morning, I learned that there's legislation to close the electoral rolls at 8pm on the day the election is called. That stinks to high heaven! I mean how on earth could justify bringing out legislation like that? How does that improve anything? I'll be really disappointed if that just gets steamrolled through the Senate. All this reminds me that I need to re-enroll to vote.

Snow, beautiful snow! We've got tons of snow coming out of the sky today. It's big and thick, what they call fourrure de li vre (rabbit fur) in Quebec. It's hard to believe we are having snow this late in the season (halfway into Germinal!), but it's kind of nice to have some snow. Especially since the United Nations report saying that Canada will lose its snow cover by 2100. Snow, please snow. tags: snow season climate change

JFS So, I'm one of those idiots who uses the IBM Journaled File System 2 (JFS2) as his root partition. Why? Because I've tried all the different journalling filesystems for Linux (reiserfs, ext3, xfs, jfs) and JFS is the one that works for me. It just seems to be the low-profile, clean, nicely-working FS. Unfortunately, I've been tracking Feisty Fawn for the last couple of weeks, and somewhere in there the JFS utility package, jfsutils, got uninstalled. Who knows why? But when I rebooted my machine today to try out a new kernel, my root partition came up in read-only mode -- because the system couldn't check the partition, because fsck.jfs couldn't be found. The fix, of course, would be to boot a live CD, chroot to the hard disk, and apt-get install the jfsutils. I typically use Finnix for this and other rescue/recovery projects, but in this situation Finnix failed me. My main computer is a honkin' amd64, and the x86 Finnix disk didn't want to let me chroot and run any amd64 binaries (like the stuff I needed to apt-get install jfsutils). So I ended up downloading and burning a Feisty live CD, dicking around with boot parameters for a while (noapic nolapic nosplash nonothing...), and finally got to a nice, friendly Gnome terminal. I mounted the hard drive using the Nautilus tools, and then tried to chroot to it -- D'OH! Permission denied. Took me a while to figure out that Nautilus mounts drives noexec by default. Once I got that working, I got jfsutils installed and was able to boot my machine again. Yay. Moral of the story: figure out a way to make packages that are crucial to you crucial to your package manager, too. Oh, and Finnix needs an amd64 build. tags: jfs feisty fawn ubuntu jfsutils finnix nautilus

YULblog YULblog meetup tonight at the Quincaillerie. YULblog is our local Montreal monthly blogging get-together. It's pretty fun, and has the highest female-to-male ratio of any technology event in Montreal. Which is great. I have a ton of work to do tonight (since I spent the afternoon dicking around with live CDs), but I'm going out anyways. YULblog comes but once a month, after all. tags: yulblog blogs montreal

N hours later Good time, that! I walked down rue Rachel to the Quincaillerie this evening around 9PM through a storm that was like being in a snowfight with Borribles. Thud thud thud! Big chunks of snow. But the Q. was pretty hoppin' for a snowy night in April, and I got to see Robin, Steve, Niko, Patrick and others. It was a fun time; the snow made it all the more special. tags: snow yulblog

Add to my Netflix Wishlist (that is, the list of features I wish Netflix had, not the list of movies I wish I had): links from IMDB entries to the respective Netflix page (or, better yet, “add to Netflix queue” directly from IMDB). Links back to IMDB from Netflix would also be nice. This seems like something that would be relatively easy to do with a Mozilla plugin. In general, Netflix would be a prime candidate for a developer/hobbyist ecology similar to that which has grown up around Amazon’s API. The only examples I could find were this Perl module and this Moveable-Type plugin. More development along these lines could be a key advantage for Netflix to preserve its now incumbent position in the market. (Does anyone have any local video stores left? Ours closed down about a year ago.) Update: James points to an impressive list of Greasemonkey/Netflix scripts, two of which seem to do the job: Netflix links in IMDB, IMDB links in Netflix. Another featuer I’ve been looking for: Netflix Ratings Granulizer (allows partial stars in ratings). Thanks, Lazyweb! (Note that these sorts of screen-scraping hacks inevitably break when the content provider modifies its presentation; an open API would obviously be preferable).

I see Brenda talking about wanting to use "Ruby", and trying to install "Rails". This conflating of the two terms annoys me. "Ruby on Rails" is a web development framework which is written in Ruby, and which uses Ruby for some customisation, but the primary learning curve in using it is to learn the framework. I installed it ("apt-get install rails", of course :-) and tried using it but found it frustrating, though that may be because the default Debian install was against MySQL. Ruby, on the other hand, is a language which is generally just as suited to writing off-line text processing scripts as it is to writing on-line scripts. It is also a language which has good database independence and GUI libraries. Two of the talks I went to at LCA this year which have had an impact on my coding were one about Puppet, a systems management application written in Ruby, and one about writing GTK programs in several languages. The GTK people didn't quite make it through their ambitious schedule so we only got to see them writing GTK in C and in Java (not in Python) but it did suggest how easy it all was. When I got back to NZ I put those two together and started writing (well, rewriting really) an application in Ruby/GTK, and I have found it a very nice language. It seems that every time I learn something new about Ruby my code gets shorter and provides more function in a clearer and more readable way. Fun.