Kevin Mark commented:

"I see--Redarded Terrorist--ok. So this Gareth fellow is making a comparison with smarter, more intelligent terrorist that was the IRA. Which kind of says that everyone should be far less afraid of the current crop of folks and yet the media, as it does so well, inflates their dangerousness for the sake of ... well, beats me. Oh, maybe it help Tony get a job ;-) If the IRA came to the US, what color (or is that colour) code would their activities get on our terror scale as opposed to these Tardorrists?"

How about Emerald Green? More seriously, I think it's entirely fair to suggest we should fear this lot less than the often-USian-funded Provisional IRA, or local groups like animal liberationists. Those didn't just attack the big cities - it was everywhere, an attempt at terrorism. I lived about three miles outside Milton Keynes, then a fairly small midlands city, which was firebombed by both those groups. Ultimately, it didn't work. Most people weren't terrified. We carried on regardless. The government may be over-hyping this threat to ride in a new load of "expensive and ineffective" Security Theatre measures, like ID cards. Some media is sceptical, but the Murdoch-run media is mostly complicit, which is hardly surprising given the historic relationship. We should not let these "tardorrists" change our way of life, yet that is exactly what our spineless politicians seem to be doing. Let's continue as before: beware, but be happy. Update: niq comments:

"Recommended reading: Terry Pratchett "Interesting Times". Written before "9/11" and set in the wrong part of the world, but nevertheless beautifully relevant."

Surprisingly many local people seem to be catching icky-illnesses of death recently. Both Megan and myself are under the weather recently. I managed to infect her with a nasty cough and cold on Wednesday and the pair of us have been mostly shivering indoors since then. Today is the closing day of The Leith Festival (Leith being a district of Edinburgh. Where we live.) So we made it outside and consumed beer and pies for a while. Now we're back and I'm wishing I'd not left the house. Still it could have been worse I could have been in the sun in a blurry suit and without any books! (Books visible and recognizable include the complete works of Terry Pratchett, minus two, the complete works of Steven Brust (Maybe Vlad will give me the edge in the assassins game!)) All being well we'll be more recovered in time for the Debconf7 activities, although I expect Meg to be driving around Scotland for part of the time with a friend and not completely available. (A three-day roadtrip with Emma - a local girl who is hoping that somebody at Debconf will be able to fix her Ubuntu laptop..?) Update: - Debconf7 game of Settlers of Catan..? (I have only the Zarahemla set myself, but it will suffice for four players in a pinch.)

As I'd semi-intended to after last week's renewal of hatred towards my current in-line skates, we popped into Skates on Haight yesterday while we were in San Francisco, and I acquired a pair of Rollerblade Crossfire TFS' The store was pretty nice. Small, but no other customers, so I got pretty good customer service. I have to wonder if I did the same level of due-diligence before purchasing as I did last time: I bought the first pair they recommended and I tried on. That said, they have a nicer closure system than the Bauers I had previously. They've got a ratchet-style strap at the top, a bit like some snowboard boots, and they've sort of got laces. They have some thin "string" and an interesting bit at the back that you grab and yank on to tighten the string, and there's a separate release catch to loosen it. A bit hard to describe. I've done a few test runs around the apartment complex today while I waited for the washing, and so far they seem not too bad. My biggest problem is I've got wide feet, so I have to find the happy medium between having the laces tight enough to have good ankle support, and not being too tight as to squish my feet. If the weather is good tomorrow and I can drag my arse out of bed at a reasonable time, I'll try skating to work.

Collection Management I like to collect things, books, audio cds (which I buy exclusively second-hand/used then rip), and films. I’ve had a lot of fun putting my film collection online (Warning image-heavy). Although I admit the reason I did it in the first place was because I found myself buying DVDs I already owned more than once. I do the same thing with books. I can recognised covers easily, so if I see a book which is by an author I like I will look at the cover and think “Hmmm got this”, or “Hmmm thats new”. This leads me to buy duplicates too often. This leads me to wanting to organise the hundreds of books I have, so I can lookup what I have/dont have easily. My recent query the other day about scanning ISBN numbers with a barcode reader seemed to suggest that using the hardware is trivial. However the next step is hard. I can’t find a decent tool for using storing the data in. So far I’ve looked at:

alexandria

I loved this when I started it up and imported a few books by ISBN. It found the title, the publisher, a cover image, and more. However the backend seems to be a bit hit and miss. Picking books at random I soon found major gaps. e.g. Adding Terry Pratchett’s Mort gave me all the details. Adding Witches Abroad gave a blank image and just the title, all the other details were wrong/missing.

tellico

Tellico I’ve just ruled out. It allows you to create collections of things, but you must enter all the details yourself. I’ve neither the time nor the patience to do that.

So I’ll postpone this project for a while. Probably just as well since I’ve discovered that a suprisingly large number of my books do not actually contain ISBN numbers! Mostly the older paperback fiction books I have such as “H.G.Wells the valley of the spiders & other stories”, but even modern books like some of Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series are free of ISBN numbers.

The State Services Commission (SSC) (the NZ government body that oversees NZ government departments) released a guide to legal issues in using Open Source Software recently. The publication of this guide has caused a certain amount of consternation in the open source community and even manged to make it to Slashdot and Groklaw as well as spawning a fairly active thread on the NZ Open Source Society’s openchat mailing list. Through all of this I’ve found myself very much on the opposite side of opinion to most other people commenting on it. My initial thoughts on the document are quite nicely summarised by the Groklaw comment that Stuart points out. While the document uses some unfortunate language, there is nothing in it that is actually untrue. In fact my initial feelings towards the document (without having read it thoroughly) were that it was good to see the SSC taking enough notice of open source to feel the need to advise departments on the particular issues that it can bring up. Particularly dissapointing to me are the conspiracy theories that have been flying around. Groklaw surmises that the paper is a Microsoft hatchet job simply because it was authored by Chapman Tripp (a large NZ law firm) who happen to also represent Microsoft NZ on a range of intellectual property issues. I’ve yet to hear a single shred of evidence to back up this assertion and I find it quite ridiculous. Large firms working in a small market such as NZ will often run into conflict of interest issues and have well established procedures for dealing with them. Without seeing evidence to the contrary I cannot accept that a reputable firm like Chapman Tripp would risk their reputation by trying to intentionally mislead the goverment in a report like this. A far more like scenario, to my mind, is simply that the author(s) of the report are not very familiar with open source issues and didn’t do quite as much research as they should have to bring themselves up to speed with the unique IP features of open source licenses. Having read the document more thoroughly now, I can agree that it is far from perfect. I think the single most glaring problem is that it focusses only on open source software and doesn’t mention that many of the risks also exist when using proprietary software. This could leave an uneducated reader completely scared off open source due to a mistaken belief that it is far too risky. On the other hand we shouldn’t completely dismiss the document either as it does raise a number of clear risks that a department will face in adding open source software to their IT environment. We’re not going to do ourselves any favours by pretending that open source is a panacea to all the worlds software ills and can just be dropped in to any IT environment to make things better! It’s worth pointing out at this point that previous evidence from the SSC indicates that they are open source friendly. They have a very clear policy stating that Departments are encouraged to consider open source software alongside proprietary software and use it in cases where it wins on the basis of cost, functionality, interoperability, and security. Given this history, I am alarmed at the hostile reactions many participants on the NZOSS open-chat mailing list had to the document. Quite frankly I think some people are responding far too emotively to the language in the document (which is problematic - but not that bad) and missing the chance to evaluate the rest of it in an objective manner. We have a SSC that has indicated a friendliness towards open source in the past, and I don’t think that they would turn around and reverse their position in this manner. This report is intended to support their overall policy after all. Rather than jumping down their throats and shouting about how poor the document is we need to engage in a civil dialog, point out the issues with the document and offer constructive suggestions for how the document can be improved. To that end, Peter Harrisson has started some pages on the NZOSS wiki where we are going to co-ordinate our impressions and responses to the document so we can present a consistent NZOSS position to the SSC in response. I’d encourage everyone with an interest in the document to read and contribute to those pages. As for exactly what I form our response should take and what it should consist of? I’ll follow up with another post on that later in the weekend when I’ve had a bit more time to reflect.
What I do know (if you haven’t guessed already) is that I think we should be very careful not to respond in a hostile and emotive manner that will result in our relationship with the SSC becoming worse. That means we should take time to consider the document objectively, evaluate its propositions and provide a well researched and substantiated list of suggested improvements to the SSC.