Monday, July 26, 2010
Who doesn’t love librarians? Or, Modding the DCMA
Big news from Washington, D.C. in the eternal struggle of art and science against Big Money.
The Librarian of Congress has just issued new rules on some exceptions to the prohibitions found in the DCMA against circumvention of access controls.
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Friday, June 4, 2010
Carl has left the building
Today my collaborator of over a decade, Carl, will be leaving the company where we’ve both worked together to purse an opportunity in greener pastures. I know they’re greener because there are already a bunch of people over there from here and they tell me so.
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Sunday, November 15, 2009
wordpress2blogger
It was over 2 years ago that I migrated both my personal and technical blogs from Google’s Blogger to my own Wordpress sites over on lembobrothers.com.
At the time there wasn’t much in the way of tools to reverse the process. About all I was able to find were some convoluted procedures that didn’t seem very promising.
All that changed in January, 2009 with the release of Google’s blog converter software. The converters, which included a “wordpress2blogger” variation, are written in python and come in a form hostable on Google’s app engine or with a shell script wrapper for running in a local console session.
After downloading the code and an .xml export of one of my blogs from Wordpress, I used wordpress2blogger to convert the export into an xml format the Blogger could import.
Testing in a “sandbox” blog specially set up for the purpose, I was pleased to find that my blog imported perfectly. The only shortcoming was that none of the links to the dozens of images I’ve uploaded to my Wordpress blogs over the years could be accessed from the new blog (as expected).
So the task now is to come up with a script to move all those images over into a Google-supplied picasa web album and then search and replace the appropriate URLs into the .xml used to import my blog. That’s not actually as hard as it sounds, especially since at this point I’m planning to keep things relatively “flat” over on the picasa side (Wordpress stored images in a hierarchy that mapped to year, month under each blog’s upload directory. Chances are I won’t need more than a “perl -pi ’s/oldurl/newurl/gi’ import.xml” to get it done.
Of course there remains the question of “why?”
Well, although my present setup is quite nice, I’m painfully aware that most people either can’t afford or don’t want their own domain and web host (although it’s incredibly cheap nowadays). As a sysadmin the challenge of getting things to work under the more limited resources available to the average user is just too tempting to pass up.
Stay tuned here for my progress on this project as I dive in, as usual, for the full immersion experience.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Furlough Post #1: A Windows Virus on Wine
In the idle time I have while watching my two H1N1 infected children deal with fevers, coughs and runny noses (Note: the fevers broke today), I’ve taken to randomly browsing the web and found some interesting and amusing stuff.
This officially 2nd day of a five-day furlough (or “unpaid leave”) from an employer that’s been hit as hard as anyone by the recession isn’t going quite as planned. By now I should have clocked at least 4 hours of walks on nearby nature trails while listening through a semester’s worth of OpenYale podcasts. Instead, I’m sitting in the kitchen surfing the Internet while the kids have Cartoon Network blaring in the family room.
As for the bit about Wine, the open source emulator layer that allows you to run Windows programs on a Linux machine (which in my opinion runs a pathetically short list of Windows software reliably after nearly a decade of development — through no fault of the developers, think “a house built on sand…”):
A virus run in Wine is akin to taking a ferocious tiger out of the jungle, paralyzing it, then hooking up all of its nerve endings to virtual jungle simulator. It’s not a perfect simulation, though, so the jungle maybe doesn’t look right, and plus there’s an omnipotent power that can change anything that goes on in the simulation, or even destroy it and the tiger’s consciousness with a few twitches of his fingers. Now that’s power.
Quote from the post I Can Haz Virus over on fsufitch’s blog. Just another “Windows virus vs. Linux” tale where the good guys win. Originally found the quote on another blog, Boycott Novell, which also has more than its share of entertaining, as well as informative, articles.
I found Boycott Novell while searching for some news on the apparent “close-sourcing” of multimedia content on the NASA web site. Apparently the suits over at NASA haven’t read The Memo that has given their brethren over at the Department of Defense new marching orders when it comes to open source (basically the word is… use it).
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Watershed moment
Red Hat announced the filing of its amicus brief in Bilski v. Kappos today.
While the court rules of professional responsibility in the several states where I’m still a retired member of the bar in good standing don’t absolutely prohibit me from writing about the case, I’m going to defer to others who know a lot more about intellectual property law than I do. That’s for the best, since for more than a decade I’ve been involved in actually manufacturing intellectual property rather than protecting it.
Apart from reading the actual brief linked to above, go on over to Groklaw for more background and updates. The community of lawyers who have formed around that site always have something interesting and informative to say. ScotusWiki has all the other filings to date on its page for the case. End Software Patents, whose position in the debate should be clear enough, is a resource rich site for anyone interested in learning more.
As Red Hat states in its brief, there has been a growing recognition in many quarters that the proliferation of software patents beginning in the 1990’s “has seriously encumbered innovation in the software industry.” In fact, it may very well be that the refusal of many states in Europe, like France, to enforce software patents may have given them a competitive advantage.
This is a very important case, whose decision will undeniably shape the course of software development for decades to come. It provides an opportunity to reverse the effect of the lower court’s opening of “the floodgates for patents on certain kinds of abstract ideas.”
This case offers an opportunity to restore the historical and well-founded boundries for patentable subject matter that exclude abstract ideas from patent eligibility. It also offers an opportunity to reaffirm the rule, supported both by case law and by sound policy, that computer software is among the types of abstract subject matter that are not patentable…
Bilsky v. Kappos, ___U.S.___ (2009), Brief Amicus Curiae of Red Hat, Inc., p. 6.