It wasn’t very long ago that I taxied out of Garibaldi after my Snowshoe Christmas, this morning I am headed north up to Birkenhead for a Telemark New Years. So happy new year to everybody who won’t be in the Felix Creek shelter.

I know, I know, we’re already in the new year. But I’m no ideologue when it comes to partying.

I don’t have a credit card per se, and I couldn’t put my hands on the $1700 in cash that MEC wanted as an alternative deposit for an alpine traverse ski package, so instead I am borrowing some honest-to-god telemark skis for the trip. Three days of learning-by-doing backcountry telemarking in God’s Own Ski Area. Shed a tear for my thighs.

In unrelated news, I dreamed last night that I was lured into going planting in Ontario this summer. When I arrived in the refugee-camp-of-a-planting-camp, filled with 100s of rookies, I was asked to crewboss because I had planted before. Given a few short weeks with a completely raw crew and my own unsuitabilty for management, I utterly failed in molding my team into a worthwhile planting unit. BUT, we did have a cool name: The Ragged Band of Misfits (RBM).

Hmmm… planting dreams. Must be getting around to that time of year: the time of thinking forward to planting. Oh dear. Have to start checking the forums when I get back.

This is neat. Kuro5hin is a user driven news and discussion community, kind of like a more wide-ranging, more open Slashdot. Although there isn’t much useful “about” information on the site, unless my memory is misleading me it orginated as a blog for one of the programmers of the old Audiogalaxy file sharing app that was gutted by the RIAA because it was so good. Whatever it’s origins, it has evolved into something quite impressive. Kuro5hin users post very intelligent stories, often created by their own hand, from which a lot of reasonably thougtful discussion springs. To call the stories wide-ranging would be an understatement. The latest contributions include a long, scholarly summation of the findings of various historians working on the “who killed the Red Baron” question (spoiler: it wasn’t the Canadian ace), an overview of Russian winter holidays, a HOW-TO on using Mexican dentists, and a link and teaser for this year’s BBC Reith Lecture with groundbreaking nuerologist Vilayanur Ramachandran. And an interview with Democratic Presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich.

Not a link to an interview with Kucinich mind you, but an exclusive Kuro5hin interview. What I think is neat about this is that the interviewer’s only credentials are that he has contibuted a few items to Kuro5hin before. One of which was a statement that, given how much he has enjoyed writing on his blog and on Kuro5hin and such, he’d like to try doing some real writing.

Apparently that’s good enough credentials to get you half an hour with Dennis. What a neat way to become a political reporter. Occasionally this whole “the internet will make individuals the new media” thing works. And the Kucinich campaign team doesn’t seem to be shy about it either, as of right now a quote from the interview and a link to it are near the top of the Kucinich campaign website.

The interview was a good one. The questions are many of the ones that I would ask a candidate myself, and I think much more relevant than the usual softballs and horse-race irrelevancies that the media usually seems to come up with. In response, I think Mr. Kucinich lived up to his mantle of Officially Endorsed Candidate of the Empty Room Blog. I like Kuro5shin, and I like Kucinich, and I like them just fine together.

in which I come up with a specific example: SCO and the Royal Bank of Canada

It’s hard to back up the argument that banks invest your money in businesses you might not like because it’s just not convenient to figure out what businesses any given bank is actually investing in. Here is a nice example of an enterprise that I at least am thrilled isn’t fingering my hard earned cash.

SCO used to be Linux vendor Caldera. They changed their name to SCO and bought the licensing rights to UNIX, the granddaddy proprietary operating system that Linux grew up to replace. They then announced that some code from UNIX had found it’s way into the code for Linux and that therefore anybody using Linux owed them cash. Since the majority of large businesses on the planet now use Linux in some capacity, they stand to take in Billions and Billions in licensing fees or legal damages for work that, even if their license ownership claims are true, they themselves never did. Since then they have been waging a war of Fear Uncertainty and Dismay against pretty much everybody. They have threatened to bring lawsuits against all those who don’t cough up for one of their “licensing packages” and have made IBM their example, filing a 3 Billion dollar damages suit against Big Blue.

If they can prove that Linux was using UNIX code, then all of this would be, if not particularly impressive, then at least within the legal framework. Underhanded and selfish for sure, since thousands of developers have freely given their efforts into making Linux a free and open operating system which now stands to suffer because of what would at most be a irresponsible mistake by some programmer somewhere, and since all the people who benefit from Linux would also stand to suffer. Once SCO “owns” some of Linux then it is no longer free, no longer freely distributives and maybe not even freely changeable. Even if the proprietary code code could be removed, the damage would be done to Linux’s reputation and momentum and the quest to make it the world’s dominant operating system would be set back by years. Despite this, SCO’s maneuver would arguably still be within the legal framework. Microsoft and Sun have already caved in and coughed up some protection money.

Except that they absolutely refuse to actually prove their claims. Claiming that if anyone were to be told which of the endless lines of code that is the Linux OS are actually SCO’s those people would then be “contaminated” by the knowledge, they have insisted that they will only come out with it in court. Well, IBM (and RedHat) have countersued, and as part of that suit the courts have ordered that SCO cough it up. To which they responded by printing out code on 1 000 000 pieces of paper and trucking it to IBM. There is nothing anybody can effectively do to analyze a million sheets of paper. Could anybody be more childish?

It’s becoming clear that SCO doesn’t really have a case. If they did, they would prosecute and progress. Instead they are pulling stunts and tricks and dragging it out to enhance the fear factor as much as they can, hoping more people will preemptively fold and pay up. Along the way, Linux’s reputation is getting permanently damaged. SCO has no concern. Also, they are they are the worst sort of ideological capitalist running dog pigs. Or at least they are claiming to be since it helps their case. Not only are they claiming Linux includes intellectual property of SCO, they are now claiming that the General Public License under which Linux and a large fraction of all open source software is released is unconstitutional and therefore illegal. Why? Because according to the constitution, the progress of science and technology is helped if authors of creative works have ownership of the intellectual component of that work so they can make money from it and therefore any scientific and intellectual progress which is done for non-profit reasons is therefore unconstitutional and hence illegal. I kid you not, they really said that. And since the GPL is based on a non-profit model it is illegal in every instance. It’s too bad, not-for-profit academic research for the benefit of society under the University system was having a pretty good run until SCO proved that sort of thing was illegal.

So what does any of this have to do with the banking system? Turns out threatening the entire computing world with fines and legal action isn’t entirely cheap. Before gearing up for the battle, they needed to find some dough to fill the petty cash drawer. And they found it: the Royal Bank of Canada, one of the banks I once considered opening an account with, invested $30 million dollars to finance their campaign. That could have been my cash (well, not actually, given the timing, but if you have an RBC account, it could well be your money).

It turns out that the banking component of this story may have a happy ending. Thanks to threatened boycotts, and more probably just the fact that the Royal Bank’s investment was outed via an SEC filing (it was originally hidden behind a larger Baxter Capital investment), the RBC has decided to “change their relationship“. Now they suddenly have the power to pull out their cash should the SCO actually try and activate the agreed-upon ambulance-chasing deal they had arranged with the legal firm who is supposed to be carrying through this mess. So that $ may turn out to be something of a poisoned pill for SCO.

But the only reason this is working out is that for once the tie was made between the business in particular and the bank whose money it was. Or more exactly, the bank whose members the money was. In the vast majority of banking investments, no such tie is made. I’d bet money that the next time bank money is used to fund some undertaking that the bank’s members might not savour, the members won’t know about it. But I don’t have to bet my money one way or the other, because it’s safely where it should be: in a credit union.

in which I outline generally why I try not to get involved in the banking system

I currently have accounts with 3 different credit unions littered across 3 different provinces and states. Yes it’s a pain in the ass. No they don’t yet have an interoperable financial network. But I’m not contemplating giving up and getting an account at a single Bank with lots of conveniently located branches.

When you get a bank account, you’re (literally) buying into the grow-or-crash system of capital investment that largely drives business in the western world, and your money is going to fund ventures that you don’t know and can’t control. Banks take your money and invest it in businesses, and then when those businesses make a profit, the Banks take a cut of that profit in return for the money they invested, and you take a cut of it in turn as interest on your account. So even if you don’t personally invest in the stock market, if you have a bank account you are effectively participating in the capital investment and return infrastructure.

I have a couple of issues with this. First of all, on a grand scale, it’s inherently unsustainable. In order for businesses to raise capital from this system, they have to be able to promise to generate profit above and beyond their operating expenses and salaries. If they don’t there is no extra return for their investors and therefore no reason for those investors to invest at all. You don’t bother buying into stock that you expect to maintain the same price from now on. So it’s not good enough for businesses to simply make worthwhile goods or services and pay wages to their employees and taxes. They have to grow, and never stop growing. And should they not grow, then their value will inevitably go down, as investors pull out looking for more profitable arenas. Once they start to lose their value, the vicious cycle kicks in as more investors leave and soon all their capital disappears. So maintaining yourself at a given size = crashing. Grow or crash, those are your options. Despite the mitigating effects of more efficient technology and practices, it’s probably not possible for every venture to grow forever without depleting the world’s resources or without being forced by the competitive environment into doing unethical things to survive, and the current state of the world appears to bear that assumption out. I recognize that there are wise people who disagree with me about this, but this is based on my own experiences and thoughts to date. And hey, George Soros has got my back on this one, and he’s rich as God.

For the record, I understand that by facilitating the availalibity of money to businesses to finance their operations before they reach full profitability, this growth-based system is responsible for generating so much of the wealth that our country and so many others is based on. But I figure we could all probably be pretty happy with a little less raw “wealth” if we had a saner world to spend it in. And I also recognize that Credit Unions, similarly to banks, use their member’s equity to make investments in profit-generating enterprises. But Credit Unions are not invested enterprises themselves, and thus don’t have the same impetus to grow or crash that Banks do, giving them a lot more leeway in choosing who they are going to invest in, and what rates of return they will demand. Being member-owned and controlled (at least in theory) they also have impetus to ensure that enterprises they invest in are in line with values of their members. Which leads me to my second issue with the Banking system.

When your bank invests, you don’t know who it invests in. They don’t make an effort to publish that information. When was the last time you saw a list of the investments your bank makes with your money? Maybe they invest in Texaco, or Shell, or Esso. Maybe they invest in RH Phillips, or the people that make cruise missiles. Maybe they invest in Starbucks, or Nike, or Walmart. Maybe you don’t care, but maybe you do. It’s 2am. Do you know where your paycheck is? To be fair, I don’t either, but I’m pretty confident it isn’t providing operating capital for any of the above.

Hopefully then, credit unions offer some sane compromise between wealth generation and wise society building. I had to take a deep breath before opening my third credit union account. At the time, I seriously considered just going with a bank. But I haven’t regretted the decision once since. As a lovely bonus prize, I’m getting the fabulous service that co-operatives seem to be able to provide (with some exceptions) and that’s a treat.

In Antartica, there are people who get paid minimum wage to scrub pots. Why not?

When I was in Yellowknife this summer, watching the float planes overfly the bush pilot monument, I was told the story of the Yellowknife-based twin otter pilots who had been the only ones able to get a critically sick scientist out of Antarctica when access was cut off by an intense storm. I had heard that story in the news, though not the Yellowknife connection. At the time, it had made me wonder what life must be like for scientists living in Antarctica, the most remote, spartan, and therefore possibly exotic, continent on Earth.

Apparently, it’s like this:

i really like it here. i realized that in my first 24 hours. i really like the thing that i came here to discover: the community. it’s very intersting. people with phd’s mopping floors. drunk blondes with shit for brains as taxi drivers.
i’ve signed up to be the pinsetter at the bowling alley. i get paid $15/week by raytheon to do it.

and this

mcmurdo is like a college campus. it is about the size of a college campus. but htere are many men with beards. everyone lives in a dorm and has a roomate or roomates. everyone eats in the same place at the same time. when you drink, everyone knows you are drinking, so it’s best not to make an ass of yourself. or, if you do make an ass of yourself, make sure you are at least cocky about it. this guy john got naked a couple weeks ago at scott base and now he’s known as ‘naked john’. he’s got a reputation that he plans to live up to. i’ve seen him naked at least 5 times in 3 weeks. we are all taking bets to see how long it will be before he’s kicked off the island. in the meantime, we are enjoying his jackassery.

and things like this happen

tomorrow is my day off. i think i’ll ask if i can drive a bulldozer and help move some snow off the ice runway. the weather is getting worse now, and there are 2 flights scheduled to leave for Pole tomorrow. it will take half the day to clear the runway if the condition doesn’t stay crappy all night. 7000 gallons of fuel was spilled near the runway the other day. i heard they dug a moat around it and stared at it for a while wondering what to do next.

You can learn all this and much more at Sandwich Girl’s website. If you find postings from Antartic Dish Dawgs interesting, there’s also this (although it’s finished now): Phil: Adventures in the Great White South. For more general strange information about the very southest place on earth, there is Big Dead Place. Check out “Ask A Fucked-Up Antartican” for some basic Q&A:

Hi Kelly,

If I was going to have an “Antarctic” themed party (which I wouldn’t), I would hope that it was an Italian Antarctic Programme themed party; I hear they eat like kings and drink wine at lunch. But if you are looking for hints on a McMurdo themed party, here’s what I suggest:

First, fill a few chaffing dishes with chicken wings and deep fried mozzarella sticks. Then pour a large bowl of potato chips and set out some dry nachos with the cheapest salsa you can find. Then invite 1000 people whom you live and work with, even the ones you can’t stand, and make sure that about half of them are horny guys and 1/4 of them are un-interested women. Don’t forget to have a lame theme like “Disco Night”, “Redneck Ball”, or “Country Bingo” and encourage everyone to dress up.

Apparently there is science that happens there too, but:

i wonder every day why all this happens.
oh yeah. science.
it;s amazing how much money is being sunk into this. and how little is actually going to the science part of it. 90% is for support, flights, food, etc.last week on my day off i went to the main science building (crary lab) and hung out with an anthropologist who took me around and gave me a private tour of the facility. i saw videos of live eruptions of mt erebus, and antarctic fish that were growing weird things on their heads, and a giant frickin laser beam that is supposedly really bright in the middle of winter.

Humans. Everywhere they go, they’re always so… human.

Well, we’ve had our electoral fun here in Canada, at leat those of us who could stomach siging up for the Liberal party in order to have a say in who would become Prime Minister. And “we’ve” elected ourselves another Brian Mulroney. Well done all round. The US is just starting to get into full swing for their real election. Bit of shock here folks: there appears to be a decent candidate for the Democratic leadership on the stage.

I am not, of course, talking about Howard Schmoward Dean. Woopity-do, he has a blog. I have a blog, and I’m not reccomending anybody elect me President. Zowy, he’s left wing. That’s about all you can say: he’s left wing. In the politics-not-policy sense of Left Wing, in which “left wing” people dutifully say vaguely socialist things until they get themselves elected and then, to quote left-winger Bob Rae “govern from the center”. Dean, if he were elected, which he won’t, would be like Clinton but way worse.

I’m talking about Dennis Kucinich. There are two good things about Dennis Kucinich, either of which would be enough to make him better than every other Presidential hopeful in the US, and both of which together make it a damned damned shame he won’t win.

1) He really appears to mean what he says. My spidey-sense tells me he’s sincere. Wow. And he’s forthright. He doesn’t politician-around. He doesn’t intentionally misinterpret questions. He doesn’t always answer them, but when he doesn’t it’s because he’s too busy telling the respected personage who asked the question how trivial it is compared to actual policy questions. A politician who thinks policy is more important than strategy in the political process. Did the Americans do something really good while I wasn’t looking to deserve such a good option?

2) He says great things. And does them. He is one of the what? 7? senators and congressman who actually shut up and voted against the war. Of course, heaps and heaps of them (including my old pseudo-representative Dianne Feinstien, D California) have made an industry out of talking against the war, but only 7ish reps in all of the combined houses of US government actually put their necks on the block and said “no” when the vote came down. And one of them could, in theory, be the next president. And he’s got a whole bunch of other decent policies.

What can I say? Kucinich for President!

Unfortunatley his ears are to big and he really beleives in non-centrist politics so nobody will vote for him. Nice to see him coming around giving it a go though.

Bad advertising is irritating, like a cheese grater applied lightly but constantly to your exposed flesh is irritating. Good advertising, on the other hand, is maddening. All that creative juice poured down exactly the wrong drain.

Fer instance: here are a couple of great ads. If you happen to have a broadband internet connection, you can watch them. Otherwise you can’t because they aren’t going to be be shown in America (or presumably Canada): 10 Ads America Won’t See, from AdAge. Particularly have a look at “Mr. Kipling’s Virgin Birth”, which is both a blasphemously medical take on a nativity pageant and an add for mince pies, and the “Cog” ad (labeled “won’t work here” on the site) which is a truley outstanding bit of very pleasing computer animation. Advertising a Honda Accord or whatever. What a sensless waste of human ingenuity. Profit is waste people. Come on now.

one of the benefits of multiculturalism is that even on major holidays in small towns there is usually a neighbourhood store open.

Oh yeah, by way of diluting the massive geek-quotient of that last post (why do I feel it’s necessary to do so?) I should mention that my snowshoe trip up to the Elfin lake shelter on Paul ridge went well. At the top the snow was four Es deeeep and beautiful, like sifted icing sugar. Hard going whenever I lost the trail. But some backcountry skiers had broken laid a track the day before and I met a fellow xmas snowshoer at the shelter (which is huge and has gas lanterns by the way - neat) with whom to rotate trail breaking on the way back down so it wasn’t too bad. An amazing landscape, I can’t remember when I’ve seen so much snow, and I’ve seen a lot of snow. And when the clouds cleared, the view down was amazing. The light on the snow and the trees was gorgeous, when there was light, which wasn’t often unfortunately. Good trip.

I was looking for a decent definition of “gaming the system” for my own interest. I was wondering wether people’s acceptance of mail fraud has to do with their sense of ownership of their society’s infrastructure and how that relates to their acceptance of system-gaming by people in positions of minor power. Anyway.

As usual, when looking for decent definition of any reasonably geeky terminology, I turned to the Jargon File. I admit, I have wasted hours trolling through the jargon file (’bucky bits’ leads to ’space cadet keyboard’ leads to ‘cokebottle’ leads to ‘bang’ leads to ‘bangpath’ and on and on). But I couldn’t remember where it was located, so I googled it and discovered something I didn’t know: it’s maintained by none other than Eric S Raymond.

Turns out Mr. Raymond has a website (I know I should have been able to guess that) and it’s located at www.catb.org/~esr. It’s quite a site. In addition to pictures of ESR dressed like James Bond and shooting guns, it also has a lot of really interesting material.

It seems (just for instance) that Mr. Raymond is proposing that the the form of the ‘glider’ from the game of life be adopted by the hacker community as their symbol. Hacker in this case meaning “a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary”, or more generally “one who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations”, as opposed to “a malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around”. Definitions used here are of course from the Jargon File.

I think using the glider is a neat idea. It’s kind of visually dull I suppose… not cool like a penguin. But still. Probably I mostly like it because I knew what the hell “the glider from the game of life” meant when I read it in a google precis. The game of life is an old chaos-programming tool/pastime that emerged in the early 70s and was a big deal with early systems theorists and AI coders. I played it once on a big screen in the Ontario Science Centre when I was too young to grok it, but I finally had the experience explained to me when I came across a longish reference to it in Complexity. So I’m all for the use of the gliders, cause it means I can get one of the old hacker’s in-jokes.

Also on the site is the text of How To Become A Hacker and A Brief History of Hackerdom which are probably seminal reading if you find yourself somehow drawn again and again to the paradoxes and fascinating granularities of geek culture. Like, um, me.

And there is of course, The Cathedral and the Bazaar which may be the closest thing the open source movement has got to a manifesto, and which Bruce Sterling isn’t very impressed by.

So there is quite a lot of good content at that website. Whatever else you can say about him, ESR is an interesting guy with interesting ideas. I think I like him, ego and all. And he has a cool self-imposed job title: observer-participant anthropologist in the Internet hacker culture. I want to be an observer-participant anthropolgist now. Especially since I’m re-reading The Telling, which I got for Christmas.

The jargon file does not, however, have a definition for “gaming the system”. Useless.

Richard Meyers is the chairman of the Joint chiefs of Staff in the US. I heard him on the radio recently, presumably in connection with the recent increase in the US terrorist threat level and he had this to say:

“There is no doubt, from all the intelligence we pick up from al-Qaida, that they want to do away with our way of life. And if they could cause another catastrophic event, a tragedy like 9-11, if they could do that again, if they could get their hands on weapons of mass destruction and make it 10,000, not 3,000, they would do that, and not just in the United States, but in any of the free world or any peoples that treasure their freedom.”

I don’t really doubt that there are terrorists groups that would kill ten thousand Americans, or possibly even citizens of other western countries if they had the means. There is more than enough evidence in the world that extremist groups, certainly including but not limited to Islamic extremists groups, will do terrible deeds of violence when they have the opportunity. Two things bother me about this though.

First, he is focusing on the fair-enough probability that terrorists would kill tens thousand if they could, without anteing up any evidence that they can at the moment. He says they’ve got intelligence that they “want to”, not that they know how. But if you’re listening to the radio, what you are going to hear is that terrorists are threatening tens of thousands of lives. That’s fear-mongering.

Secondly, he’s almost certainly mingling facts with lies in a way that gives credibility to the lies. I’m not quite cynical enough to assume that the recent security alerts are purely made-up or blown entirely out of proportion. They very well might be, I don’t think I’d give the current US administration the full benefit of the doubt on that score, but it’s also possible that they really do have “credible intelligence” indicating imminent attacks. I highly doubt, however, that their intelligence really shows that the terrorists in question are out to attack “any peoples that treasure their freedom”. Attack the US maybe, or attack capitalist societies, or christian societies, or even just western societies generally. And certainly some of those groups include what could realistically be called free societies. But that’s not the same thing. Meyers would like his audience to think that freedom and westernism equate, and he would like his audience to think that terrorists hate “freedom”. But I figure terrorists probably like freedom just fine thank you, even if they have a different notion of it that Meyers or Ashcroft or you or me. I am confident that Al Qa’ida doesn’t order it’s foot soldiers to attack “any peoples that treasure their freedom”, so I am confident that the US didn’t obtain any such intelligence. That must be a lie. If it is, it’s a lie obscured by wrapping it up in a statement about intelligence reports, which is even worse. US officials shouldn’t allow value-laden rhetoric to contaminate security discussions. It seems that is you want to accept national security as a worthwhile goal, you have to buy into a lot of dangerous crap about terrorists being inexplicably evil.

Tangentially, one of the reasons it’s hard to oppose decreases in civil liberties is because of the ancient counter-argument that “you don’t have to be afraid of laws if you aren’t a bad person”. Well, of course you do, but if the media isn’t interested in cataloguing incidences of not-bad people suffering from theoretically-good laws, then any attempt to oppose those laws is forced onto shaky theoretical ground and dark mutterings about the unprovable ill-intent of Bush and Dick and so on. What I’d like to see is an attempt to round up the all of the times that the US and Canadian governments have used their anti-terrorism powers, so that we could see just exactly who is being targeted by those laws. Failing that, I’d like to see an attempt to just round up the news stories that have made it through the journalistic cracks. Here’s one anyway, I know there are others but I can’t point you to them because there isn’t such a database that I’m aware of.

Feds’ fumble costs family: Accusations of terrorism wreak havoc since March - Rocky Mountain News

solstice was great. party was great. post-party parade into the smoke bluffs with tiki torches and homemade lanterns was really great - seeing the rock of the bluffs lit up from below by torch light was very cool, and not something you would otherwise get to see in this modern era of flashlights. They may be ‘electric torches’ to the brits, but it’s not quite the same thing. Seeing the bluffs lit up by bloody great puffs of flame from a fire-breather was really really great, and learning how to breath flames of one’s own was really really really (3) great.

just watched the sun drift down over the foggy shoulder of the hills on the far side of Howe sound. That’s it, the end of the shortest day of the year. Tonight’s the longest night. As far as I’m concerned, tomorrow is that start of a new year. I’m glad. It’s hard when it gets dark so early, thinking that the worst is yet to come. From now on the light is returning.

plenty left to do preparing for our solstice party. must go bake or tidy or make lanterns or something.

happy new year!

my plan to migrate the blog over to the Movable Type system and move it into my own domain is nearing fruition. Bwa hah hah &tc. I’m excited. It hasn’t happened yet obviously.

That was just an update. Here’s a poem.

rain on paint over metal around internal combustion engine

I saw a sky blue Volvo
I don’t mean a new Volvo
I don’t mean the daytime sky
I mean an old night blue box with a sunroof
It was calling out in the rain

I think it was calling to my motorcycle

My motorcycle is beached. It’s battery ripped out for “charging”.
It’s oilpan drained of oil. It’s engine has stop turning.
It’s plate was handed back
My motorcycle is too black
I don’t mean glossy black
I mean hammered beaten uneven charcoal
like the slag along the tracks

I think it calls out to the volvos
that have the honour to be parked downtown
they sing together like the whales on the record
from the National Geo issue with a record instead of a map

My face has got some colour
I don’t mean a tan
I mean it’s misfit red and glowering
It’s coloured because it can

And somewhere there is a moped that is quiet
It doesn’t know it’s got me beat
It doesn’t know that small engines
Can really sing and go to town
It doesn’t know that you don’t need your own driveway
If you’ve got gas and plans

So we’ve got Longhorn coming out from Windows. Apple is releasing Panther to replace Jaguar. Boooring.

The new Linux kernel (2.6) has been released. It’s been codenamed “stoned beaver”. Inspired by a previous kernel release known as “greased weasel”. Okay, that’s not bad.

Here’s a program that’s really got it going with the version release names: Pan (a newsreader for Gnome).

Release 0.10.0.92 of PAN was code named “Andrew Orlowski Can Kiss My Ass”. Andrew Orlowski, by the way, is one of my favourite tech journalists. He lives in SF and writes for the UK based The Register. By the way.

Current beta release of PAN is 0.14.2.90 (”A Bouquet of Corpses”). Current stable version is 0.14.2 (”This is not a psychotic episode. It’s a cleansing moment of clarity.”). For a long and eddifying journey through the past release codenames, you could dig through PAN’s news archives. There you will find, for example, 0.9.7pre2 (”beware of the leopard”) - Hitchhiker’s Guide fans will get that one - and also 0.9.7pre5 (”Neddie Seagoon”). To know what the hell a Neddie Seagoon is, it would help if you knew what this is all about.

Sharman Networks manage the Fastrack Network on which the Kazaa music downloading program operates. Kazaa is the most popular way to download music in the world - the modern Napster replacement. It isn’t the very best system, but it’s the most heavily used which means it’s also the best place to go for hard-to-find files, which means that I use it a lot too.

Sort of. Kazaa is packed with spamware that it loads onto your computer - the hated Gator program, and ads you have to look at and so on. Until recently, there was an altenative that myself and all true hardcore geeks used, called Kazaa Lite. Kazaa lite was a hacked version of Kazaa which got rid of all the badness, but gave users access to the same network of music sharing (i.e. Fasttrack Network. Confused yet?). In the last few weeks however, Sharman networks has been making a lot of noise about turning music downloading into a legitimate service “in co-operation” with the music industry. Presumably as part of this campaign, they went out and got all the downloading sites for Kazaa Lite shut down. I’m not sure how one would go about doing that, but they did. Hardcore downloading geeks worldwide wept and trembled. Kazaa Lite was dead. We’d all have to find some other service to use, because inviting all that spamware onto our systems was, as the British used to say before cracking down on a colony, not to be borne.

Kazaa Lite is reborn. It isn’t imeadiatley easy to get a hold of (and it doesn’t work on Win98 anymore) but a brand new version has been released. The trouble is that Sharman networks may still be actively looking to kill it. The following posts make an interesting record of the struggle of the Yankee Geeks (sharman) vs. the Reb Geeks (kazaa lite and freinds):

link to the posts

(note that there are various links to the new version(s) of K-lite in the posts)

The National Post has a half-way decent article on file-sharing today.

The music industry conundrum, Copyright Board, CRIA at odds over downloading

While they blow the background material for the most part - they fail to make much of a distinction between the music “industry” and musicians and technicians, and they implicitly link music industry sales losses with downloading - it is otherwise a lucid fact-based relation of the legality of music downloading in Canada. If you’re asking yourself the question “is legally safe to d/l music in Canada now”, which lots of people seem to be asking, it’s worth reading.

Excerpts:

After watching annual sales tumble 23%, or $450-million since 1999, the music industry has finally lost its patience. The industry has spent $1-million on an educational program with little impact, so it has little choice but to follow the Recording Industry Association of America’s lead and pursue legal action.

Er, I guess improving on the spectacularly poor fair the music industry has been churning out by the truckload over the last decade isn’t considered an option then. And I suppose it’s irrelevant that most of the (admittedly weak) studies that have been done conclude that d/li’ng music and reduced music purchases aren’t linked.

Given its current mandate, the CPCC has difficult choices to make. If it raises levies to a high enough level that artists, authors, publishers and record companies and are fairly compensated for lost sales, many consumers will make blank media purchases outside Canada and a “grey” market will likely emerge to avoid the levies. This would be terrible news for retailers and blank media makers. If the levies are too low, not enough revenue will be generated to pay musicians.

That’s a good point. like most pro-downloaders, I’m a tentative advocate of compulsory licensing fees as a way to directly recompense artists without getting stuck carrying the parasticial/obsolete music industry around on our collective backs. And the long-standing but quiet Canadian system of taxing blank media is used as a test case by people around the world thinking about compulsory fees as an option. But I hadn’t thought of it that way.

For PC users aware of the Copyright Board’s decision, the gates are apparently wide open to download to your heart’s content. For the music industry, the fight is just starting to get serious.

There you have it folks. If the National Post said it, it must be true.

Speaking of Naomi Klein, she might appreciate this slant on “diversity of tactics”:

Eric S Raymond, the founder and godfatha of open source software (or Free Software as he angrily puts it) is angry at SCO. Not just in the general way he is angry at everything, but in a very directed, particular way. Which is not suprising, given that SCO has mounted a massive, unashamed and explicit attack on open source software. Any level of anger higher than his normal level of anger is pretty high, and he is, indeed, highly angry. Way back in late August - sorry for the reporting delay folks - he wrote about his anger in a rather angry way in an angry letter to SCO. You can read the letter which is appended to this article entitled Eric Raymond gets very mad at SCO.

In it he makes this interesting and probably good point:

Yes, one of the parties I talk with is, in fact, IBM. And you know what? They’re smarter than you. One of the many things they understand that you do not is that in the kind of confrontation SCO and IBM are having, independent but willing allies are far better value than lackeys and sock puppets. Allies, you see, have initiative and flexibility. The time it takes a lackey to check with HQ for orders is time an ally can spend thinking up ways to make your life complicated that HQ would be too nervous to use. Go on, try to imagine an IBM lawyer approving this letter.

As an aside, I recently came across this article by Mr. Raymond, pontificating on what he was going to do with the 36 million dollars he made overnight when VA Linux went public on the stock market. Notice the date of the article (Dec 10, 1999). Notice his mention that due to SEC custom, he would have to wait 6 months before actually getting access to the cash value of his shares, but that he wasn’t terribly concerned, you know, “unless VA or the U.S. economy craters before then. I’ll bet on VA; I’m not so sure about the U.S. economy :-)”. The Dot Com Bubble Burst on March 13th, 2000. Ahem. To his credit his recently published book, The Art of Unix Programming, is also freely available, suggesting he never got too attached to all that virtual wealth he must have watched dissapear on that fateful day in March. Good man.

file this one under time waster because you’ve been fighting CSS HTML and CMS macro code for three straight days and you’re siiiick of it

The english language doesn’t have masculine and feminine words like Spanish or English (except for boats and nations I suppose) but alledgedly some words are more likely to be written by men or women. For instance, these words are feminine:

[with]
[if]
[not]
[where]
[be]
[when]
[your]
[her]
[we]
[should]
[she]
[and]
[me]
[myself]
[hers]
[was]

and these are masculine:

[around]
[what]
[more]
[as]
[who]
[below]
[is]
[these]
[a]
[at]
[it]
[said]
[above]
[are]
[the]
[many]

Sceptical? Try it out: the Gender Genie. Enter 500 words of text, and this funky little algorithm developed by some academic types will tell you if the author was male or female. I can’t decide if it’s accurate or not.

Although it was often right, it blew it on a couple of Naomi Klein articles. Is there something Ms. Klein isn’t telling us? On the other hand, it tagged Meg Hourihan talking about baseball. But then juuust lost her when I added in her thoughts on XHTML scripting. Okay, I was pushing the system. On the other hand, it caught Raymi the Minx writing about percodan with no problem, even though I had trouble deciding wether to submit it as fiction or nonfiction.

Here’s an interesting challenge: finding enough 500 word passages, written by females, on the internet, to test the system.

File this under diary entry.

that was one heck of a weekend. just the fact that I’m saying that on Wednesday points to it being a heck of a weekend.

Saturday was one of those saturdays. one of those saturdays when you wake up old enough to be proud of yourself for waking up with a hangover on a saturday morning. One of those saturdays when you wake up with a proud hangover but don’t have the opportunity to savour it, because you have to get up and dressed and walk into town in the dark little rainy winter saturday morning in search of a cup of bakery coffee and an early meeting at work. you know, one of those saturdays.

But then it was even more kinds of Saturday. The meeting wasn’t too bad and afterwards I was chatting with my sysadmin and he asked what I thought of Squamish and I said that it was great but I was having trouble getting into a local scene. He asked what sort of scene I had in mind and I stumbled through a few bad ideas for getting into a local scene - it always takes me 2 years to get settled in to anywhere, so I haven’t even bothered to come up with some good plans for finding a place in Squamish. One of the half-formed ideas I mentioned was my hope of finding some local theatre, which I hadn’t. “Theatre?” he asked, or words to that effect, “What are you doing this afternoon?”

What I was doing that afternoon, to start with, was climbing into the back of a ‘82 brown american sedan with a ‘78 engine and driving north to Brackendale with my sysadmin and a couple of his friends who were on their way to a dress rehearsal for a dinner theatre adaptation of Merry Wives of Windsor. I was under the vague impression that I was going to hang out and be the dress audience. Then he said I could dress up and play a servant if I was in to it. I figured he meant a costumed usher or waiter or something. He didn’t, of course, he was asking if I wanted a bit part. Guess who spent their weekend doing Shakespeare? Guess who got up on a real stage in a real costume with a real script in front of a real audience for the first time since, um… Waterloo?

It’s better than just that. The Brackendale Art Gallery is an extraordinary space for dinner theatre, particularly renaissance-era dinner theatre, full of heavy log beams and odd carvings and wall painting and fire places and hanging pennants in faded colours, and strange staircases and upper balconies around the wrong side of the stage. And the cast were blessed with a brilliant costume designer and a hard working musical director. Everyone - actors, “crew”, servers, front-of-stage entertainers, assorted children - were in fabulous custom period dress. The gallery building is run as an grudging collective, the theatre troupe has no director. Everything was adhoc and unlikely. A wonderful sense of immersion developed. The usual massive surreality of a backstage was heightened. Restoration era women in overtightened bodices and complicated hairdos and powder blue down jackets. A perfectly shakespearean bearded figure in expansive pantaloons and authentic looking tights leans out of the shadow of a black velvet curtain, his eyes twinkle for a sec, he picks up an open bottle of Miller Genuine Draft and disappears. Wedged in the doorway of the hectic wood-beamed kitchen, between acts, I eat an entire left over baby chicken carcass while pretty wenches - there is no other word - rush back and forth with trays and banter with shaved-head hoody-wearing bus boys.

Out back of the gallery there is the most beautiful little chapel I think I have ever seen in North America. It’s not big, maybe a dozen pews. Friendly modern colours, fluorescent lights cut to look like clouds, and a mural of Howe Sound at sunset above the stained glass above the altar. It should seem campy but somehow it’s just right. In the back there is a little loft with a bed, and on the wall a framed photocopied cheque for three months rent. Someone lived there? There’s a minora, a wedding registry and lieing on the ledge of the pulpit, in a heavy leather dust cover with an ancient, heavy leather bookmark, a 60’s era edition of “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran.

That night is opening night party. The next day it’s raining by the time I get up, and by the time I get dressed it’s already getting dark and I have to hitch out to Brackendale in the rain on the highway to get to the theatre. That doesn’t go so well, but I get there. Already it’s surreal there. I get to get in front of an audience again. They want me to work up some lines for this performance but I’m pretty happy doing my walk-ons and working the curtain (my hardest task) with my “assistant” Marpho, the recovering TO punker who now lives in an ad-hoc house on the outskirts of Squamish and makes bejewelled hammers and such - knick-knacks he says - for a living.

That night is closing night party. First we have to clear the set, pack it all up and sweep the floors, but it’s not too bad when the fiddlers got a lively medieval riff to work on and the audience is hanging around and seems to be helping out. Once we start, we start in the gallery. At some point the scandihoovian greybeard gallery owner turns us out. Back into the ‘82 American, which I now recall was pulled over and ticketed for three different violations the night before, all of which were waved “because it’s so close to christmas”. Eventually we make it to a cast members house. We listen to all that music that you can only listen to when buzzed and in a mood without feeling a little silly: Led Zeppelin, the B52s, the Pixie’s louder material. Rock rock rock. We didn’t feel silly that night. It’s quite a group here in Squamish. Ex-80’s soldiers and the types of odd characters who would have gotten swallowed up in some larger scene in a City, but are an empire unto themselves here.

It turns out mondays are the traditional nights for the empire to get together and I’ve been invited. This time I borrow a bike for the rainy transit. This time it’s really raining. It really is a small logging town on the west coast, smack in the pocket of the mountains, right on the fingernail tip of a big finger of the ocean. The clouds are low and dumping, the streetlights are random and pink. At the music director’s/costume designer’s house there are an awful lot of instruments and a thorough jam session.

I had planned to get a lot of work done over the weekend. I’m getting caught up. Heck of a weekend really, if I didn’t mention.

I had forgotten about this. I stumbled across it again, and it’s just as incredible to me now as it was the last time I saw it.

Imagine for a moment, that you belong to a culture of humans generates it’s power in such a way that as a side product a terriby lethal, nearly indestructible substance is created which will remain mortally dangerous for 10,000 odd years. What do you do with the substance? It needs to be stored somewhere where it will not kill or harm you. Moreover, if your culture is an ethical one, you need somehow to mark the storage sight in such a way that will not only discourage people from your own culture from compromising it (that’s the easy part), it has to be able to deter people from cultures 10 000 years in the future. Without knowing a thing about those future cultures, their language or values, you are faced with a difficult question: how do you adequatley warn them?

To the credit (?) of the US government, they decided to take a crack at it. Specifically, Sandia National Labratories put together a working group of anthropologists and materials scientists and such who wrote an Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (document SAND92-1382 / UC-721). Excerpts from it are located here.

Appropriately, they took into consideration lessons learned from successes and failures of the pyramids and other Egyptian immortality-buildings. Of course, the pyramids have only survived half as long or less than the specs for the nuclear waste markers require.

Many of the considerations here are of course similar to those facing the builders of the 10 000 year clock. It’s remarkable that two different groups should be working on such an unlikely project at the same time. It’s remarkable in a lot of ways, and equally weird. And eerie. And scary.

The design of the whole site itself is to be a major source of meaning, acting as a framework for other levels of communication, reinforcing and being reinforced by those other levels in a system of communication. The message that we believe can be communication non-linguistically (through the design of the whole site), using physical form as a “natural language,” encompasses Level I and portions (faces showing horror and sickness) of Level II. Put into words, it would communicate something like the following:

• This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
• Sending this message was impotant to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
• This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
• What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
• The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
• The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
• The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
• The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
• The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

In case you wondered, I came across this report again when I found a t-shirt with part of the “message” on it.

I remember last year when the Creative Commons project was first announced. I remember because I was excited about it. A tangible tool to help in the fight against intellectual-property rot. Wot a grand idea! All of a sudden, if you wanted to publish some work of yours, some book or song or what have you, and you didn’t want to limit it with the heavy-handed (c), but you didn’t want to relinquish absolutley all control to the public domain, you had some real options with some legal infrastructure behind them. Brilliant.

It’s been a year, and a couple of days ago they had an anniversary party in SF (wish I could have been there) and they’ve also just released a flashy new state-of-the-project animation movie. Holy Smokes. Looks like things are going pretty well. They report over a million works licensed with the various flavours of (cc). In the first year. Already people are not only releasing plenty of content under (cc), but other people are taking advantage to remix and renew and rerelease just as intended.

They also hinted that they’re getting ready to take on intellectual property in science. Oh boy. There’s more than a few scientists that are ready to accept their help. Why are we still paying enormous fees to journal publishers so we can read the work of our colleaugues who would much prefer it to be freely available? Why is electronic distribution of academic journals not vastly cheaper than the paper-and-ink variety? Why do scientists not have publishing rights for their own discoverys? WTF? Hello (cc), let’s hear any ideas you have.

I also noticed that Movable Type, whose blogging system I’m in the process of migrating this weblog to, is building (cc) options straight into the system. Cool.

Check out the neato animation. It’s big (7mb) but it’s sooper flashy and feel good (in a good way). The connected-community, emergent-behaviour, information-wants-to-be-free, loving-anarchy movement has yet another idea in ascendancy. The revolution can’t be long now.

after months of hot airline boycotting action (suprisingly easy to do when you don’t need to fly anywhere), the airlines are starting to feel the heat.

Profiling System Takeoff Delayed

The industry group, whose members include almost every major domestic airline, including two carriers that already revoked commitments to help with CAPPS, said it was concerned that the beleaguered airline industry would suffer if passengers who worry about their privacy stopped flying.

yeah, that’s right suckas.

it’s okay, I got out in time.

or did I?

An older Indo-Canadian fellow came into the office yesterday while I was on the desk. Squamish has a large Indo-Canadian population, in fact the freenet is next to “High-Class Fabrics”, where they sell sari material and Bollywood flicks. (incidentally, our neighbours on the other side are a cheque-cashing establishment, a pawn shop and an “escort service” - yes, this is Squamish.) The older gentleman was looking for Employment Insurance forms. I gather we used to keep a stock of them to be helpful, but Human Resources Canada has since decided to save trees by having it all done online or on the phone. Environmentally thoughtful people at HRC. I explained to him that we didn’t have the forms anymore, but we could help him do it online, and explained our costs and hours. About half way through the conversation I realized that the reason we were having some difficulty communicating was because he didn’t speak any english. I was suprised for a second, then unsure how to proceed, then remembered that I have had plenty of these functional conversations in languages I didn’t speak and we successfully concluded.

Occasionally, looking back on my time in south east asia, I wonder how the hell we managed to function in places like Laos where we couldn’t begin to speak the language and couldn’t read the script. I have no memories of it being an overwhelming challenge, just a challenge. Sometimes I forget how that could be possible.

It is possible of course. Mostly you just speak whatever language you know and point as much as is polite and throw in any words you’ve picked up in the local language. People talk back to you in whatever language they know and do the same. And most of the time, as long as you don’t get too worried about the impossibility of it, the substantial thrust of what you’re trying to communicate gets through.

I had a dream last night that I was a prisoner in a minimum security prison. One of my fellow inmates looked suspicously like Steve McQueen. One morning I saw Steve McQueen walking towards the far end of the excercise yard. He didn’t come back. I followed a while later and found a hole in the fence. Several of us went through, but by that time we could already hear the dogs howling behind us. I had just enough time get to a patio and have a beer and a chat before I was tracked down. I lost a hand in the confrontation, but was brought back in. Only Steve got away.

I am sure there is no connection between my dream and this well thought out and reasonably balanced article by Steven Levy of Newsweek:A Net of Control. This is the first time I’ve seen a non-geeky journalist reporting on the coming of Microsoft/Intel’s “trusted computing” regime. It’s also the best explanation of it I’ve seen. I’m more concerned than ever, although he does point out some of the real advantages that would come alongside the drawbacks.

How could the freedom genie be shoved back into the bottle? Basically, it?s part of a huge effort to transform the Net from an arena where anyone can anonymously participate to a sign-in affair where tamperproof ?digital certificates? identify who you are. The advantages of such a system are clear: it would eliminate identity theft and enable small, secure electronic ?microtransactions,? long a dream of Internet commerce pioneers. (Another bonus: arrivederci, unwelcome spam.) A concurrent step would be the adoption of ?trusted computing,? a system by which not only people but computer programs would be stamped with identifying marks. Those would link with certificates that determine whether programs are uncorrupted and cleared to run on your computer.

The best-known implementation of this scheme is the work in progress at Microsoft known as Next Generation Secure Computing Base (formerly called Palladium). It will be part of Longhorn, the next big Windows version, out in 2006. Intel and AMD are onboard to create special secure chips that would make all computers sold after that point secure. No more viruses! And the addition of ?digital rights management? to movies, music and even documents created by individuals (such protections are already built into the recently released version of Microsoft Office) would use the secure system to make sure that no one can access or, potentially, even post anything without permission.

Where’s Steve McQueen when you need him?

but nobody does anything about it right?

for what it’s worth, I will drop this letter into the mailbox on the way home

Dear Patagonia,

When will I be able to read in Patagonia’s catalogue about the company’s labour standards?

I am impressed by Patagonia’s comittment to environmental sustainability. However, I don’t know if I can count on the company to give the same consideration to the equally important task of ensuring livable conditions for the employees of it’s contractors. Does Patagonia have a policy about the work and pay conditions of the people who make Patagonia gear? Where I can I read about it?

Something as simple as a mention in the catalogue of where each garment was manufactured would help me to make mindful choices.

Patagonia’s leadership in the environmental field has been a great success (and helped me to find the money to buy Patagonia products). I would love to see Patagonia become as much a leader in the fight against the downward spiral of worldwide working conditions as it is environmentally.

Sincerely,

Hugh Stimson

ok, I admit it. every so often, when I can afford it, I buy something from patagonia. I currently own (let’s see…) 4 patagonia things, and would like to own 1 or 2 more. I figure that it’s better to buy a good thing once and wear it out over 4 years than 3 bad things in the same time. You pay less and get more that way. If you can actually afford it the first time.

That said, I recognize I’m paying a premium for the name. If I could buy the same product without the label for less money I would jump all over it, but I can’t. And I recognize that Patagonia is an upper-class trendy label. And it bugs me and I wish they wouldn’t make it so difficult to cut their labels off because of it. I realize patagonia-owner bashing is being introduced as an exhibition sport at the next winter olympics. I know all this. I expect to catch flack from my freinds for wearing Patagonia (except the lucky few that get pro-deal prices and can’t hassle me because they own some too).

What I didn’t expect was to come across Patagonia-bashing in a Slashdot thread.

Padaguchi you meant to say Padaguchi.

Ahhhh Yvon Chouinard, how I respected you for you clean climbing approach and great technical gear at Black Diamond. Ahhh Patagonia how I laugh at you latte sipping bitchs in Yukons with $600 coated fabric jackets.

for background, Yvon Chouinard was the mountain climber and blacksmith that founded patagonia.

for further background, I think he really meant to say Fratagonia.

While looking for some background on the BBC’s release of their archives to file-sharing, I came across another interesting iniative they are planning. In the works is a box which would sit on top of the TV sets of all Britons and turn their television into a device for navigating and accessing all of the BBC’s content all of the time. Including last Monday’s Eastenders episode which you missed because you had to go the laundry, and the entire 1983 season of Dr. Who. And, possibly, all of the Goon Show radio episodes.

Geek folk everywhere were already impressed that such a creaking old public institution as the BBC would be the first big entity to wake up to the distribution possibilities of the peer-to-peer filesharing. This new iniative is potentially an even bigger step forward. Together, these plans go a long way in demonstrating the power of publicly-owned entertainment. You probably couldn’t get away with such a plan if you were trying to give people access to privately-copyrighted material. The job of getting permission from all of the dead and forgotten owners would be enormous, and there would be endless licensing fee issues and who knows what. Maybe it could be done, but the work involved would probably overwhelm any institution, including the big networks, who tried to take it on. But the BBC can just - poof - release any material they can get out the door because it’s all public domain.

When you dump the silly profit motive it gives you a lot of flexibility.

Of course, there are problems brewing with the project. I sure hope it succeeds so I can lord it over the small-government marketplace capitalists till I’m giddy.