Thoughts and musings
Oh happy day. Creative Commons Canada is being officially launched in Ottawa today. This means that there are now versions of the Creative Commons licenses available that are tailored to Canadian copyright law.
If you don’t know what the Creative Commons is, you need to spend some time watching the MPEG and Flash movies on the primary Creative Commons site.
Despite what the “always bad news first” nightly news programs may make you think murder rates were at a 30 year low in 2003.
It’s too bad that the CBC decided it was necessary to feature the bad news predominately. CTV also managed to put in their own little bit of fear mongering on the eleven o’clock news.
Michael Geist has written another great piece encouraging balanced copyright reform.
I still find it surprising that the Liberal led Heritage committee is so biased towards the content creators. Content creation groups have apparently out numbered content user groups at these hearings by a wide margin. How can this be right? Surely, there are more people using copyrighted material than there are creators. It’s odd how governments can forget who they actually represent.
I think the biggest obstacle to reasonable discussions on intellectual property issues is that it is very easy to quantify what more restrictive laws will do for the content creators; it’s all money. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to quantify the loss that is incurred throughout our culture by these same laws. What is the cost of works not entering the public domain? What interesting new industries could be formed by freed content? What is the cost when a school teacher cannot adequately teach her students? These are all next to impossible to quantify.
People like simple things. I believe our governmental representatives are no exception. Perhaps they are just leaning towards what they actually can get a mental grip on.
Valdis Krebs has found a really interesting use of some Amazon book data. Amazon suggests books based on “People who bought this book also bought X”. Valdis uses this information to graph the left and right of the American political spectrum. You can find the graph and some background here.
How can there ever be a productive political debate when the two sides don’t take the time to understand the other sides arguments?
This graph was built with social network mapping software called InFlow. It’s interesting to see computers being used to study the relationships between people.
In Copyright vs. The Laws of Physics the author discusses copying in the digital world. In reality, every action on digital information involves copying. This is the fundamental reason why copy protection on computers is so hard. Lawrence Lessig touches on this in Free Culture too.
Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet.
— Bruce Schneier
I stumbled on a great RFC today. It’s worth the short read.
George Farris alerted me to a change in the way CBC does radio streaming on the Internet. Previously, CBC supported QuickTime, Real Player and Windows Media player. As of August 30, 2004 they only support Windows Media player. CBC has an announcement about this change which they ironically call “Live CBC Radio streaming improvements”. You can find the link to it on this page.
From the perspective of a desktop Linux user this decision is bad. There is no easy way to listen to Windows Media streams from Linux. Real Player was not open source but at least it worked in Linux. Since the CBC audio streams were the only reason I had Real Player installed I guess I can remove it now. I always felt bad having it installed anyway.
From a free software perspective this decision doesn’t really change much. Both Real and Windows Media are proprietary formats. I wish there was some way to make the general computing audience understand that free does not equal standard. A standard way to stream audio or video over the Internet would allow anyone to do their own implementation. The free downloads offered by Microsoft and Real in the form of Windows Media player and Real Player are just a way to lock the user into their technology. Standards that allow others to innovate drive the world forward not proprietary lock-in.
There is hope for standards based Internet media. Xiph.Org is building a set of truly free audio and video codecs. Also, Fluendo is building a free software streaming media server that will use the free codecs from Xiph.Org.
I little while ago I asked a friend to proof read my LQL project page. We ended up in a discussion about the proper spelling of Queueing. Bob blogged about this conversation over here so I won’t bother repeating the outcome. However, I would like to add this one link that provides additional information.
I can’t believe I didn’t realize this before. If you have Bell Canada’s call answer service you can speak to the person who is leaving a message by pressing the flash or link button on your phone. This makes using the voice mail more effective for screening calls as well as allowing you to still speak to the caller even if you couldn’t get to the phone quite fast enough.
Today, I decided it was time to test my UPSs out to make sure they were still functioning properly. Like any well designed product UPSs just work. They fade into the background which makes it easy to forget that they may need maintenance too.
Computers can be very sensitive to power conditions. The hardware expects the power to be within a certain tolerance. Peaks or dips in the power can cause unexpected behavior. I don’t know how often bad power conditions result in crashes but it can’t help the stability of your computer. There may also be problems with cutting the power to hard drives. During a clean shutdown a hard drive will spin down and park the head. This cannot happen if the power is suddenly cut off. A good UPS not only provides power during a brownout or blackout it will also do some amount of filtering to ensure a clean power source. On the software side of things modern operating systems use RAM to cache file system operations. This means that the file you just told you word processor to save may not actually be written to the disk immediately. If the power were to drop at just the right moment the file system can be left in a inconsistent state resulting in lost data. For these reasons I view having a UPS on a computer as an absolute requirement.
The description of the file system caching above suggests a problem with testing the run time of an UPS. If a complete power drop can result in a corrupted file system then running the UPS to the point when it shuts down has the potential to be a bad thing. The solution to this problem on a Linux system is to mount the file system as read-only before running the test. If the file system is read only the OS cannot be caching any writes (because they are not allowed) so power loss should be OK (there may still be hardware problems). This can be accomplished by switching to a console (CTRL-ALT-F1 if you are in X) and then running the following commands:
init 1 df (to see the mounted file systems) umount -r FILESYSTEM (for each file system).
It should now be safe to run test your UPSs until they cut the power. I do not know how to accomplish something similar to this on a Windows system but I expect there is a way. If anyone does know how please comment below.
It turns out my suspicions were warranted as my UPSs clearly need battery replacements. The APC Office 280 that powers my gateway computer, DSL modem and Ethernet hub lasted only a couple of seconds after the power plug was pulled. I have my primary monitor (19″) attached to an APC Back-UPS 300 which lasted only 4 minutes 22 seconds. The only good news is that the APC Back-UPS Pro 280 that powers my work station (not the monitor) lasted 12 minutes 24 seconds. Not stellar but at least it would stay online during a short blackout.
Now, the question becomes what should I replace, the batteries or the whole UPSs? It looks like batteries are going to cost about $45 for each unit. I can get a new Back-UPS CS 350 for about $100. I would hope that the power noise filtering in a more modern UPS would be better but I’m not sure that is worth double the cost. It looks like battery replacement is the way to go.
There are a couple of lessons in this adventure. First, if your UPS is more than a couple of years old take the time to test it. It’s quite likely it is not functioning as well as you think it is. Second, battery technology still sucks.
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