There are three rather spectacular waterfalls within a few minutes of home. Here's the 'little' one...

 

Apologies for the lack of clarity. It's a cell phone picture.

 

The lawyers are winning. Found this over on Night Passage (one of my favorite jazz websites):

 

IMSLP.ORG, the Internet Music Score Library Project has closed down, the founder of the site sadly announces:

On Saturday October 13, 2007, I received a second Cease and Desist letter from Universal Edition. At first I thought this letter would be similar in content to the first Cease and Desist letter I received in August. However, after lengthy discussions with very knowledgeable lawyers and supporters, I became painfully aware of the fact that I, a normal college student, has neither the energy nor the money necessary to deal with this issue in any other way than to agree with the cease and desist, and take down the entire site. I cannot apologize enough to all IMSLP contributors, who have done so much for IMSLP in the last two years.

There were more than 10.000 music scores in the public domain on the site
I must add I am not surprised at all, as I wrote in my previous post I re-started playing piano, and I was so happy to find on IMSLP the whole Mikrokosmos by Bartok, a serie of studies divided in 6 volumes, very popular among piano students. It was an old Sovietic edition with titles in cyrliic, but all the studies were there. The problem is: Bartok died in 1945, 62 years ago, therefore Mikrokosmos does not comply with the rule life+70 years and it's not in the public domain. But this is not the only case. I really hope they open again, but being more careful about published scores.

Amanda arrived at the stables yesterday to come face-to-face with a parent's worst nightmare. A four-year old boy had gotten wedged under the wheels of a moving horse float.

Amanda drove the boy and his mum to the nearest hospital (Bowral, 15km away) as fast as humanly possible, but  the damage had already been done.

He didn't make it.

Things can change in the blink of an eye.

The Australian election came and went in about six weeks. Rudd took office the next day. It's over. In America, they're still duking it out over an election a year away.

The latest squabble is between Clinton and Obama -  who's health care plan is better? Pardon me, I'm now just a curious outsider - but as it turns out I can still vote. 

Hillary, you need Barack. Whether you like it or not, he's your vice president. Deal with it - or get out of the race. You can't win without him.

In any event, you'll never get to battle Republicans if you're stuck in the mud fighting your own party.  If you want to differentiate yourself from other candidates, the best way is to go for the jugular of the other party - not your own. 

Screw health care. Didn't you learn that when your hubby was the president? Nobody wants your health care initiative. They didn't want it then, they don't want it now. You aren't strong enough (today) to fight the health care lobby. It's the economy, stupid. It's the war, stupid. Health care? It's just stupid, stupid. Pardon me Hillary - because this is sexist, but you just don't have the balls to socialize the American medical system. It's a nasty fight that will probably destroy whatever president tries to pull it off. Save it for another day, like a second term - if you get that far. That's a good time to go down swinging. The way things are going, you'll never get the first term.

Nothing spectacular today. Well, ok - there was that head-on collision at the top of MacQuarie Pass this morning. Guess that counts for something. Glad it wasn't me.

Dug into the mysteries of 'udev', or why your Linux box can't seem to use 'eth0' ever again with another hardware address, insisting on eth1, eth2, etc... Well in fact it can re-use eth0, but you've got to find the file (/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules) where they store the MAC addresses of every adapter that ever gets plugged in and fix it. It's not exactly something that comes up on a web search for re-configuring net adapters under Linux. You kinda' haveta' figure out that 'udev' is the culprit and track it down from there.

Worked a bit more on this website. Lots of under the covers changes that will make a lot of people happy. But I'll let them figure it out.

Now I'm settling down to a homebrew. It's done. It's not the best I've ever cooked up, but considering what I've got to work with - it's absolutely the best beer (the first decent one) I've had in this country. It'll do (quite nicely). I've got 5 cases to go through before I have to make some more - and I can only drink a couple bottles at a time before the walls start spinning. So this should last a month or two.

It cost me about $15-20 a case all told. Over time I should be able to make it better and drop the cost to about $5/case. If you consider that anything better than toilet-water beer costs $50-$60 a case - and lasts about a week, it's a pretty fair savings overall. Should be able to trim my monthly beer budget at least in half, and not have to drink the disgusting swill that sells as 'premium' beer here.

Looks like we've got a new prime minister. That would be Kevin Rudd - although I learned from the last couple of elections in the states not to call a winner until the court has spoken. Last night the Liberal Party spokespersons were taking care not to admit defeat or make concession speeches - holding out for every last vote to be counted.

Labor unions are still big here, and the Labor Party is big with the unions. So even though Mr. Rudd won the election on platforms such as global warming which appeal to all voters, deep down, you can hear the Labor Party leaders talking about how they've now got a 'mandate' to rewrite all the workplace agreement laws. This is no different than the states, where a republican victory is usually declared a mandate to change abortion or school prayer laws.

When I took my current job, I was offered a choice - either an individual contract or a collective contract. Taking the collective contract pretty much makes you a union member. I chose the individual contract. This choice is at the heart of the workplace agreement reform Labor's talking about. They really don't like the fact that individual contracts are offered as a choice and want to make joining the union more opt-out than opt-in. 

---

There was a big sign out front of the hardware store yesterday. Chook manure. Translated: chicken shit.

Over in Pakistan, things have gone in a somewhat predictable fashion. Since Musharraf stacked the Supreme Court with friendly faces, they've responded in kind and dropped all the challenges to his continued rule.

So it seems there is nothing standing in the way of him holding an election with himself as the only voter and declaring victory for himself. It's a done deal.

Back in Washington DC, you aren't likely to see any action against Musharraf, despite the peace treaty with the Taliban that he negotiated earlier this year. He's still acknowledged as an ally in the war against islam  on terror.

But the real reason that Washington is keeping quiet is purely self-serving. Pakistan has nukes - at least one or two. As long as they control the person in charge of the nukes, said nukes will stay out of the hands of islamic extremists. But as soon as you go about changing regimes and opening up the potential for political and social reforms, you open up the possibility of turmoil. If you've got turmoil, you don't know exactly what will happen to the nukes.

If we were able to step in and grab the bombs and spirit them away from Pakistan, you'd see Musharraf vanish from the world stage in a New York minute. There would be no further reason to keep him around.

Thanksgiving came and went here yesterday without much fanfare. Just another work day. We had a ham dinner at the pub - which is the only place in town that serves food after 8PM. We'll probably have something a bit more traditional tonight (Friday) to go along with the U.S. holiday. 

But all eyes here are on the Australian election tomorrow. Kevin Rudd seems to have a strong lead. He's Labor Party or what those in the states would call a 'democrat'. The Liberal Party here is John Howard and would be what would be called a 'republican' in America. 

Howard has made some pretty bold moves in the last month, but 80% of it is pure financial bribery to get re-elected. Most people are genuinely tired of him. If he comes out on top, it's going to be expensive to make good on all the financial promises he  has made. His main argument for staying in power sounds reminiscent of Bush in 2004. Stay the course - you are a fool if you want to change horses in the middle of a stream.

Well, yes - valid point. But I personally think it's OK to jump off a horse in the middle of a stream if in fact you had no intention of being in the stream in the first place, and the durn fool horse just decided (against all better judgement) to go swimming in flood currents. 

 

 

I woke up this morning with the solution to the Unified Field Theory. I'm quite serious. It was absurdly simple, not any more complicated than the infamous E=MC². I thought about it during the drive in to work and it was going to be my first post of the day. Like hey guys (and gals) - here is the answer to one of the most challenging problems of the last century. I mean matter (that which has mass) and energy are intimately intertwined - to the point that they are just different perspectives of each other. To say that there are four kinds of energy which aren't at all related is absurd, because that means there would have to be four kinds of mass which likewise are totally unrelated. 

Then I arrived at work and found the main staff file+mail server was in a catatonic state. Spent the rest of the day rebuilding the operating system and restoring files from backup. By mid afternoon, my brain was total mush from manually editing hundreds of obscure configuration files which had to be syntactically perfect for everything to work correctly. The whole chain of matter and energy calculations completely dissolved.

Sigh, looks like I won't be getting the Nobel Prize today.

My neighbor asked me - are the flies this bad in the states? Nope, not at all. The closest thing I can think of is the bees swarming your summer barbecue in the California foothills. But that's nothing compared to these bugs. A fly will seek you out, and then chase you down the street, swarming your face the entire way. There's nothing you can do about it. You can't shake 'em or wave 'em away.  No repellent will deter them. They keep coming back for more. They make it a point of buzzing your face, an inch and a half in front of your eyes where it bugs you the most. They'll keep at it for an hour or more - or until they've found somebody else to bother. They'll land on your nose and do a walkabout. Sneak up from behind and crawl around inside your ear when you least expect it. Don't even think of opening your mouth - it's like handing out invitations to a party with naked girls and free beer...

Nope, I've never experienced anything quite like these tenacious little buggers before.  

I'm not exactly thinking about Thanksgiving. It isn't celebrated here. Even less than Halloween. A non-event. But everybody has been pushing Christmas here since about six weeks ago. However, it's hard to think about Christmas in the middle of summer. It just doesn't seem natural to be looking at Christmas decorations and beach towels at the same time. The university is preparing for graduation next week, about the time y'all are gonna' be carving turkeys. Today we went to the Frensham Iris Festival. Frensham is a private girl's school and this is their spring/summer event. Hotter than blazes. 

 

 

I think Kenneth Donnell (Glasgow, Scotland) takes the cake for being scalped for concert tickets.

He paid almost $200,000 for the privilege of seeing Led Zeppelin re-unite for an evening in London. Yup, the return of the satanic coke-heads that can't remember what song they're playing from one bar to the next.

 

 

Dude, they're old. Brains long since fried. Have any of them made any memorable music in the last 30 years? There you go. Do you remember the Cream re-union? It was freaking horrible - and Clapton still plays guitar for a living.  A year from now the DVD of the event will be in the discount bins at K-Mart for $4.95. Why not spend the money on a new Ferrari or something? 

 

 

In the late 80's and early 90's, the 'web' didn't exist in its present form. The 'web' of the day was called USENET - a set of global discussion groups that were constantly being replicated around the world to anybody with enough disk space to store them and feed them on to others. 

I remember briefly visiting one called 'alt.seduction.fast' which seemed basically like a bunch of guys talking about how to hit up chicks. At the time I thought this was petty and juvenile, and spent more of my time hanging out on comp.mail.* and comp.infosystems.*; which were relevant to the work I was doing.

In retrospect I wish now I had spent more time with the boys at ASF. They basically compiled a complete compendium of knowledge about the 'science' and mechanics of seduction. How it all works, how to do it, etc. If I had only known, my life might have taken hundreds of different turns - considering I wasted considerable resources trying to figure out the requisite knowledge on my own, with mixed success.

As it turns out, it's now well documented that the 'art' of seduction is a bunch of phooey and ditto for chemical attraction, although this sometimes helps the guys who don't get any otherwise.

It's completely mechanical. Follow a prescribed sequence of steps and you'll get laid every time. By anybody? Pretty much. There are rare exceptions, but you will usually be best off avoiding these anyway for other reasons. For the super-model type babes, there's a set of additional steps called 'negging' to bring them down to earth so that they're fair game as well.

Anyway, if you're a younger guy or younger girl, it would behoove you to find out about this compendium of knowledge. I'm not going to tell you where to find it; because if it was common knowledge I don't think the world would be a very nice place. There's enough exploitation going on already.    

Decided that I'd best learn a little about snakes - especially since I just about tread on a red-bellied black snake yesterday at the farm. We also know there are at least a couple of copperheads on the property. 

Still struggling with device drivers on Windows Vista. The sound card drivers have an update, but I'm skeptical. Several folks reported BSOD when they installed it. 

And I've lost any good feelings I had for Debian. Recently I moved my old RedHat installation to a newer PC - one that was only 8 years old rather than 10. All went extremely smooth. On bootup, it found the new motherboard, new network card, mouse, monitor, etc. - and configured all of them.  Everything worked fine.

Then I upgraded to Debian. The RedHat was a couple of years old, and I didn't want to mess with building PHP, MySQL, and Apache upgrades as well. Just boot up a newer Linux. Debian is currently one of the more popular Linux flavors - and I especially like the APT package management utility. Need PHP? 'apt-get install php'. You don't need to build and configure it and mess with library dependencies. These are all taken care of. If it needs new libraries, these are installed as well as any libraries that they depend on. 

Anyway, now (a couple of weeks later) I put in another newer PC - this time only 4 years old. I was expecting everything to go smoothly like it did last time. But it didn't. Debian doesn't have very good hardware (re-)detection, and they also don't load any other drivers than what is absolutely necessary. So I'm faced with an incomplete operating system that doesn't recognize the monitor or ethernet card. And I can't load in the modules for these devices over the net, because it doesn't recognize the network card. It's a Catch-22.

The only solution now is a re-install. Spend a few weeks getting everything configured and then start over. Right. I've been here before. Way too often...

But if you're one of those folks considering moving away from RedHat/Fedora, beware. It's nice to be able to plop your disks into another box if the one you've got goes bad - and keep running. Debian won't do this. 

CNN reports: 

... 

13-year-old in alleged teacher-student liaison is illegal immigrant

...

And this is important because ...? 

I've managed to code up some radical changes to the newsfeed system - which I believe will allow us to provide some (very limited) functionality w/r/t reading news without causing any legal issues and without subjecting any site members to liability just for the crime of looking at published newsfeeds. I'll be enabling some of this in the next several days as I get any remaining kinks worked out.

The ability to import articles into the CMS from newsfeeds will not be included. I could of course take the common approach and let y'all take legal responsibility for your own imported content, but that's hardly the kind of thing that a reputable web service would do to its members. Granted that's what some supposedly reputable web services do, but I don't necessarily agree that it's the right thing to do.

You probably should be cautious in any articles you publish to this site that any citations you might provide from elsewhere are free and clear - as we're under a bit of extra legal scrutiny at the moment. It's generally OK to include a snippet of an external article and add comment to it. Don't include the entire source article; and ensure that you have provided additional content/commentary written in your own words.  

 

A look at the website statistics bears out what I already knew from instinct. Traffic is dropping like a rock. What do people want? They want aggregated content. They want the answers to their questions. If you can't provide these, they'll move on to somebody who does; even if this exposes them to a lawsuit. 

In fact, it is only the 1% of people that are writers and contributors who might ever have legal troubles. The vast majority of people (99% or more) are lurkers who never perform a single action to create content.

Last week, over 100,000 page hits a day. Now, 29,000 and falling. There's still a lot of stuff here, but it's hard to compete with celebrity gossip and tech news that are now off limits as content sources.

I'm not complaining about this trend. Those of you who know me also should know better than to think so. I'm just an observer, reporting the facts.

   

A friend (now at Google) responds:

"Mike, obviously I cannot talk about Google internals, but what did we do about content violations at AOL?"

Uhm, nothing.

"Right."

OK, this isn't entirely true. There was that big flap with the EU over their different definition of the age at which a child is subject to parental controls. And then we spent weeks coming up with a solution to the problem of what should happen to group content if a group founder/moderator leaves the online service.

But mostly, content issues weren't our problem as software designers/engineers. The recently passed (at the time) DMCA had a "Safe Harbour" provision - which basically states that a service cannot be liable for infringement by its members if notified of content offenses and takes the offending content down/offline in a reasonable amount of time. Ultimately, this was our solution to any legal issues that might arise. We left it to the legal team to sort out what was or wasn't illegal content, and provided tools to operations staff to actually remove the infringing material.  

 

I've been plunged headon into an absolute chaotic nightmare trying to fully understand the issues of copyright as they apply to newsfeeds.

The short answer is that in terms of the law, copyright wins. You legally cannot show an RSS feed on another website without the express permission of the content owner. There are rare exceptions. The existence of a syndication feed on a website does not grant any rights to the content it contains.

My previous post on why Google can get away with it, is simply because 'they are Google'. According to every document that I've managed to cram in the last few days, they are clearly in violation of copyright law both in letter and spirit. But if you feel infringed, your only choice is a lawsuit - and you will be going up against one of the shrewdest collections of intellectual property lawyers ever assembled. I don't believe anybody has attempted it for Google Reader, although others who have sued Google over copyright infringement have come home with their tail between their legs.

In any other case, posting a newsfeed on another website (in whole or in part) puts you in questionable legal status. Fair use is nebulous. You cannot code fair use into software, and it doesn't offer any protection against getting sued for infringement. It merely gives you some guidelines for a handful of possible defenses.

You can of course view a newsfeed legally on another website if you have the express permission of the copyright owner. But again, this cannot be coded into software, and even then you can't make it available for another person to read - who has not obtained similar permission. This makes Digg, Technorati, Google Reader, and del.icio.us violators in principle, if not in fact. Truncating articles (as some of these sites do) is a defense, it is not a legal standard - and they still could face legal challenges. This is not just limited to RSS/Atom and other syndication formats. It applies to any website content.

If you're a small website operator like me, and you provide any publicly accessible newsfeeds without express permission of the feed owner (or copyright holder), you're technically in violation of U.S. law (this assumes that the U.S. is somehow involved in the content and/or reproduction at issue). Even if members create their own feed sources - but in that case, the members are in violation - not you. You are guilty of facilitating their infringement.

There's only one way out of this mess. Somebody has to sue Google over this issue and lose. Then we'll have some established legal principle. Until then as one writer wrote - 'view a newsfeed, go to jail'. (Though technically copyright law is a civil violation and not a criminal violation).

We were warned not to expect much - that Halloween is an 'American' holiday that just isn't practiced here.

The numbers tell a different story.

As far as children are concerned, it was about 97% participation. We had 30-40 visitors at the door, which accounts for every kid in the neighborhood except for 1 girl across the street who didn't join in.

As far as adults are concerned, the participation rate was about half. Many folks had the TV on in the living room, but didn't come to the door. Couldn't be bothered. Of the half that participated, it was quite common of them to run out of lollies (candy). It's a new neighborhood, and they probably expected about a dozen kids, which is what we were told the youth population was a year ago.

Now I took a group of my daughter's friends around the block - six in all. Five had never done Halloween before. Upon knowing this fact, I didn't expect much, but there were kids in costume everywhere. It was quite funny that these girls were more concerned with their costumes and various wardrobe malfunctions than they were about getting to the next house. It took 45 minutes to get through one little cul-de-sac of about 10 houses, and almost an hour to get down the next side street. Obviously amateurs. We saw some teen-age boys that had it down - they came back around probably three times before we finally shooed them away at 9:30. I'm sure they covered the entire east side of town - because if I was their age, I would've been one of them.

So to say Halloween isn't really practiced here isn't entirely true. It has a solid foothold, and with such high children participation rates,  it's only a matter of time.