This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

So, I just got this email:

Dear Sir:

My name is Eric Sommer and I am the trademark owner of iCapture. It is a trademark for a company I own and you are using

the name in an unauthorized manner without permission and are thus infringing – and have been infringing – on
my exclusive trademark and copyright.

I need to ask you to do one of two things – cease immediately from using it on your website and everywhere else, deliver

all materials that carry the name or logo to me immediately or negotiate a license deal for it’s use and replication. I
will request a review of all your books and records in order to determine what monies are owed as well.

If there are any partners to the projects you have worked on or under, or additional products who use the name iCapture
as well, then they may be liable too, and you should provide me with the names of their corporate counsels wherever they

are located. Additionally, if this is a code project, as a copyright and trademark infringer, all code, all work
product, hard products and all monies made under the name iCapture must be accounted for and may be the property of the
trademark holder.

If you have been using it for sometime, and clearly you have since you have had significant business at your location,
then
I will ask for some sort of payment for its use. If you have an attorney, please have him contact me.

Eric Sommer
2314 19th Street NW

#3
Washington, DC 20009

You can reach me at 202-255-1995. Trademark and copyright infringement is a serious matter and carries significant
financial penalties – up to treble damages can be awarded.

Sincerely,

Eric Sommer

cc: Michael Kessler, ESQ.

Now, all I have that mentions iCapture is a post praising its coolness. Am I worried about this? You will be amazed to hear that I am not.

So, I’m back from touring around families at Christmas. Pretty fun time: a more interesting post is forthcoming (I have to tidy the house in preparation for another visitor) but I just wanted to say: I have a DVD recorder. Cool. I haven’t even taken it out of the box yet, mind…

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You can follow Father Christmas’ progress around the globe via the NORAD Tracks Santa radar.
Every year NORAD do this. Every year. They’ve been doing it now for fifty years—the website is new, but they also take phone calls from kids and tell them where Santa is, and they have done so every Christmas for half a century. I cannot believe that they do this. It is wonderful. Wonderful. I’m sitting here—quite seriously—choked up at the thought of this bunch of military officers taking all this time and effort to make Christmas a bit more special for a bunch of kids around the globe. Wow.

Niamh has just asked if it’s nearly bedtime, on the grounds that, as we always tell her, the earlier you go to bed on Christmas Eve the earlier that Christmas will come.
We pointed out that, no, 10.40am is not nearly bedtime.
Today is going to be a lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ong day.

Via On Call Bald I learn that the EU has dropped the Software Patent Directive. This is bloody superb news! We have Wlodzimierz Marcinski, the Polish Minister of Science and Computerisation, to thank for it. Never heard of the bloke before now, but he’s suddenly become an Edgar Villanueva level of hero to the Free Software community overnight. Apparently Marcinski “firmly requested” that the Directive was withdrawn from the agenda. FFII has more (as you might expect) including the following press release:

National governments were misled into believing they were getting a Directive which allowed patents only for computer-controlled technical devices. Instead, most patent professionals believe the proposed text would have forced Member States to uphold the furthest reaches of current EPO practice—so that, in the words of patent attorney Simon Davies, “all inventions that might reasonably be considered as within the realm of computer science, for example procedures at the operating system level to improve machine operation, or generic algorithms, techniques and functionality at the application level” would be patentable. Even the UK Government, one of the strongest supporters of the proposed text, admitted that “Clarity will only come from the first test case in a European court.”

Hands up anyone who’s surprised that the UK Ministry of Truth are strong supporters of it, by the way.

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For my sins, I installed Evolution in the past. I don’t use it; I use Thunderbird. But clicking a mailto link in Firefox starts up Evo. Big no-no. So, I had a poke around. In Computer | Desktop Preferences | Preferred Applications you can choose Mail Reader to configure your default mail reader. TB doesn’t seem to show up in the dropdown, so I thought I’d bang it into Custom Mail Reader. So, what do you put in? I’d have thought mozilla-thunderbird %s. Nope. That doesn’t work. Moreover, if you try that from the command-line:

mozilla-thunderbird someone@example.org
/usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/mozilla-thunderbird-xremote-client: Error: Failed to send command: 509 internal error

That’s no good. On the other hand, what’s a mozilla-thunderbird-xremote-client?

/usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/mozilla-thunderbird-xremote-client someone@example.org
/usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/mozilla-thunderbird-xremote-client: Error: Failed to send command: 500 command not parsable: someone@example.org

Ah, “command not parsable“. It must take the -remote commands.

/usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/mozilla-thunderbird-xremote-client "mailto(someone@example.org)"

That works! Yay! So, let’s try that in the Custom Mail Reader box in Preferred Applications. Nope. Dammit. It pops up a mail window, no problem…with “%s” in the To box. Dammit. Any suggestions?

On the 15th December, the long-awaited Report of the Review of the Regulatory Framework for Legal Services in England and Wales was published by Sir David Clementi. It’s a serious and large-scale review of how legal services are carried out in the UK, and it’s been viewed with increasing trepidation by bits of the legal industry. Fortunately, the Legal Services Review team who did it appear to have their heads screwed on right, much as does Sir David himself. The report is published in HTML as well as PDF, and that HTML is pretty accessible (it’s table-based, but hey). Sir David himself seems to have taken a cold and clear-eyed look at legal provision in the UK, and there are a couple of superb bits in the report. It was clear in advance of the report that it would support LDPs, organisations employing both solicitors and barristers (this isn’t the norm), and the idea that such LDPs might be owned by a larger commercial organisation. The Bar Council and others were resisting this, claiming that being owned by a commercial concern might corrupt the poor innocent lawyers and conflict with their ethical mores. Clementi, in response to this concern, unleashes this mighty zinger:

It should not be permissible for the owner, under the terms of the LDP’s regulatory conditions, to interfere in any client case or to have access to any individual client files or client information. What the owner does have a right to seek, from the money he invests in the business, is a proper profit. But then lawyers are not uninterested in such matters either. The notion that for lawyers, unlike businessmen, making money is merely a happy by-product of doing their professional duty has limited resonance with the public. [ F/54 ]

Nice one, Sir David. We like you, yes we do.

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The LugRadio 2004 Christmas Special is now available! Hear the LugRadio team review the open source world in 2004 and offer their predictions for 2005!

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A while back I wrote about how the tyranny of tabbed browsing leaves you with a load of interesting links left open in tabs that you haven’t got time to write a post about but can’t close because you so want to post about them. I have since alleviated that problem. Instead, the tyrant in my life is Bloglines’ “Keep New” function. I’m subscribed to about 120 feeds in Bloglines, and when I find something that I want to write something about, I tick “Keep New” so it stays unread. Repeat for a few months and I now permanently have twelve things that are in need of exposition. The difference, I suppose, is that since I built the linklog, these are not quick dash-off-a-note-and-snarky-comment items, but things deserving of a real discusrive post, which they just aren’t going to get. Not unless I get a lot less busy, anyway. So, here goes.

• i’ll replace you with machines – I’ve been reading Delimiter for a while without actually realising that it was Scott Andrew. Amazing. Anyway, Scott bemoans his lack of that essential something that keeps his weblog running, especially the technical DHTML/JS/etc bits of it. What is the something? I know how he feels: it’s partly time, partly inclination, partly lack of inspiration. “Yeah, there’s plenty of stuff out there that hasn’t been built yet, and I have no desire to build most of it. Why, yes, we could implement a [insert like-to-have feature here] in JavaScript. I know it can be done, you know it can be done — so do we really have to build it? Next!” I’ve seen quite a few things that I had an idea about in the past but never wrote up: I wish I’d carried on with Renditioner, which was an HTML/CSS/JS-based presentation package like Eric Meyer’s excellent S5. (I foundered on it because I was, and remain, convinced that it all needs to be in one file: this is what prompted my investigations into inline images in web pages and caused me to give up because it doesn’t work in IE.) Eric’s work is superlative, and I’m sure Renditioner would have been a lot more crufty, don’t get me wrong here.
• Miguel the Iguana notes a CyberSource study on Linux vs Windows TCO (caveat Acrobat), which I’d love to distribute at work if I thought it’d make any difference, which it won’t.
• Bill Mill’s del.icio.us game is cool. Score points for how perspicacious you were with linking to something. It’s an amusing conceit which underlies a serious point, that del.icio.us is a huge and useful data store for what people are linking to, in a much more direct way than services like blogdex. It’s also changed the way linklogs work—I’ll probably be shifting mine over to it as part of the Grand Site Redesign—and it’s got a great API. Moreover, the API isn’t a separate bolt-on; using del.icio.us means that you are using the API directly, because it’s RESTish. I love that. Our CRM product at work, InterAction from Interface Software, is another excellent example of that, and at some point I will write up a description of its superb web API so that other people can write stuff that works like it.
• Another example of how del.icio.us is changing how people work is that Jeremy Z wants his own personal del.icio.us to archive his links from emails and his browser and so on. I remain convinced that a trivial Firefox extension that indexes your browser history and makes it searchable is a very good thing to do: not like Slogger, which archives it all (I don’t need a separate copy of it, that’s what the damned web is for), but something which indexes it so that it can be searched later.
• Greatest Dilbert cartoon ever. Don’t know how long that link will last, but the exchange is between Alice and the PHB, obviously in the context of a performance review: the PHB declares that Alice’s biggest defect is inability to handle criticism, which gets Alice’s goat, because she can’t argue with that statement without proving it true. Similar scenes occur in performance reviews right up and down the country, every single day, and Adams lampoons them perfectly here. (He goes on to, ahem, hammer the point home in the last panel, where the PHB also complains that Alice argues with people who are much smarter than her, heh.) Remind me someday, in the future, to tell you about the ridiculous performance review scheme at work.
• Dunstan has been busy coming up with cool new CSS techniques for Mozilla Europe. Likely to be of more use to real designers than to me, I’m still really glad that it is still possible to innovate in ways like this. One of my fears about the rise of WYSIWYG tools is that, if we abtract away from the complexity of CSS, then this will suddenly stop being possible: you’ll only be able to organise pages in ways that your tool makers thought of, and they won’t think of things lke this. (Oh, this tehcnique might be in the new version of the tool, as long as you think that $99 is worth paying for it. Unless you’re using Nvu or something.) Schwuk has written about the tool/IDE debate (following on from the much-linked paper on The IDE Divide and what it is), commenting that “they’re just electric screwdrivers to me – they do the job faster, but you don’t need them” and summing up my own thoughts on the matter perfectly.
• Seth Nickell vies in my head for Greatest Usability Guy, along with Tog and Matthew Thomas (his new place doesn’t have as much usability stuff). Nickell is a lot less acerbic than Thomas, but they’re both excellent: Nickell’s Improving Usability essay is recommended.
• Still on usability, Drew McLellan wrote about Supermarket Usability and questioned the very idea that the user comes first, given that supermarkets unashamedly put their own interests before those of consumers (Daniel Davies has more on how supermarkets outsource their costs to the customer and similar tricks) and yet still make a whole shitload of money.
• Steven Garrity wants the Google search box in Firefox to interact with Google Suggest. I’ll bet money that the Google people will cut that off if someone implements it, which is a real shame…
• Sparkes notes in a comment that the Ubuntu Guide is “stolen from GPL and FDL sources with no accreditation“. I’ve had a poke around and can’t find many examples of direct plagiarism, but sparkes’ point about the licence (that the Guide can only be reproduced in full) is well taken, and I should not have linked to it.
• In another comment here Rob Annable said “we should all get off our lazy aRSSes and go visit some sites“, meaning that the rise of the agggregator means that we’re missing something essential. He’s not wrong, but…well, I want to mainline information. That’s what’s important to me. The method of delivery is a serious long way behind in second place. This is probably one of the reasons why I haven’t got the new design done yet (although that’s more properly a rearchitecting, and I’ll bang a new look on top as a fringe benefit).
• Schwuk has been reading ebooks. Both he and Rory do this the same as I: having ebooks on your mobile device is marvellous because you can read for five minutes while you’re standing in a queue, or sitting outside the shop waiting for your wife, or on the bog, or having a cigarette in the car park. I do these things a lot (well, I do the last two a lot and the other two sometimes). Fortunately (and thanks to the kindness of Jono) I now have a Zaurus again, so I don’t have to go through the rather convoluted process of putting them on my phone for reading there any more.
• Finally, Matt has written up the beginnings of some thoughts on marketing Open Source software with a look at Jaguar’s approach. Look for more on this from LugRadio in the new year…

Jon Hicks has been naming his top 3s of the year and invites us to do the same using his categories. I think he’d be disappointed with mine.

Albums

Couldn’t tell you. I haven’t bought any albums this year, I don’t think. I listen to music a lot—this is why I have an mp3 player in the car—but it’s all stuff that I already own and that came out ages ago. The most recent thing I’ve got on there is probably the first Eminem album, which came out about five years ago…

OS X browser

Don’t even care :) I am no Mac-head. On Linux, the choice of Firefox is obvious. Hear LugRadio passim for why Epiphany is not good.

Site design I wish I’d come up with first

Not really any. As has been remarked before in these pages, I read stuff through an RSS aggregator. There are some pretty neat tricks that I want to do to the architecture around here, but not the design as such, where to me that dictates what it looks like rather than how it works. The neat things that I’m going to steal are mainly described in the Redesign details.

Blog Posts

Don’t know. I mean, I have a weblog so that I can put things in it, not so I can remember them later :) There’s not that much that stands out, but that’s a function of my memory rather than my compadres.

Events

1. Men With Big Thrones without question. The Men With Big week is the highlight of my year, every year.
2. The LUDEx 2004 (not for the event itself, but for the quality of the people there, including the lovely Casey)
3. tEC7
4. (couldn’t decide between the last two) As Jon notes, the first Geekend. I’d have loved to make it to the subsequent ones, and I’ll try harder next year.

finally…

Niamh (who goes to school in January) and Sam (who’s now been working as a teacher for three months). Couldn’t have done it without the two of you.

Looking forward

Get the book published. Redesign this place. Try and pass the Joel Test at work, but I don’t think I’ll get anywhere with that because people are not interested and I can’t compel it.

So…

Your go. What are your answers?

I’ve updated my hackergotchi:

Now I have to update Planet Wolves, Planet Lugradio, et al.

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New bit of code: windowmovie. This is like every screenshot app in the world, except that it actually takes a movie as an animated GIF. Run it, choose a length for the movie, and choose a window (or --screen for the whole screen). It’ll then “film” what you’re doing for the length selected and drop an animated GIF of it on your desktop. X Windows only.

Tom is obviously not very well travelled, although I am not a lot better:

create your own visited country map

One of the reasons that I wanted my K700i and that I paid for the OrangeWorld data subscription was that I’d get GPRS access to the net, which means that I can see the net from wherever I am using my Zaurus, which can browse the web and do SSH and everything (unlike the lame WAP browser built in to the phone). So, I rang Orange and said “How do I make a PDA dial the net via GPRS, if te PDA can talk infrared to the K700i?” They said: just dial the number *99#. So I set up a connection in the Z’s “Network and Sync” applet to do “IrDA – PPP” and told it that the phone number was *99#. Didn’t work; it talks to the phone and tells it to connect, but then the phone disconnects immediately. Bah. I rang Orange, and—guess what?—they said “we only support Windows-based PocketPCs, because we’re a bunch of droid muppets who don’t actually understand the technology.” Or words to that effect. So, after a bit of investigating, I have worked out how to do it for myself:

• On your UK Orange K700i, go Menu | Connectivity | Data comm. | Data accounts
• It should have a number of accounts in there: you need to count down until you find “Orange GPRS Internet“, ignoring the “New account” at the top. Mine has “Orange GPRS WAP” first (after “New account“), then “Orange MMS“, then “Orange GPRS Internet“, so it’s number 3. Remember this number: it’s called the CID.
• Edit that “Orange GPRS Internet” account
• In “Authentication“, there should be “Normal” (ticked), “Secure” (unticked), and “None” (unticked). Tick “None“, and hit OK to save.
• On the Zaurus, go into the Network and Sync applet in Settings
• In the Services tab, say “Add”
• Choose “IrDA – PPP” and say “Add”
• In the “Phone” section on the Account tab, enter * 99 * * * CID #, where CID is the CID you remembered from earlier (so in my case I entered * 99 * * * 3 #) (don’t put spaces in between the things: it’s a seven character string star-nine-nine-star-star-star-CID-hash)
• Save the connection with OK

Now, you should be able to turn on IR on your K700i, position it and the Z appropriately, and connect using the connect button on the taskbar on the Z. When it connects you;ll have a full on (and pretty darn fast) net connection on the Z. Go nuts.

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Ade points me at the Unofficial Ubuntu 4.10 Starter Guide—which is absolutely excellent. It has a long list of “how do I do this“-type questions (how do I install an eDonkey client? how do I burn CDs? how do I share files with Samba?), and is an invaluable resource. I shall be pointing people I’ve moved to ubuntu (Andy, this means you, in case you were wondering!) at this…

Ned Batchelder notes the existence of the (very cool) Google Suggest and invites a little competition: how much of your name do you have to type before you’re the top link?
I have to type “stuart langr“, disappointingly (but there is a guy called Stuart Lang, so it’s not entirely unexpected). i only need “kryog” to get hits on my site—like Ned, I’m most puzzled by the order in which they show the suggested links.
Some other things: Microsoft appear to own “mi“, you have to go as far as “linu” to get Linux, Ubuntu are there with “ubu“, and “lugr” gets you LugRadio. Cool tool, Google guys.

If there is at least one person in your life whom you consider a close friend, and whom you would not have met without the internet, post this sentence in your weblog, or journal, or whatever.

“What they could and did do was send a powerful message that this city was now an armed camp and that those with the arms would do as they pleased and the rest of us would just have to deal with it. For many New Yorkers, it was like living under occupation…One man got into an argument with a captain who told him to get moving. When the man asked for the captain’s shield number, he was arrested. Just like that…It was weird seeing this kind of thing right in front of you and not on a TV program about some distant land where freedom is merely a concept…Strange as it may seem, this was the most pleasant part of the whole ordeal. The police were almost friendly as they tied our hands behind our backs with thick plastic tie wraps…“I’ve got five bodies down the hall to move into a cell,” they would say. Perhaps that dehumanized the detainees to them but it made us feel more human than ever. At least it did at that point…It’s a nifty concept – I’ll bet if they arrested the entire city, they’d find enough wanted criminals to get some people to actually support the idea…As we moved down that hallway, I heard the hoarse voice of a female detainee from behind the wall crying out for a lawyer. I was sickened when I realized that it was the same voice I had heard there twelve hours before.”
What is wrong with America that 1200 or so people were swept off the streets of Manhattan by the police on August 31st 2004? They’re the land of the free, fergawdsake: what’s going on?
(props to Bill for the pointer)

I’ve been meaning to write something about Linux viruses for some time, prompted by a note from Ade on how the virus threat on Linux has the potential to be a big one. I’ve finally writtenup my thoughts on the Linux virus threat for the Wolves LUG mailing list. It’s more of a primer on the subject, designed to be shown to people who say “Linux is invulnerable to viruses, because users don’t have root privileges!“, rather than a set of suggested solutions, but I can think of one solution (as said in the primer): I’d like to see the Linux distributions include AV software as standard (even if, right now, it has nothing to scan for).
This would require some work. For a start, it should be scanning, even if it has nothing to compare the scans against but the EICAR test file, and freshclam should be running to make sure that virus definitions are always up to date. Secondly, ClamAV needs to be able to scan stuff as it’s written to disc, rather than only doing on-demand scanning as it does now. Nevertheless, having it on and scanning inbound emails all the time and the filesystem regularly would leave us in a very strong position if (and when) the Linux viruses come to town.

So, Sam’s car blew the head gasket. Bit of a pain, could cost up to £750 to get fixed. Not happy. She took my car to work, I drove hers to the garage to ask about getting it fixed. They told me how much it’d cost: I said, “fuck me that’s a lot of money! Can I get back to you this evening? Meanwhile, can I leave the car here so we can pick it up tonight? I have to go to work.” They agreed, and off I went to work.
A few phone calls later, it turned out that the head gasket is covered by the warranty. Brilliant. A ray of sunshine in my sad life with cars. So I rang Sam, told her the good news. She agreed to go to the garage when she left work, leave my car there, and pick hers up and drive it home. No problem. She dropped my car off at 5.15pm. I got off the bus at 7pm to get my car and drive it home.
Whereupon I found that someone had crashed into the side of it.
I hate everything. Everything. My car! My beautiful car!
I feel like I’m going to cry.

Will one of you usability guys out there get to work on advent calendars? They’re a total pain: the little windows are basically impossible to open without bending the main structure of the thing all over the place, even if you have decent nails, which neither Niamh nor I do. Tom has a flashy wooden one with drawers, which looks very pretty but seems to take some of the mystique out of it for me. I made an advent calendar for Sam, years ago, so that I could put decent chocolates in it rather than horrible ones pressed into a piece of plastic, and it was a disaster. Of course, that might be my ham-fistedness rather than something inherently wrong with the concept. Please don’t suggest that the solution here is to buy decent advent calendars: I’m not paying, like, ten pounds for an advent calendar. I’m just not. The ordinary ones should be easy to open. I can’t think of a way to do this, though. Could be a niche in the market here!

Lasso is a GPLed implementation of the Liberty Alliance single sign-on protocols. I’ve been thinking about single sign-on at work, both for internal services (where we already have a login that could be used as the single sign-on: the Windows login) and for external services (where we do not). Is this what Project Liberty does? Can I use it for this? That would be pretty alarmingly cool. And Free Software, to boot, yay!

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