Announcing: DAO

I’ve been working for many months now on a home jukebox project, and finally have a (very unexciting) piece far enough along to release.

DAO is a part of the PHP client interface to the jukebox. DAO is a database object abstraction layer for PHP, inspired in part by DB::DataObject, which is part of PEAR.

Relative to DB::DataObject, DAO:

• is simpler in design:
  • no cursor pool
  • no .ini files
  • updates affect changed fields only, by default
• is more idiot-proof:
  • guards against inadvertent update/delete all
  • clean, easy join and related object support
• is more extensible:
  • SQL generation operations are broken out into build methods, not bundled into generate-and-send methods
• is more compatible:
  • supports sequences and auto_increment
• offers cleaner error handling:
  • methods always return PEAR::Error in event of error
  • last error seen is preserved in error property

DAO is also not likely to ever be included in PEAR itself.

The DAO API documentation is here.

DAO is released as a PEAR package, which you can download here, and install with the pear installer (or just untar it and copy the file DAO.class.php to somewhere in your php library path).

The remaining, more exciting pieces of PJ (which stands for P[HP/ython] Jukebox) will be released under the GPL as well, as soon as they’re reasonably complete and documented. Not all that soon, in other words.

Filed under: projects

Monday recipe

Coconut milk. Is there anything it can’t do?

Tempeh curry with lemon

First things first: curry paste. If, unlike me, you can eat the peanut without fear of anaphylactic shock, or find some bottled curry paste that does not contain trace amounts of that vilest of legumes, use the bottled stuff. Making your own is time-consuming, to say the least, and it’s hard to get the balance of heat and flavor right. If you do want to make your own, you can find a recipe with a quick Googling. You might also consider other kinds of pepper-based flavorings: basically, you want an intense combination of hot, sour, and savory. Improvise.

Once you’ve selected or created the spice mixture, the question is, how much to use? For this particular dish, unless you just can’t stand mild food, I’d advise lowballing it. Otherwise, you’re likely to overwhelm the flavors of the lemon and coconut milk; the heat should be like background music, not getting beaten around the head and neck with a viola.

Ingredients

(serves 2 generously)

curry paste (see above)
8 oz tempeh, cut into 1 inch cubes
juice of 1 lime
1 clove garlic, smashed or minced
1 to 1.5 cans of coconut milk
1 red bell pepper, cut into 1 inch dice
3 green onions, cut on the diagonal
1 or 2 carrots, finely sliced on the diagonal
1 cup fresh or frozen peas, corn, or combination
1 lemon, sliced into half-moons
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp soy sauce
canola or other light vegetable oil
salt

Procedure

Combine the tempeh cubes with the lime juice, garlic, and a good pinch of salt in a covered plastic container (or ziplock bag), and put in the refrigerator to marinate. Do this before doing any of the other prep, and let the tempeh stew for at least half an hour.

Drain tempeh. Heat oil in a large non-stick skillet over medium-high. Brown the tempeh in the oil, a few minutes per side. I like to turn each cube individually with chopsticks. This may be a sign of madness. In any case, when the tempeh is well-browned on all sides, transfer to draining rack or paper towels to drain.

Heat a wok or other deep frying pan over medium-high heat. Skim the cream off of one can of coconut milk and add to the wok, with the desired amount of your selected curry paste. Whisk the paste into the cream. Keep whisking. The cream will separate into colored oil and coconut solids, and you will hear (and smell) the spice paste frying. Let it fry for about a minute, then whisk in the remaining coconut milk (and half of another can if you want a very saucy result, or have extra ingredients). Let this cook down for a few minutes, stirring frequently.

Reserve a few green onions for garnishing, if you are a garnisher. Add the tempeh, green onion, carrots, soy sauce, and sugar. Now you have a choice: do you want deep lemony, or bright lemony? If you want a mild but pervasive lemon flavor, add 6 or 7 lemon slices now. If not, wait.

Cook the mixture, stirring often, for 5 to 10 minutes, until the carrots are soft. Now, if you added the lemon slices in the previous step, take them out. Otherwise, add them now. In any case, add the remaining vegetables. Cook until the red pepper is just barely heated through, remove any cooked lemon slices, garnish with reserved green onions and a few fresh lemon slices, and serve with a side of rice.

Filed under: cooking

CIPA

I hope that every one of my readers also visits Jenny Levine’s Shifted Librarian. If it wasn’t clear enough before now, CIPA ought to make it obvious that librarians, open source advocates, and supporters of limited copyright are on the same side in the conflict over freedom of information.

Topical example: Jenny’s friday post about CIPA demonstrates one way that we in the open source world can directly aid our librarian friends, now that CIPA is really-truly not going away.

The biggest problem with so-called filters is that the commercial filter companies won’t tell their customers what they block or why. In fact, they have routinely used the DMCA to prevent their customers from discovering, except through trial and error, what exactly they are and are not allowed to see.

We can do better. (Seth Finkelstein, who knows far more about this than I do, disagrees, but bear with me.) There are already at least two open source, open block list, censorware packages available: Squidguard and DansGuardian. By using open censorware—oxymoron though it might be—librarians can at least know what they are censoring, and gain greater control over the censoring lists and processes, and so, ultimately, censor less and do less harm. The problem is, setting up these packages to work reasonably well over time, and to be configurable and monitorable by non-nerds is not trivial. For nerds, though, we’re talking about ./configure && make && make install and a little config file twiddling—and maybe a couple of cronjobs to scan logs for interesting things .

Pace Seth's objections, I think volunteering our time and nerdliness to help our allies who are caught in a pretty awful bind by an absurd law would be a good thing. So, if you are a librarian in the Chicagoland area whose library is caught in the CIPA trap and who wants to install or try DansGuardian or Squidgard, please feel free to contact me at the email address at the top of the page (or leave a comment), and if I can help, I will.

Filed under: technology

Boring DAO project homepage

Welcome to the boring DAO project homepage.

Find out what DAO is by reading the API documentation. Download the latest version of DAO here.

Filed under: projects/DAO

They love IKEA

Just when you think it’s safe to go back into the living room, the cats ascend to a mind-boggling plane of ultracuteness that induces you to go out and buy more furniture for them to be cute on.

At least, I think that’s how we wound up as owners of a Klackbo

Filed under: cats

Centrifuges of mass destruction

CNN reports a significant WMD program find in Iraq:

The CIA has in its hands the critical parts of a key piece of Iraqi nuclear technology—parts needed to develop a bomb program—that were dug up in a back yard in Baghdad, CNN has learned.

The parts, with accompanying plans, were unearthed by Iraqi scientist Mahdi Obeidi who had hidden them under a rose bush in his garden 12 years ago under orders from Qusay Hussein and Saddam Hussein’s then son-in-law, Hussein Kamel.

The crowing from administration apologists has already begun, of course. Never mind the numerous false alarms in the past, from the pesticide barrels to the hydrogen factories. Let’s assume this one is for real: it seems legitimate. We really have found a 12 year old gas centrifuge in a barrel buried in a scientist’s back yard. What does that prove? Two things:

1. Iraq had a nuclear program in 1991.
2. Iraq did not have a nuclear program in 2003.

In the words of former weapons inspector David Albright:

“In a sense, the program was in hibernation. He was the key to the restart of this centrifuge program, and he never got the order. So in that sense it doesn’t show at all that Iraq had a nuclear program. And Obeidi told me that he never worked on a nuclear program after 1991.”

Saddam didn’t restart his nuclear program in 1998, after the inspectors were gone. What evidence is there that he would have ever restarted it? In the absence of an active program, a centrifuge in a barrel is a threat to no one, and can’t be called a justification for pre-emptive war.

Except, of course, that it will be. Instapundit has the war apologist spin going. Fox news has doctored the story to read thus:

Obeidi also said he was told the materials should remain buried in the backyard of his Baghdad home until sanctions against Iraq ended, when they would be dug up and used to reconstitute a program to enrich uranium to make a nuclear weapon.

(my emphasis, on this unsourced, non-quoted piece of unsupported “fact”) and so the Mighty Wurlitzer begins its hypnotic serenade. The inflammatory headlines will enter the public consciousness. The clear indication that there was no active nuclear program in Iraq this year, last year, or any year after 1991, will not. Those who have raised legitimate questions about the Bush administration’s shameful conduct leading up the war will be shouted down with chants of “CENTRIFUGE! CENTRIFUGE!”—even though, centrifuge or no, Bush still lied about the Niger-Uranium connection in the State of the Union speech; even though he lied about Iraq’s fearsome unmanned aerial vehicle arsenal; even though Rumsfeld said flat-out that he knew where the WsMD were deployed; even though Condi Rice lied about the aluminum tubes; even though Cheney lied on Meet the Press about this very subject, claiming that Saddam “has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons”.

The WsMD scandal-in-the-making is about to dry up and blow away like dead leaves. Just you wait and see.

UPDATE: In fairness, the AP also has the “until the end of sanctions” construction in its story, so my heated claim of Fox doctoring would be, well, wrong. The AP version is here.

Filed under: politics/war

Support the Public Domain Enhancement Act

Thanks to the efforts of Lawrence Lessig, and the good graces of Zoe Lofgren and John Doolittle, The Public Domain Enhancement (or Eric Eldred) Act has been introduced in the House of Representatives. This common-sense law will help to undo some of the greatest harm done by the 1998 copyright land grab:

The Public Domain Enhancement Act offers American copyright owners with continuing interest in works an easy way to maintain their copyrights while allowing abandoned works to enter the public domain. It requires that American copyright owners pay a simple $1 fee to maintain their copyrights 50 years after publication. If the owner fails to pay the $1 fee, the copyright expires and the work enters the public domain. In addition, copyright owners are required to submit a form identifying the copyright holder to facilitate proper licensing of copyrighted works.

[]

In 1998, Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), extending the term of copyright laws by 20 years for works copyrighted after the year 1923. In his dissent in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case upholding CTEA, Supreme Court Justice Breyer found that only about 2% of copyrights between 55 and 75 years old retain commercial value. Yet under the CTEA, these works will not enter the public domain for many years. This prevents commercial entities and the public from building upon, cultivating and preserving these works.

Under current law, essentially nothing will enter the public domain in the US until 2019, if then. The only exceptions are a few very old works that were re-granted copyright protection by the Sono Bono act in 1998.

Support the public domain and the future of our culture—write or call your Representative today and ask him or her to support this bill.

Filed under: copyright

The triumphant return

I have been shamed into shedding my lameness and posting another recipe. It’s a day late, so let’s call it

Dollar short pasta salad

Hot-weather food. Pasta. Olive oil. Tuna. Crunchy vegetables. It’s what’s it, baby.

Don’t be afraid to vegetarianize this by leaving out the tuna—just substitute something else with a little salt and a little chew, like this stuff for example. Don’t fear the tempeh, omnivores: it’s good.

If you do use tuna, I strongly recommend starkist albacore in the pouch. Unlike essentially all other tuna that isn’t packed in olive oil in Europe somewhere and sold here for extortionate prices, if you can even find it, it does not taste like tin can.

Ingredients

1. 1 pound shaped pasta
2. 7 oz tuna (or substitute), flaked (or diced and quickly fried, for the tempeh strips)
3. 1/2 red onion, diced very small
4. 1 red bell pepper, diced
5. 1/2 small red hot pepper, seeded and minced
6. olive oil—GOOD olive oil
7. juice of 1 lemon
8. 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar (a reasonable fake kind is ok)
9. salt
10. black pepper

Procedure

1. Cook the pasta. But first, salt the water. A lot. Drain the pasta, run cold water over it to stop cooking, and toss in a very large bowl with a few substantial glugs of olive oil.
2. Let the pasta cool in the fridge for 1/2 hour or so. This is a good time to do all of the chopping and juicing and flaking.
3. Add the tuna (or substitute), lemon juice, half of the balsamic, and the onion and peppers, and mix well. Taste. It will be a little more tart right now than when you’re done, don’t worry about it. Add salt and pepper, slowly, until it shakes off that dull, undersalted feeling.
4. Just before serving—when you have the serving spoon in your hand, or at least, out of the drawer—add the rest of the balsamic and another shot of oil, and mix well.

Filed under: cooking

Howard Dean for president

Readers of this blog have probably figured out that I am one of those freakish small government, free market leftists. There aren’t many of us out there, or at least, I used to think that there weren’t. Then I heard a serious US presidential candidate say things like:

We cannot have social justice without a sound fiscal foundation. We must balance the federal budget.

And:

[T]here is a fundamental difference between the defense of our nation and the doctrine of preemptive war espoused by this administration. The President’s group of narrow-minded ideological advisors are undermining our nation’s greatness in the world. They have embraced a form of unilateralism that is even more dangerous than isolationism.

And let’s not forget:

I did not sign civil unions into law for gays and lesbians. I did it for America. I want to be the president where everyone in America has equal rights under the law.

That candidate? Readers of the title of this post will be unsurprised to learn that it was former VT Governor Howard Dean.

Howard Dean is a freak like me. He believes in social justice, but understands that a bankrupt government can help no-one. He opposed the war in Iraq not because he’s a pacifist (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but because he understood that Iraq was never a threat to the US, and the wrong war at the wrong time would damage our security, not enhance it. He wants to attain idealistic goals—universal healthcare, equal rights for gays and lesbians—through pragmatic and achievable means. Dean has my support, and my whopping $60 Bush tax cut; if you want to see the end of the Bush administration, then I think he deserves yours as well.

Filed under: politics/2004

Update: Hartz flea medicine warning

TJ left a comment on my post about Hartz flea medicine, and why one must never, ever buy it that I want to highlight:

I work for an emergency veterinary hospital. It is true, we see a Hartz toxicity patient about once a week. But it doesn’t stop there. Though Hartz is the most common, we have also seen reactions to Zodiac and Biospot. Do yourselves a favorspend a little more on Frontline or Advantage, and you will possibly save yourselves hundreds in emergency care.

Cat owners: don’t buy this junk. Free market lovers: test out that invisible hand! Tell all of your friends not to buy this falsely-advertised poison, and maybe thse irresponsible megacorporations who are trying to make an extra buck by killing peoples’ pets will get the slap they so richly deserve.

Filed under: cats

Entertaining open source

Beware of raining frogs: an unimpeachably excellent article on DeCSS has appeared in the mainstream media. In DVD-Piracy Paranoia Proves Counterproductive (TechNews.com), Rob Pegoraro hits the trifecta, noting that:

These unauthorized DVD programs handle a variety of useful tasks. They allow you to jump past the FBI warning that licensed playback software must display before showing the movie. They let you breeze by the otherwise unskippable commercials that some movie studios are fond of shoving into their DVDs. They can ignore the “region controls” that prevent you from watching the movie you bought in Paris on the player you picked up here.

And:

I could use this program to copy rented DVDs at will, but I have no such interest. Rather, this program is useful to me because it lets me move movies I own to my laptop’s hard drive, then leave the external DVD/CD-RW drive at home when I travel.

In other words, this unauthorized, unlicensed software makes DVDs more valuable and useful to me.

And don’t forget:

You don’t need DeCSS to steal a DVD; you can create a “disc image,” an exact, bit-for-bit copy, and use that to make new copies.

Oh, and:

[P]rogrammers of unauthorized DVD software are performing an interesting economic service by determining what features customers would enjoy if the capabilities of DVD players were not locked down by licensing dictates.

Wait, that’s a quadrifecta. My apologies. In any case, who is this Pegoraro guy, and how the hell did he get into print? It’s almost enough to make you think the vast IP absolutist conspiracy might be, like, fallible. Cool.

Filed under: technology

Boring open source

Spurred by Kieran Healy’s post here, Kevin Drum expresses his skepticism about open source, in unfortunately over-broad terms.

I think most of what he says in the post itself is wrong, or at least very much contrary to my experience; but passing over that, I want to respond on something he says later in the post’s comment thread:

Programmers who do Open Source mostly do it because they like coding and this stuff is cool. But most Open Source software is also an example of pure coding, not coding that requires involvement with an outside world of industry knowledge, marketing compromises, UI development, etc. etc. This is the boring stuff that will likely never be touched by Open Source, and my guess is that it’s at least 99% of the industry, maybe more.

It’s true that what I believe Kevin is talking about here—custom software written inside of corporations for internal use—does by some measure account for the vast majority of software written today. Saying that this kind of software is boring and that open source will never touch it, though. I couldn’t disagree more. At least on the second point. This is the kind of software I write, and I write it using entirely open source tools; and whenever I can, I give back things that I write that are of general utility to the community. Why?

What’s missing from the argument Kevin is making is the demand side of the equation. While it may be true that many programmers who do open source are only in it for recreational cool points (though that seems like a very anachronistic statement to me; I might have agreed 7 or 8 years ago), most users of open source are not. They are in it for the value. Not the “free as in beer” value of not having to pay the Microsoft/Adobe/whatever tax; the value that they derive from participation in an open market for the software they use. The user has the code, so she can, if it needs modification, either modify it herself (with sufficient knowledge), or pay someone else to modify it (with sufficient funds). Using open source means that you, the user, own the means of producing your own software. You are not at the mercy of a vendor. You are not caught in an upgrade cycle. Your sole supplier will not go out of business, or refuse to fix a bug that’s keeping you from doing what you need to do.

The fact is that getting the source with the software provides a huge value to the user over just getting the software. The bigger the user, the more they might need things to be done in a peculiar, local way, the bigger the value. The invisible hand of the market is hardly an impediment to open source; where the users and their money go, following the greater value, the programmers will follow. And, of course, many users are programmers themselves, who both gain value from the system and often add a little bit back; like a pyramid scheme, but, you know, not with money and stealing and going to jail.

One last point, for those who are wondering why I take this stuff so seriously. As I’ve argued before, wide use of open source software, especially in vital infrastructures of information exchange and democracy, is a necessary condition for our great-grandchildren having the same freedoms we enjoy today. Allowing anyone to examine (or pay a trusted third party to examine) the inner workings of the software that mediates our communications and activities will be the only way to preserve the transparency that exists today, when many of those things are still largely unmediated. When the question is not just “who watches the watchers”, but “who watches the watchmaker”, we as a society need the answer to be: I do.

Filed under: technology

He's ready for his closeup

Admittedly, not as much of a closeup as some.

Filed under: cats

It's George, not Karl

Just a quickie to note a great post from Political Aims on the Karl Rove Experience:

But here’s the best reason to start treating Karl like any other political hack—doing otherwise plays directly into a strategy that isolates Bush from responsibility for political dirtywork. [] There is no way that Karl Rove is the Great Oz operating everything behind the curtain while Bush just moves his lips. But if we perpetuate that almighty Rove image, Bush gets to escape questions about his own responsibility for the blatant politicization of everything from policy (choose a topic) to tragedy (the 2004 GOP convention and 9/11 tie-ins are shameless).

I couldn’t agree more. As I said way, way back in my second post ever, calling Bush a moron—as opposed to the very clever, amoral political manipulator that he is—just gives him a free pass on all of his despicable policies and behaviors. We have to stop. The man is clearly not stupid; if he were, he would not keep winning. Saying that Rove is his “brain”, that Rove is the evil mastermind and Bush just a charming bumbler, only allows Bush use “Aw shucks!” as his response to every indictment of his malevolent, deceitful, warmongering administration. He loves it when you call him stupid. It lets him off the hook.

George is the mad scientist. Karl is just his wicked little homunculus.

Filed under: politics

Blogroll expansion

I’ve just added a few sites to the blogroll which have (in most cases) long deserved it, for definitions of ‘long’ under one month or so. The rundown of newcomers:

Billmon’s Whiskey Bar – famed home of the awesome and terrifying WMD quotes list, as well—just for example—this excellent post, which nearty summarizes one of the main reasons leftists like myself find the right’s late conversion to concern for human rights to be less than convincing.

Not Geniuses – A promising, super-new, politics-oriented blog from Ezra Klein, Joe Rospars, and Matt Singer.

Kieran Healy – Creamy sociological goodness.

Three Howard Dean sites: The official blog, the unofficial blog, and the Dean Defense Forces blog. Added because, yes, surprise of surprises, I am a Dean supporter. I think he’s the only electable Democrat running. But more on that later.

Aaron Swartz – I’m not sure I was ever as smart as Aaron, though I certainly am not now. But at least I can say with confidence: I was once as young. (Strangely enough, these are exactly my feelings about Matt Yglesias.)

And last, I’ve moved Gallowglass down to the culture/unclassifiable section (you did know there were sections, right?), where the Parrots now take up residence as well.

Filed under: culture/blogs

The WMD Conundrum

Responsible people all over the world are wondering what ever happened to Iraq’s WsMD (to put it in Note-ese). Irresponsible right-wing ideologues, on the other hand, can’t be bothered to care. They like to make an argument (to see how much they like to make it, check out this insanely long Calpundit comment thread) about why it’s not a problem that we haven’t found them, which goes something like this:

1. Iraq had a weapons program and a stockpile of weapons as of 1998; Clinton said so.
2. Therefore, Iraq had the same program and stockpile in 2003.
3. We haven’t found the weapons, and should patiently wait to find them, even though:
4. We had to go to war right away to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands, and:
5. If only we had gone to war sooner, we would have found them already, and:
6. It doesn’t matter anyway, because Saddam was a Very Bad Man, and also, We Won.

The logical inconsistency of this case for blithe WMD unconcern ought to be immediately apparent. The only thing that keeps WMD apologists standing on any kind of leg, however rickety, is that they usually don’t make the whole argument at once. They stretch it out: a ‘Clinton said so too!’ here, a ‘France is to blame’ there—but that just makes them dishonest partisan hacks, not clever or right.

Here’s how I see it. There are four major possibilities:

1. Iraq had an active WMD development program at the start of the war, and significant stockpiles of weapons.
2. Iraq had significant stockpiles of weapons, but no active WMD development program to produce more weapons.
3. Iraq had an active WMD development program, but no significant stockpiles of weapons.
4. Iraq had neither an active WMD development program, nor significant stockpiles of weapons.

Bush’s public statements indicate a desire to convince the public of (1); this was our casus belli: Iraq must be prevented from giving WMD to terrorists. Bush administration officials repeatedly expressed certainty that Iraq had significant weapons and an ongoing program; which is understandable, because without at least one of those, the danger that Iraq would export weapons would be nil, and they would not get to have a war that they clearly wanted, WMD or no.

The best public evidence to date points to case (4); no weapons or production facilities have been found; no weapons were used. All public statements from Iraqis indicate no program was running, many say weapons were destroyed by 1998. But we really don’t know, and in fact, probably never could know that case (4) was the truth, since the possibility of someone finding a few hundred drums in a hole somewhere will always be non-zero. Iraq did once have at least chemical arms, and we genuinely don’t know what happened to them.

That should frighten you.

If the Bush administration was correct and (1) or (2) is the case, I see four possibilities for the situation today:

1. There really are weapons, hidden away, we haven’t found them, and no-one else has either.
2. Weapons were transported to 3rd country.
3. Weapons were given to terrorists.
4. Weapons were found by someone else, who is not likely to have good plans in mind for them.

The only one of these options that should not scare the hell out of you is option (a). In any other case, the war caused proliferation of WMD, the very thing it was supposedly fought to prevent, and so was a catastrophic failure.

Case (3) offers somewhat more hope, because program components can’t be as easily transported, and of course the program would have to be reconstituted to produce actual weapons. So if it’s (3), then I can see only this likely possibility:

1. Program constituents are hidden away, we haven’t found them yet.

This is the best-case scenario for Bush, politically, if no-one comes to the realization that empirically, we can’t tell this from any of the possibilities above; and in fact, finding the components of an active program but no weapons would make it seem much more likely that the weapons themselves had eluded us.

Lastly, case (4) . If there are no weapons and no active program, then it’s one of:

1. Bush knowingly lied.
2. Bush had a good-faith but wrong belief, and made an “innocent mistake”.
3. Bush had a good-faith, wrong belief, because he was mislead by bad intelligence or duped by advisers with “hidden” agendas.

I have no idea which of those is most likely, or which of them would be worse to imagine. However, it’s clear that case (4) is the only case in which we can be certain that no WsMD from Iraq are now in Osama’s hands, and so, this is the case I am rooting for.

Last, a question. Given the lack of positive evidence for WsMD in Iraq, on what is Bush’s often-stated certainty that they exist based?

Filed under: politics/war

Belatedly, the browser war

Stuart Robinson, a few days ago, commented on Microsoft dropping Mac IE:

There was a time when Microsoft looked set to use ISS and IE to remake the web in their proprietory image. That time is over. HTML and HTTP are staying open. Mozilla and Apache need more respect for that.

Much as I love the lizard, I don’t think Mozilla deserves all that much of the credit here. The latest Google zeitgeist has non-IE browsers in numbers easily small enough to ignore. If Microsoft’s plot to embrace and extend the web has failed—which I agree that it has, so far—I think the credit goes to, in order:

1. Apache
2. Apache
3. Linux
4. php/perl/python
5. MySQL

Apache gets two votes, because, well, Apache rules. It is fast, flexible, secure, powerful, easy to configure, and easy to extend. And free as in speech, and free as in beer. And most importantly: ubiquitous. Without Apache, MS would own the web.

Linux, the p-langs, and MySQL get votes because they are the L,M and P in LAMP. LAMP makes it possible for any nerd with $10 in his pocket to have a sophisticated web presence (well, for a month). Even non-nerds with nerd friends or money they are willing to give to nerds can very quickly find themselves running a professional-seeming operation, with little startup cost; and the common platform means that they are not tied to a specific vendor or hosting provider—and that’s why it only costs $10, and not $100, for the nerd. Open systems make free markets, and free markets make innovation, and innovation makes better mousetraps, and better mousetraps kill more mice, and everyone hates mice, right?

Filed under: technology

Copyright notes

Once again from Donna Wentworh’s Copyfight: EFF Georgia has is collecting comment from Georgia legislators on that state’s pending super-DMCA law.

I’d also like to note that I’ve received a very encouraging reply to my super-DMCA letter from one of my state (Illinois) Rep’s staffers. I’ll post more news as I get it.

In other self-referential news, I’m reposting here my comments from this discussion at Matt Rolls a Hoover. More context, and the comments themselves, below.

Update: Jeff Harrell now has the last word.

Matt writes:
bq. Jeff Harrell wrote to me to say that he has a blog and he supports absolute copyright. In fact, he’s just written a post titled An Open Letter to Matthew R. Morse. I’m flattered to receive this attention.
After reading Jeff’s letter, and previous comments in the thread, I weighed in with:
bq. I think Jeff deserves a lot of credit for forthrightly arguing for his views in a forum where he knows that his arguments are likely to get, shall we say, a very close reading.
bq. Although I disagree with Jeff, strongly, I do have sympathy for the authors’ viewpoint. I have a natural proprietary instinct towards the software that I write, and I’ve licensed my blog posts under a CC license that allows redistribution only for non-commercial purposes. I don’t want unscrupulous publishers making money off of my work, unless they give me a cut; and I don’t want unscrupulous programmers modifying my software, unless they promise to give me back the changes they make and distribute. Those constraints on others’ usage of my work would be impossible without some copyright protection.
bq. But: am I right to call that work “mine”? Jeff’s mistake, as I see it, is giving too much credence to those natural proprietary instincts. The things that I write, words or code, are not sui generis. They build, consciously or not, on the work of others. My authorial instinct may be that I own the whole product, but from a broader perspective I’m clearly just a compiler, adding a bit of myself in the choice of things compiled and in the very occasional bit of originality. My rights in my work don’t supercede the rights of those others upon whom I build. One consequence of recognizing that is accepting that my proprietary instincts are misplaced, and that “my” work belongs to the public to the same degree as the work I built it on. I am only the author of the moment, and am not entitled to special protection against some future author building on top of me.
Jeff responded, in part:
bq. Jason: another reader emailed me earlier this week to make that same basic point. The difference between artist-as-creator and artist-as-compiler is, to me, plain as day. I compare Jackson Pollack to a two-year-old. Both spatter paint on canvases to produce results that aren’t obviously different. One is art and the other error. Why? Because we recognize that artistic creations are more than merely the sum of the parts that went into constructing them.
bq. I have to say, right up front, that the very implication that anything a person creates with his own hands and mind belongs rightfully to “the public” bewilders and disappoints me. It belongs to the creator until the creator cedes it over to this imaginary thing that we call the “public domain.”
So far (6pm central, 6/13), I have the last word:
bq. “The difference between artist-as-creator and artist-as-compiler is, to me, plain as day.”
bq. I think that may be one central point of disagreement from which many little disagreements radiate. I don’t see this distinction as black-and-white at all. There is a continuum between, say, a Cliffs Notes author, on the one hand, and James Joyce on the other. But in either case, the author is not creating out of nothing. He owes a debt to his predecessors; a debt he pays by giving to his successors the same thing he got: the freedom to take a piece from the work that came before, and create something new with it.
It’s always good to butt rhetorical heads with a smart opponent who holds strong views opposed to one’s own, so I’d like to thank Jeff again for starting the discussion, and Matt for encouraging it, and hope it continues.
Here’s an email I got from Jeff today, posted with permission:
bq. On the subject of degrees of originality, I think we’re mostly saying
the same basic thing, but going in a different direction with it. My
point is this: some works are devoid of the creation act. An example I
used elsewhere was the two-year-old who splatters paint at random
because it’s fun to do so. The resulting object might look a bit like a
Jackson Pollack, but it’s not a work of art. It’s not the product of an
act of creation. It’s a by-product, an incidental.
bq. Setting aside for a moment those works that do not result from the
creation act, any given work is going to have a degree of originality.
The degree may be relatively high (“Ulysses”) or somewhat less so (“The
Magnificent Seven,” which was a retelling of “The Seven Samurai”), but
every work that is deliberately created has an aspect of originality to
it.
bq. I say that the degree of originality is irrelevant to the creator’s
dominion over the work. If somebody sits down and writes a play about a
prince who attempts to avenge his father’s death and comes to a tragic
end, he’s got just as much right over that creation as Shakespeare had
over “Hamlet.” Because that plot is an idea, and as any writer,
amateur or professional, knows, ideas come from outside. Nobody knows
where ideas come from, exactly, but they do not come from within.
Anybody who believes he actually comes up with his own ideas is guilty
of hubris, and is, as they say, Asking For It.
bq. But between idea and work itself is expression. Taking an idea—be it a
plot, or a melody, or an emotion—and transforming it into a work is an
act of creation, and the end result of that act is an expression of the
idea or ideas that went into it.
bq. Ideas cannot be owned. They flit around our heads like invisible
sprites. They enter and exit our brains at will, their will, not
ours. You can no more own an idea than you can own a butterfly.
bq. But works works are sacrosanct.
bq. Does a creator owe a debt of gratitude to those who have aided,
instructed, and inspired him? Of course! Must that debt be settled
through indentured servitude? I say no. When I write a book that
inspires someone to go off and write his own book, that individual owes
me nothing. I welcome his acknowledgment. I accept his gratitude. I do
not demand anything, and neither should anyone else. And most
especially nor should “society,” this polite fiction we endure solely
because it momentarily suits our purposes to.
bq. In this discussion, we must not confuse inspiration with exploitation.
If you read my words and are inspired by them, that makes me happy, a
bit, but ultimately doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. But if
you read my words and then take them and claim them to be your own, you
have stolen something from me as surely as if you had come into my
house and taken the gold from my purse.
bq. To appropriate a character, or a piece of dialogue, or a descriptive
passage these things are wrong. To reproduce a work without
permission, whether or profit or whimsy or to satisfy your own
avarice these things are wrong. They are acts of theft, pure and
simple.
Lots there to ponder, so I think Jeff will have the last word for a while.
(Jeff’s comments belong to Jeff, and Matt’s to Matt, and are not included in the Creative Commons license that covers the rest of this site)

Filed under: copyright

Today's active lifestyle

Linus is an excitable young man.

He has numerous interests including eating the food that the people eat, opening drawers, and running furiously from room to room. He enjoys all of the major sports, from ankle biting to hunting the little spots of red light that live on the wall. If he has a personal motto, it would have to be “mraaaaaaaaaaaaaaow!”

In his workday role as ‘catsbody’ to the Professor, he assists in important research into the best places to sleep, and performs essential daily testing of the continued deliciousness of milk. But he’s not satisfied with second fiddle: his career is going places, maybe even to the back porch.

Linus: living today’s active lifestyle, and loving it!

Filed under: cats

From the unsurprising comments file

Fantastically wrongheaded ideas on intellectual property? Must be a representative of the RIAA*. On Newshour’s Copyright Conundrum, Matt Oppenheim speaks:

Intellectual property should not be treated any differently than other property.

The US Constitution says different.

From an ethical perspective, when individuals engage in illegal copying, they are taking money out of the pockets of all of the people who have put their hard work into making the music.

This makes no sense. From an “ethical perspective [] they are taking money”? Meaningless. Either you are actually taking money, or not. There’s no perspective involved. Flailing appeals to ethics don’t make the RIAA‘s case that downloading equals lost sales any stronger on the facts.

The DMCA Anti-Circumvention provision is not intended to stifle technological innovation. Indeed, it is intended to spur it on by creating and protecting business markets for new technologies.

The DMCA is all about stifling technology in defense of established markets. To suggest that somehow restricting research into cryptography will “spur” innovation in cryptography is ridiculous.

No, [it is not legal to make and distribute (not for personal profit), to my friends and non-commercially, “mix CDs” that contain compilations of music from my personal collection?]

Wow—mix tapes are illegal? No, wait—mix tapes are legal, but mix CDs are not! Whatever.

Just as you would not go into a video store and steal a DVD copy of Star Wars and claim that you should be permitted to do that because you own the VHS version, you cannot download somebody else’s copy of a recording.

For the last time—well, no. It won’t be the last time. So, again: physical property can be stolen in this way. Intellectual property can not. You can’t steal a DiVX of Star Wars the way you can steal a DVD of Star Wars, because when you take a copy of the DiVX, the original DiVX remains. Isn’t that the whole basis of the RIAA‘s contention that digital copies are worse than regular copies? You can’t have it both ways: either a digital copy is an object that you can steal, or a digital copy is a spooky computer ghost thingy that can be infinitely replicated without the original being removed,—and therefore, can’t be stolen. Pick one.

To date, nobody has suggested that copy control technologies have locked up a work that should be in the public domain.

Because nothing is going to enter the public domain again until 2019, maybe?

* Or the MPAA. Wouldn't want to appear to discriminate.

Filed under: copyright

A little behind

SCO.

I haven’t blogged about them, because I have nothing much to offer besides invective, of which there is already plenty to go around.

Professor Felten, thought, has an important point in a post from yesterday:

Conventional wisdom about the SCO/IBM dustup is that it demonstrates a serious flaw in the open-source model—an asserted lack of “quality control” on open-source code that leaves end users open to potential copyright and patent infringement suits. If any pimply-faced teenager can contribute code to open-source projects, how can you be sure that that code isn’t copyrighted or patented by somebody?

Assuming that SCO’s charges are correct, the moral of the story is not, as the conventional wisdom would have it, to avoid software that comes from pimply-faced teenagers. Quite the contrary. The moral is to be wary of software from big, established companies like IBM. In SCO’s story, the pimply-faced teenagers are bystanders – the gray-haired guys in expensive suits are the crooks.

I agree. Whatever happens in this case strengthens the argument for the use of free software.

If SCO loses, they will lose at least in part because Linux is open for examination by anyone, and this means there is an army of a million eyeballs to examine their claims. If SCO were to complain about a proprietary product, there would be no such army.

And even if SCO wins, even if their claim to a whopping 0.003% of the kernel is upheld, and even if they are somehow granted ownership control of the whole kernel as a result, and then proceed to declare that they will not ship any more Linux and Linux is dead, the position of Linux users is secure. Especially enterprise users—because what makes our position secure is our ability to work on the code ourselves, or pay others to do so, in secret if need be. To put it in Marxian terms, we own the factory, not a widget. We can make more widgets, and whatever SCO says or does, we will keep that power, until they send the lawyers to each and every one of us to pry the keyboards from our cold, dead hands.

Filed under: technology/linux

Dean in Austin, the Note

Drawing 3000 people to a campaign event this early in the season is extraordinary. Must have been the power of the new blog. Ok, not really. In any case, there’s a detailed first-person writeup of the rally on the excellently named Burnt Orange Report.

Equally important—no kdding—is this blurb from ABC‘s Note:

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Howard Dean might win both Iowa and New Hampshire; Howard Dean is the only major candidate in the race who talks like both a governor AND a real person from outside Washington; Howard Dean is really using the Internet to fundraise and organize (It ain’t just hype … .); Howard Dean connects regularly with Democratic audiences in a way that the others can do only sporadically; Howard Dean has a long record of policy thoughtfulness and a capacity to connect it to the real lives of real people that governors do best (and is, dare we say it, Clintonesque) ; and he evinces real anger at George Bush’s polices.

The dirty little (not-so) secret of political strategists of both parties is how hard it is to get people interested in, and emotional about, politics. Howard Dean is doing that, and he is bringing new (and young) people into the process. In a crowded field, that is a good thing.

The Note is, as the Trent Lott bigot eruption showed, enormously influential. Let me get out ahead of the curve for a moment and declare that the Note is the David Broder of the coming generation. I mean that in a postive, center-of-political-consensus kind of way, not a negative, mealy-mouthed-apologist-for-the-mighty kind of way. If the Note thinks Dean can win, Dean can win. And since the major knock against Dean is that he’s a “longshot” (or lately “unelectable”), well

Filed under: politics/2004

1 hour down, 2 years to go

On the one hand, playing a nearly perfect game like The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is a great thing. On the other hand, eventually you finish, and then you realize that even under the best case scenario, you’re SoZ for a good two years plus. Even with F. and my habit of extremely slow play, that winds up with an anticipation to fun ratio of about 12:1.

Granted, movie series are far worse: years of waiting for 90 minutes of feeling like this one isn’t quite up to the standard set by the last one. And books; will the next volume in A Song of Ice and Fire ever come out? In fact, for nearly every cultural or computational product I enjoy, the gaps spent waiting for the next one in line and imagining how cool it will be when it finally gets here are a lot longer than the amount of time actually spent enjoying the product.

I guess the moral here is: kids, don’t be an obsessive nerd.

Filed under: culture/games

Professor B., feline hypnotist

You are under my power. You will visit my weblog. You will leave a comment telling me that I am cuter and better behaved than this guy.

You will also bring me some food. In fact, forget the weblog, just bring the food.

Filed under: cats

Two fish, a barrel, and no smoking gun

Mona Charen has never been one to resist a pull on the administration hip flask. Bob Somerby has been—incomparably—on her case for years at the Daily Howler. But let’s see what she has to say today.

That Iraq once possessed these weapons is not in dispute. Are we to believe that Saddam destroyed them voluntarily but refused to provide proof of that destruction to the United Nations even as U.S. and British forces massed on his border? He knew that proof of the weapons’ destruction would avoid the war and his own removal.

Surely it is obvious that only three scenarios are possible. 1) Saddam secreted the weapons to Syria or some other country. 2) Saddam hid the weapons extremely well, and they will be found eventually. 3) Saddam destroyed the weapons at the last minute before the war began.

That’s my emphasis. All I have to say about that is, Charen should watch more CNN. And get a better psychic.

Turning to her three possible scenarios. Those are indeed three of the possible scenarios. Allow me to suggest a one more:

4) Saddam destroyed his weapon stocks sometime in the last 12 years, but kept baiting the inspectors because fear of his weapons programs was just as effective at keeping in place the sanctions regime (which benefited him personally while destroying the lives of his people), and keeping his neighbors afraid, as real weapons would have been. Bush and his merry men misread this situation, willfully or not, driven by a preconceived desire to oust Saddam; a desire which had been burning since the end of Gulf War I; a desire now inflamed by their feeling that to cow the terror-breeding Arab world would require the US knocking off a bigger target than Afghanistan. However, “we need to whack the Arabs a good one so they are more afraid of us killing them than they are afraid to die while killing us” was clearly not a tune that even the Rovian Wurlitzer could carry. So, for reasons of marketing, and perhaps bureaucracy as Wolfowitz has said, BushCo descended upon the threat of Saddam’s mighty WMD arsenal as the cassus belli of record for a war they wanted anyway. And now, we own Iraq, but have found no weapons, and the drive to war has been revealed as the fraud it was: either the weapons aren’t there, or they’re cached so deeply as to be useless, or they were there, and are now in the hands of who-knows-who, exactly the situation the war was supposedly fought to prevent. The fact that the search has been so lackluster ought to make it clear that even the administration itself does not now, and has never, truly taken seriously their own claims about the presence of WMDs in Iraq. Because if they were there, and we haven’t found them because somebody else found them first, then we are well and truly boned. “Bush lied” is the best scenario for everyone—even Bush.

Second barrel-dweller: U.S. Rep. Mike Ferguson, R-New Jersey, who, according to The Express Times:
bq. blamed the failure to find forbidden large caches of weapons of mass destruction upon anti-war demonstrators in the United States and anti-war leaders in Europe.
bq. Public protests and objections filed by U.S. allies at the United Nations delayed the American invasion, Ferguson declared. The setbacks may have allowed Hussein to spirit some of his forbidden arms out of Iraq, the congressman claimed.
bq. “Had we had an opportunity to go into Iraq when the president originally wanted to, this process might have been much easier,” Ferguson said. “But because of the months of delay caused by a few people here at home and some of our allies in France and Russia, it gave Saddam Hussein several months to hide and conceal this program That delay that they caused may have given Saddam Hussein time to get some of those weapons out of the country.”
Funny, I would have thought that with all of those spy satellite dealies that can spot suspicious trucks moving around suspicious buildings from way up in the sky, and all those helpful guys from the INC just itching to get us on Saddam’s ass, someone would have noticed all of this weapon moving sometime when it was actually happening. Would have made a great line for a determined and resolute President to bring out: “He’s moving the weapons he says he doesn’t have!”
And which of Iraq’s neighbors, exactly, was on such good terms with Mr. Hussein that he would trust them with his arsenal, anyway?
Not that reason has ever slowed the Republican spin machine, so expect this one to make the full rounds soon. “No WMDs? Blame France!”—coming soon to a Mona Charen column near you.

Filed under: politics/war

Smoking gun followup

Bush addressing the troops:

“We’re on the look. We’ll reveal the truth,” Bush said, without specifically promising weapons would be found. “But one thing is certain: no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime because the Iraqi regime is no more.”

Right. Unless the weapons really were there, and the terrorists found them first. The only way he can make this claim with any confidence is if he knows that there were never any weapons to find. Either that, or he’s hanging a whole lot on a tight reading of the word ‘from’.

Filed under: politics/war

"Electable"

Democrats are right to be concerned about which of our candidates is the most electable. But what does “electable” mean?

It means: the one who will get more votes than Bush, and enough more this time that Scalia can’t get involved. Beyond that, I’ve tried to come up with my own clever and insightful critique of the received wisdom about who is electable and who isn’t, but I can’t do any better than this Tom Tommorrow cartoon.

Filed under: politics/2004

Annoyance meter creeps into red

Like every rational being, I love CalPundit and frequently agree with Kevin Drum, or at least, am not instantly, scathingly annoyed with the things he says. On the other hand

On the other hand, as much as I like Dean’s message and his charisma, I keep reminding myself that his opposition to the war and his lack of credibility on national security make him unelectable. Maybe that’s not fair, but I’d like a Democrat to win the presidency in 2004, and I’m very skeptical that Dean can beat Bush.

For once, I am scathingly annoyed. And disheartened. Because, if you have been paying attention to the events of the last 3 months, then you must know that Dean is tougher on national security than Bush.

Why?

1. Dean did not support the war against Iraq, a war that—whatever its benefit for the Iraqis—has clearly not been of any benefit to us. There are no WMDs, Iraq was never a threat to America, and so whatever blowback or instability has been wrought by our adventurism has come with no compensatory security gains whatsoever.
2. Dean supports giving firefighters, police, and other first responders—and the cities where they live—the money they need to protect us. And themselves.
3. Dean will keep our troops in Iraq for long enough to clean up the mess we made and leave a decent, safe, and civil society when they go.
4. Dean takes Afghanistan seriously—unlike Bush.
5. Dean takes North Korea seriously—unlike Bush.
6. Dean takes Al-Qaeda seriously—unlike Bush.
7. Dean understands that some problems require the help of allies, and can not be solved by unilateral JDAMmage. Need I say, unlike Bush?

If you can clear your mind for a moment of dizzying Bush spin, you will see that opposition to the Iraq war is in no way incompatible with a credible, strong security posture. The fact that even really smart and thoughtful people with really nice cats can’t see that just demonstrates how deeply that spin has, uh, spun, our national discourse. And that’s why I’m annoyed, and disheartened.

Filed under: politics

Quick copyright links

Via Donna Wentworth’s invaluable Copyfight—

• Adina Levin tells the tale of EFF Austin vs. MPAA, which has a happy ending.
• Professor Lessig is circulating a petition with the aim of getting a hearing in Congress for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. Go sign it.

Filed under: copyright

Liberals and markets

Kevin Drum has a worthy post tonight on free markets, which has got me thinking. A little while ago, I brought up a quote from Eric S. Raymond where he says, to paraphrase, liberals are idiots (and possibly evil) because they don’t believe in free markets or individual liberty, and don’t care about international human rights issues like the status of women in places where that status is extremely, extremely bad.

That’s bunk, of course. But conspicuously absent from my response was a defense of liberals as advocates of free markets. Absent not because I personally am anti-free market, nor because I think liberals, or liberalism, are anti-free market, but because I think the free markets that liberals believe in are substantially different than those libertarians and conservatives believe in.

Markets are non synonymous with the exchange of money. Obviously, this is not a new or “liberal” idea; the point is that many people who otherwise understand this, and talk intelligently about the marketplace of ideas for example, don’t follow it through to its logical conclusion. Which is, I would argue, that if markets mean more than money, then the metric by which a market’s freedom is measured may not be the level of government involvement in the economic aspects of that market.

The example on my mind is, naturally, the media market. The three Republican members of the FCC voted today to institute new rules that will allow increased media consolidation, thus clearly making the media market more oligopolistic and less free. The fact that these rules also make the business of media less regulated is entirely beside the point, because the metric of freedom in the media market is the freedom to speak and hear, not the freedom to buy and sell.

Filed under: politics

Basement historian

From the amusing found objects file, "The World's Greatest Newspaper" (link opens in new window), circa 1938.

I particularly like the classifieds, which you can see in the second image. For those too afear'd of 80k of jpegs, here's an excerpt:

HELP WANTED--MEN

LIQUOR CLERK-YOUNG MAN: GOOD SALARY: must have surety bond. Mur Ann Liquor Stores, 11 S. Kedzie av., 12-4 p. m.

MAN--MUST BE RESPONSIBLE to manage retail liquor store: refs will be investigated. Address O A 287, Tribune

Employment law was little different back in the day.

Filed under: culture