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Via Infectious Greed, a great little piece from the Boston Globe The iPod’s dirty little secret.

IT USED TO BE EASIER to judge people unfairly. A cursory scan of their record collection revealed secrets. Telltale copies of REO Speedwagon’s ”Hi Infidelity” were known to wither budding relationships overnight. Soul-deep conversation and physical attraction could not compensate for the nagging doubt planted by ”Frampton Comes Alive.” ”I must have been really drunk at the time” did not explain away Air Supply’s ”Greatest Hits.”

[...]

No condominium in 1989 was considered furnished without a 6-foot-tall, 72-CD capacity rack made of spiraling wrought iron. From top to bottom, they read like psychological profiles. Unlike rifling through a medicine cabinet, there was no guilt associated with this kind of examination. Demure, born-again type has ”Cat Scratch Fever”? Check exit accessibility. Self-proclaimed jazz aficionado’s ”Kind of Blue” still shrink-wrapped? File under ”fraud who favors Kenny G.”

And it was about more than content. CDs in alphabetical order, sorted by genre, haphazardly placed, without jewel cases - they sounded out a person before a note played.

Yes, bookshelves similarly serve as portals into personalities, but they often mislead. Required-reading college books with uncracked spines, for example, say nothing about a person’s true habits (though ”Finnegans Wake” does look lovely against distressed pine).

CD choices seemed less calculated, more telling, and because they were clunky and costly, the average collection was small enough to make a quick verdict feasible. But iPod has changed the rules. Its storage capacity, up to 5,000 songs, allows consumers to mix whims and impulses with commitments. At 99 cents a track, everything is disposable, nothing has to matter. It is a jumble out there.

For your psychoanalyzing pleasure here’s a photograph of most of my CD collection during the great study relocation project of last Sunday. The Vinyl collection is still hiding in a cupboard, waiting for turntables to make a comeback… to our house.

And (to make a Hi Fidelity riff) the top 5 played songs on my iPod (normalised to exclude accidentally-repeated-until-battery-death-iPod-madness songs):

1. Scissor Sisters’ Laura
2. Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence (Reinterpreted)
3. Bent’s I Can’t Believe It’s Over
4. Visage’s Fade To Grey (Extended)
5. Sia’s Breathe Me

Welcome back Mr Ed.

HackNot!

I’ve been linked to from a scuba diving site.

I have a secret and completely unrealistic desire to be a games programmer.

I’ve messed around making simple games in OpenGL and DirectX without ever being inspired enough to take them to a level where they are usable by people who aren’t me. My interest pre-dates my time working with flight and tactical environment simulation engines to when a friend and I used to spend our afternoons and weekends peer-programming games in Basic and Assember with the 2D drawing primitives available on a Vic 20 with a Super Expander and Apple II.

I read the IGDA newsletter and I trawl a variety of game development-related sites. It’ll never happen to me. It’s not an impossible dream, but the wide-eyed respect I have for some games and game developers is tempered by cold reality — or should that be — annealed by hot steaming reality?

Number 1 on the list of “advocacy” issues on the IGDA site is “Quality of life” and there are plenty of war stories around about burnout and professional slavery at game development studios. A problem with wanting to be a game designer/developer in Australia is that, with a few exceptions, game development means writing gambling-related software. It’ll never happen to me.

Bad me! I hadn’t noticed this until today.

The Australian Federal Attorney-General’s Department has an issues paper out examining fair use of copyrighted material. The lack of liberal fair use provisions in Australian copyright law are what prevent us from recording television programs and ripping CDs to listen to them on our computers or iPods like they do in the USA. Many Australians presume that because video broadcast recording equipment, iPods and CD ripping software are available here, that all of the modes of use — including format- and time-shifting — must be legal. They’re not.

The press release is promising

The review will examine whether an exception or specific exceptions to copyright based on principles of ‘fair use’ should be adopted to make copyright law more flexible and relevant in the digital age.

“The Government is aware developments in digital technology are changing the way people use copyright material,” Mr Ruddock said.

“Many Australians believe quite reasonably they should be able to record a television program or format-shift music from their own CD to an iPod or MP3 player without infringing copyright law. However, this issue needs careful consideration,” he said.

Australia’s copyright law presently exists in some alternate reality that may never affect video-tapers and personal CD-rippers, but that’s no reason to leave the law alone. I see three approaches to this disparity — ignore it and hope it will fix itself; prosecute 90% of the population of Australia; or fix the law. I think fixing the law is a *good idea*.

The A-G’s paper provides an opportunity to make Australia’s copyright law a little more favourable to consumers of copyright materials. It’s important to vote with your pen because I presume there are many companies and industry associations putting the case for the status quo, and better enforcement of the current laws.

Apart from allowing for video taping and converting your CDs to digital file format there’s some food for thought about whether current fair dealing definitions are wide enough to provide bloggers with legal latitude for using copyrighted works. The Australian Copyright Act restricts itself to providing rights to copyright users when reproducing copyrighted works for review, criticism, reasearch, study, news reporting, or as a part of professional advice given by various types of attorney.

Bloggers often use copyrighted works to enhance a point, rather than to produce news or criticism. I doubt that a court would spend much time listening to you argue that you used a copyrighted work as research for something your inner sock-puppet was going to say.

Copyright law needs to be made flexible enough to allow anyone to reproduce excerpts of other works if that use is reasonable. I can’t think of a good definition of “reasonable” off the top of my head… but I’ll try and come up with something for my submission.

The issues paper “Fair Use and Other Copyright Exceptions An examination of fair use, fair dealing and other exceptions in the Digital Age” is here. Instructions on sending submissions are on page 37.

Please consider reading and responding to this paper.

* Update: Chris at TIS has blogged about the same thing at the same time. There’s something in the water I swear.

When I first went to YubNub, I thought it was kind of gimmicky.

“A social command line for the web” sounds like a del.icio.us, Yahoo! personals and Linux ubergeek mashup that would last for about 2 seconds of my Internet attention span.

I found myself drawn in by what people care enough about to set up Yubnub commands. Just look at this stuff:

tts I want to record a record
(Invoke text to speech from AT&T labs on a sentence that’s easy for TTS to screw up)

wikip buggles
(search Wikipedia for buggles)

man ascii
(Display the manpage for ascii)

There’s some mileage in being able to almost roll your own Ninja Google command qualifiers.

Install the Firefox search engine plugin today.

Really, I’ve never had a *bad* job. There have been bad parts to all of my jobs, but I think I’ll focus on my history of menial work instead of the time I worked for gambling, alcoholic, habitual absentees.

In my youth I was designated child responsible for the chopping and carrying of wood. This was an important role because our house had wood-fire-powered everything. I’m sure that if they were still sold in commercial quantities we would have owned a wood-powered car. We had slow combustion heaters and a slow combustion stove that acted in the role of oven, stove and cameoed as our sole source of hot water. There’s nothing that motivates you to get out of the house more than a 35 degree (celcius) day when the stove has to be stoked up for a couple of hours so that we could have hot showers that night.

However, It was the cold days that hurt most. Snow, frost, sleet, rain - when we ran out of wood it was my duty to chop, carry and stack.

Within six months of leaving home for university mum and dad ripped out all of the wood-powered stuff and bought gas-powered replacements. Whenever this comes up in conversation I smile pleasantly and move on.

I was also security guy at a local Fosseys store during high school. That was good for the kind of money I needed to fund my motor scooter and C64 game habits, but a little mind numbing. My usual duties were to tidy stuff up, count things as they were delivered and compare the numbers to mysterious printed reports, give customers directions to stuff and look busy. After failing to look busy enough a couple of times I was given a badge that said “Security” and stood out the front of the store to smile pleasantly and look inside bags. No touching of people or bags was permitted. Security work was a delicate matter.

At the other end of the scale is the *best menial job I evah had*. During university I got a job at a large Sydney law firm as a … wait for it … fax operator. That’s right.

My job was to:

1. Work out who incoming faxes were for. Clip all of the pages together. Phone the intended recipient’s assistant and ask them if they wanted someone (else) to deliver it, or if I should just place it into their pigeon hole for later delivery by the mail room
2. Receive sheafs of documents from the firm’s solicitors with notes on who to send them to. Either dial the fax numbers on the note, or look them up in the pile of international fax directories provided
3. Examine the 15th storey, 200 degree unobstructed view of Sydney harbour
4. Replace toner and call the manufacturer if any of the six fax machines broke

Sure that sounds hard, but the machinery provided to me was more than capable. These were top of the line for 1987-1988. The Rolls Royce, the Alan Bond, the Christopher Skase of fax technology. My babies had touchtone dial, comprehensive error reporting and job logging, big trays, 9600 baud, huge toner reserves and racing stripes. Sure the photocopier guy next door had bigger gear than me, but I was wired to a world of communication he couldn’t hope to understand. He had all that Gutenberg could offer while I had the lovechild of Gutenberg, Marconi and Samuel Morse at my beck and call.

The most challenging part of the job was figuring out when you had been given a telephone instead of a fax number and interpreting international ring tones (what were the French thinking?). Perhaps that’s where my interest in telecommunications comes from?

My employers didn’t care much whether I looked busy or not, so long as I smiled pleasantly and faxes were fax-operated upon competently. This was fortunate because I started a few days before Christmas, and a few days after Christmas the courts shut down and 99% of the solicitors in the office were suddenly on vacation. This left me with just about nothing to do. Often I was so busy I was only able to read one novel a day.

Eventually the pace picked up again. Sadly I had to hand my stable of 6 fax machines over to an apprentice and return to university.

Oblogation: What you’re under when someone asks you to write about something on your blog.

The problem I have with the book meme I foisted upon Chris at TIS is the scale of chain mail expansion. With each person in the meme tagging five other people, it’s not long before my entire blogging audience is consumed in memeness. I’m not even finished with my previous meme obligations.

I’m sure it’s all a plot by Amazon to spritz their flagging Google ranking.

My book reading has slowed down significantly since I became an Internet devotee, so forgive the ancient history.

Total number of books owned

In our house there are approximately 1000 books. When we lived in a 12-foot wide terrace we were quite ruthless in our book culling, so we’re probably down a couple of hundred from par.

Last book bought

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell By Susanna Clarke which I’m quite enjoying reading, but I’ve been distracted with some other projects. It’s on my bedside table, half read.

Last book read

Like Girtby, the last book I read was actually a kids book (hmm this will be a challenge for Amazon… or not) The Three Robbers by Tomi Ungerer.

The last book I read to myself without my lips moving (much) was Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. A feat of genius. A swashbuckling (Arr!) historical masterpiece. It only suffers from one thing — that a friend put his finger on — Neal Stephenson writes like he doesn’t know how to end a book. I’m sure he gets close to page 1000 and thinks “Oh shit, I had better kill off a Shaftoe and tie it all up so I can get my advance.”

Before reading Cryptonomicon I read Quicksilver, and before that I read Gleick’s must-read Isaac Newton biography. Astute readers will note the breadcrumbs I have been following. I have The System of the World and The Confusion sitting on the bedside table — my input queue.

Five books that mean a lot to you

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

Haldeman is an Astronomer, drafted into the US Army to serve in Vietnam. He says that even today little pieces of shrapnel work their way out of his body. Most of Haldeman’s work is best viewed through the lens of his Vietnam experience.

Forever War, like most of Haldeman’s Sci-Fi, is an anti-war story. It has been widely interpreted as a reaction to Heinlein’s glorification of war in Starship Troopers, but I doubt it. Forever war has some nice hard (for the time) Sci-Fi ideas such as fighting a war that takes hundreds or thousands of years to reach the enemy, only to discover that their technology has advanced hundreds of years beyond yours by the time you engage.

In order to cram more than my allocated 5 books into the list I put what I think the most popular Haldeman novel in the list, rather than what I consider his most interesting and though provoking — Buying Time (or The Long habit of Living as it was known in Australia). I believe it is out of print, and my copy is still on loan to someone I haven’t seen in 10 years.

Lyonesse — Suldrun’s Garden by Jack Vance

Lyonesse is a fairy tale for grown ups. An intriguing and often heart-wrenching plot. Incidental features of the trilogy include strong references to Arthurian legends (it’s set in approximately Arthurian times) and a system of magic humourously administered by language lawyer sandestins.

I was hooked on Jack Vance from the moment I read the Dying Earth books, particularly the very funny Cugel’s Saga.

It seems Jack Vance always stayed well away from public relations machinery, so not a lot was known about him, but some interesting bios have surfaced recently (e.g. here and here. The wife of another science fiction writer on my list once told me that Jack Vance’s eyesight had been failing for years and that before Lyonesse he had almost completely lost his vision. Jack used a special typewriter that one of his children modified for him, with different shaped objects glued to the keys. His wife proofreads and edits the text.

The Dispossessed, by Ursula K LeGuinn

A difficult book to get into, but very rewarding. A fascinating journey into a very alien culture — Anarchism — with big picture ideas about culture and humanity. I first read The Dispossessed after finishing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which provides interesting contrast. I read that John Quiggin was re-reading it recently.

Honourable mentions for Lathe of Heaven, and The Left Hand of Darkness.

Managing the Software Process, Watts Humphrey

This was my introduction to software process metrics, CMM and *good practice*. While it was a valuable book at the time, it is now quite dated. It was after I made fun of the strange names of the process luminaries of the day (Watts Humphrey, Grady Booch, Walker Royce) that Mr Rohan started calling me by my adopted process luminary name: Sprinter.

Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications (1st Edition), Grady Booch

This book was my OO methodology bible on my first OO job. Sure it was missing any description of methodology and just headed straight in there with OOD in a kind of… YOU ARE FEELING VERY SLEEPY! YOU CAN FORGET THE OOA PART AND SKIP STRAIGHT TO THE SECTION ON OOD AS REALLY THIS IDEA OF OOA IS KINDA BORING AND UNNECESSARY ANYWAY. OOD’S WHERE THE KOOL KIDS HANG! ALSO HAVE YOU NOTICED MY COMPANY SELLS C++ COMPONENT LIBRARIES AND A CLOUD DRAWING APPLICATION?… Anyway, for our project we stole Ivar Jacobson’s use cases, some Firesmith and then patched it all up with some Rumbaugh and called it Booch Methodology.

Nothing scares defense people like software documented with pictures of clouds. Particularly when you show clouds inside and *outside* of subsystem boxes. Defense people want the smoke to remain *inside* the boxes, or even better, for there to not be any smoke at all.

But I digress. Let’s just say I agree with the Amazon.com reviewer who titled their review “[4 out of 5 stars] Overrated somewhat dated book of great historical importance.”

Runners up: The Bible, some Shakespeare (even better, Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human) and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Tag FiveTwo people

In what’s left unmemed in my hemisphere of the blogosphere I tag:

• OddThinking
• Sunny @ the superbly titled USS Quad Damage

Secret Ballots Bad!

SARAH CLARKE: Japan’s rejected the report’s findings, claiming it’s a standard allegation that ignores real science and is aimed at misinforming the public.

But the report’s release is clearly timed to coincide with next week’s International Whaling Commission meeting in South Korea, where Japan will push to overturn a moratorium on commercial whaling.

While it may not be successful, Australia’s concerned Japan will push to introduce secret ballots - a move Environment Minister Ian Campbell says would undermine the accountability of the Commission, and eventually help in Japan’s pro-whaling cause.

IAN CAMPBELL: Their goal is to go out and destroy more whales with grenades, destroy more whales, blowing them up. They want to go from the hundreds that are taken now, to thousands and we’re trying to stop them, and they figure that secret ballots is a way to try to make that easier.

Are they going to work for conservation, are they going to work for the future of the world’s environment or are they going to quietly, behind closed doors in a secret ballot, vote to explode, put more explosives inside these innocent whales?

Secret Ballots Good!

[...]

Secret ballots provide a fair, effective and simple process for determining whether a group of employees want to take industrial action. The secret ballot process will create and protect jobs by preventing unnecessary strikes. It will ensure that the right to protected industrial action is not abused by union officials pushing agendas unrelated to the workers at the workplace concerned.

[...]

Secret ballot arrangements exist in Canada, Japan, Germany and Ireland and have existed in the UK since 1984. When the Blair Government amended the U.K. laws it retained secret ballots which, in conjunction with other reforms, have helped to significantly reduce strikes whilst giving union members a direct say in the authorisation of industrial action and encouraging consultation by unions of their members.

To work?

Making things people love alongside other people who are motivated to make things people love.

There’s nothing better than working on a project where you have a clear idea of what your customers want, with easy communication with people who can tell you what they expect, and almost enough resources to make it all happen smoothly. It doesn’t often come together like this, but when it does it’s magic.

I once declared that I’d rather resign than work on a project that used a dongle. It’s the dilemma of software engineering that your end-users aren’t always motivated by the same things as your stakeholders. Rights management technology usually makes management happy and your customers unhappy.

I don’t think I’d actually resign if I had to work on such a project, but I wouldn’t be very motivated.

To live?

Love of my family and friends is what I live for.

That truthful, yet soppy and schmaltzy explanation makes me uncomfortable enough to require a good distraction. Hey! Look down here, it’s a random walk through another nicely observed description of love…

Mr Ed has taken HackNot down. There is no word on when, or whether, HackNot will return.

Via Brad Delong & Rising Hegemon: Asian Labour News’ new Big Mac Index compares countries by the length of time McDonalds counter staff need to work before they can afford a Big Mac from their own place of work.

* Australia: 14 to 21 minutes (depending on age)
* Philippines: 2 hours 21 minutes