Posts

Tue, Aug 3, 2004

What follows below is the text of an email that I sent to John Kerry today trying to get his response on the IICA act and on general copyright policy issues. One of the things that has driven the American economy over the past decade is the relentless advance of technology. Much of this technology was conceived and developed by the people who understand it best, the technologists. Recently, Congress has seen fit to intervene in this progress by proposing restrictions on the development of technology.

Thu, Jul 1, 2004

So I lied about the complete autopilot. I just gotta do a shout-out to IBM’s service division and how much they rock. My laptop started to go on the fritz on Friday morning. On saturday I called them and was informed that my main board was probably dead. A box showed up Tuesday for me to send the laptop back in, and the fixed laptop was returned today. That’s amazing. Not even a 48 hour turnaround for repair.

Thu, Jul 1, 2004

Starting today, this weblog and server will be on autopilot for the next month or so. I’m leaving tomorrow around 4am for the 22 hour drive from Pittsburgh to Austin. Then, on the 10th, I get married and go on a honeymoon and come back sometime near the end of the month. If for some reason my cable modem dies or my WRT54G goes gimpy, both of which seem to happen whenever I leave town, the server will be dead for a while.

Sun, Jun 27, 2004

While searching for information related to the INDUCE/IICA act on Thomas, I began to wonder, why not make a more flexible architecture for it. Ideally I’d like to see something like RSS Government, read on to see what I mean. RSS Government (or Atom Government, for those of that persuasion) would provide a method to subscribe to RSS feeds about action in the house and senate. Not only would it allow you to subscribe to the overall feed, but also for a particular bill.

Fri, Jun 25, 2004

Pennsylvania’s senior senator, the moderate Arlen Specter, is on the Senate Judiciary Committee. As such, he can be a valuable ally in destroying this horrible bill. What follows is a copy of the letter I sent him. The Honorable Senator Arlen Specter 711 Hart Building Washington, DC 20510 Dear Senator Specter: On June 22nd, 2004, Senator Orrin Hatch introduced the “Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act of 2004” (S. 2560) which has since been sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
IBM DeveloperWorks has a nice article up about Python development with Eclipse and Ant. This makes me pretty happy because I had been looking for a decent way to use Python with Eclipse and it looks as though there finally is one. The question now is, do I want to remain a preacher in the Church of Emacs, or should I backslide and start using Eclipse? On the plus side, I can use Emacs over a telnet/ssh session.
Today, for the third time in less than a year information came to the surface that more airlines gave information to TSA contractors than previously thought. What started with Delta and then expanded to Jet Blue and Northwest, has now expanded to six of the 10 major airlines and now, more disturbingly, two of the four largest travel booking firms. And this isn’t causing a big red flag with people?
The INDUCE bill is really bad bill that somehow has gained bipartisan support in the Senate. Basically it makes creating a device that induces copyright infringement by another a crime. Under this legislation we would not have technology like TiVo, the VCR, or home cassette recording because such devices can be used for infringement. I think congress is overstepping their bounds in trying to tie together the criminal and the civil codes here.

Mon, Jun 21, 2004

BMG has been putting the full spin about the new release from Velvet Revolver, the band consisting of non-Axl Guns N’ Roses and Scott Weiland from Stone Temple Pilots. They claim that the large sales of the album, incidentally protected with shift-key-bypassable-SunnComm, means that people are accepting the DRM. But that’s probably not the case, most people don’t realize that the album has this copy protection on it. Furthermore, the copy protection is supposed to prevent users from ripping the albums to MP3, but that only works on Windows PCs, a Mac or Linux can still rip the CD, eliminating the whole problem.

Sun, Jun 20, 2004

About two years ago, I wrote a [simple 2d drawing program][http://patrick.wagstrom.net/projects/academic/cs411/prog1/] for an undergraduate computer graphics class. I got bored today and somehow decided that I need to play around with Python, pygame, and OpenGL some more, so I decided to redo it. It ended up being a lot easier than I thought it would be, and the most difficult part was remembering what all the commands to the input file meant.