Thursday, May 26, 2005

Book Recommendation - A Long Way Down

With what at first glance would appear to be a depressing plotline, Nick Hornby has written a humourous, thought provoking novel about suicide, life, and what it takes to get off the ledge.

A Long Way Down is about four people who accidentally bump into each other on New Years Eve. They have all, for different reasons, made their way to the top of a building and planned to jump. The novel explores why they ended up there, and the group dynamic that ensues.

This is not Chicken Soup For The Soul, but rather more black humour and insight into what makes ordinary lives livable. It is a quick and satisfying read that opens some doors in one's brain normally kept tightly shut.

Highly recommended.

Monday, May 16, 2005

LAMP goes limp - WAMP to the rescue


After researching, reading, installing, configuring and getting increasingly frustrated, I have to admit partial defeat.

The quest to build my own database driven webserver has foundered on the reality that you ought to know Linux really well before you try this. The combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, known as LAMP, does work, and there are a number of different scripts to have it all installed. Ultimately though, you still need to fiddle and tweak, and I am just not comfortable doing that in Linux.

On the off chance that all the work was not in vain, I started looking for the Windows equivalent of the AMP part of LAMP. I was surprised to find that they all existed, and there was actually something called WAMP, which is the Windows equivalent of LAMP.

I decided to start over with the old Dell XPS I have been using for this project, and install a clean copy of XP. I figured I might as well go all the way to SP2 and test out that whole can of worms at the same time. Some additional research and I learned how to create a new install CD with all the patches already "slipstreamed". I'll do a separate entry on this later.

With a fresh OS in place, it was just a matter of running WAMP5, an installation script and .exe package that sets everything up automatically. With that done, it was time to select a content management system to manage the web site.

Much researching later, and when I regained conciousness, I had selected Mambo as the environment. This requires the downloading of another zip file, and the extraction of the PHP scripts into the web server's document directory. After configuring passwords and directories with the admin tools included in WAMP5, and with a final edit of a config file, automagically, a pre-canned web site appears.

With the basics in place, I now have a working web site and content management system in place and accessible across the LAN. Next step is to learn more about how to use Mambo.

More later.

The Ultimate Google

Google's transformation from plucky underdog to Orwellian master is complete now that satire sites have started appearing.

For those who feel just the slightest discomfort about the control that Serge and Larry have over the Internet at this point, The Google Content Blocker should provide some food for thought.

Muzzled in Singapore

A week has gone by since I last posted. The relentless barrage of noise from the demolition next door continues to make coherent thought impossible, and I have been watching, with increasing disquiet, the recent cases of Singaporean bloggers being threatened with lawsuits by those who disagree with their postings.

It certainly has a chilling effect, since one is unable to determine in advance what will provoke the ire of the authorities. In Singapore, these invisible boundaries are referred to as "OB markers" or out of bounds markers. You can say anything you want unless you cross the boundary. The trouble is, nobody can figure out what the boundaries are in advance. The resulting self-censorship is extremely effective in limiting debate.

A group of filmmakers wrote a letter to the Straits Times asking for clarification on what is permitted, as yet another film was pulled from the local film festival for "being political". It turns out that it is illegal to make a film that involves party politics, and the subject of the film was the leader of one of the opposition parties.

The problem of course is that "politics" is never defined. It seems to be whatever you are doing that the authorities disapprove of. If you want to lobby for a speed bump on your street, and talk to your neighbours to gain their support, is that politicking? If you express an opinion on a blog which can be read by others, is that politicking?

If you are not a Singapore citizen, but a permanent resident or visitor, things are even more dire. As the head of the SIA pilots union discovered, you can go from being a respected long term resident to undesirable alien over night.

today's Straits Times (May 16, 2005) had this gem of a quote from an unnamed government official at the Ministry of Home Affairs.

The spokesman reiterated the Government's stand that politics in Singapore is reserved for Singaporeans.

Foreigners like Mr Moser-Puangsuwan 'with no stake in the future of Singapore and of Singaporeans will not be allowed to interfere in Singapore's domestic politics, much less to instigate, agitate and promote civil disobedience among targeted segments of society, against the laws of the country'.

The spokesman said foreigners who abuse privileges given to visitors here, and who seek to meddle in domestic politics, 'are not welcome here'.

Quoting from the Straits Times article again,

This (workshop) was aimed to teach Singaporeans how to wage a non-violent campaign of civil disobedience against the Government so as to liberate and expand civil rights of Singaporean citizens who, he deludes himself to believe, are living under dire oppression and injustice.

One would hazard a guess that if Singaporeans did not feel that they were "living under dire oppression and injustice", Mr. Moser-Puangsuwan would be unlikely to find an audience and would therefore be talking to himself, hardly posing a threat to the stability and continued existence of Singapore.

One wonders what would happen to a Singaporean who decided to offer a workshop on civil disobedience. Luckily, the Internal Security Act is available to deal with any such threats.

Time to go back to the shopping malls, where there are no politics, and both the customers and the air are conditioned.

Saturday, May 07, 2005

Another Librarian Speaks - blogs and bloggers are crap

It seems the gatekeepers are continuing to feel the pressure from all the "unauthorized" publishing going on these days. The latest outburst is from Blaise Cronin, who once again avoids the real point by denigrating the bloggers instead of figuring out how to take advantage of the technology.

One wonders for whom these hapless souls blog. Why do they choose to expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism? The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better.

Indiana University Dean and Rudy Professor of Information Science Blaise Cronin

Broadcast Flag at half mast

A US appellate court has struck down the infamous "broadcast flag" rule brought in by the FCC and its friends.

This rule would have required all devices sold in the US capable of receiving or recording digital broadcasts to implement a broadcast flag
by July 1, 2005, to prevent further distribution of the content

Since the rule would have prevented something as simple as recording a TV program, there was naturally considerable opposition. A case was brought against the FCC by the American Library Association on behalf of those opposed, and the Motion Picture Association of America intervened on behalf of the FCC.

The court overturned the broadcast flag rule on the grounds that FCC had overstepped its authority. Congress had never given the agency the power to regulate the use or manufacture of devices after they received a transmission. This is a relatively narrow ground for invalidating the rule, and does not address the issue of fair use.

With the music and film industries unable or unwilling to adjust to technology shifts, these constant assaults on the freedom of an individual to use goods purchased in good faith will continue.

The whole idea that the manufacturer somehow retains rights to how a product is used after it is sold is pernicious.

We have seen lawsuits about mod chips for video consoles, software becoming nothing more than a license (you don't own it, just the right to use it in the way the manufacturer permits), and music and film becoming so schizophrenic they don't know what they are anymore.

Am I buying a CD or just licensing the music? If it is a license, why won't the publishers replace broken CD's? If it is a license, why won't the publishers replace obsolete media with new media as in the transition from vinyl to cassette to CD to MP3?

The decision of the court is quite readable and is available here and here.

Thursday, May 05, 2005

What's Your Name? No, really....

If you surf the web widely, you have been presented with endless requests to register before viewing content. And if you follow any sort of security best practices, you need to invent different login and password pairs for each site. And then keep track of them all.

Bugmenot to the rescue! This site brokers the exchange of logins so that you don't have to create your own. Just enter the URL of the site you are trying to enter, and Bugmenot will supply you with a login and password.

All the userids and passwords are created by users, presumably with fake data, so it becomes a matter of adding a pair if a site is not already listed, or using what is there already.