(Finally. I really need to move my "blog to Congress" script over to ikiwiki.)

Dear Representative Stark:

I am writing to ask you to oppose H.R. 3699, the Research Works Act.

If Rep. Darrell Issa came to you and said, "Let's give our grant recipients permission to steal taxpayer-funded equipment from the lab and resell it on the Internet," you would say he was nuts. But this is exactly what H.R. 3699 would do with those scientists' research results.

The Public Access Policy at the National Institutes of Health has been a success, and makes original papers available to health professionals, patients, and their families. Open access to research also encourages follow-up research in the public and private sectors.

H.R. 3699 would throw away these benefits for no gain. The foreign publishing companies that would benefit from this bill are not publishers in the usual sense. They do not provide the same editing and selection functions that a typical magazine does in-house. Our Federally funded researchers already do the work of reviewing and editing at no charge.

Please do what you can to stop H.R. 3699.

Sincerely,

Donald B. Marti Jr.

SCALE this year had a quiz game for attendees, and here are my notes on how to play and some things we could do better next time. Lori Barfield, who was in charge of SCALE Game Night, brought it all together on a very tight schedule.

The object of the game for the players is to put together the best possible 5-card poker hand. Each card has an answer printed on it, and in order for that card to count as part of the player's hand, the player has to find the matching question. Card photo at Lisa's iXsystems marketing blog.

All of the questions are about information revealed at booths, talks, and other show events. It's important to get questions that are hard to look up online. The object of the game for the organizers is to get attendees to talk with each other, because they pretty much have to trade cards and information to win.

We gave out seven cards per player.

With a little more time we'll be able to make the game easier to run at the show. Things to improve next time:

• Handouts for people who supplied questions, to give out at exhibitor or speaker registration at the show.

• Entry forms for players turning in hands, to avoid having to write questions on the cards

• Numbered questions on the question sheet, to make it easier to check completed hands.

• Ask for questions earlier, to have extras to work with.

• Give out two cards at registration, then have opportunities to get more cards later?

Some people thought the questions were too hard, but groups of attendees working together were able to figure everything out.

UN Resolution 16/18 would restrict “defamation of religion”. Meanwhile, file sharing is now an official religion in Sweden.

Don't know where I was going with this. Must be a slow news day.

As of Public Domain Day (yesterday) Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys enters the public domain. Looking forward to grabbing a copy. Anybody put one up yet?

For all of you who have moved your domain to a new registrar, or if you're running into DNS issues, or just want to make sure your DNS is set up correctly (it can be tweaky), here's a DNS checklist from Rick Moen on the SVLUG list. (To get started on DNS basics, see this story, also from Rick: The Village of Lan: A Networking Fairy Tale)

Web pricing factoid from Rian van der Merwe: "Facebook says that they have over 800 million active users, and that 'more than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day.' So let’s, for argument’s sake, say that about 500 million users visit Facebook every day. If each of those users paid Facebook $2 per year, the revenue would cover the cost of running the site. Just increase that to $3 per year, or 25c per month, and you suddenly have $1.5B revenue per year (or roughly $500M profit, based on Facebook’s rough estimate of their operating costs). Let’s be clear about this: it’s the cost of one coffee per year."

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are the unacknowledged CTOs.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Wide Scream. (Ideas? Best I can think of is to turn a 1920x1200 by 90 degrees, and use that for most things and the laptop screen for stuff that has to be wide.)

Thomas Philippon: Has the finance industry become less efficient? (But, I wonder, is it fair to talk about "efficiency" of what's really just economic sin-eating? Imagine that you put your retirement savings into Enron, or pork bellies, or Las Vegas real estate, or whatever, and you lose most of it--the guilt over your bad decisions is a non-financial cost to you. Now imagine that you gave the money to whatever financial wizards are currently "the smartest guys in the room" and they lose it. What could you have done? Intangibly you're better off and all they take for it is money.)

I've heard that in the German Navy of the Kaiser's time, the enlisted sailors's diet was a health hazard until they established the simple rule that the officers eat what the sailors do, after they're done. Finland does something like that for education.

Hillary Rettig's blog, recommended by RMS, is full of wisdom. New Year's piece: "There’s also another, even more pernicious form of procrastination: activities that mimic productive work." (RTWT)

Oh, that is too bad. All those other phones are getting dressed up and accessorized for the big Christmas party, and you have nothing to wear.

I know, it's not your fault you're not a perfect size four. Yes, I know size 4S is the same size, so they can wear each other's stuff.

It is too bad some people don't even look at you because of all the nice things that those other phones can wear. Yes, I know you have many good points on the inside.

Yes, I even looked at Fry's for you. Lots to wear, but nothing in your size. I'm sorry.

No, I don't know what to do either. But I'll post this on the Internet and maybe the nice Internet people can help.

Or maybe the Googlers will come up with some standard Android sizes, so that more accessory makers will be able to make nice things for you to wear.

Yes, I'll still take you to the Christmas party.

No, I won't take you off "silent" this year.

khakiatto (n): a delicious coffee beverage brewed to match the color of the customer's pants. A great pick-me-up to enjoy while driving to that important meeting.

Asa Dotzler's "websites, you're doing it wrong" is a good list of silly password rules from various web sites. (another good one: your password can be any length, but we only check the first eight characters. If you're into correct horse battery staple-style passwords, that's trouble.)

I have a confession to make. If I don't use your site much, I'm probably just using the "forgot your password" workflow every time. So, as long as we have crash-only software, let's make Forgot Password Only Software.

I'm going to assume that everyone is going to forget the stupid password, and optimize for that. (People who haven't forgotten the password have been using the same password on so many sites that they might as well not have been using a password at all.)

Next web application I do will have one or more of: mail me a login URL, ssh to the server to get a login URL, log in with (some set of big web sites for which users have a real password), BrowserID, maybe some others. (I kind of like the choice of "ssh to the server for a login URL" for the Rick Moen types, and "log in with example.com" for the Kool-Aid drinkers.)

But I will never again be arrogant enough to believe that users will make unique, high-quality passwords just for my web site. I don't do it for other people's sites, how could I act like people would do it for mine?

Bonus link: Crash-only software: More than meets the eye

Picking a printer for Linux?

The process is going to be a little different from what you might be used to with another OS. If you shop carefully (and reading blogs is a good first step) then the drivers you will need are already available through your Linux distribution's printer setup tool.

HP has done a good job with enabling this. The company has already released the necessary printer software as open source, and your Linux distribution has already installed it. So, go to printers fully supported with the HPLIP software, pick a printer you like, and you're done.

If you want a recommendation from me, the HP LaserJet 3055 black and white all-in-one device has worked fine for me with various Linux setups for years. It's also a scanner/copier/fax machine, and you get the extra functionality for not much more than the price of a regular printer. It also comes with a good-sized toner cartridge, so your cost per page is probably going to be pretty reasonable.

Other printer brands have given me more grief, but fortunately the HP LaserJets are widely available and don't jam much.

It's important not to show a smug expression on your face while printing if users of non-Linux OSs are still dealing with driver CDs or vendor downloads.

If you have a script that uses ssh, here's something to put at the beginning of the script to make sure the necessary passphrase has already been entered, and the remote host is reachable, before starting a time-consuming operation such as an rsync or offlineimap:

ssh-add -L > /dev/null || ssh-add
ssh $REMOTE_HOST true || exit 0

(If the ssh agent has no identities, prompt for a passphrase. Then exit if the remote system is not reachable.)

Latest experiment with writing a news aggregation tool dragged in these two stories:

Departing Skype employees have had their stock options zeroed out

Fewer American kids are growing up to be bona fide computer geeks.

Maybe teenagers aren't so dumb after all.

Just got done reading Taking Economics Seriously by Dean Baker. To quote from near the beginning of chapter 1:

"In general, political debates over regulation have been wrongly cast as disputes over the extent of regulation, with conservatives assumed to prefer less regulation, while liberals prefer more....Conservatives support regulatory structures that cause income to flow upward, while liberals support regulatory structures that promote equality."

A little general, but good point. It's refreshing to see a book that points out some of the creeping corporate welfare disguised as free market policy. And the book is worth reading just for the part about medical tourism.

The first example is the copyright system, though, and Baker unfortunately skims over a key difference between actual copyright law and anticircumvention law, or what you might call "protrust" law. (We have antitrust, and anticircumvention does the opposite, so might as well call it protrust.) He mentions the Dmitry Sklyarov case, in which a Russian programmer was arrested for writing software to "get around a form of copyright protection."

But "copyright protection" doesn't really describe technological systems very well, because there's no DRM system whose restrictions actually map to the same boundaries as real copyright law. DRM systems always go further. The reason why the CEO of Dmitry's employer got an "Honorary Deputy Sheriff" award was that the software was sold to made copies that the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Department was permitted to make under copyright law.

From a free market point of view, the problematic part about the kind of "anticircumvention" laws that Dmitry was accused of violating is this: they effectively turn private feature decisions from technology vendors into laws enforced at taxpayer expense. Copyright law has principles such as fair use and first sale, which no automatic system can handle.

A free market view might be something like this: the government won't regulate anti-copying and other restriction features of media systems, but it won't offer an enforcement subsidy either. Tim Lee wrote, in Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,

"Congress ought not to enact specially crafted copyright legislation to assist particular industries in enforcing the terms of their contracts. If a contract’s terms are arbitrary, unreasonable, and impossible to enforce....then the company ought to bear the legal and public relations costs that come with monitoring and suing its own customers."

And the result of the Dmitry Sklyarov case? The US government dropped the case against Dmitry himself, continued with the case against his employer, and it ended in a jury nullification of the DMCA. Has there been a standalone anticircumvention criminal case (not just anticircumvention charges added to an infringement case) since then?

Just discussing today's IT business news on a mailing list. Really, this is good news. While users are trying to figure out whether to download "Skype Live Small Business Edition" or "Skype For Windows Professional Platinum 7.0", some startup will eat their lunch.

bonus links: mmmm, platinum sandwich and Microsoft designs the iPod package

Real simple. Tell the Linux box that the printer is a Generic PCL Printer attached via JetDirect, give it the IP address, and whatever you do, don't let the printer config tools go surfing the web for warez—you don't need them. Keep it old school and it works fine. While everyone else on the network is searching for and installing drivers, you will be printing.

(If anyone from HP is reading this, thanks for keeping this working. PC LOAD LETTER forever.)

"By moving so much of the conversation away from their own websites and out to Facebook, media companies are basically saying, 'We did a lousy job of engaging readers under our own roof, so we’re going to encourage it to happen on someone else’s turf.'"

-- Scott Rosenberg

Having fun with hooking up a "central" shared git repository to other tools, which had been hooked up to a Subversion repository. (hey, kids! hack for track-git-plugin to make the old Subversion revision links keep working).

Anyway, the git "post-receive-hook" interface is a little tweakier than the Subversion "post-commit" one. The hook gets its input on stdin, not via the command-line arguments as the Subversion hook does. But I have to run multiple tools, each of which has its own post-receive-hook script, and I don't want to mash up the scripts.

So far the simplest way I have found to handle this is to put something like this in .git/hooks/post-receive:

    #!/bin/sh
    pee $GIT_DIR/hooks/tool-hook-*

(pee is from moreutils.) Runs all the tool hooks each with its own copy of the same stdin. Works so far.

You can do something similar with a temporary file, but it's more lines.