Life Outside PLT1

PSA

Yesterday was kebab thursday.

The kebabs are rather good.

I dripped chilli sauce onto a white shirt. I blame the fact that I ordered BBQ instead of chilli. Obviously people don’t understand my accent.

I washed my shirt, and then sat around in my office for a while wearing a thick sweatshirt, on the basis that if my manager came in this would be better for my prospects of continued employment than sitting there topless.

It was really really warm sitting around like that in a room without Air Conditioning, in almost-direct sunlight, although I dare say Itamar would have found it a touch chilly. Chilli. Sorry.
Anyway, none of this shit matters. What really matters is that Jeremy found the best fucking horoscope ever, in the aforementioned kebab place.

The horoscope for Pisces was something along the lines of:
Blablabla, usual crap, you are awesome “don’t ever change”. The part in “quotation marks” is, in fact a quote.

DON’T EVER CHANGE. There we have it, no need to read another horoscope ever again. It’s all pre-determined. Pisceans are perfect. I’ve converted to Calvinism.

Jeremy is a Pisces. I am a Pisces. I assume there are other people who are also Pisces, but that’s not the fucking point.

We forgot to take a pxt as evidence, or keep the horoscope.

Some things just don’t change.

And apparently, that’s just the way it should be.

Random MSN convos

I’ve had some random MSN conversations while at work, some of which were NSFW and all of which I shouldn’t be having anyway.

This one struck me as a bit odd:

I should have utilised the opportunity, but I wasn't awake yet

After this I think we blocked each other.

Hmm, I should go do some work.

It’s so shiny

Israeli Weather Forecast

For mysterious reasons unknown to men,  I am finding Jewland to be surprisingly fitting for my lifestyle.  Instead of exploring this  phenomenon and trying to really find out what makes me happy, I have decided to use my time and provide a proof for my  obviously superior style of (over)dressing.

I am happy to announce it is now supported by the Israeli Channel 10 News.

The main points of interest would be the heavy overcoat + scarf for 17 degrees Celsius, and Ski gear for 12.

Who has the better wardrobe

The proposed Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act assumes Guilt Upon Accusation

The following is copied from http://creativefreedom.org.nz/s92.html. For those of you that haven’t heard of Section 92a, it’s worth a read. For those of you that have, also worth a read. Check out the site as well:

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Copyright infringement is wrong, but should people, schools, and hospitals have their internet connections and websites cut off due to accusations of copyright infringement?

111 calls, schools, businesses and artists rely on Internet Connections so it’s not unreasonable to say that “Internet access is a basic human right”, which is presumably why former Labour MP Judith Tizard said that. Unfortunately she also said:

“It is easier for ISPs, Internet Service Providers, to cut off anyone who might be breaking the law. “

– Judith Tizard (previous Labour MPs) in a bFM interview

This explanation was given for Section 92a and 92c of the Copyright Act: the parts that involve cutting off internet connections and websites based on nothing more than accusations. But our focus isn’t to point the finger at MPs because they still have time to stop this unjust law before the regulation comes into effect on the 28th of February, 2009.

“A “copyright holder” can get you kicked off an ISP without having to provide any evidence of an actual infringement. Having to [provide evidence] is apparently “impractical” and “ridiculous” in the words of RIANZ chief executive Campbell Smith. What happens when the “you” above is a public library, or a school? Or if the “copyright holder” makes a mistake or a malicious accusation?”

– ComputerWorld Magazine

Making mistakes can be an easy thing to do, 25% of computers are infected with viruses that download and distribute material without the owners knowledge. What happens to owners whose wireless internet connection is compromised? What if that owner is a school or hospital?

As stated above, Section 92 has no punishment for false accuser, leaving this law ripe for abuse. RIANZ (the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand) are pushing for this to be done in the name of protecting creativity and the arts, but we don’t believe this fairly represents artist’s values.

Already, TelstraClear’s head of corporate services, Matthew Bolland, has stated that from 1 November 2008, TelstraClear are taking down websites upon a single accusation of copyright breach: “We don’t check or verify,” he says “We take it down.” ISPs like TelstraClear do not and cannot identify copyright infringement which is why this law forces them to take actions such as these.

Mainstream organisations such as the Consumers Institute of New Zealand and The National Business Review have warned about the danger of such a law:

“The onus is then on the customer to prove their case and get their website access reinstated. We believe this responsibility is open to malicious abuse by parties who wish to close-down websites or disrupt in some way another person’s business or enjoyment of the use of the internet. “

– Consumer Institute NZ [PDF]

Effectively, a single person’s bad behaviour can bring down an institution, all because certain elements of the recording, videogame and movie industries can’t solve their own piracy problems.

“Businesses support the need to protect intellectual property, and we are sympathetic to the significant problems the music, movie and gaming industries face. However, balance is the key. Protecting one person’s interests at the expense of others is completely inappropriate,” Telecommunications Carriers Forum chief executive Ralph Chivers said.

“More sadly, it’s symptomatic of a technologically uneducated group of political decision makers being taken for a ride by lobbyists putting their interests ahead of the nation.”

– National Business Review

In practice many businesses and people may be forced to bear the burden of paying for a secondary backup internet connection and website just in case they are falsely accused.

The dangers of a law supporting Guilt Upon Accusation are becoming increasingly understood and the CFF aim to help spread the word. Overseas similar laws have been abused to limit free speech, restrict artists, and hurt businesses.

No one we know – certainly no one at the CFF – is in favour of fellow artists losing income due to copyright infringement. We do however have grave concerns with recent trends in international copyright laws that bypass the traditional expectations of civil rights (such as due process). How far should should we go to hunt down copyright infringers? Should we shut down internet connections or websites based on accusations? Should we let private companies snoop on internet connections without a police warrant? Should iPods be searched by customs when you travel through the airport?

Section 92a and 92c are unjust laws. We must tell politicians that we want copyright changed in fair ways to help artists work and to stop injustices like Guilt Upon Accusation being done in our name.

http://creativefreedom.org.nz/s92.html

I was bored

The cricket had finished earlier than expected and I had eaten all the pizza I had. I was quite bored and decided to make one of those coffin storage boxes that are in even pizza box from Hell Pizza. Also please note Hell don’t peal their kumara properly so their kumara chips awful.

From idea to failure

During the party I went to at New Year’s I realised that TVs are now large enough, that a lot of people can sit around them and that just about everyone now has a cellphone. So why restrict yourself to only having a maximum of 4 players for a game? If you could use a cellphone as a controller via Bluetooth, then you could have many players playing the same game, perhaps playing virtual cricket.

Figure 1. Crude drawing of people sitting around a TV playing cricket.

This seemed like a cool little project to work on. Since the bluetooth protocol has named devices, you could automatically have your name appear in game. Also FPGAs are cheap now, so combined with some basic bluetooth hardware it would be possible to build your own console system, though for now I was going to use my laptop as a testbed.

The first task was working out how to connect a bluetooth device (in this case my cellphone) to my computer via code. My language of choice is C# as it’s the language I’ve worked with it for about 4 years now and tends to have better library support on the Windows platform.

After a couple of minutes hunting around I discovered that there was a bluetooth library in the Coding4Fun samples. From there it was a breeze to programmatically find my cellphone and connect it and prod it, and it’s at this point I realised I had a problem. I can’t fetch arbitary input from it, hence I can’t use cellphones as input devices.

Which kind of throws a spanner in the works. Now I could target specific phones from this point on, and write an app that sends the information I want via Bluetooth, but currently this idea is on hold as what I really want is a nice general solution for all cellphones.