digital

Editing Hell

Editing my thesis is hell. Every time I pick it up to do some more work there is a physical feeling of lethargy which needs to be overcome. Thankfully a quote of Albert Camus keeps me on track. He wrote this in his personal notebook on September 30, 1937

It is in order to shine sooner that authors refuse to rewrite. Despicable. Begin again.

Albert Camus (1947) photo: Henri Cartier-Bresson

This was not written for others but I see it as a message to himself- a reminder that the work must be done. So ok – I am not Camus but I realise that when such a great writer needed to remind himself of the work that needed to be done…I feel comforted and begin again.

The thesis is now 101 815 words long. This is spread over 270 pages. An updated draft can be found online here.

Posted on by mklang

Denial of Service

Denial of service attacks have earlier been used as protest forms (more here .pdf). Yesterday the Swedish government website was the target of such an attack. The attack claimed to be a protest against the actions of the Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström for being the minister who has introduced the most amount of repressive legislation in the shortest time (see earlier posts here and here)

The attack was sparked by actions by the Police on the request of the minister to shut down the bittorrent site The Pirate Bay. During the raid several organisations not connected with torrent sharing were closed down and the legal representative of the Pirate Bay was required to leave a DNA sample (see more here). The Pirate Bay was offline for less than five days and yesterday protests were held in both Stockholm and Göteborg.

While not seen as part of the formal/official protests DoS attacks have targed the Swedish Police website and the website of the Swedish Government. For a while a message to Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström was up on a site connected with the attack: “Thomas – we want our freedom back”. Aftonbladet has the screenshot here.

(via Media Culpa)

Posted on by mklang

Back Online

A couple of days ago 50 police raided the bittorrent site The Pirate Bay. Today they are back online. The site is slow but the implications are far reaching.

Whats new? Amongst other things the name: The Police Bay and their new logo – too cool!!!

So it took 50 police with a questionable legal basis to take down the Pirate Bay for five days. The ethical and legal questions will carry on for a long time. For review of the questions see here. The Swedish Minister of Justice will have to use more than his usual amount of teflon to avoid this mess sticking to him.

Posted on by mklang

Starcups, Starbucks & Trademarks

While on a short coffee break from the exciting world of thesis writing I saw this sign on the coffee place next to the place where I was having coffee.

Starcups Coffee? Its amazing that Starbucks would let such a thing survive… There seems to be a site registered online but it keeps timing out. Thanks to google image search here is a better image of the Starcups logo and next to it the Starbucks logo.

So what do you think? Trademark infringement? Which is the copy and which is the original? If you know anything about this please comment. And if you happen to be in Göteborg on Plantagegatan then I can recommend Cafe con Leche next door to Starcups…

Posted on by mklang

Graph of the Website

As you may have seen I have updated the design of this site – let me know what you think.

Also I found this website that makes a graph of your website – check it out. What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Posted on by mklang

ccPublisher & Internet Archive

ccPublisher is out in a new version. ccPublisher is an application that helps you select a CC license for your audio and video files. It then helps you tag your files and upload them to the Internet Archive for permanent free hosting. If you prefer to host elsewhere ccPublisher will generate some HTML for you that lets others validate the license it embeds in the file.

By the way – If you haven’t done so already then you should take a nostalgia trip on the Internet Archive’s wayback machine. Here are some examples of what the web used to be like in the olden days…

Chalmers Technical University 1996

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Göteborg University from 1997

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Finally, this is my website in 2001 thankfully my earlier aesthetic experiments seem not to have been saved for the afterworld…

Posted on by mklang

Engraving Quixote

Monday morning and I have taken my powerbook to the engraver, a local firm called Brion. Choosing the image that I am going to have on my laptop was tough but I settled for this:

I even got permission from the artist Gene Colan. On choosing, editing the image and asking permission see previous post here.

So with the image chosen its off to the engraver to watch him use heavy machinery to diamond engrave my computer â?? itâ??s a bit scary. So first here is the â??beforeâ?? picture:

The next step is fitting the laptop into the machine and clamping it down (also a bit scary) so that it will not move during the engraving process

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The machine starts by drawing the outer lines of the drawing

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It then moves in for the smaller details. The whole process is based on finding lines â?? which means that the filled in areas of the sketch become blanks in the engraving. Here are some photos of the machine filling in the details:

Leg detail

Sancho Panza


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Quixote

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Rocinante

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And the finished product â?? I need to take better pictures, but at least you get the idea. Its great!

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Posted on by mklang

Seeds of Change

A scary issue which I keep meaning to look more at is the politics and technology of food production, treatment, transportation and selling. Here is a very interesting documentary about GM foods from the University of Manitoba

Everyone has heard both the positives and negatives of genetically modified crops, from biotech companies like Monsanto and from environmental and consumer groups like Greenpeace, yet no one has actually heard from those who actually grow the food we eat – the farmers.

The film can be downloaded from the film website.

The film Seeds of Change is a seventy-minute documentary film made by University of Manitoba (U of M) professor Stéphane McLachlan, U of M PhD student Ian Mauro, and independent videographer Jim Sanders, is a balanced yet hard-hitting exposé of the controversy surrounding genetically modified crops and how they have changed the face of agriculture in western Canada.

Posted on by mklang

Book review

We got a good book review!

Lee Bygrave wrote a review of our (Andrew Murray & I) edited book “Human Rights in the Digital Age” check it out here. The review appeared in Nordic Journal on Human Rights (Nordisk Tidsskrift for Menneskerettigheter, Vol. 24, no. 1, 2006).

Particularly praiseworthy is the unique blend of contributors. These are not only drawn from a wide variety of countries…but also from a wide variety of fields of scholarship…All in all, the composition of contributors brings a multifaceted, cross-discipinary set of perspectives to the issues at hand.

…the book’s editors and authors are to be congratulated on producing a timely, wide-ranging and stimulating work.

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GPLv3 Conference

On the 22nd & 23rd June its the 3rd International GPLv3 Conference which will be held in Barcelona.

The focus will be on the GPLv3 – this is from the press release

The goal of the GPL is to ensure that recipients of GPL covered software are free to examine it, to modify it, to pass on copies, and to distribute modifications. Version two of the GPL was released fifteen years ago, in 1991. The new version is being drafted to account for changes in the legal and technical environment in which software licences operate.

The main changes in version three are to minimise the harm of software patents, to prevent Digital Restrictions Management from being used against software users, and to make the licence compatible with certain classes of other Free Software licences.

Speakers will include, amongst others, Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen.

Posted on by mklang