One idiot's blog

The continuation of this blog can be found here.

So, you're all just beside yourselves in elation that Sun has finalized their decision to release Java under the GNU GPL. Here's my one thought on things surrounding that, after reading Tim Bray's writeup on the topic as an insider. He mentions under the heading "Forks" that those who would try to create a new-and-improved version of Java would run up against the Java trademark, and would have to call their new-and-improved Java something else. This is the same thing Red Hat does with its operating system. You are free, naturally, to take all the source, minus trademark-related stuff like logos, and build your own Linux OS and distrubute it all under a similar license, but you can't call it Red Hat (I think they actually take this to some sort of extreme, but that's off the topic for now). On the surface, this seems reasonable; if you do this, what you are distributing is not, in fact, a Red Hat system. However, isn't it reasonable to let the consumer know, in some convenient way, that this is an attempt to duplicate Red Hat, that it is not just YALD?

Companies like Red Hat and Sun could go a long way towards earning community goodwill and keeping in the spirit of the GPL by creating a secondary trademark, reserved for software derived in some way from their own. Let's propose Sumatra, for example, as the secondary trademark for Java. Suppose I take the Java source code, re-engineer the garbage collection to speed up deletion of objects of type JPEGPr0nImage, and re-compile. I could release it as "One Idiot's Sumatra Runtime Environment". Everyone who had any idea what this meant would know that it is not Java, but it is like Java. The important trademark is not diluted, but derivatives get a fair shake.

OK, that's my brilliant thought for the month.

It's time. It's time to reformat the hard drive on my laptop. It took about 6 months to get 95% of my iBook working properly under Gentoo, and then about 2 years for that percentage to fall down to 75%. Things that have stopped working as a result of software/kernel upgrades: screen brightness control. Volume control/mute. Sound is disabled on bootup, and I have to chmod a+rx /dev/sound/dsp to make it work. Then it plays only at full volume, until I put the laptop to sleep. After I wake it up, it only plays at what seems like minimal volume, until the next reboot. When the laptop is unplugged, the screen will dim after a minute or so, then go into hibernation mode after about 10 minutes. These are good things for saving the battery when I'm not using it. They are bad things when I'm in the middle of typing something and my laptop goes to sleep. Takes about 10 seconds to come back to life. I never got the X-windows DRI working -- hell, I was lucky to get X working at all after some upgrades -- so I couldn't get the great, smooth graphics running under Linux the way they worked on the OSX side.

Now, finally, I need Tomcat on my laptop, and It Just Ain't Happening. Too many things blocking the install, most having to do with X, and I'd been wanting to do a fresh install for probably close to a year. (I remember carefullly avoiding any upgrades other than dire necessities once I found out I had two weeks to get to Europe, since I didn't want to risk breaking anything else, and I didn't want to spend my time in Europe d*cking with Gentoo).

And the big thing here is... the blog. One Idiot's Blog runs Movable Type 2.64, which I doubt is available anymore. And in my setup I had done all sorts of unspeakable things like put the data and the pages under my home directory, use BerkelyDB instead of MySQL, and use my IP address as the URL, with lots of sub-directories below it to get to my blog. I'm not sure what that all has to do with anything. Most of that is probably not that unsurmountable; I'm actually giving you kind of a mish-mash of Things That Could Break and Things I Would Dearly Love to Fix But Haven't Had Time To And Don't Know Whether I Can This Time But At Least I'm Getting Good At Writing Long Capitalized Noun Phrases.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't know if my blog will continue as is. One less-than-ideal possible outcome (I suspect "scenario" is really not proper here) is that I will not be able to migrate this blog, intact, to something I want, and that I will have to leave the backed up HTML pages of this blog in place, statically, with no engine behind them, while I continue my blogging activity elsewhere (which probably means in some more normal directory on my laptop, but could also mean on something like LiveJournal, Yahoo360, etc.) Better than that, unequivocally, would be if I could successfully migrate my posts to whatever I move to (WordPress, etc.). Internal linkage seems to be an inevitable problem, though.

So, this is sort of a sign-off here. For good? For brief? Don't know.

I think the thing that's on everyone's mind as election day approaches is the war in Iraq. Few people wil disagree that it has been a disaster, with this past October giving us the highest US body count in a year, and armed militias operating unchallenged, purging Shiite neighborhoods of Sunnis and Sunni neighborhoods of Shiites, and executing those from the wrong group who enter areas under their control. Who is responsible for this mess?

Well, I've just learned from a flyer from the Maryland Democratic Party that the blame falls on three people: Governor Bob Erlich, former Lieutenant Governor and Senate candidate Michael Steele, and George W. Bush. I'm embarrassed that I didn't know this, but I really don't have time to read the whole paper every day. I knew Bush had something to do with it, but the involvement of these two Marylanders comes as a shock to me. I wish I could learn more, but, well, I gotta get that absentee ballot sent in, so I'm just gonna go with what I got. Thanks for the heads up, MDP!

I am, I think, slowly -- ever so slowly -- migrating towards the standard human behavior regarding the handling of Licenses for this and that. You know the drill, for downloading/installing some piece of software: you have to click a box or an "I Agree" button stating that you have read and understood the 10 pages of legalese that they have devised to confer as many benefits as possible to themselves while still allowing you to do the stuff most normal people would want to do with their software/service. My friend Henry's approach is always purely pragmatic: is anything going to happen to you if you don't read it? Is someone going to come after you? This is his approach to a lot of things, however -- especially using commercial software without paying for it. I don't personally agree with that latter philosophy, but in the case of these license agreements, it seems as if this is exactly what the vendors/providers of services expect; they WANT you to click in agreement without reading it. They don't care if you bind yourself to conditions you're not aware of; doesn't hurt them. There's no disincentive for them to keep expanding their claims until the license is bigger than the software itself. The end user, meanwhile, is left deciding whether he shold follow the letter of the law and read the whole damn license, sacrificing a lot of time and mental energy, or to recognize this for the farce that it is, click "Agree", and hope no legal ill befalls him.

I don't know what the best solution is. Software and service vendors certainly have legal needs, but it's unethical to put the user in such a position. The problem stems from a disconnect between legal and marketing, basically. The marketing just wants you to use the product; the legal dept. wants to cover their asses. Both take advantage of the fact that, in the real world, just about nobody actually reads the licenses, and everyone is clicking in agreement essentially fraudulently. But I wonder... what if we just took one simple step? What if we made a law that every User License must be preceded by a word count and a statement of reading time? For example: "The license contains 9,193 words [see Amazon.com's license Agreement], and will take most people between 10-20 minutes to read". Or, even better, if it is implicit that reading the license is mandatory to clicking on the agreement, make it explicit: "You must read the terms and conditions below. The agreement contains 150,000 words and takes most people 1-1½ hours to read."

Something like this would go a long way towards restoring the link between fantasy and reality in this department. And who knows what effects might flow from that. Perhaps vendors might start fielding more irate phone calls from people asking why their licenses are so long. Perhaps lawmakers would start taking a closer look at this absurdity. Perhaps judges might give the benefit of the doubt more often to the end user who says "no, I didn't read the license; it was too long".

And the beauty of it is that it's very straightforward. Compliance would require all of five minutes on the part of the license crafters. Yet the ripple effects could be pretty astounding.

The preceding blog post contains 552 words, and should take most people from 2-3 minutes to read.

Update 11-14-2006: It turns out I've written about this before, though not as in depth. Plus it was almost 3 years ago, and you don't remember, do you?

We need more people -- journalists and politicians -- like Robert Kagan. I confess I was all "tell it, brother" at the news of the National intelligence Estimate leaked recently to the press that prompted the New York Times headline, "Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat." I mean, duh, the war in Iraq is always item #2 on any Muslim's list of grievances, right behind the genocide in Darf -- I mean, the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and people don't turn to suicide bombing because it seems like a nice career path; they are usually pissed about something. But Kagan lays out a very clear, cool-headed argument that the report -- or what we know of it -- really offers precious little, that we are left with some good questions for which we may never get answers, and that this smells of spin or bias by the NYT and the creators and/or leakers of the report. The report has not been seen by the press, so it's not even clear what exactly is meant by the "terrorist threat", or how it is quantitatively measured. And he points out that it is probably absurd to say definitively that you can attribute any particular terrorist recruitment to anger over the Iraq war; for a great many of these people, if they don't have Iraq as an excuse, it'll just be something else.

Of course, and now I hate to sound like I'm in lock-step with all my liberal friends, colleagues and associates, but I do nonetheless believe that the war in Iraq has, to give a concrete example, probably increased Al-Qaeda recruitment. I'm not sure how I can argue this, necessarily; maybe I'll have to go find some other columnist who lays out that case well. Maybe there is one who can give a sound argument. But what we've got second- or third-hand from the NIE is pretty dubious.

Bush will de-classify part of the report tomorrow. I'm sure that'll make everything crystal clear.

OK, you can stop laughing about the idea of politicians asking hard questions with no clear answers.

I'd like to apologize to the World Wide Web for, until now, leaving it completely devoid of the phrase, "Johnny, you knight us". It was my job to do this, and has been ever since I got my first internet presence, and I have failed the blogosphere, the Web community, and Capricorns everywhere. Please accept this late addition to teh Intarweb.

Johnny Unitas was someone famous in some sport -- football, I think -- and his fans used to write signs saying "Johnny, Unite us!" His Lithuanian surname was undoubtedly originally pronounced "Oo-nih-tahs", but Americans evidently Anglicized it to the maximum extent possible. But somehow...somehow, it never occurred to anyone to render his name so as to ascribe to this sports legend (could someone tell me just what sport that was, anyway?) a power that is definitely way cooler than uniting people.

Bob's your uncle!

There are a couple of things I figured I'd take care of after I was settled in Europe, not running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to make sure everything was squared away before I left, but instead have let fester, to my detriment. One of the pending tasks was to put money into a Scottrade account I'd opened, so that my personal fortune, made from hush money paid to me by the former CEO of my company, would earn better than 0.5% or whatever the banks pay for checking. I let so much time pass by that not only did I lose out on all that income, but Scottrade closed the damn account because I hadn't funded it.

But the more significant thing for you, dear reader, is that I completely failed to check on how my blog in its temporary home was doing. And what a sorry state I left it in, as I just found out: with all internal links as full URLs pointing to my blog's regular home, nothing but the front page, with a mere two entries (neither of which mentioned anything about my expatriation) was accessible (and the styling was also missing!)

I regret not being able to keep the blog up to date with all my exciting adventures in Deutschland in real time, as it were; I am now at the point where, every time someone at my European workplace sees me, it's "I heard you're leaving us". Anyway, I have now, once again, made my increasingly irrelevant blog available to the world.