Archive for September, 2007

License to code

September 30th, 2007

This week, i wandered into the Information Architecture Meetup. Out of interest – the concept of Information architecture is still somewhat fuzzy to me (mainly because i don’t know much about it). The subject presented was interesting: open source licenses, as presented by an IP-IT lawyer, Ywein Van Den Brande.

There are two main open source categories: the copyleft licenses and the non-copyleft licenses. Copyleft means the license is contagious: if you modify the code, or add on to it, the license must be extended to your code.

The well-known ones in copyleft land:

GPLv2 and v3: V3 is somewhat stricter than v2. Difference: v3 allows you to use any means to access GPL’ed code hidden in an appliance without breaching the license. It also makes it more difficult to patent GPLed code.
Lesser GPL: softer form of GPL

Non-copyleft:

Both very light – and can be used in proprietary software.

Others I know (not mentioned in the presentation), brought out by organizations to fit their requirements:

MIT License: a bit like BSD license
Ruby license
Mozilla Public license
Apparently Google is going to come out with one too.

All open source license have it in common that they offer no warranty and the authors are not liable for any problems issuing from using their code.
An interesting twist: if you sell something in Belgium, you are responsible. So whatever your license, you’re still liable to get sued over bad code.

Text, designs and pictures fall under another open license: Creative Commons. By default, any original content you produce falls under copyright, unless you indicate, with Creative Commons, that you are willing to relinquish some of your rights.

There’s different Creative Commons licenses, corresponding to degrees of freedom:

Attribution (by): you authorize any person to use your material, if they make a reference to you
NonCommercial (nc): your material can not be sold
ShareAlike (sa) aka copyleft: anything reusing your material must have the same license
NoDerivs (nd): you may copy, distribute, display and perform the work itself, but not modify it

It was a good presentation. All the more because I think this knowledge is essential if you want to make a living working with open source.

5 comments »

Posted in developer, law

Koyaanisqatsi

September 30th, 2007

Koyaanisqatsi means ‘life out of balance’ in Hopi native indian language. Rediscovered the soundtrack of Koyaanisqatsi recently. It manages to be beautiful, calm, ample, uplifting, and music you can even listen to while you work (usually not the case for me).

If you’ve got the chance, you’ve got to watch the film that goes with it. Don’t wait for dialogue, it’s one long videoclip – but a well-directed one.

Sample:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

4 comments »

Posted in movies, music

China in your hand

September 29th, 2007

China being this humungous market, the economic compass of multinationals will start pointing to this new pole.
How will this affect our life and our consumer goods ?

I’ve got a couple of chinese friends, i’ve been for a short stint, and i’ve even studied the language a little bit. I won’t say i know the culture – that would take growing up there.

First off: chinese are not into individuality. Human rights couldn’t have originated there, because individuals are not that important in the big picture. I’m told that’s a legacy of taoism and confucianism.

As a consequence, they don’t mind to conform. Most actually feel confortable with their government, who they feel are doing what’s best for the common good. As long as life can go on safely and unimpeded. A computing student told me: of course, a lot of us know how to bypass the firewall, but why would we ?

They have a culture of hard working: those of us with some academic past have probably met chinese PhD working 16 hours a day. I’ve also known some lazy people, so i suppose human nature variability applies.

Back to our consumer goods. Large market with little appreciation for customization: that smells like economies of scale. We might see our number of options go down a bit.

Esthetically, they seem to like cute and coloured (red and pink – red is lucky). We might escape that, unless they also become culturally dominant, in which case we’ll probably start liking cute and coloured, too

More seriously, a Chinese world leader could have a downwards leveling effect on workplace regulations and social security. And of course a serious drainage of work opportunities: if china is the place to be to do business, there’s no point in staying in Europe.

Then again, some say that with their abysmal rich-poor divide, China is headed more towards a revolution than a world leadership. Wait and see …

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Posted in economy, politics, Uncategorized

Traffic

September 27th, 2007

Last few days i’ve had fun with setting up performance tests. Part of this is to record the HTTP requests to the server in questions, so you can replay it later (adding the necessary variable bits, like session ids and stuff).

As a bonus, while i was recording i noticed a couple of things.

Calling up Gmail takes (I kid you not) 71 HTTP requests to load – pictures, css, chat and other ajaxy bits included. Seventy-one. No wonder it switches to what i’d call ugly interface when your bandwidth is reduced.

The del.icio.us Firefox extension is a much appreciated tool to bookmark your stuff. But did you know it contacts the mother ship about every 10 minutes ? I didn’t.

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Posted in developer

Links on a fickle monday

September 24th, 2007

I had a little rant about people who don’t comment their source the other day. What was i thinking ? (via eMich)

OAuth: a way to limit sites in their access to your stuff. I’ll look that one up. I didn’t know the concept of valet key, since i drive a decent but not extravagant german car, and i’ve never been to them places where you give your Bentley key to a total stranger.

Interesting web surveys: robots.txt and http headers (via Simon Willison).

… and we didn’t win the European e-gov awards. I can always put the following in my CV

… participated to a project that was e-government awards finalist in 2007 …

which sounds impressive until you know there were 60 finalists (6 of which belgian !). We just can’t compete with a german application linking up 5000 towns.

2 comments »

Posted in developer, privacy, security

Black and white

September 24th, 2007

I received a compilation of interesting radio shows about the history of film recorded from France Culture. This weekend i did a whole lot of cooking, so i listened to a 4 or 5 shows.

I like France Culture – varied programming, a very high intellectual level, and no adverts. Sometimes too intelligent for me, like when they link famous film directors to philosophers – but never too old to learn.

So here’s a few film directors i will get films of in the next few weeks (from another great institution, of Belgium this time, the Mediathèque) :

Fritz Lang
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Josef Von Sternberg
well, i’ve seen some of Hitchcock already, but always nice to rewatch with some expert comment in mind
Sacha Guitry

Nice to know there are so many things to discover still.

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Posted in movies

None of your business

September 22nd, 2007

Attention data is one of the commodities of our times: how to get it, how to use it, how to keep it safe from big greedy Google and other Yahoos.

There’s the data you offer by doing web searches. Depersonalizer claims to keep your searches anonymous. This plugin should do the same, and more.

Then there’s all your surfing habits: Tor is a way to surf anonymously (albeit more slowly). And then there’s obviously all the ‘surf through a proxy’ solutions, as used by chinese if they want to bypass the Golden Shield.

Last but not least there’s the identity data. Lately i’ve been subscribing and testing all kinds of web2.0 contraptions, but i’m wondering if that was such a good idea. I should probably multiply my web identities (and then keep track of those).

In a way, single sign-on implementations might go against privacy, since they link a whole lot of services to one identity. Hosting the authenticating server yourself (like is possible with OpenID) might be a partial solution – but someone managing to track the traffic to your server might still get a pretty good picture.

Keeping your cards close to your chest is going to be a hard thing to do.

2 comments »

Posted in privacy

Kraftwerk on X&Y

September 19th, 2007

I haven’t had the chance to show off my nice new media player yet – but now i’m going to indulge.

All music is derived from other music somehow, i know, i know – but i heard this number a short while ago (not sure who it’s from, but it sounds like the Kraftwerk era):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Not bad in itself – funny and quaint, timebound.

Now how close is that, and especially the end, to this tune:

I hope some royalties were forthcoming, because it might have gone beyond just inspiration.

3 comments »

Posted in Uncategorized

Simplicity

September 18th, 2007

Simplicity. no ajax, no candy-like design, no sounds, no flash (no login).
just a new ingenious concept, and a good implementation:
jottit
doodle
Fantastic.

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Posted in web2.0

Links for an unexceptional tuesday

September 18th, 2007

Belgium on eBay. I’ve got a wager on with one of the guys of the helpdesk – he thinks we won’t have a new government before the end of the year, i do (or i hope so anyway).
Update: they removed it from sale Anyway, story here and here.

Tripit: upload and share your travel schedule.

Human-readable source to set up tests, with Behaviour driven programming. Intriguing.

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Posted in Belgium, developer, web2.0

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