philisha.net

Look!

I made a web site.

Yes indeed, with the help of the peerless Tim Malabuyo, I have brought online The King’s Business, Biola’s old monthly periodical.

I really like the feeling of working with a designer. I’m a programmer, and I’ve really only done a couple sites that I feel good about the design. So having a designer working with me lets me focus on the fun stuff. Plus, he’s really good. (Of course, he also thinks that he gets to focus on the fun stuff and leave the hard stuff to me. Ha. I’m not the one that has to deal with IE bugs!)

The other different thing about this project is that I hardly spent any time on the coding. (136 LOC, for what it’s worth.) The difficult thing was dealing with the gigabytes of image files that had to be converted and organized. I wrote some Ruby scripts to handle the conversion (in retrospect, Bash would have been more appropriate, but it was a good learning experience.) The image conversion was a huge task; the first time I ran it, it took 9 hours to complete. I think the CPU of my desktop running that program raised the temperature in the apartment noticeably that day.

Anyway, feel free to take a look and tell me what you think. There’s some good stuff in there. Biola had some pretty sharp people in those early “what can we do to take the world for Christ” days, back before it became “a safe place to send your kids.” One of my favorite parts is the ads for the Bible Institute: “Tuition Free!”

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When they kick at your front door,
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
or on the trigger of your gun?
When the law breaks in,
how you gonna go?
Shot down on the pavement,
or waiting on death row?

You can crush us,
You can bruise us,
Or even try to shoot us.
But you’ll have to answer to
the Guns of Brixton.

Three cheers for the second ammendment. (I know, I know, they’re British.) The Clash have actually made me quite curious about the political climate in 1970’s England. (No music has ever done that for me before, oddly enough.)

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“Quake Mobile takes all of the action, gameplay and atmosphere of the groundbreaking original, and puts it right in the palm of your hands.”
—Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software, commenting on a planned release of Quake for mobile phones

“You aren’t going to be able to make an immersive experience on a 2-inch screen, no matter what the graphics look like. Moody and atmospheric are pretty much out. Stylish and fun is about the best you can do.”
—John Carmack, creator of Quake, commenting on developing for mobile phones

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I have been known to criticise the state of American copyright law in the past, but some people were confused because most of what I said was criticism without offering much positive opinion on what things should look like. My biggest problem with the current state of affairs is that people have lost sight of the fact that the original intent of copyright was a compromise. The public would allow for certain people to control media for a time because it was the only way that certain works could be produced. As the U.S. Constitution puts it:

“The Congress shall have power […] To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

Thus we get the basis of the authority which has established copyright and patent law.

It was always intuitive to me that the recent extensions of copyright did nothing to further this goal. In particular, the DMCA prohibits rather than promotes the progress of science and the useful arts, and it always seemed obvious to me that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension (which extended copyright term to seventy years after the death of a work’s author) has more to do with protecting media cartels than promoting the creation of new art. However, I never really felt that I could express why I felt that way.

Well, the other day I stumbled upon a fantastic article on K5 with Lord Macaulay’s copyright speech. Lord Macaulay was an influential British statesman and philosopher who was largely responsible for drafting the legal system of colonial India, among other things.

His speech, while long, is really a gem. It is a bit of a shock for me (and probably anyone who is used to contemporary American speeches) to hear a politician give a long discourse that appeals to common sense and reason. He makes a sound case that (a) copyright is based on a compromise of accepting a necessary evil of monopoly so that creativity will flourish, and (b) extending the period of that monopoly past the death of the author does much to increase the public disadvantage of the monopoly while doing little to increase the advantage of the author. The context of the speech is that of opposition to a bill which would extend copyright duration to sixty years past the author’s death. The bill was soundly defeated.

Almost all of the speech is surprisingly relevant even today (perhaps because his warnings have been ignored?) but the most powerful is the closing of the speech:

I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind.

Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions.

Pass this law, and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim’s Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?

Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.

If only today’s politicians had the wisdom and vision of this fellow! (Jon: now do you understand?)

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Yesterday my friend Dustin Guenther married his friend Katie Fisher. They are so uncommonly right for each other in a way that doesn’t need to be explained if you know them. I happily returned the favour of being a groomsman in their blessed wedding. They are off in Hawaii at the moment, but expect an update when they return, if you can expect anything about Dustin’s blog to be timely. (Dustin—there’s nothing wrong with posting on your honeymoon…. I did it.)

My warmest congratulations to you both.

It looks like Libby posted pictures And Lem promised to put some up, too. I only got three pictures, and two of them were of the cake.

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Finally our connection at the new apartment is up! We’re with Verizon this time. I’ve heard a few nasty things about them, (blocking port 80 for one) but no problems so far. They even gave us a nifty DSL modem that has an integrated router and wireless! So much cool! Hopefully service doesn’t cut out when it rains… (ahem—SBC!)

The week of downtime was embarassing, but it’s over. Worst was not having Planet Zacchaeus and having to check all my friends blogs manually. Poor me, I know. (Actually worst was not having email at home without going outside to bum off an unsecured signal a few units over. We are the 5th or 6th wireless signal in the complex that I know of. I haven’t done a thorough search yet.)

I’ve always thought those ‘My child is an honor student’ stickers were kind of silly, but here’s something worse. ‘My child may not be an honor student, but he tried really hard’.

Oh yeah, and we have a phone in our apartment now. It was hooked up two days ago, and so far we have received nine phone calls, none of them useful. They’ve been divided about evenly between wrong numbers and telemarketers, with one “open the gate, Phil” call from Dustin. (The gate wouldn’t open.) Additional irony: we used to need a land line because our handphones got no reception indoors. Now we have perfect reception through the whole apartment, but we have to get a land line for DSL purposes.

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I actually feel a good deal stupider after watching this movie:
http://spherule.com/media/video/ballmer_musicvideo.mov
Dance, monkey boy; dance! Oh, sorry. What I meant to say was, ‘stay away’!

If you ever visit China, you may find this link helpful!

From the Tao of Programming:

There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of
the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: “Which is easier to
design: an accounting package or an operating system?”

“An operating system,” replied the programmer.

The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. “Surely an accounting
package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system,” he said.

“Not so,” said the programmer, “when designing an accounting package,
the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different
ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must
conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited
by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the
programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is
why an operating system is easier to design.”

The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. “That is all good and well, but
which is easier to debug?”

The programmer made no reply.

This is absolutely insane. It’s Lemmings written entirely in
Javascript! Unbelieveable.

Oh, and Ben, are you
listening?
Public key cryptography is where it’s at! But you knew that.
Implementors? Please?

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The symptoms of our getting older
The problems we say we don’t mind
Most of us never get over
Memories mingled with lies

Coincidence gave a confession
That no one’s allowed to forget
I don’t wanna give the impression
That predestination is set

The distance will increase the danger
Where certainty’s never enjoyed
Regarded as equal yet stranger
Embark then embrace then destroy

Observing the process will change it
And afterwards even if you
Subconsciously rearrange it
It doesn’t seem any less true

And no one can tell me to listen
And no one can tell me what’s right
‘cause nobody has my condition
And no one can see in your mind
In your mind

When magnifications explore
There slowly emerges a pattern
The details you normally ignore
You notice really what matters

There isn’t a time or a place
Only an ebb and a flowing
A permanent repeating space
Occuring, connecting and growing

And no one can tell me to listen
And no one can tell me what’s right
‘cause nobody has my condition
And no one can see in your mind
In your mind

In your Mind by Built to Spill

I think that part of this song is a justification of moral relativism through quantum uncertainty. Which is, of course, absolutely absurd. Still, you have to give them points for trying. The audacity of such a mental project is definitely something.

I’m debating the point of putting music here because I realized it’s not nearly as interesting to read it if you don’t have the sounds in your head. It turns out that’s a bigger issue than just with music, because half the stuff I post doesn’t make much sense without the context I have. And yet somehow I still seem to maintain a positive comments-to-posts ratio. (Don’t know how that happened…)

New Design: better? It’s not yet done; I still need to style the posts themselves. But the business at the top will stay how it is, and the sidebar might just change a little.

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