afongen

Mr. Paul Sowden is writing on his web site again. Very glad to see you, Paul.

Kiara was at big band practice, where she had of course broken out photos of the boy. One guy peered closely at a picture. “That’s his first bath,” Kiara offered helpfully.

“Yeah…” He squinted at the picture for a while longer. “Is Sam a programmer?”

When I heard this, I was dying to see what picture had led him to this conclusion. I didn’t think I had a Perl shirt on in any of them. Maybe an Apple shirt? Nah, that’d just peg me as a Mac user. Maybe that MySQL shirt…that would still be weird, though, why would he assume programmer?

Then I found it.

If this were TV, here’s where the camera would quickly back off to the house, then the city, then the country, then the planet, all while my screams echoed through the galaxy.

In the photo, I am wearing a Visual Basic .NET t-shirt.

Go ahead, Matt, chortle.

Why would I wear such a thing? Two words: free clothes. And I’m not the language bigot you might make me out to be.

It’s really funny the reactions I get to the shirt when I work up the courage to wear it in public. No one’s actually come up to me and tried to start a conversation, as has happened when I’ve worn Perl gear or an Apple shirt, but they do stare. Aghast, I assume. ;-)

Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions Superbowl trailer.

Excellent. This is what I get for not watching the game. (via Hack the Planet)

There are two movies that Kiara and I absolutely loved but it seems no one else ever actually watched: Dark City and Gattaca. No more. Wil Wheaton is a self-described Dark City weenie.

Ooh, guess what just made it to my wishlist: All Creatures Great and Small on DVD. Series 1 and Series 2 are out, it looks like Series 3 will be available before long.

I love this show. When Kiara was in Sweden for Christmas a couple years ago, my evenings consisted of pouring myself a glass of 20-year tawny port, dimming the lights, and watching episodes from the first season. It runs at such a completely different pace from anything else I’ve ever seen. If ever you find you need to slow down your life, All Creatures is for you. It might take some getting used to, especially if you’ve only been exposed to the frenetic whirlwind that is modern television, but take your time, kick back, and let yourself go. It is absolutely marvelous.

No, I never read the books. Probably should. They don’t have Peter Davison, though.

And did you know that there’s a BBC America Shop? Me neither.

It’s been cold here in Minnesota the last few days. Really cold, refreshingly cold. The kind of cold when I can stand at the bus stop feeling smugly, snugly warm in my thermal underwear and multiple layers, laughing at the wind as it fails to whistle through my windblocking polarfleece scarf. Hah!

And now finally, after the cold lets up a bit and it’s climbed above zero, we’re getting snow. I cannot tell you how good it feels to shovel again. Seriously. Mostly, though, I love the crunch under my feet. I love the quiet hush of snow falling at night. I love that maybe, finally, Kiara can go skiing.

It can’t last. We’ve been teased like this before this winter, getting a similar dusting right before Christmas. It disappeared shortly after my sister and family left town, back to Indiana…where they promptly got more snow than we’ve seen all year.

Not that I’m bitter, de gozaimasu.

No, I have little hope that this snow’s going to last. I’m gonna go walk the dog.

Two articles on the same day about producing Excel spreadsheets using the Apache POI project, APIs for manipulating Microsoft document formats with Java:

• Avik Sengupta and Andrew Oliver’s “Opening Microsoft File Formats to Java” on OnJava.com, and
• Steve Punte’s “Excel Reports with Apache Cocoon and POI” on XML.com.

I keep having to create Excel spreadsheets on the fly. I do it with Perl, of course, but POI is intriguing. One of the reasons that I’m getting back into Java is all the cool Apache projects that use Java.

Frodo has failed.

John Le Carré in the London Times last week: The United States of America has gone mad.

The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.

The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world?s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.

But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet.

To follow up on a point in that first paragraph, something I meant to point to last week. A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union, “Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society“, tries to connect the dots between the disparate stories of just how our freedoms are being eroded (actively attacked, more like). Small stories about will appear in the mainstream press but not framed in the larger sense in which they really need to be seen.

One major hurdle is, of course, that the very people who most need to read this report are the ones least likely to see it. Many will disregard it solely because it comes from the ACLU, which has the unfortunate reputation of being just a bunch of whining commies. As if concern for civil liberty were not among the highest of American values.

Oh wait. That’s right. The idea of valuing civil liberty went out the door a long, long time ago. Silly me.

On the slightly geekier side, I thought it was pretty nifty how they have separate links to download the report and to display it in the browser — it’s available only as a PDF. I cannot tell you how often I have fielded questions from users panicking because they’re not getting whatever behavior they expect from a PDF, just because their browser either does or does not have the Acrobat Reader plugin. The ACLU‘s solution — to use different Content-Type headers — is not perfect, but it’s an interesting idea.

Damn. The US Supreme Court ruled against Eldred, 7-2. Lawrence Lessig has copies of the rulings on his weblog.

Update: I like what Dan Gillmor has to say: “Supreme Court Endorses Copyright Theft.”

The thieves are the members of the copyright cartel. Hollywood, the music industry, publishers and their vassals in Congress have continually heisted what you should already own: the words and songs and films and more of people, long dead, who have already been richly (and justly under copyright law’s original intent) rewarded for their creations.

They call it piracy now when a college student downloads an MP3. The most recent extension of copyright terms, giving huge corporations royalties on ancient art for another 20 years for no other reason than pure greed and corruption, is the single greatest act of copyright piracy in history.

On a more positive, related note, here’s an interview with Representative Rick Boucher, who’s introduced a bill to fix the DMCA: the Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act (HR 107).

The bill is very simple. It says that if a person is bypassing for a lawful purpose, then the bypass itself is lawful. If a person bypasses for the purpose of piracy or otherwise infringing the copyright, then the bypass and the infringement would remain unlawful. The bill also says that the manufacturer of technology that has multiple uses, some of which are potentially infringing, and others of which are useful, will be permitted under the DMCA; and that the manufacturer will not be punished under the DMCA, if the technology is capable of substantial noninfringing uses.