SuperHappyDevHouse

The price of bovine lactation keeps going up...

hence cafes are upping the price of coffees that contain milk, like Cappachino and Flatwhites. Long blacks and shots remain the same price.

I drink a Soy Flat White. Cafes charge 50c extra for soymilk, ontop of the normal flatwhite price.

So, the price of my soy flat white increases yet again, because the price of dairy milk has gone up.. this really doesn't seem fair to keep charging me more and more because of the price increase on an unrelated item.

RARRRR!. Time to stop buying from cafes and just make my own.

1) sue every ISP that allows copyrighted material to get through
2) sue every broadcast television station that allows people to record to VCR etc.
3) sue every retail store that sells DVDs that allows people to rip them, or share with friends.
4) sue makers of televisions and computer screens, for allowing people to play copyrighted material without permission
5) sue every cinema that allows people to secretly record the movie - that's the cinemas that don't do strip searches of their patrons.

Failing that.. We could remove everyone's eyeballs, and replace them with digital units that only operate if the RIANZ allows it. That's what's needed to clamp down on these terrorists... (and perhaps a war or two).

ISP sued for "Allowing Copyright Infringement".

What's next for the film industry? Lets sue those that build+maintain public roads people for "allowing" transport of stolen goods on them?

"The leading film studios and Channel 7 have taken legal action against iiNet claiming the ISP is complicit in the infringement of their copyrighted material.

The action was filed in the Federal Court today.

According to a statement of claim, .the ISP knows that there are a large number of customers who are engaging in continuing infringements of copyright by using BitTorrent file sharing technology..

The plaintiffs . Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Disney Enterprises, and the Seven Network claim that iiNet is aware of the problem but has chosen not to take reasonable steps, including enforcing its own terms and conditions, to prevent known unauthorised use of copies of the companies. films and TV programs by iiNet.s customers. "

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4767496a28.html
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/268184/film_industry_sues_iinet_...
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/11/20/1411213.shtml

(Thanks to MF for sending this to NZOSS list)

DSC_6848, originally uploaded by Steinmagne

one of my slides from Drupal South - :-)

Looking for christmas gifts? Check out OXFAM New Zealand's "OXFAM Unwrapped"

gift a duck, a goat, a coffee plant to your friends and family, and OXFAM will send it to someone in need of such an item on their behalf

e.g. buy a shade grown environmental sustainable coffee plants Price: $20

ACTA negotations involving New Zealand are still guided by people who think copyright infringement is equivalent to terrorism.. and when a crime is as bad as terrorism then we don't get a trial. (That logic appears often this century)

National Party (NZ's new government) coud be reviewing our insane new copyright law, perhaps fixing the section 92A and 92C "guilty apon accusation" clauses - but possibly adding more wishlist of BigContent owners at the expense of New Zealander's freedoms.
quoting from http://www.stuff.co.nz/4763648a28.html

"National has said it is open to a "complete review" of copyright
legislation and there is speculation it may intervene to stop 92A taking effect."

I'm working working working - doing a few "middle of the morning" (aka 4am) changes in corners of telcos.

and I'm moving house - new place is definitely a student pad, cheap, no dishwasher, no bath, no gas, no heating :-( but it's cheap and close to the city and has a lawn access via a tall ladder that has 270 degree views of the city. Previous tenants used it as a Stoner Lawn - we'll be making it an Epic Beer Drinking Lawn.

-QQ-Rice - InternationalSource: www.qqrice.co.nz

new place in dixon street - bag of squished rice that you push into your face... actually tasty.

yesterday my blog was "dugg" - and appeared on the technology page on Digg.com

It promptly fell over. It's a stock standard untuned debian etch server running drupal, on 256Mytes RAM.. I'd never spent the time to tune it.

So, yesterday, after rebooting I did the following:

1) turn on drupal's agressive caching - this means it saves the entire page it generates into the database so it doesn't need to regenerate.

2) gave a minimum page life of 5 minutes - so Drupal won't regenerate a page, even if there'es new comments, until it's at least 5 minutes since last regeneration

3) install eAccelerator - an opcode cache for php. This precompiles php ready to run. I also turned off checking of file modified time, so it doesn't re-read the php code from disk again until i restart apache and/or purge the eaccelerator cache

4) install varnish, a simple proxy, as a reverse proxy. I gave varnish control of port 80. It can handle more requests per second, and even serve most of them outta cache -- and pass requests to apache2. Apache2 doesn't have to wait for the resulting page to transfer to the requestor, it will send to varnish and then it's done. Varnish takes care of the rest of the tranfer, and varnish is a lighter process than apache2.

My hosting company emailed to say my server was doing lotsa swapping -- i replied it was because of Digg -- the lovely person there said they would forgive going over the traffic limit :-) isn't that nice?? they're slicehost.com, a very opensource friendly company, and i highly recommend them.

Debian have a new service -- screenshots. They're asking for users to contribute screen shots of applications

see post to debian mailing list:

a picture is worth a thousand words. And thanks to
screenshots.debian.net this finally comes true for Debian packages.
Several people have proposed a service to provide screenshots for them. So
after getting other developers' opinions and suggestions I sat down and
crafted a web application that allows to upload and provide screenshots.

Unless you are busy helping to fix RC bugs for the Lenny release please
consider contributing screenshots of your favorite applications. Currently
there are already over 260 screenshots available but there is still some
way to go. Everybody can upload screenshots - you don't have to be a
Debian developer or Debian maintainer to help. Your uploads will just be
checked by the admin team and then published.

I would love to see the screenshots integrated into packages.debian.org and
perhaps they even get used in graphical package managers like synaptic,
kpackage, adept or gnome-apt. It is easy to refer to screenshots from your
own application or web site. Just use these URLs:

Thumbnail (<= 160x120 pixels):
http://screenshots.debian.net/thumbnail/PACKAGENAME
(this URL returns a dummy thumbnail if no screenshot was found)

Package's page with all available screenshots:
http://screenshots.debian.net/package/PACKAGENAME

once apon a time, about 3 years ago, i was accused of copyright infringement.

It was a photo, posted to flickr long ago, and used in my blog. It was a photo i took of my chocolate milkshake, out at "The Bach" near island bay.

Here's the photo:

Some random from the intarwebs left comment after comment on this blog saying "You stole my photo". It was complete buillshit. They also started emailing my webhost, repeatedly accusing me of copyright infringement. My webhost dutifully forwarded these to me, i replied it was all complete bollocks.. we moved on.

fast forward to November 2008 - what's an ISP supposed to do under this circumstance? I'd call their claim "unreasonable", but i dislike the idea that my ISP is the judge and adjudicator.

I work for a telco, and we do work at ungodly hours. I don't go to my office for these 3am system changes - i do these at my kitchen table in my pyjamas. Judith Tizard proposes I can do these at my local library instead!! WTF!

Aparently i'm talking to postgresql users' group tonight on Master/Master replication

it'll actually be a whirlwind tour of loadbalancing + replication tools i've used with Postgresql.

I like to i'm a pragmatist. I use posgresql alot because i know it well - but when the job is better suited to something like sqlite or mnesia then i'll use that.

If you use another database, we'd be keen for you to come along and share your experiences. Even if (shock && horror!) your favourite database is closed source.

The meeting is tonight, 12th Novermber, at 6:00 PM, Level 3, 150
Willis St, Wellington.

There are so many fronts on which the "freedom" of the internet is under attack in my own country, neighbouring countries, and elsewhere.

Here in New Zealand a new copyright act went into effect on 1st November. The most controversial clause has been delayed until 28th February. This clause says that an ISP must have a policy of disconnecting anyone repeatedly accused of copyright infringment. ...

That's accusation only. There's no oppourtunity to defend yourself, no recourse for reconnection, and there's no penalty for false accusations. If you want someone off the internet you need only repeatedly accuse them of copyright infringement ("repeatedly" has legal precidents to mean 3 times). Aparently file sharing is so bad you don't even get a trial (can they not see where that logic leads?). Even pedaphiles get a trial before they are considered guilty and punished. I could not continue my occupation if i was disconnected.

There's also that great treaty called "ACTA" - Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which on the surface is defending against fake prada handbags, but also fake baby prams (won't someone please think of the children!).. and fake medicines. I'm unsure if they mean cheap generic medicines that infringes patents, or if they mean dangerous medicines that aren't what they say on the labels -- but regardless, the Music and Film industry have been asked for their wishlist (to crack down on those dangerous counterfeit music tracks). The problem is the countries participating in ACTA negotiations have signed with the USA that they will not reveal the contents of the treaty until after they ratify it.

The public were asked for submissions in New Zealand, but how the frack am i to send a submission on a treaty when i cannot see the contents of it?

In the EU a group of citizens used their official information act to force the EU council to reveal the contents of this treaty... the Council said No. Who are they accountable to? Aparently not to their citizens and not to their own laws.

Within the wishlists of RIAA is making ISPs liable for copyright infringement that happens through their networks.. This we need to be very vocal about. How's an ISP to know whether a data packet contains a copyright infringement?? by only allowing you to talk to sony.com + apple.com ?

In other news, Australia looks like it's about to force all isps to enforce a blacklist of IPs. The result is all of Australia's internet access being filtered, in the on going mission to stamp out child porn. Their internet is going to get horribly slow, and it's not going to stop child porn. You just know the black list (a huge collection of child porn website urls) is going to leak out straight into the hands of the folks who want these urls. I hear a politician is trying to get a list of all R18 sites and add that to a list also. That's some huge list to check against on every packet. (not just port 80, otherwise it'd be too easy to bypass).

http://coffee.geek.nz/copyrightnz

http://coffee.geek.nz/aggregator/sources/6

check out this:
git clone http://git.shiny.geek.nz/twitter/generatus_auto/

a perl script - pass your username+password to it as first and second args, and it'll update your twitter with something from generatus.com.

Pass M as the third argument if you prefer male pronouns.

whack it in cron, and never need update twitter yourself again

boobs on bikes is fine with me, as long as it's intermingled with naked cocks on roller-skates. seems only fair.

11:30 <@corsair> does anyone here with some postgres-fu know what you should use instead of ::ABSTIME?
11:30 <@matt> ::VAGUETIME
11:30 <@matt> ::LUCHTIME-ISH
11:30 <@matt> LUNCH, of course
11:30 <@gordon> ::ABDOMINALSTIME
11:31 <@corsair> i said postgres-fu, not ass-fu you guys :P

Internet NZ have published the answers to questions sent to NZ political parties -- including a good section on the ammendments to our Copyright Act
http://internetnz.net.nz/issues/newzealand/2008%20General%20Election%20Questionnaire

Snippets:

Democrats for Social Credit: Copyright law needs to be completely reviewed. Not because it is no longer relevant, but because it is no longer working.

Progressive Party: ISPs should not be made policing agents and should not be liable for the use that end users make of the infrastructure they provide. Access to the internet should only be terminated on a court order after due process.

Workers' Party: The Workers Party would repeal Section 92A, and amend copyright legislation to give more rights to end users of content.

Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party: While creative work is crucial to the New Zealand economy and will become more so, a clear distinction needs to be made between copyright infringement and theft. The deliberate blurring of this distinction by American powers such as the RIAA must be discouraged.

Labour: The Labour government, in amending the Copyright Act is to create a more technology neutral framework for copyright and to ensure that an appropriate balance between the interests of content producers (copyright owners) and users is maintained with the advent of new technologies.

The Greens: The Greens would repeal section 92A of the Act. Instead of the current “notice and take-down” provisions, the Greens support a “notice and notice” regime.

National: Didn't answer questions, but pointed to its website

NZ First: Didn't answer questions, but pointed to its website

This saturday November 8th
shorland park, island bay
Live bands and DJ's from 12-7PM

Upper Hutt Posse (hip hop)
Lotus Eaters (funk)
Psychedelic Jellyfish and the Boom Box (dub)
Gwilym Evans (acoustic)
Moody (ambient/house)
Chomp (breaks)
Lean Up (dubstep)
+ guests (surprise)

There will be food and drinks availible for koha to wellington anarchist black cross, prisoner support/prison abolition group...

bring kids and kites, crafts and cutlery!

Hiro and Silar!!!, originally uploaded by Br3nda

Okay, so Twisted Hop has awesome beer -- the only Hand Pulled Cask Ale i christchurch... hmmm..

40 odd geeks gathered at this pub for some Drupal Conferencing. It's a complete "NERD PROM"

Some things we'd like to see are:
* More New Zealand focused drupal modules -
e.g. Payment gateways
i'd like to find time to make a Zoomin maps API CCK field.
* Maori language translations
* More NZ Drupal association membership
* More rescuing sites from other CMSes

Jonathan mentioned node/8, which is the oldset drupal "bug" that hasn't been fixed. It's a user deleting their own account.