Politics

DMCA Unintended Consequences List Updated

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has kept a running list of the unintended consequences arising from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act’s passage seven years ago.

It’s a long, sobering and scary list.

And the Copyright Office (who is charged with making changes to the DMCA to temper it’s effects) is not doing it’s job.

You can read the EFF’s list here.

Also here is a column by Infoworld’s Ed Foster discussing the how the DMCA and the Copyright Office protected the Sony Rootkit.

The DMCA was a bad law when it was enacted and it’s still a bad law seven years later.

Digital Photography

Good News

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

I got the okay from Liz to buy a lens for my camera! Charles pointed me to keh.com – a used camera site – where they had the Canon 18-55MM “kit” lens used for $65! That’s a pretty good price and not a bad lens.

I also tossed an RC-5 remote shutter release into the deal for $19.

Now I need to figure out what “long” lens I need… 🙂

Motorcycles

Bad News

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

It would appear that the fuel pump is dying in the K1100RS. Again. Seems to me I just put a new pump in there. I’ll have to check the receipt and see if it’s under warranty (highly doubtful.)

The pump began singing me a little whiny song about half way home last night. Bah. At least it didn’t die on me out in the middle of nowhere.

So now I get to spend about $200 and put in a new one. Again.

This is why one needs to own more than one motorcycle. 🙂

Family

Parade Ice Gardens Follow-Up

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

I got a nice email today from the General Manager of Administration for the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation:

Mr. Foreman,

I received your complaint on open skating at Parade – I oversee the ice area operation. I would like to start by apologizing and offering you an hour of ice time at no charge for your daughter and her friends to skate at Parade Ice Garden. You can contact Reggie Krakowski, the manager at Parade to redeem this. I hope this will compensate you for the inconvenience.

Our open skaters generally know to check in advance, so this is rarely a problem. If you plan another event at Parade (and we hope you will) please call in advance and reserve the ice for your party. Parade Ice Garden is 100% supported by fees, there are no tax dollars used to support the operation. As such, we always want to make sure our customers are satisfied with our service. Thanks, Don.

Don Siggelkow
General Manager of Administration
Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board

This is a follow-up to this email I had sent them.

I guess we’ll have to try and organize another skating party now.

Misc

Worst Music Videos?

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Over on the Music Thing blog they posted a Finnish music video. It’s from around 1976 and it’s sooo awful.

Watch it here.

But the best part is in the comments on the blog. I’m going to pull out the video links and list them here:

But I think JWZ beat them all the other day when he posted links to Britney Spears covering I Love Rock and Roll and Jessica Simpson covering Take My Breath Away.

You will have to excuse me now while I go bleach my eyeballs.

Computers

Another poorly implemented site

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

This page renders in IE. It does not in Firefox. Why?

Let’s find out.

It’s because the webserver returns a “Content-Type: text/plain” header instead of a “Content-Type: text/html” one.

IE, like a helpful puppy, looks at the contents and renders the html.

Firefox does what the server tells it to and renders it as plain text.

Which is doing the right thing? There’s a religious debate for you. I think Firefox is doing the right thing.

But is it really the web server’s fault? Note that the page has no file extension. How is poor Apache to know what the content type should be without a little help from the page creator? How much more work would it have been to type .html? Or .htm? Or even .h if you are lazy and configure Apache to serve .h as html pages?

Let’s look a little further:
Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.25 OpenSSL/0.9.7d PowWeb/1.1

Ah, a FrontPage user. There you go.

Standards? What are those for?

Yet another stupid decision made by a web programmer.

Update: I poked around some more and clicked on the “Home” button which takes you to the front page. Or it would if they had an index.html page defined. But they don’t, so you get a directory listing.

I see several index pages:

index1.html
index111a.html
index2.html
indexWORKS.html
indexdeact.html
indexold
indexold.html

but no index.html

Whoops!

Family

Letter to the Park Board

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

If you read my entry about Stephanie’s party, you saw that we got canceled out of Ice Skating.

I sent an email to several members of the park board:

To: mschmidt@minneapolisparks.org, tnordstrom@minneapolisparks.org,
mmerrillanderson@minneapolisparks.org, ayoung@minneapolisparks.org,
tnordyke@minneapolisparks.org
Subject: Parade Ice Gardens Complaint

I would like to lodge a complaint about the operations of the Parade Ice
Gardens.

On Saturday, March 25th, my wife called the information line for Parade Ice
Gardens and was told that there would be open skating on April 1st from
2:30 to 4:00.

We then planned my daughter’s 13th birthday party with the intention to go
skating at Parade.

We had all the parents drop their kids at Parade at 2:15. We stood around
waiting for the rink to open.

Finally around 2:40, an employee informed us that open skate had been
canceled because The Wild hockey team was going to be using it at 3:00.

He stated that there had been a message on the information line for a few
days and there had been notes on the bulletin board.

As you might imagine, my daughter was very dissapointed.

There was a woman in line in front of me who was very annoyed and I got the
impression that the cancellation of public open skate with little notice
happens quite often.

I think this is unacceptable.

I don’t think that I should have to call the information line every day
before I plan on going skating to see if public skating has been canceled.

I also don’t think it’s reasonable that I should have to change my
daughter’s birthday plans at the last moment due to the whims of a
professional hockey team.

Parade Ice Gardens is a Minneapols Park and Recreation facility. It is
supposed to be for public use. Not for the use of a professional hockey
team when ever they feel like it.

If you are going to publish a schedule that states there will be public
open skate on Saturdays from 2:30 to 4:00 I don’t think it’s unreasonable
to expect that to happen.

I would have to assume that The Wild have a practice schedule that could be
merged into the park schedule at the very least.

If my wife had called on March 25th and been told that there was no public
skating on April 1st, that would have been fine. We would have made other
plans.

But to tell us that there would be public skating and then change it,
that’s unacceptable.

I got an almost immediate reply from one member:

Mr. Foreman-

Thank you for letting me know your concerns about the Ice Gardens. You are quite right that if public open skate is advertised for Saturdays from 2:30 to 4:00 it is not unreasonable to expect that to happen.

I apologize, and I sincerely hope your daughter’s birthday was not ruined.

I will ask Mr. Schmidt to find out what went wrong and why you were subjected to this last minute change. I agree that this is not acceptable and should never happen again.

Thank you again, and please feel free to contact me in the future if this is not resolved to your satisfaction.

Tom Nordyke

I guess that’s a reasonable response. I don’t know if they will change anything though. :-O

Family

Stephanie’s Birthday Party

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

This weekend was pretty fun. On Saturday Stephanie had 7 friends over for her 13th birthday party. Imagine, eight 12 and 13 year old girls! Whee!

They are a really nice gaggle of girls though, so they all had a good time. And so did Liz and I.

The original plan was to go ice skating at the Parade Ice Gardens. They are supposed to have open skate from 2:30 – 4:00 on Saturdays right now.

I say original plan because we all arrived at the ice rink around 2:30. After we had been standing around for about 10 minutes, one of the people working there told us that open skate had been canceled because The Wild (the Minnesota state hockey team) were going to be using the ice starting at 3:00.

WTF? This is a Minneapolis Parks and Rec facility. Why is a professional hockey team booting people off the ice so they can practice?

So we discussed things and decided to go play mini-golf at Lava Links instead. And the girls had a good time.

Then we went to our house where the girls had a snack (which they practically inhaled) and made a crafty item. Stephanie and I had gone out and bought each girl a wooden letter that was their first initial and lots of sequins and pom poms they could glue on. So each girl made a fridge magnet.

After they were done with that I made sushi for them and then they had cake and ice cream.

Then they popped in Monty Python and the Holy Grail to watch until their parents picked them up around 8:00.

All in all it was a very successful birthday party.

Security

More Homeland Security Run Amok

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

There is a small town in Alaska named Dillingham. It has a population of about 2400 and is very remote. A fishing village, mainly.

The city council and mayor have spent about $220,000 of Homeland Security money to install 60 cameras (with 20 more to come) around the town.

What are the expecting to see?

Total insanity.

Oh! I just realised its a multi-page article and it gets even better! It’s a movie-plot threat scenario!

“Tokyo is that way,” says Thompson, extending his arm to the left. He’s standing near the spot in the harbor where Roberts stood the previous day.

“Russia is about 800 miles that way,” he says, arm extending right.

“Seattle is about 1,200 miles back that way.” He points behind him.

“So if I have the math right, we’re closer to Russia than we are to Seattle.”

Now imagine, he says: What if the bad guys, whoever they are, manage to obtain a nuclear device in Russia, where some weapons are believed to be poorly guarded. They put the device in a container and then hire organized criminals, “maybe Mafiosi,” to arrange a tramp steamer to pick it up. The steamer drops off the container at the Dillingham harbor, complete with forged paperwork to ship it to Seattle. The container is picked up by a barge.

“Ten days later,” the chief says, “the barge pulls into the Port of Seattle.”

Thompson pauses for effect.

“Phoooom,” he says, his hands blooming like a flower.

“Farfetched? My view is we pay people like me to think of the ‘what ifs,’ ” Thompson says.

Bruce Schneier loves to write about movie-plot threat scenarios.

Story details here.