AlexH

I’ve talked to my MP twice: once briefly during his 2007 XMas Open
House, and then on July 23, 2008.

I discussed my objections to the bill, from a perspective of a parent
who needs to back up his kid’s dvds, someone who uses MythTV, and a
software engineer who is concerned about reverse engineering and
‘digital locks’.

Section #’s are from memory here:
I marked up a copy of the act with my notes, mostly regarding 29.21,
the rules about keeping one copy (which people can inadvertantly
violate with RAID, Apple’s Time Machine, drive caches, etc), and
destruction of copies after resale clause which would require physical
destruction of hard drives / flash media due to forensic recovery
software, 29.23, the restrictions on time-shifting, and the entire
section 41.

He is going to pass along my notes to someone in the Industry Committee.

He agreed with me that keeping one copy was not practical from a
computer architecture standpoint.

He agreed that the time shifting restrictions weren’t practial for a
PVR user that may catch up on their TV watching once a week. He also
admitted that he has some favourite episodes of The Hour that he
watches multiple times on his iPod.

So he understands things and is fairly computer literate, ie
understands the difference between RAM and hard drives.

We talked about what is going to happen to the bill when it is
discussed in the Industry Committee, and how the various parties can
voice their objections and bring in expert witnesses to explain
things.

My impression is that he is keeping the party line, said that there is
a need to bring the copyright legislation up to date. But he has been
known to vote against the party line for things that his constituents
want, ie the gay marriage ban.

Someone posted this link on the VanLUG mailing list. Very interesting!

Sony – Open Source Code – English

The following products incorporate software covered by the terms of the GNU General Public License and/or GNU Lesser General Public License, as specified in the software listing below.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/yum”, line 29, in ?
yummain.main(sys.argv[1:])
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py”, line 105, in main
result, resultmsgs = base.doCommands()
File “/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py”, line 287, in doCommands
self._getTs()
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py”, line 85, in _getTs
self._getTsInfo()
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/depsolve.py”, line 91, in _getTsInfo
self._tsInfo.setDatabases(self.rpmdb, self.pkgSack)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 529, in
pkgSack = property(fget=lambda self: self._getSacks(),
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 384, in _getSacks
self.repos.populateSack(which=repos)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/repos.py”, line 242, in populateSack
sack.populate(repo, mdtype, callback, cacheonly)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/yumRepo.py”, line 167, in populate
dobj = repo_cache_function(xml, csum)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/sqlitecachec.py”, line 46, in getPrimary
self.repoid)
TypeError: Parsing primary.xml error: Start tag expected, ‘< ' not found

For future reference and Google searches, this is caused by libxml2 being compiled without zlib support. >:-|

Wow, it was hot last night! So hot, I had to shut down the PVR:

Message from syslogd@ebi at Wed Jul 11 18:39:42 2007 …
ebi kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold

It seems like my plants are doing ok. There is a danger of the tomatoes dropping their blossoms before fruit has formed, but I don’t think that has happened.

And on a blogging note, there aren’t many times that I can have a post that’s in both the MythTV and Gardening categories!

B.C. swelters under record highs

Seven all-time temperature highs were set across British Columbia on Wednesday, with most of the records falling in the Fraser Valley, the Greater Vancouver area and on Vancouver Island.

New feature from Amazon EC2:

Paid AMIs allow AWS developers to charge other Amazon EC2 users for the use of AMIs they have created and shared. Sellers of AMIs set the price, and their customers then purchase one or more AMIs and are billed through Amazon.com for their use of these paid AMIs.

Right now, only a select group of people can create paid AMIs, but hopefully they will open it up to more in the future.

People are drooling over Drobo:

Data Robotics, Inc. | Drobo Product Specifications

Drobo Product Specifications

Four Bay Disk Interface
• 3.5″ SATA I or SATA II hard disk drives
• Full or half-height, no carriers required
• Choose the drive manufacturer, capacity (mixed capacities ok), and spindle speed or cache that fits your current storage needs

It looks like a cool device, and at $500 USD, it’s a bit pricey. I’d rather go with a more open solution that doesn’t need special software to run on the clients. Something like Openfilter:

File-based networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV and FTP. Network directories supported by Openfiler include NIS, LDAP (with support for SMB/CIFS encrypted passwords), Active Directory (in native and mixed modes) and Hesiod. Authentication protocols include Kerberos 5.

Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, iSCSI (target and initiator), scheduled snapshots, resource quota, and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols a breeze.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the presentation tonight.

Here are some links with some more information:

• Amazon Web Services blog
• S3Fox Organizer for Firefox
• Web interface to AWS
• EC2 plugin for Firefox
• Amazon Web Services forums

Congrats to Sebastian Trueg and his team:

K3b 1.0 Announcement – K3b

I am proud to announce the release of K3b 1.0.

powered by performancing firefox

There is a lot of confusion going on about Amazon EC2. I know I didn’t fully understand it when I signed up, but now that I’ve played with it for a while, I feel that I can comment on how it works.

• It is a full Linux machine. You can install anything on it. The only thing you can’t change is hardware. Kernels are a bit complicated, but doable. If there are things missing from the base images, the Amazon crew can provide it, if there is demand.
• It’s on a ram disk. That’s how you think about it. If you turn off the power, it goes away. BUT! If you reboot, it’s still there.
• You can save your images. They get saved to S3, and can be reloaded in the future. However, this is a time consuming process.

What it’s not:

• Something that private data can be stored on. There are too many variables, too many places a hacker can get in. When I talk about private data, I mean something that is under NDA or legislated to be private. I don’t mean passwords to a website.
• An infinitely expandable server.  1GB RAM, 160GB disk space, that’s it.  If you want more, you create a new server, and it’s up to you to deal with load balancing, new hostnames, getting the data to the image, etc.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, EC2, Elastic Computing Cloud, S3, Simple Storage Server, Web Hosting, Data Center, Utility Computing

If I could push one ‘net meme this year, I would choose this one:

‘I will purchase the $100 laptop at $300′ – PledgeBank

The project has just released its prototypes, and they look great. They run Linux, include WiFi, and can be hand cranked. The screen can operate in colour for dark conditions, or black and white for bright light conditions. There is a ton of attention being paid to this project, and I hope it can get off the ground.

The pledge is to pay $300 for the laptop, which you’ll get one, and two will be donated to children in a third world country.

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