Derik in Minnesota

12:21 am - Dispatches from Safe Mode: Google Chrome is the worst browser ever made

Preramble

I picked up a virus on… fridayish.
I call it a virus– I suppose technically it’s considered adware. My web searches get routed through ad sites instead of Google. Or my Google searches appear to go through– but any attempt to go to those sites instead gets routed through an ad-site. (It’s most annoying.)

Now, I picked up this virus from a WMA (a window media authenticated file) so you might think that this thread would be about how Window Media Player sucks, or the WMA format sucks (80% of WMA license-required files I’ve ever dealt with have been trying to infect my system with viruses) and loudly decry the death of the format.
…thing is, everyone knows that already.
I could decry Windows Defender, which warned me about the virus it saw Windows Media Player installing, and claimed to have caught it before it executed, which is clearly did not. But again– everyone knows Windows Defender (like most anything with “Windows” before its name) does not work. What’s the point?

So with my Firefox and Opera (I didn’t bother with Microsoft Internet Explorer… do I need to go into why?) thoroughly buggered, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Google Chrome browser showed no signs of infection.
You’d think that would make Google Chrome the best browser ever made, right?

09:58 pm - Test

TYhis is a test post. You should ignore it.

08:00 pm - LEGO More Dakka?

Awesomely unsafe at any speed setting.

I learned two things tonight:

1. When connecting a LEGO TECHNIC™ building set to a Dremel rotary tool, no matter how favorable a gearing is used, a drive shaft spinning at 15,000 RPM’s will generate enough friction to melt plastic.
2. Despite its excellent performance in loosening tight mechanisms, WD-40 is in fact a cleaner, not a lubricant, and is highly flammable. It should not be used to combat friction in a gearbox.

I could probably have arrived at both of these discoveries via Socratic reasoning had I stopped to think through the implications of my actions beforehand.

…but where’s the fun in that? (Video of attempt #3 below the cut.)

11:15 pm - Coincidence Is Not Just a Valley in Egypt

Reading House of Leaves, and my hot water has just gone out.

…I shall wait until it’s light out to look into this.

(No spoilers, I want to be surprised.)

02:43 pm - Remote Wiki Backup

I am not a trusting soul.
When the Wiki I contribute to crashed a few months ago, we discovered that our backups were not being performed as billed. That was a great sadness, and a scramble to back up ~27,000 pages out of web-caches, plus re-creating some very complicated templates from scratch. It was not fun.

Several months later… TWiki is safely ensconced in a new host and humming along. Our new host’s backups have been tested and verified to work.

I still worry. I mean… it’s not like the backups are off-site. A fire would wipe us out. A properly robust backup system must allow users to download their own backups.
(Quite aside the fact that our ostensible philosophical commitment when departing from Wikia should compel us to make reasonable backups to allow others to leave from us.)
Complicating things… I don’t have database access, so any backup system must, perforce, run remotely.

With all that in mind, I’ve been noodling at a script to scrape the name of every page in every namespace from the wiki, then archive’s the page’s raw contents. No history, no user data, no IP addresses… just the essentials.

…it’s harder than you’d think. We’ve got plenty of articles with multibyte names (non-english characters) in addition to multi-byte text. MySQL handles multibye text easily enough… as does PHP if you beat it hard enough, but the default behavior of mySQL seems to be to deliver multibyte-encoded content as latin-1, scrambling foreign characters. Getting all the ducks lined up has been a back-burner project for a couple months.
(It was actually backburner since BEFORE the Bookworm Crash that wiped out TFWiki. I regret not having it worked out before then.)

After some debugging, this is what I have:

• A script that scrapes the names/namespaces of all the pages currently on the wiki– that’s about 37,000 pages.
• A script that will then query the wiki for the raw (pre-render) text of these pages and store them in a database.

This isn’t a great solution. Since I’m running on a remote web-server, it means making 37,000 individual queries to the server I’m querying. I could do this in minutes with database access, but since this is a live wiki, I’m throttling the queries to one every 10 seconds to prevent overloading the server, which means snapshotting all 37,000 pages will take… 10 days.
There is no guarantee that the version I snapshot won’t be a vandalized page, reverted seconds after i take a picture. Or with templates… that I’m not grabbing a micro-version that’s not working, or incomparable with an inter-dependent template snapshotted later. (My solution was to hard-code the templates to be snapshotted first, and simply monitor the recentChanges to make sure there were no edits to them while they were being scraped.)
And of course the results aren’t in an easily imported format– they’re BLOB fields in an associative database that doesn’t correspond to mediaWiki structure. You cant’ really do much with them in this form.

…except hold onto them. If something goes wrong… they’re not in the best format– but they’re archived with no character-encoding issues, in original wikitext. It would take some custom-coding, but the text would get back into the wiki with 0 loss.
Well, no loss… except the pages which have been edited since they had a snapshot taken.

In an ideal world… this script would be crontab’d and monitor its own progress and execution-time to adjust its own throttle, it would monitor recentChanges, and it would import the edits onto its own wiki– live-mirroring the other. Oh– and it’d do something about the images, which this doesn’t back up at all.

That goes on the backburner though. Next up for me is a total rewrite of the site’s bot, using some of what I learned here… there are some links it stubbornly refuses to fix, and I think that a proper systematic script will get it working better.

For now… I can hold onto this and be content. Whatever else may happen… I know the site will not be wiped out.
Bird in the hand.

09:48 pm - 5 Things You Are Not Supposed to Say About Race and Sexuality in America

From CNN: Black university passes “no-crossdressing” rules targeting targeting 5 gay students

We are by now conditioned for the usual “not targeted at any one in particular, just a revision of…” blah blah blah have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too spin cycle. Which is what makes this story so openly refreshing!

So just this once, I’m gonna gently touch on some stuff I’m Not Supposed To Talk About:

1. The Black Community is homophobic. Whether it’s rooted in class, religion, collective cultural memory of some of the ugly parts of Slavery you don’t see in movies or a lingering legacy of the Nation of Islam’s involvement in the civil rights movement I can’t say… but a black community that’s preached tolerance for 50 years isn’t big on practicing it themselves. The surprise defeat of Proposition 8 is the most public example, but the fact is that within Black circles expressing and even advocating for these kind of view is deemed is culturally acceptable, and no one wants to call them on it because… you know!
2. The Gay Community is extremely racist, or at least prejudiced. One of the “problems” with a cross-section of society defined by their preferred sexual partners is that this preference takes on a more prominent role in that culture; namely the ‘I’m not attracted to other races’ thing that exists across the board. It’s not that there aren’t black gays… (though on a per-capita basis there are fewer) it’s that a gay black man inherits a triple-burden of their own cultural baggage, stereotypical and/or degrading ideas of what it means to be black within gay culture, and in a society defined primarily by the dating scene black members can find themselves “separate but equal.”
3. I’m not black, so it’s hard for me to be sure on this… but I suspect a lot of this represents an “old guard” of leaders in the African American community, mostly the guys who were activists in the 1970’s; like Jesse Jackson, whose ouster in 2007 came because he couldn’t see the war they’d fought for 50 years had been won, and American could elect a black man President. That generation needs to learn how to be quietly gaycist like the Republicans! Sure, everyone knows what’s going on… buy you’d don’t go around giving interviews confirming that “yes, this is exactly what’s going on!” That whole “attitude” needs to be kept in the closet! You know… keep it on the down low!
4. The Gay community is changing, and it’s changing quickly! We threw out our irrelevant leadership 5 years ago and replaced then with younger, sexier spokespeople! Honored war veterans wrongly discharged, accomplished politicians, Sulu! The 90’s were a sea change… a whole generation of gays that (unlike their predecessors) didn’t grow up sucking off strangers in park bathrooms! And they’re a lot less screwed up as a result! Plus the ‘turnaround time’ on a gay “generation,” from emergent awareness of adolescent sexuality to joining the adult community… is only 10 years. That makes gay culture a lot lighter on its feet, able to adapt and respond to cultural changes faster than other groups. The de-institutionalization of racial identity we’ve been living through for the past few years is gonna hit big; 7 years from now the racial barriers in gay culture will be– if not gone– at least reduced to a knee-high fence that’s easily stepped over.
5. We know you’re pissed that it took Gays 15 years to go from persona-non-grata to #1 sitcom stars, episcopal conventions and the marriage rights you’re apparently still fighting for. (WTF?) Frankly, it caught us by surprise too, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to give it back. Tell you what… in 35 years when being Gay is considered about as significant as being Irish and our shared cultural identity has disintegrated, leaving nothing but a meaningless parade and “Queer 4 Beer” t-shirts… then you can laugh. You can remind us not to discriminate against the Trangendered, and we can keep our mouths shut instead of telling you that your insistence on a separate African-America culture is a big part of why your own progress is so glacial.

Deal?

03:05 pm - Dispatches From Safe Mode: Reverse Cowgirl

I Installed McAfee 2 days ago from my old disks. (I’ve been running without Anti-virus for months.)
I like McAfee. I’ve run it off-and-on for years. It’s much lighter than, say, Norton… just a tiny lag while opening files as it scans them.

So imagine my rude awakening when it downloads updates, (which I’m apparently still entitled to?) and I suddenly realize I’m running something called McAffey “Security Center.”

Now, apparently this has existed since 2005… so I must have had Security Center when i was running XP. That sounds vaguely plausible… I have some memory of there being two active-process icons associated with the program.
But I remember the program I was interacting with as VirusScan– that was where all the “stuff” happened. …not anymore. I am now constantly aware of Security Center’s presence.

Here’s the thing… McAffee’s anti-virus program has grown into a whole suite of bloated crap I don’t want. So naturally… I only install VirusScan– all I want is on-access file scanning! I don’t want their firewall, I don’t want their wireless protection, SiteAdvisor or registry protection. I don’t even want constant scanning… I’ll do one manually when I feel like it.
All I want is on-access file scan. McAfee is good at on-access file scan! I know– I used it for years! It caught shit! So it’s the only component I install.

So I run updates… and my system bogs horribly. What? How could this be? This isn’t what McAffee feels like!
Turns out (upon research) that in mid-2008 McAffee pushed out and update that causes some systems to idiosyncratically bog horribly. It’s idiosyncratic, and somehow related to Vista’s “search for files” function.
Now, I understand how some of McAfee’s functions might intersect with that Vista function… by how in seven green hells is it causing my system to bog when the only thing I’m running is scan-on-access? McAffey is hogging my system resources… yet the only thing I’ve given it permission to do it scan-on-access! This bogging cannot be caused by scan-on-access!

You’ve probably already guessed what I slowly realized.
McAffee Security Center is the ‘hub’ management application meant to coral the 6-or-7 separate tools in their security suite. it doesn’t actually do anything… but you cannot install the tools without installing it, because many common functions run through it.
So despite only having installed VirusScan, and having de-activated 70% of VirusScan’s functionality specifically so the program would have the smallest possible footprint on my system… McAfee had installed a monolithic mega-program designed to insinuate itself into every nook and cranny of my system so that it can manage the 500 different ways its anti-virus tools can rape my performance in the name of perfect security… and then simply turned those functions off.

Security Center is riding my system like a reverse cowgirl. And this is why the spastic allegic reactions between McAffee and Vista’s search functions are going off even though I didn’t (theoretically) install anything that should cause them. Security Center did install itself in these areas. It does so regardless of whether or not you’re using those functions, even if you specifically chose not to install them.

*sigh*

Vista has all the system integrity of two bricks tied together with tissue paper. Thus my desire to tread as lightly as possible, installing a bare-minimum of functions to interfere with the already rickety OS. Anti-virus programs burrow even deeper into the OS than most programs, so this is a very deliberate choice.
And in order to get a single scan-on-access function running… I had to install SecurityCenter, which burrows down and insinuates itself into virtually every function of the system… despite the fact I specifically chose not to install the applications related to that burrowing.
And so, my system wigs out.

This, in itself, doesn’t make for a very interesting story. I uninstalled McAfee and the bog-down stopped.

The part that makes for a good story is that when I rebooted after having done so… my optical drive vanished again. One of the hundreds of system-hooks SecurityCenter first installed, then removed, has managed to fuck it up again.

I’m not a fan of Adobe Bridge, Nero Whatever-its-called or any other “monolitic central component that sucks” that seem to be all the rage in “software suites” these days. When you install Photoshop, you’re not installing Photoshop– you’re installing a special version of the Adobe Creative Suite (with the ‘bridge’ hub-program) whose only suite-component is Photoshop. …but you still get Bridge because the Photoshop program on a fundamental architectural level is no longer capable of ’standing alone.’

That’s fine for Photoshop and stuff… hell, for most suites. It doesn’t really bother me.

But anti-virus is… something different. People have been screaming for years that Anti-virus is terrible (The benchmarks I’ve been reading indicate a 700-1200% computer-slowdown is average for any anti-virus program.) The processing burden placed on a computer is not a subtle one. And when an OS, frankly, sucks as badly as Vista does… crap is going to start breaking. (Crap breaks on vista out of the box. It shipped with a search function that didn’t work.)
It’s… you can’t do this. If McAfee actually intends for it’s program to be useful for people who know what they’re doing… it has to be able to run components in a true standalone fashion, without a central hub that sends tendrils and execution hooks throughout Window’s unstable 47 dependency layers. That’s just daring the operating system to break!

But that’s a good, useful AV program. Which is not the same thing as a good, marketable product. A product has bazillions of functions, and a central hub so you can justify selling them all-in-one to the customer instead of piecemeal.
And a product mentality says… you want to make it hard for the customer to only install part of the suite, and certainly not encourage it. “Because if they buy our AV product, then get a virus… they say we have a bad product even if they’re the ones that decided to turn all the protection off. It’s better for our brand to impose a 700-1200% slowdown that renders computers unusable than to develop a product that leaves computers useful but offers less perfect protection.”

Guess what? Your product is terrible. Not just McAfee… all anti-virus products are terrible. Look at those benchmarks… the 1200% slowdown is middle of the pack. The industry has somehow come together to create a product category so terrible that the only way to use my computer is to run without anti-virus. There is literally not an anti-virus product on the market today that will not make you bleed out of your eyes.

Allow me to be more explicit… I have never had a virus that crippled my computer as badly, or made the system as unstable or as likely to lose data as an Anti-virus program does! These programs act more like viruses than viruses do.
As near as I am able to determine… there does not exist a serious AV solution that allows me to manually scan my computer computer once a week without also demanding I accept it insinuating itself into my OS so that it can fuck my system with perform real-time protection.

(All I want is a virus-scanner! With a single hook to check a file before I open it. 90% of the protection, 10% of the performance hit. I will pay money for this! WHY IS NO ONE WILLING TO SELL IT TO ME?)
Or at least have the decency to look me in the face when you’re screwing me!

06:14 pm - Dispatches from Safe Mode: Optical Disllusionment

I’ve been relatively inactive online for the past two weeks. (I’ve been on, but not participating much.) What follows is about 50% of the reason why.
13 days ago I went to burn some CD’s for work… and discovered I couldn’t. My optical drive was missing.

05:13 pm - CSS Discovery of the Day: Inline inheritance

This has has very little applicability to anything… but it made me smile.

A link in the footer of a site I’m working on was obnoxiously showing up in bright red. This is the color all non-navigation links are set to. But footers are meta-information, they’re not supposed to be highlighted like that!

(Obviously I didn’t write the main CSS for this site.)

So the color needs to be overriden. Problem: I happen to know the design on the site is slated to change, so if I override the global link color with another color to match the gray of the rest of the footer text, it may just drive some future web-dev person batty. (Likewise, I probably shouldn’t make sweeping changes to the global link markup in the CSS file, since it’s used on a lot of things.)

“Inherit” isn’t a value a lot of web-developers use… it’s used primarily to ’switch off’ a CSS attribute value that has already been set by overriding the setting of another rule with a more specific value telling it to “inherit the value of this attribute from your parent.”
So if all the <a>’s have colors set, you can override that color setting and say “in this circumstance, inherit the color setting from <div id="body">.”
It’s absurdly useful, especially when re-skinning a site– I just reset CSS values back to default/null/inherit until I remove the offending rule instead of trying to override them one at a time… all without touching the original CSS.

CSS operates on 4 levels of “authority”; general rule, rule with explicit identifier, !important rule, inline.

I set the link’s color to inherit using inline code… and was delighted to see it properly inherit the color set by the general rule.
<a href="http://domain.com" style="color:inherit;">domain.com</a>

Inline style code is all about overriding rule-based style definitions. But I was able to use an inline override to tell this element to adhere to a rule-based style definition with lower authority than the original rule-based definition!
It makes perfect sense, but it also makes my eyes cross at how non-instinctive the idea is, so I has a reasonable expectation that it would not work. “I’m setting a local variable to override a global variable… that’s an alias for a global variable’s value.”

Works perfectly in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and I.E.

Awesome.

02:18 pm - ZX License: Key Ideas

It is September 14. I am crazy busy. All Hail Megatron #15 is released in the 16th.
Let’s do this thing.

I’ve been calling my proposal for TFWiki’s hypothetical “second license” intended to protect producers of official Transformers-related material from legal complications around the CC-BY-SA license which governs our content the “ZX License.” I’ve never really defined what that means. I do so now, shotgun style.

Given: Copyright exists

It is a given of this license that TFWiki has a basic copyright over its own value-added contributions which is separate from the raw facts of the universe which are indisputably Hasbro’s property.

(Whether or not Hasbro is able to exert copyright over those ‘bare facts’ is a question; people can publish “unauthorized guides,” which suggests that collections of fiction-fact may not be subject to copyright. However, such guides are written in a very specific “voice” to toe this legal line very carefully. TFWiki’s articles are not- and frequently include direct quotes from Hasbro’s material they indisputably can exert copyright control over. So for our purposes, we’ll just say ‘yes, Hasbro can exert ownership over its portion of our content.’)

The result is that TFWiki’s articles are under joint copyright, partly Hasbro’s property, partly our own. Neither party can legally publish them without the permission of the other. That is not the same thing as “Hasbro owns our articles,” rather it is “Hasbro’s partial ownership of our articles restricts our ability to do whatever we want with them.”
The correlary that many seem to miss is that our partial ownership of the article restricts Hasbro from doing whatever they want with them. Specifically, if Hasbro use them, our portion is automatically licensed under CC-BY-SA, whose viral license terms (including the right for anyone to make or distribute copies) will then contaminate the resulting work.
Thus… the need for a second license.

Permissive vs. restrictive law

IP License grants tend to be very long and legally complicated things, because they wish to grant the licensee very specific, non-blanket usage rights, so every way in which those rights are granted-but-then-limited must be outlined in mind-numbeing detail phrased in the most unambiguous way possible.

…we’re not doing that. The ZX License is permissive, not restrictive. It essentially boils down to “You can do literally anything as long as you limit the content used to a small ammount. This license is only offered for small-amount usage.”
As a result, the legalese can be short.

Legal concepts

The “ZX” in the ZX License is rooted in two basic concepts of common or natural law.

Customary Freehold – The unwritten legal relationship between a landowner and tenants on his land whose right to be there has never been officially written down but stands from long tradition. These include the tenants responsibilities towards the landowner, their rights towards the land, etc. Customary Freehold has largely fallen out of use since the 19th century (when it became typical for all contracts to be written down) but is still recognized to be legally valid.

Xenia – The ritualized “guest-host” relationship that exists between a Household and the temporary guests within it. The guest’s responsibility not to abuse the Host’s hospitality and the Host’s not to make his guests feel a burden, as well as some social and even legal obligations. Somewhat notably, it includes an obligation for guests to defend their host from attack. (This last bit was actually the cause of the Trojan War… Hellen of Troy may have been beautiful, but it was the honor-obligation from all the guests at her husband’s dinner party where she was stolen that launched the thousand ships…)

In both cases the obligations between Guest-Resident and Host center on ideas of “implied consent” and “duty to rescue” found in most modern Good Samaritan Laws. (Indemnification: not so much.)

Intellectual Property as Real Estate

The concepts above govern the relationship between a guest and host on physical property.
We hold that the same basic principles apply with intellectual property. Both recognize a difference between trespass and theft, concepts of adverse possession and (most importantly) have guests… not just int he form of business partners (who are granted explicit license to be on that property) but individuals who are invited to stay for a bit and play with the owned-concepts fount there.

Broadly, you can divide this sort of “intellectual real estate” into two types, dependent on the landowner’s relationship to guests on their property.
* Closed Culture – Guests are allowed to visit, but strictly on a look-but-do-not-touch basis, like a tour. Melrose Place is a good example of a Closed Culture; the Spelling Entertainment Group has consistently (and notoriously) acted to shut down many type of “fan” activities, including fanfic archives and even discussion boards. Melrose Place is a Closed Culture entertainment where fans are welcome to visit and view, but not wander freely or create their own works. It is very much provided with “no user serviceable parts inside.”
* Open Culture – Guests are allowed to wander freely and actively encouraged to create their own derivations based on the IP found there, which are recognized as belonging to them. Dungeons & Dragons would be an extreme example of an Open Culture. Users are provided a sandbox kit and expected to make their own characters, settings and adventures that TSR will not have no ownership of except for those elements which were drawn from the D&D lexicon.

Most properties fall somewhere between these extremes. Increasingly in recent years the fans-as-receivers closed model has fallen out of favor as a relic of an management culture that made no distinction between fandom-activity and piracy… but it is still sometimes practiced today by property owners who want to exert control over the manner in which fans interact with their product.
Transformers is something of a middle-ground. Cartoon, comics et all are centrally produced, but (fairly uniquely at the time) every Transformers toy produced since 1984 has included a bio, and character stats including a ranking within the faction command hierarchy, and the play-pattern presented by it’s own commercials has consistently been one of narrative roleplay. Clearly children have been encouraged to create their own adventures, and each character comes with their own bio and stat-set as a starter kit to do so.

What this all essentially amounts to is the idea that if a Copyright owner has historically extended safe harbor to fanish activities, they cannot summarily retract it, in the same way a Landowner cannot summarily eject customary freeholders and similar to the way a trademark owner cannot seek to exert control over a trademark which they have allowed to fall into general use.

This means that the status fans occupy on the owner’s property is more akin to Homesteading than squatting. (Arguably this is legally important, because it characterizes many common fandom activities as a permitted or semi-permitted use rather than an ongoing copyright violation that weakens the general copyright on the core property.)

(There is something of a fandom-bill-of-rights-and-responsibilities at work here… but that’s more of a side effect of the root law being used than an intention. The intention comes in with the next bit.)

Key Meta-concepts

Having identified underlying concepts and applied them to IP-as-property, it’s time to label our understanding of those ideas:
* Zeloxenia – The “ZX” in ZX License, this loosely translates as “fan guest-hospitality.” Zeloxenia encompasses Xenia, Customary Freehold, and homesteading as outlined above. Fans who have been invited to play on another’s property are recognized to have a right to do so, while also having significant responsibility toward the property-owner not to damage the landscape in the process.
Fans who choose to tarry or ‘camp’ in this property and build more complex derivations may have an understood right to do so… but in so doing they also become more responsible for the area they occupy. As their level of involvement deepens, fans bear an increasing burden to protect the value of the property; this may mean properly citing copyright so their use does not erode the owner’s property, and a basic responsibility cultivate the property they are occupying. To a certain extent, resident-fans go from being visitors on this property to stewards or Yeomen of it.
Xenia includes a ritual exchange of gifts, which may be fulfilled here by a “good-neighbor” relationship; you may borrow one another’s hedgeclippers as long as you make sure to return them. This is similar to land-use rights that might be expected under common freehold… a basic diffusion or interchange of rights and property occurs between both parties that is mutually-forgiven/freely-gifted as a natural part of their relationship.
Good faith is a prerequisite for Zeloxenia to exist, and in Closed Culture broadcast-receiver models where fans have no rights, it is understood to be very weak or not exist at all.

An important point to note here: This is all describing a relationship and understanding that has always existed between fans and the object of their fandom. (At least in media fandom, most non-media fandom qualifies as a Close Culture.) As such, we hold that these principles (and the unwritten contract they encompass) have always been in effect, and fans’ past contributions to TFWiki were made under this understanding. (Asking people to explicitly ratify the license largely renders this distinction moot though.)

* Lagom measure – A Sweedish/Norwegian concept of “just the right amount.” (If you know Norwegians… this explains a lot about their personality.) Under the ZX License, a licensee will be granted the right to re-use a Lagom measure of content– an amount which does not prohibit use, but also does not encourage it. This means the unit size of a Lagom measure variable by situation… which heads off precedent-based license jailbreaking; just because X amount of re-use was Lagon for one situation does not mean it is automatically Lagom for another. The maximum ammount of re-use in a Lagom measure is understood to be greater than that permitted by Fair Use.
You could use a dozen pages of legalese to try to define how that works… or you could just fall back on the pre-existing Sweedish concept. Since our license is permissive and not restrictive… we can just cite the Sweedish concept.
Basic bounds are set via a philosophical statement to the effect that: “We think it is bad for the vitality of the Transformers brand to be re-using our content because that may cause it to become fixed and cease to grow and change… but recognize that some re-use is inevitable and wish to permit that without consequence.” …and you are essentially granting a blank check for content re-usage that still strongly encourages such usage to be minimal: Gross abuse of the definition constitutes bad faith and causes the license to lapse.

How content is used

For a hypothetical content re-user (such as IDW) that wanted to use our content under the ZX license, their re-use can be broken down as follows:
* Use under the ZX license. That is to say– usage rights afforded to content generated after the date of the ZX Licens’es adoption, or to prior content which was generated by users ratifying the ZX License and explicitly re-releasing their contributions.
* Use under principle of Zeloxenia. The balance of past contributions not signed-off-on, but whose usage in combination with the prior category up to a Lagom measure is implicitly provided for under the operative principle of fan guest-hospitality.
* Use under Fair Use. A portion of any remaining content not covered by the ZX license or beyond the size of a Lagon measure may be used as fair use.
* Any use more extensive than a Lagom Measure + fair use of the remainder must be licensed under the terms governing the remainder. (In most wikis’ case, this is CC-BY-SA.)

In short, if a re-user (such as IDW) takes shallow sips of our content, they are provided by 3 level of cascading protection before the question of CC-BY-SA license contamination can even come into play. You would have to drink a mighty gulp from our content to exceed all 3.

Structure

Finally, I believe the license structure would (roughly) break down into the following sections.

• License deed – (nonbinding) – plain-English statement of “what you get”
• Philosophical statement – (nonbinding) – Responsibilities fans have toward a brand
• Key ideas – (nonbinding) – Summary of legal concept, as above
• Application of Key Ideas – (nonbinding) – How we understand them to apply to our situation
• License code – (binding) – “consistent with the principles granted above, the copyright holders grant you use to…” Because the license hangs on pre-existing legal principles, we do not need to outline them in legalese; and any deficiency in our description in the prior nonbinding sections is moot, because that deficiency would not be ‘consistent with the principles.’ Again, this is only possible because we’re drafting a permissive license, not a restrictive one.
• Clauses – (binding) – Future versions and enforceability caveats; cribbed from existing licenses.
• Adoption – (binding) – Proviso to allow individual users to ratify this license beyond just the community doing so and thus explicitly re-release their prior contributions under the ZX license “to remove any doubt.”

Ugh. Anyway– that’s the reasoning and skeleton I’m thinking of. Most of the license is essentially a “statement of understanding” of legal principles which exist outside this license… no more binding than the Creative Commons “GUI” deed. The actual binding legal code is kept to an absolute minimum and essentially boils down to “you can use it under the relationship described above, if you exceed this or act in bad faith, your use lapses and you may incur CC-BY-SA consequences.” Because it would require truly heroic abuse to do so, this provides more-than-reasonable protection for a content re-user.

If each of those sections can be boiled down to a few sentences (and I’m fairly sure they can) then you have the basis for a serviceable plain-English license that covers our ass, covers Hasbro and it’s licensees ass, does not give away the farm, recognizes the rights of fans to exist, and codifies or recognizes the moral imperative of good conduct and good faith that should underlay fans relationship to the underlying brand.
Oh– and it doesn’t violate the terms of CC-BY-SA. Important that.
And it doesn’t weaken CC-BY-SA3, since the core principle of Zeloxenia, by fundamental definition, only exists in relation to media fandom– so the principles of the ZX License cannot be used as to pry other content out of CC-BY-SA– and actually (as outlined in a previous post) strengthens the CC license by relieving unresolved legal “pressure” at stress points where CC-BY-SA fails in relation to wikis.

But thank god most of that can go unwritten, because I’m exhausted just looking at it.

03:23 am - In which I yell at people kind enough to talk to me

I have not slept in some time, and perhaps have taken too many different kinds of cold medication at once… because everything is sort of pulsing, and my peripheral vision has developed a scanline flicker like a bad CRT monitor.
Anyway I’m high as a kite and catching up on blog comments and discussions relating to TFWiki’s current copyright issues.
I generalize these comments below: (Expect profanity. A lot of profanity.)

COMMENT: Nothing a fan produces can be owned by a fan, because it is an illegal use of another’s property, the whole of the new work (including the fan’s original additions) is ‘confiscated’ back to the original copyright owner.
RESPONSE: Horseshit. Go fuck yourself.
This argument is insane on it’s face. People get their head up their ass and think “ooh, fanfic, you don’t own it, no one can own it…” like it’s as a tenant of uncritical belief. But that belief has no basis in fact.
There is no “special legal status” for fan fiction. That means there’s no special protected status… but there’s also no special persecuted status. It comes down to Copyright.
• A graphic designer creates a poster. By mistake he fails to clear the rights to one of the images used (a flower.) Following the logic of the above argument, the graphic designer would not be able to re-compose the poster, replacing the offending images with another one because the entire poster had become property of the flower’s copyright holder. “You used something that doesn’t belong to you, now it all belongs to us.”
• That sure must be a rude surprise to the owners of the other 5 flower images the graphic designer did pay to use. Suddenly their flowers belong to someone else?
Copyright does not work that way.

“Oh, but what about Bitter Sweet Symphony? The Verve used a Rolling Stones track, and the Stones ended up owning the whole thing!”
…that was a court settlement. Binding arbitration to repay damages for mis-representing the extend of the sample used when it was licensed (”you paid for an inch and took a yard”) awarded the Stones ownership over the song in lieu if financial damages. The verve didn’t have the $$ to pay for their mistake, so the song rights were confiscated, just like repossessing someone’s belongings to pay debt.

This is like saying “I hit someone with a car, now he owns my house.” No, he sues you for hitting him with your car, and if he wins he gets your house.
It’s. Not. Automatic. The practical application of law is not the same thing as “the law says.”

I repeat; Horseshit. Go fuck yourself. I entertain no more repetition of this argument.

COMMENT: One-sided licenses cannot exist, the licensing party has to explicitly sign on to a license or it has no binding force.
RESPONSE: This argument is too stupid to live.
• Someone owns an image.
• They offer it for sale under certain terms and conditions.
• You don’t get to ignore those conditions just because you paid for a copy. If you paid the fee for for “500 printed copies” you can’t print 5000. Nor can you give away copies of it for free, or resell more copies yourself.

If I buy a copy of a Microsoft Word, am I allowed to make copies of it, give them to my friends, or sell copies to other people?

If I use an image that was free-for-use under “CC-BY”, that means I have to include attribution. If I don’t feel like it, I’m not allowed to just pretend I own the picture and not be bound by the license. It’s pre-condition of use. If it is used, that pre-condition must be met!

There are some rumblings going on with software EULAs being invalidated. EULA’s are those crappy little contracts you have to sign to use software (and increasingly, DVD’s.) But they’re failing because you can’t sell someone a product and then spring more conditions on them. For that kind of agreement to be binding, it would have to be made before/when the person bought it.

But again– EULA’s are completely different than copyright. Just like Damages. This has nothing to do the the natural action of copyright law.

COMMENT: You’ll never be able to sue IDW, you’re crazy to try.
RESPONSE: Just… go away. You haven’t been paying attention, and now we’re at step 25 in the process. I’m not going back to explain how you got turned around at step 3. The class is not going to stop for Ralph Wiggum to catch up, because Ralph isn’t gonna catch up even if we do.

COMMENT: You really think you can claim Hasbro doesn’t have a right to use it’s own intellectual property?
RESPONSE: Okay– for starters “you really think you can claim” puts us back into ‘practical application of law’ territory, so this question isn’t about the natural action of copyright.
But let’s pretend it is. This situation is, in fact very messy. So lets break it down into cleaner examples highlighting the principles involved.

• “The original licensor has a right to use all derivations of their work.”
No. Not unless that was a condition they made when licensing that work. Look no further than various versions of The Tick. The original 12-issue comic book series was adapted into a cartoon series and a live action series. The cartoon created several characters not found in the comic. Years later, the live-action series wanted to use those characters… and found they couldn’t. They belonged to the producers of the cartoon series, and when they bought the rights to the 12 issue comic by Ben Edlund… those characters had not been included. They would also have to purchase the rights from the cartoon’s producers. (Instead they created new, similar characters.)

Popular fiction is littered with examples of this. Perhaps one of the strangest examples is the tendency of British sci-fi publishers to acquire the Dr. Who license, publish a few adventures with an original companion, lose the license… and then continue publishing solo adventures with the companion, carefully avoiding direct reference to the Who-elements while still taking place in the same continuity. Clearly copyright can be broken up into parts.

At the other extreme- properties like Star Trek or Star Wars have typically allow licensees to do whatever they want- but Paramount has right-of-use over any new derivations. Indeed, the original owner does have a right to all derivations… but not because it’s an intrinsic right, but because they wrote their licensing contracts that way.

Transformers used to be like this. Up through the year 2003 appearances by Japanese or Euro-exclusive characters in US materials were limited to Easter Eggs because the US and Japanese Transformers licenses were separate, having many characters in common but also many characters unique to each side of the Pacific. The state of Transformers licensing seems to have changes in the year 2005 (possibly relating to Takara’s bankruptcy) and Hasbro and TakaraTomy now hold joint rights over the totality of Transformers fiction, able to reference anything they damn well please. (And oh, how they please…)

• Does Hasbro have a right to use copyrighted material they do not own?
No. I don’t think anyone’s claiming this, but I’m underlining it. Hasbro can’t use Flash Gordon or Harry Potter without paying for those rights- just like any other kind of intellectual property. That includes Wikipedia. Hasbro (or anyone else) wanting to use any ammount of Wikipedia content beyond Fair Use would have to license it. In Wikipedia’s case, that means CC-BY-SA, and the “SA” clause means that the resulting product created from that use would also be CC-BY-SA.
So if IDW created a cover for All Hail Megatron #15 that was a homage to DaVinci’s Virtuvian Man and quoted large chunks of of the Wikipedia article on DaVinci as background text… that cover would logically become CC-BY-SA.

So. If work can become contaminated, and this kind of re-use reaches the standard to cause contamination… the question is really “Does TFWiki have any copyright claim on its own content?” If it does, then our content can contaminate IDW. If it doesn’t…

Well, if it doesn’t, it could come as a shock to Wookiepedia, all of Wikia, not to mention thousands of other wikis operating under the exact same license we are. Because it would mean that all their content belongs to Lucasfilm/dozens of other planes, exclusively.

To some degree, this is a re-stating of the original “does a fan own any part of a fanfic” question, to which the answer appears to be yes, though it hasn’t been definitively settled. (Mostly because such issues can only be settled by court cases– and who goes to court over a fanfic?) There is a vocal minority of fanfic authors who believe the law says that fanfic cannot be copyrighted. They may think this makes it ‘pure.’ Unfortunately, I was on the internet in 1997 when FOX started targeting fansites, so I can’t help but remember this ideological orthodoxy suddenly springing up everywhere as a magic spell by fanfic archive mistresses terrified of being sued to ward off the demon-lawyers. I know this belief is deeply entrenched in its culture, but so are the teachings of Saul of Tarses; that don’t make ‘em right.
20% of American adults think the sun revolves around the Earth. Belief does not make it so.

But in another (more important) way, it’s a different issue entirely. Because these are facts. Facts cannot be copyrighted, only a particular expression of those facts. Phone Numbers and trivia books are two seminal examples of what cannot be copyrighted and what defines fair use.

So if facts can’t be copyrighted… what about the facts of a fictional story? Could it possibly be legal to (for example) publish a book consisting of nothing but character bios, summaries of fiction and behind-the-scenes anecdotes about a series without having the license for that series?

YES GOD DAMNIT. THEY’RE CALLED “UNAUTORIZED GUIDES.” THEY’VE BEEN WRITTEN FOR EVERY MAJOR FRANCHISE THAT EVER EXISTED FROM STAR WARS TO HARRY POTTER. IN THE MID-1990’s WHEN STAR TREK WAS AT ITS PEAK, AUTHORIZED AND UNAUTHORIZED GUIDES TO TNG WERE COMPETING HEAD-TO-HEAD. IF PARAMOUNT HAD A LEGAL BASIS TO BLOCK THAT KIND OF SHIT THEY WOULD HAVE! TRANSFORMERS HAD AN UNAUTHRIZED STORY GUIDE PUBLISHED IN 2002. IT’S 320 PAGES OF SMALL-PRINT DOUBLE COLUMN TEXT SUMMARIZING EVERY TRANSFORMERS CARTOON OR COMIC STORY EVERY PUBLISHED BROKEN DOWN BY SUMMARY, ANALYSIS, FEATURED CHARACTERS, TRIVIA AND GOOFS, MEMORABLE MOMENTS, AND CONTINUITY REFERENCES.

(Does that structure sound familiar? Almost identical to the Wiki’s story summary pages? Uh huh! I own a signed copy of this guide.)

If you want to discuss “but I don’t think we actually can have copyright to our own material” please go away. The discussion you want to have back at step 6 isn’t useful, we’re on step 25.

75% of the crap people keep bringing up isn’t copyright law. It’s punitive settlements, law-as-practiced, Trademark, EULAS, examples of bad faith licensing whose meaning someone has misinterpreted.

So 75% of you shut the fuck up. The remaining 25%, continue.
If you’re not sure which group you belong to… *sigh*, continue. But please be open to the idea you might be wrong.

As rage-tastic as this post is, I am open to the possibility that I might be wrong. I am willing to be convinced.
But any argument that hopes to convince me that you can’t create collections of Transformers facts without Hasbro owning the copyright on the result absolutely must somehow account for the demonstrated fact you $%^&*() can.

(Oh man… I am not a patient and reasonable person by nature, and it chafes. I will doubtless regret posting this when I am no longer high, but for right now… it’s like some kind of rage colonic. I feel cleansed in my everything.)

I declare the “you can’t own shit” discussion closed.

Suck my balls.

09:56 am - Brilliant Blue Batshit Strikes Back: Cold Lasers

Seriously, freeze rays?

Isn’t this exactly the kind of crap “hard” sci-fi threw out 30 years ago because it was impossible?

As I follow the science (which turns out to be rather poorly) it operates on come cockamamie variation of the Photoelectric Effect, which causes the electron shells of the gas freezing medium to ‘expand.’ Because higher orbits require more speed/energy to maintain, that means the gas medium has to suck in heat.
A traditional refrigerator uses a compressor motor to lower the pressure within a liquid freezing medium, which causes it to expand and thus suck up heat. This is a super-efficient atomic-level version of the same– changing volumes of the atoms instead of the liquid itself.

So shouldn’t changing the volume of the atoms increase the pressure on the gas medium and counteract the effect?
1) No, because the photoelectric effect is irresistible.
2) No because while the overall radius of the atoms is increasing, their physical density is not, which means the increase in pressure due to radius is blah blah blah cube root law. (Or something similar.) Anyway, the atoms-per-spatial-unit aren’t increasing, which means the increase in pressure is pretty factional.
3) No, because apparently the high pressure is what causes the electrons to act funny in the first place. Increasing it more just increases their tendency towards such shenanigans. Basically it’s a big chilly-willy physics… thing.

In layman’s terms: They get the electrons really drunk, which causes them to think/act like they’re hot, even though their temperature is dropping. There, sorted.

Physics! Freeze rays! This shit is CRAZY.
Last time they had a breakthrough in superfreezing we got transparent aluminum! And this seems MUCH more effective!

Run and hide in terror, RUN BEFORE THE SCIENCE GETS YOU!
What rules are left to be broken? Cordless electricity and teleportation are next up.

Ooh, I know! Scientists at Harvard will isolate the morphogenic field using orgone accumulators, and then use it to teach us all to like Fanta!
I am shitting myself in terror. Seriously. The rule book is going out the window in the next 20 years.

10:19 am - If A Tree Falls in the Woods: Fair Dealing vs. Fair Use

Doing six rounds on copyright, I keep running into the concepts of fair use and fair dealing.

The United States (and Israel) have fair use, the rest of the world has fair dealing. The two concepts are legally distinct, but for practical purposes tend to be considered more-or-less equivalent, with a caveat that fair dealing may allow for ’slightly less’ than fair use does.

I think I’ve figured out the difference. And as usual… it’s all the Mormons’ fault.

06:50 pm - 19 days, 351 Words and Patient Zero

When the Transformers Wiki was deciding to relicense its content under the Creative Commons, we spent a lot of time discussing it. I mean—an insane amount of time. The GFDL’s relicensing option offered a single up-or-down choice; stay with GFDL or switch to Creative Commons. Why bother?

Well, because the community is concerned about potential problems our license might cause for Hasbro. CC-BY-SA is not a ‘play license,’ it’s court-tested and carries significant consequences.
The question that we kept coming back to: So what if some official Transformers publication re-uses a portion of our content? Of course, what are the odds of that happening?

06:31 pm - Princesses and Kilolangs

Defining “word” as a language unit 5.1 Latin-alphabet letters in length followed by a space or punctuation: “1000 words” is ~ 6.1 x 1000 x 8 bits, or 5.95kb of information.

The place I’m working doesn’t have a brand identity or mission statement, but they know they want one that will give them a leg up on the competition. So over the last few months I’ve been ambushing people with value surveys, brand architectures, market segmentation and positioning questions.

If you have enough of those, it’s actually possible to feed subjective impressions into spreadsheets and get a graphs out. (Terrifyingly, this actually works.)

It’s all being chunked and slowly regurgitated into a Powerpoint presentation, but this is my favorite bit so far, about brand positioning;

• Industry trends favor speciation; your peers are transforming into specialist shops that only provide one kind of service, in volume.
• This leaves new customers bewildered. They’re not sure how to determine which specialist is best at (or is even capable of) meeting their needs.
• Value surveys indicate that your company’s most fervent desire is to never become this guy:

I should feel like I’m misbehaving… but everyone gets it from this example. Not just as a game reference… they understand the frustration of customers who can’t even figure out where to start, they get that their own values (skill, knowledge and relationships) are antithetical to the high-volume low-craftsmanship model others are embracing and they see how this presents the opportunity to counter-position themselves.

So Toad actually makes a really good didactic model for what you don’t want to be.

Actual size of 8-color PNG file: 4.32kb, which makes this picture worth 1,375 words!

02:31 pm - Lists, Tabs and Institutional Autism 2007

Today, I was forced to work with bulleted lists in Microsoft Word 2007.

I almost put a chair through a window.

Not as a flight of fancy not ‘had an urge to,’ I was literally half a second from throwing my chair through a plate glass window while screaming in unholy rage and had to force myself to stop.

For the curious; 2007 changed the ‘automatic indenting’ behavior used by lists. You can’t tab-indent anymore.

• Microsoft helpfully tells you to use the incredibly non-instinctive ‘add/decrease indent’ icons in their list area; so stop typing and use the mouse every time you want to change something.
• Or you can switch to outline view, where tab-updating works… but everything is listed on a flat hierarchy with icon columns to indicate what level you’re on. (Basically “the most brain-bendingly noninstinctive display mode ever.”)
• Or (as the Microsoft Word 2007 help documents assure you) you can use the Tab keys. (I know they don’t work, but the help still insists they work, presumably because they work in Outline view.)

Microsoft. MICROSOFT. You actually had something that worked, and people were used to it… so of course you broke it and told people to use your $%^&*() ribbon icons.

Now, I want to be clear… it is apparently possible to get list tabbing to work in Microsoft Word 2007. This (from what I’ve read) involves defining a custom list style and burrowing approximately 18 levels deep to define custom attributes. …for every list you create.
Not only is the old behavior no longer the default list behavior… Word doesn’t even provide it as the behavior of an alternate style. Annoying as constantly side-clicking for Style B in would be… it’s not even an option. You have to go in and do it custom style. (And be sure not to accidentally apply any of Words default styles later, because that’ll overwrite ‘em!)

Any feature that requires that many steps every time it’s used is simply broken. Plain and simple.

I’m sure this approach makes perfect sense for formatting pre-existing text as a list. …but that’s not what I’m using it for; I’m chunking raw data and notes and pushing it around until the natural information hierarchy becomes apparent, so I need to be able to move stuff around easily. And frankly Microsoft Word is (at least ostensibly) a word processor. Something you write in. It shouldn’t be behaving like a prepress formatting program!

What I’ve settled on is using the ALT + SHIFT + RIGHT-ARROW / ALT + SHIFT + LEFT-ARROW keys; shortcuts for the increase/decrease indent ribbon icons.
Why am I still upset? They’re keyboard shortcuts, isn’t that what I wanted?

Try typing them. (If you’re on a Mac, remember on a PC ALT is where your CONTROL key is.)
Both your hands have to leave the default position to use these shortcuts. It’s as disruptive to typing as having to stop and use the %^&*() mouse!

01:42 pm - Thoughts on Health Care

Andy’s Blog posted Thoughts on Health Care the other day. This is my take.

I was born in 1978, which is the ‘trough’ in the US population bubble.

The boomers will start hitting retirement age in 2012. and they’ll keep on doing so for 20 years.

2025 is the year the ‘peak’ of the baby boom hits 65. It’s also the year that the ‘trough’ will hit 45. In the year 2025…
At that point, the peak-earning population (45 years old) will be supporting a retiree population many times its size due to the sustained 20-year nature of the bubble. Worse… the 1945 boomers who retired in 2012 will be reaching the end of their lifespans, and starting to incur the staggering increase in health-care costs that comes in the last 6 months of life. And they’ll be coming up short, because even if they put away money for this… there will have been twice as much demand for any service targeted at retirees, driving up costs (and simply overall inflation) across the board.
Oh, and because many boomers have their savings in 401K’s… drawing them down is going to crash the stock market– which will depress the value of the remainder– which…

This is why 2025 is identified as the ‘crisis point’ in health care cost projections. It’s when the system goes from strained to breaking… and it’s not even at a peak yet, because people have just started dying, which is their peak period of consumption… and it’s goign to go on for 20 more years.

Right now, Health Care consumes 15% of the US GDP. In 2025 it’s going to consume 25%.

That doesn’t work. Not “I disagree with it,” not “I want it not to happen,” it simply does not work. Health care costs are already choking corporate, and state budgets… a 66% increase is not something that can be weathered. Companies will drop health care– dumping the costs on states– states will slash it… leaving it to be handled by families which are now paying insane taxes to support health care they aren’t receiving, and crunched by having their elders move in with them, and having to provide for their own health care. All of which means more and more of the un-served population will be getting health care from emergency services… which aren’t meant to handle basic health care, and cost significantly more to provide it.
It’s not one dam bursting… it’s one dam bursting… and the runoff causes the backup dam to burst, which in turn causes another to burst…

The U.S. could grimace and wade through it by borrowing the costs from other countries. China’s population bubble is 20 years offset from our own. Japan doesn’t have one. India doesn’t have one. Their economies aren’t going to be screwed by this demographic bubble… they remain viable sources to borrow from.

Here’s the thing… the United States Federal government is 11 trillion dollars in debt. (we’re runnign a shortfall this year too.) The feferal government only takes in between 2 and 2.5 trillion in taxes every year. If a person was in debt for 5 times their annual income… we call them beyond broke. Unless that gets paid down, come 2025 we won’t have a credit rating to borrow on.

So ultimately, here’s my thing. I’m not fond of the health care plans being proposed. They seem like unwieldy hybrids designed to please no one.
But the most vocal opponents of the plan aren’t offering an alternative. (And really don’t seem to have one. I’ve seen the proposals being floated… they’re not serious health-care proposals, they’re nonviable political constructs designed to beat up the other guy.) They are essentially arguing for no change.

And a vote against changing health care is a vote for the United States to no longer exist in 15 years. Would you remain a member of an organization that provides you with no services but demands onorous membership fees to pay down its debts?
I’m serious. Dissolution of the United States. Look at those numbers. They are fundamentally non-sustainable. If nothing changes, in 2025 we’ll have endured long-term economic stress only to have it redouble while the services we depend on collapse, requiring us to provide them for ourselves. Oh, and the stock market will probably crash as end-of-life savings in 401k are consumed and not reinvested. Oh– and the prime tax base will have contracted 30%, while the largest chunk of the population enters into a phase of life where they’re no longer earning income.

Right now there’s tremendous static resistance against any change in the system. That’s one of the reasons it has resisted “gentle market pressure” that should have encouraged change for 20 years. It’s the fundamental reason the choices we’re being presented with now are “Obamacare” and “no change.” Because it doesn’t want to change.

It really doesn’t matter how bad Obama’s health care plan is, we can patch it once it’s in place. (We’re going to be patching it anyway, because what everyone is talking about is sweeping changes with agile “on rails” adaption as the needs of a new system become clearer.) Overcoming the resistance to change is the real victory.

01:16 pm - Evangelion Rebuild 2.0 Subs

Evangelion Rebuild 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance premiered in Japan on June 27. Predictably, a CAM bootleg of the film made its way to the internet.

Let’s talk about the economics of fansubs. Groups of people who work together to translate and redistribute foreign-language television shows or movies… often within hours of their premiere.

But this time weeks passed, and no one bothered to sub the film. Why is that?

12:28 am - Translate Japanese with Wiki Templates

Everyone has “someday maybe” creative projects; the kind of think they’d like to do if they got an opportunity, but rarely make time for. Sometimes these are passionate fever-dreams, more often they’re simple roads-not-taken… a possible path you glimpse while on your way to another destination, and regret not having the time to explore.

I’ve done a lot of (fairly complicated) Wikiparser template programming for The Transformers Wiki over the years. You can combine the conditional and transformative control-structures that come standard on wikis in surprisingly complicated ways. It’s a bit like a programming language where there are no variables.

For over a year I’ve been wanting to apply Wikiparser to the problem of translating Japanese; at least Hiragana and Katakana (their ‘phoenetic’ alphabets.) I had the idea while gut-deep in another template… and I was pretty sure it could be done, the question was how well?

I got off work early last Friday and decided to find out.

12:59 pm - Pontifex Maximus and the Arcana of Timestamps

On February 18th, 2009 I had too much time on my hands. As I am wont to do in such circumstances, I pursued a blue sky inquiry. Everyone has odd or silly questions about the world; I make it a hobby to answer mine. In this case, I was curious about leap seconds.

After a bit of digging, I determined that the people I needed to ask were the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, and send the following e-mail: