Is piracy the problem or the symptom? In problem solving an important technique and skill to have but the crux of the skill in my mind is the ability to differentiate between the problem and the symptom of the problem. The question “are you treating the symptom or the problem?” perhaps raises this most pertinently. But let me diverge to why I’ve come to this point.
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Looking through various access control systems, it is interesting to see the different concepts and features. The concept of root, a user with all privileges inalienably granted to it. So let’s have a look at how this works for Windows, Linux and Joomla!’s upcoming 1.6 version.
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So lately I’ve had issues with CNC4. I paid for it and ended up downloading a server emulator to play the game. It even gave me the pre-order mission anyway. A while back I got EzyDVD’s Battlestar Galactica collection. Every single episode of the new series plus Razor and The Plan. It also has the 1978 and 1980’s material as well. It is a box and IMHO very well presented. Early on one of the DVD’s wasn’t playing properly, I put it in my Mac and it worked on both my Mac and the PC. I tried Season 3 Disc 4 today and that isn’t working. Fortunately I have DVD rips of season three downloaded so I stopped watching “the real thing” and swapped to the pirate. The pirate copy doesn’t require me to sit through two sets of copyright notices, Universal’s gratuitous logo and then wait for their fancy little intro sequences just to watch a single episode.

So much for the real thing. I want to spend money on supporting things but Firefly and Dollhouse is proof that doesn’t matter either. The fact that it takes ages for a Region 4 DVD to come out (compared to Region 1 and 2) so I can’t at times legally buy something anyway. Let alone the fact some things never get released in Australia anyway. Rather depressing at the end of the day.

I had a thought the other day about smoking. The problem with banning smoking is two fold. The first problem is that you put out a large corporation that makes lots of money, pays some taxes and pays more towards your electoral campaign. It also employs people. The second problem is harder: smoking has a significant addicted population. These people vote. So not only do you have corporations with donations but people who vote.

But I feel there is a curious middle ground to be made. Each year increase the minimum age to buy cigarettes – or simpler, those born after a particular year cannot buy cigarettes. This way older smokers aren’t threatened and eventually dissipate and it is hard for newer smokers to get started. A curious example is that of slightly older members of social groups or families being able to supply cigarettes to younger people who can’t buy it yet. As the age increases, this will become increasingly hard to do and slowly this impact will dissipate. This strategy also gives the ability for those companies producing cigarettes to diversify into other areas.

The main complication with doing this is international travel. If one can reasonably travel to another part of the world and become addicted then this poses a problem. Ideally there would be a global ban like this but I don’t foresee that happening.

A simple thought on a weekend afternoon.

My day job is in theory based around development, primarily web application development. Whilst lately I’ve been doing far too much infrastructure stuff, most of what I do lives in a web browser eventually. I am also an Apple user. I have an iPod Classic, an iPod shuffle, an iPhone, I got my Dad an AppleTV and I have a MacBookPro, convinced my ex-gf, her father, my father and my sister to get Mac. Probably a few other people along the way. I came to a Mac because it was the cheapest laptop I could buy that would reliably work well. I was a Linux user at the time (still am to a point) so the UNIX functionality and X11 features in Mac OS X appealed to me. Worst comes to worse, I reasoned, I could run X straight from my computer when I’m at home and hopefully the browser and text editor choices would be fine. I’ve come a long way from that.

So Apple lately have been doing a lot nifty stuff. They’ve released the iPad, their tablet PC. In the announcement the other day they said they’d sold 450,000 of the devices. To be honest that is impressive. That is a lot of tablet PC’s sold, probably a significant portion of the market now are Apple after a week. They also announced iPhone OS 4.0 which has some curious things.

The first change with it isn’t technical but legal. They’ve changed the Terms of Service section 3.3.1 from:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

To:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

So basically if you’re not writing Objective-C, C, C++ or JS (HTML5/CSS/etc) then you’re not welcome. Bye bye CS5’s funky Flash Export to iPhone App feature. I’m not going to comment on this in general however Apple have consistently said those four languages are it. Using or developing tools to get around it was seriously tempting fate given all of the announcements Apple made. I’m not surprised, I’m not sure if it is a good or a bad thing (Flash shares a special loathing in my heart) but given Adobe have lately made their Flash player on Mac a piece of crap and not improvement (don’t get me started on Linux support), I can see where Apple have come from. Some argue that there way it handles it’s fast switching blah blah won’t work with quasi emulated apps because it doesn’t know data structures blah sounds to me like crap. The observation that Adobe’s write once run anywhere CS5 deployment could mean that Apple’s extra features aren’t supported until Adobe deem it to be included is a problem. That would mean any cool features would be unavailable to a portion of the developer community potentially never. It would potentially give Adobe control over the platform in a way Apple may not like. At the end of the day Apple is a public company and what makes them a profit is why they are there, so this is where their decision takes them. And whilst many claim Apple owe Adobe for their heritage, it is clear that recently Adobe haven’t been supplying a good experience for Mac users of their software anyway. Titanium keeps being included in the list of tools that might be excluded but I’m not entirely sure, it is certainly a border case.

The other interesting feature they added is multitasking. But nowhere do I see that people are understanding that it isn’t multitasking, it is just services. Apple aren’t giving people the ability to run what they want in the background, they’re offering services that will handle what they need for them. Other comments like the platform can’t support true multitasking and Apple’s design is flawed have come up in a few places which miss the point of the services. Apple doesn’t want your trashy code chewing memory and CPU, potentially going rogue and killing the users battery like it can on other platforms. That is unfriendly. The iPhone OS runs a system more than capable of multitasking it is just Apple prohibiting access to do so. The services they’ve got seem to meet the criteria and also permit reasonable flexibility. Will it be enough? Perhaps, but it is a start. They’ve got seven services: background audio (Pandora), VoIP (Sykep), background location (anything that watches your location), push notifications (yawn), local notifications (think alarm clock), task completion (the closest to true multitasking, example is a photo upload takes a while) and fast app switching (my old Palm worked like this in some respects). I think these will work well and solve a number of needs on the device and bring it up.

The other features announced included folders (better categorisation really) which reminds me in part of how stacks works as well. The next was improvements to mail for a unified inbox. Apple Mail on the desktop has this and I’m not a fan of it (I use the per mailbox inbox). Other Mail enhancements included threading and opening attachments in other apps. The last useful feature is the multiple Exchange account functionality, this will mean I can use Google’s Sync toy with my work’s Exchange account whilst still retaining some other identities I have. I have things sort of working but it could be better. Their book app is also coming to the iPhone which is more than predictable.

From the enterprise front they’ve beefed up support. Some of it already sounded familiar but the wireless app distribution is going to be useful for work (the current method involves connecting it to a desktop and loading the apps manually or App Store, this is a third option). Game Center seems interesting and a bit late to the game but better late than never as they say. They’ve also got an advertising framework built in. Not sure how this is going to play out but we will see. Hopefully they won’t nuke the third party advertising frameworks but I don’t see them as making that mistake, a regulator would surely snap them for that. Including it in the framework will probably mean the demise of most alternatives and they’re doing it in a way that can be relative unobtrusive compared to how it is handled now. Time will tell.

All in all there are some things that people don’t like (TOS Change) but I can see the Apple progressing slowly and improving. They’ve got a head start over every other platform and it appears that only Google have been able to come close to match them. Microsoft have pulled out all stops with Windows Phone 7 to create something that looks cool but they’ve almost left it too late, those burnt by Windows Mobile are perhaps wary of the next operating system. The Apple ad with the PC going “Trust me” over the ages rings true. My iPhone will miss out on a lot of the cooler stuff with services because of it’s age which is annoying but life. How application developers will handle this will also be interesting.

Of course now the iPad is out, maybe they will update a whole heap of other things.

Today was a slower day and I rocked up to work around 9:30am, read emails, attended a meeting about RPCS (we got some action yesterday), did some more emails, fixed a few things and had a long lunch with my boss discussing the shape of the world and things to come. I headed back to my office, processed a few minor things, made a few backups, responded to phone calls and emails before heading home for the day.

I went home, spent most of the afternoon crafting my assignment together. And then submitted it. To do this I need a TurnItIn originality report. Easy enough. I do all of that, wait for the report to come up, download the report (0% copied!) and upload it and the assignment to EASE. I have the sneaking suspicion that I had forgotten something and re-read the specification. I had, it was an introduction and a conclusion. I was close to writing one but didn’t because I forgot to put it in the original outline (I had everything else mind you). So I write up an introduction paragraph and a conclusory paragraph, regenerate the PDF (using LaTeX, NeoOffice on Mac is just a hog, is slow and non-responsive. TeXShop on Mac is fast and lets me write what I need with minimal fuss. Random style is hard but such is life) and resubmit to TurnItIn. Since I’ve already submitted they’re telling me I will need to wait two days. This really annoys me that I need this to submit, my university is paying anyway plus if we used the Moodle API we wouldn’t have this problem. In some respects it is a form of extortion because they want a material support to release it in some respects (signing up again with a new account would obviate the problem). In any case I submit anyway with the old report. We’ll see how we go.

Just recently I had issues with Outlook Web Access doing stupid things. I think my mailbox was over quota because when I emptied the trash via Apple Mail, everything started working. The weird thing is that when I clicked “Check Names”, it nuked the entire email for some reason. Curious behaviour. Anyway, email sent with mild frustration. Another day passes.

Today, like yesterday, one of my staff was away sick. Like yesterday this didn’t help things because with them away and another staff member away that means that we’re covering for two people. So I was helping out supporting the first guy but I also had to keep up with the support requests for the other person which was also fun.

So I had the on going issues with the wiki. Some appear to be legitimate, others appear to be an inability to copy and paste accurately. This is rather unfortunate but such is life. They are only first year students, so hopefully they’ll learn at some point. There were a few that weren’t in this bucket and I managed to get them resolved. We also had one student who changed their email address to a non-USQ student email address and is complaining that they didn’t get any email notification. I have a distinct feeling that the email was dropped as the student had a Yahoo! account and they have a habit of blacklisting us and our emails don’t go through. This is in part why we have the UMail accounts so that we can avoid this problem. We can’t blacklist ourselves.

Other issues involved some hosts needing to be added ezproxy’s list. It appears that EBSCO were redirecting this particular resource back onto ezproxy even though it was free. The ezproxy upgrade we did appears to have had this strange side effect that I will need to spend some time investigating if we can get rid of it so that for URL’s it doesn’t recognise it will unset itself.

The next issue was a link in the journal list that wasn’t being rewritten through ezproxy. That was an easy matter of updating the link where it was to run it back through ezproxy. I’m not entirely sure how it got changed but it was changed none the less and fixed now.

I had the regular Thursday tasks that the person off sick would have done. This involved kicking off the MARC export of our Library Management System, VTLS Virtua, and then starting the 11 hour reindex process into Solr and VuFind, the tool we use to index the catalogue. This bit doesn’t take much time however I spent a bit of time working on improving some of the scripts. I altered the way it handled logging and printed some user friendly messages to the screen. I’ve made small improvements along the way so hopefully this will continue.

Another curious thing was EndNote again complaining about a particular page implicating them more than VTLS. The issue is that since the upgrade EndNote has been broken. The original text read like this:

APOLOGIES – PLEASE NOTE: Currently there is no connection file for the USQ Library catalogue. We are awaiting a compliance upgrade from EndNote to match our Library Management System. We apologise for the inconvenience this causes. As an interim measure you might choose to search the UQ or other Australian Libraries for the title once you’ve found it in a normal websearch of our catalogue. We ask you to understand that this is NOT a permanent situation. Notification of the availability of the USQ connection file will be made ASAP

EndNote were upset about the implication that their system could be at fault here and that they had to do something. Curiously EndNote is the only system impacted and malfunctioning. Every other system that utilises the Z39.50 interface works perfectly well including but not limited to our Library Catalogue, the desktop management tool and web search tool provided by VTLS, OCLC’s VDX, Civica Aurora, Biblioscape 8, Yaz and Mercury Z39.50. Both Yaz and Mercury are freely available tools and Mercury was even tested off campus by a colleague at UQ. There are perhaps other systems that interface on Z39.50 that I have missed but it looks very much like the only system that isn’t working is EndNote. This has now been changed to the following:

APOLOGIES – PLEASE NOTE: Currently there is no connection file for the USQ Library catalogue. We are awaiting a compliance upgrade of our Library Management System to fix this. We apologise for the inconvenience this causes. As an interim measure you might choose to search the UQ or other Australian Libraries for the title once you’ve found it in a normal websearch of our catalogue. We ask you to understand that this is NOT a permanent situation and is not a problem created by the EndNote software. Notification of the availability of the USQ connection file will be made ASAP.

Fortunately VTLS have accepted that they made a change that broke EndNote and they’ve said they’ll fix it in their latest revision. It is unfortunate that EndNote seem disinterested in resolving the issue when VTLS took ownership and I must admit I never got a reasonable response from anyone about what was happening. As far as I could see from the logs, Virtua issues a challenge to EndNote which never gets responded to and EndNote just times out on its own. So whilst VTLS has agreed to do a fix to resolve the issue and restore compatibility however it will be in their next release which will be in a few months and due to the time it takes us to complete formal testing around the system it will likely be another few months after that until the fix reaches our production system. Unfortunate really. What I really don’t get is why EndNote is the only product that isn’t working but such is life. VTLS are happy to fix the problem and it’ll get resolved eventually. To be honest I don’t care who fixes it, I’m just disappointed that it took us a long period of time to get anyone to fix it.

Another day slowly turns.

It was a bit of a slow day for me today compared to yesterday. I had my usual set of meetings, I started working on building out the interface for the opening hours and generally had an easy day. I did a bit of documentation and fought with Visio before giving up and going back to Omnigraffle to draw what I wanted in less time than I had been fighting with Visio for – depressingly. Was quite a quiet day overall however there does appear to be a quirk with the library blog now sending out notifications on any update instead of just when we post something, will need to look at that.

Happy Easter!