Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Wedding

Friday, September 21st, 2007 | Personal | No Comments

So, after being together for over eight years, Ida and I got married on the first of September in an old village church by one of Ida’s former colleagues. (No, placing the information on my blog is not a way to help me remember my anniversary, for those of you who might have thought so).

The day was joyously spent together and with all our best friends and family. Thank you to everyone who has sent greetings and their best wishes. For the curious there are a lot more photos up here.

Tags: life, wedding

A joyous proclamation

Monday, April 16th, 2007 | Personal | No Comments

After nearly eight years together, my fiancée and I have decided to get married in the early autumn. Here’s to hoping for a long and prosperous life together with the most magnificent person I have ever met.

Tags: life, wedding

Order of the Stick

Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 | Personal | No Comments

Some people might say that I read entirely too many webcomics already, but I felt compelled to add this one to the list of webcomics that I read, entirely due to its great qualities of letting me reminisce on the many years where I played pen and paper role playing games.

In style with the great Knights of the dinner table comic that was shown in Dragon, it provides many great puns on roleplaying, the mix of in- and out-of-game conversation that takes place, and Order of the Stick manages to do all of this just using stick figures. Highly recommended.

Tags: webcomic

The da Vinci Code

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 | Personal | No Comments

A good while ago this ‘spectacular’ movie came out, based on Dan Brown‘s novel. When it came out, most critics pretty much eviscerated it for its poor quality. Last week I watched it on DVD, and I have to say… the critics were pretty lenient on it. While the novel wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of literary craftmanship, it was leagues better than the movie. Now, if we neatly sidestep the whole anti-Christian bias in the novel and movie, there are still a great number of unfortunate changes from the novel.

Enter Langdon, the middle-aged bachelor university professor in religious symbolism. Hanks conveys the image of Langdon rather poorly in my opinion, but I’m sure others will disagree.

In the novel, Langdon is disturbed at his hotel room after giving a guest lecture on his latest book. In the movie we see the police officer show up in the middle of Langdon signing books and showing him a picture of Saunière (the guy who died, in case anyone is wondering) in the middle of it all. To the astonished gasps of the attendees. We quickly change the scene to the Louvre where Langdon is to be questioned by the chief investigator, Fachè, as his primary suspect.

In the middle of the investigation, the second main character shows up, the charming Sophie who is a member of the cryptography unit of the Paris police. She arrives with a faux phone message for Langdon telling him that he is in danger and she starts a ploy to ‘free’ him from Fachè. So far so good.

Now, once freed, they start discussing the fibonacci sequence that Saunière has written on the floor and Langdon suddenly guesses that it’s a key to the rest of the message that it’s an anagram for something else. Langdon, a professor in symbolism, sees this, not the female cryptographer who has spent ages learning about substitution ciphers, Vignière ciphers, elliptic curve cryptography and the Gods knows what else. Audrey Tautou is reduced to nothing more than a beautiful side-kick without the brains to go with a degree in mathematics. Pitiful.

Jumping a bit ahead, in the end of the movie, suddenly everything is revealed from Langdon glancing at a few newspaper clips that Sophie is actually of the Saint-Claire family and she is the sangreal. Then the whole Priory of Sion shows up in the church where this revelation takes place, and a woman tells Sophie that she is her grandmother. Now contrast this with the entire premise of the book: only four members of the Priory of Sion knows of the Sangreal: the three sénéchaux and the grand master, now the entire Priory shows up and says ‘by the way, hi, we’re here to protect you’. And then we close up the movie with a bit of philosophical meandering on whether Sophie revealing herself to the world would constitute the final breakdown of the Catholic church and restore the true gospel of Christ, or something to that effect. Honestly!

There is a host of changes from the novel to the movie, hardly any for the better, most for the worse. Wikipedia has a long list of differences for those who are interested in the finer details. I had low expectations for this movie, and even they were let down. The only relatively positive side to the movie was Sir Ian McKellen, as he successfully portrayed Sir Leigh Teabing to perfection.

Just pitiful.

Edit: Just to clarify then I am not regarding the book or movie as fact. I am also not demeaning the book. I am, however, saying that given whatever qualities the book may or may not have had, the movie loses any and all of them.

Tags: movie, movie review

Misfile

Thursday, November 9th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

Imagine you’ve lived your life as a boy, then one day you wake up as a girl. Imaging that you’re a girl and you wake up with the last two years of your life whisked out of existence. Imagine when you wake up there’s a delinquent angel telling you he misfiled some of your papers in the great filing room of heaven, causing your lives to be all messed up, and the only way to fix it is by finding a way for the angel to get back into heaven.

If you think this sounds like a recipe for disaster, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Find the webcomic behind this idea here.

Tags: webcomic

A new time

Friday, October 20th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

So, when I said in my last blog post that I was back in the blogging business, I had, of course, counted on the fact that we were moving on the first, and that my telephone company couldn’t hook me up with Internet at the new place for almost two weeks. The best way to come back to the blogging business is to leave it abruptly again, making everyone wonder where you’ve went, driving up traffic when people pine for your next nugget of information (or something).

It has, unfortunately been pretty much overcast constantly since we moved in, so you’ll have to do with a slightly dark image from the back side of the house. We’ve bought this lovely house in a nice suburb north of Copenhagen, just next to a school and a stone throw from a nursery, so the stage is set for the next aspect of life.

We’re still getting settled in, so until we’re finished with that, I’ll postpone the indoors pictures as everything is a bit cluttered. My desk is still in a temporary position in the middle of the living room so I can do some work. Hopefully everything will have gotten in order within long. We’re fortunate that there’s also a lot of nature around, so I’ll be sure to take a few snapshots from the lake nearby as well if I can manage to remember to bring the camera when we go for a walk.

Apart from us moving, then Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 unto the world and since it fixes a lot of issues with formatting the layout of my website I have taken the chance to do a nice spring cleaning and make my site look pristine on IE7 and FireFox. If you’re on an earlier version of Internet Explorer and my site suddenly looks very strange then… well, that’s why.

Lastly, I’ve written another fascinating project in partial fulfillment of my masters degree in Computer Science, which you can see here (PDF). It is about creating a language for specifying typefaces (fonts) for the computer. If you want bit more of a description of the project, look at the research page.

So, to a new time…

Tags: life, university

Server move and silence

Sunday, September 24th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

So, a while back the person hosting my website decided to move his server and while doing that, change the access setup so that I no longer had access to directly logon to the server. Since I used an authentication setup for my administration module that required that I had logon rights it meant that I could no longer post any new blog posts. This has, seemingly, taken me quite a while to remedy, but now that the administration module is back in business with a new authentication setup, the duration of my silence should diminish ever so slightly (not that I have the best track record for making regular blog posts).

For the non-technical, a slight redux: I’m back in the blogging business, baby!

Digital Rights Management and Culture

Monday, June 12th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is all the craze these days, as companies are vying for ever more control over how we consumers use their products. Imagine those non-skip-able parts on your new DVD movie. You know them: the anti-copying schtick, the promotional advertisements for other movies you probably don’t want to watch, because you’ve already seen them a dozen times. Now imagine it was illegal to get a player that allows you to skip them. That is part of what DRM is about.

The world of television is soon moving to digital broadcasting, where those same DRM rules will apply. Let us presume that the broadcasting companies get a special flag added to the digital stream that says “you must not change channel now” and use this flag while sending commercials. This means that if you got a digital TV that allowed you to change channel despite of this flag then you would potentially be violating DRM laws. Philips has already sought a patent for doing exactly this.

In the audio world, CD publisher Sony was happily distributing a DRM system with some of their newer CDs to make sure that their CD wasn’t copied. It did this by adding what is called a filter driver to your CD-ROM device, among other things. This filter driver, apart from containing bugs, was always active, regardless of whether your Sony CD was in the drive or not. So what does it do? It tries to interfere with burning software so you might find yourself unable to burn that CD with your backups because you listened to a Sony CD sometime earlier. Apart from this there was no indication of this software, nor any way to uninstall it. Worse, this DRM that kindly allows Sony to “protect” their interests contained a bug that allowed any website to execute arbitrary code on your machine. In human terms that means Sony just opened a door for a hacker to control your system. After public outcry over this how was this corporation punished? Oh wait, they weren’t. They magnanimously promised customers who contacted them about their DRM CDs to get free non-DRM CDs. That was it.

The games industry has been doing this for year with various copy protections. One of the worse ones is the StarForce DRM software that in many cases renders the system completely unstable. Most people just attribute it to Windows being bad.

These are just a few examples of DRM things that have come up in recent years, and this will just be the beginning. We are moving to a world where it is not the laws of your country that defines what you are allowed to do. No, in the future it may very well be companies who can define how you may use your digital equipment: you may not use a CD burner once you’ve listened to this CD, you may not watch this DVD on two different players, you may not copy the song you bought online to another device than your iPod.

Do we really want companies to be able to control in detail how we may use what we buy? Would it be alright if publishers told us that it was illegal to lend a book to a friend? Let the laws define what we may, not the corporations, and don’t let the corporations write the laws. Our culture is too important to be turned into nothing more than profit on the bottom line.

Tags: digital rights management, legislation

Propagandising the audience

Sunday, June 11th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

You may think of me as you please, but I have always been a fan of the Hollywood action movies like Die Hard, I, Robot, The Rock and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (the Pitt and Jolie version), to name a few. Tonight we were taking a break from our studies and put on Mr. and Mrs. Smith to watch, and what pops up first? A propaganda movie by the MPA(A). A propaganda movie that you cannot skip as it utilises the non-skip-able DVD setting (which was conveniently added to the format). Of course, there are players that allow me to skip past these things, but let us leave that for another time. Let us, rather, look at the contents of this rather educating production.

We are greeted with the message that You would not steal a purse, You would not steal a movie. And finally what this property theft appeal leads up to: Downloading a pirated movie is stealing. So they’re saying that copying a movie is the equivalent of stealing property from someone, rather than what it really is: copyright infringement. Now, copyright infringement is, according to the current laws in most places, of course, also illegal, but it is not the same thing as property theft. In property theft one party gains something and another one loses it. With copyright infringement one person has something, and now the other person has it too. It’s rather like ideas in that respect. Copyright protection is basically a protection of the collective ideas represented in your work. So what is this that the movie industry is trying to insinuate? That copyright infringement should be punished as property theft? What they’re doing is feeding us falsehood. Oh but it was only meant as an allegory would be a plausible defense on their part. An allegory indeed.

Over the past centuries these interest organisations have lobbied for longer and longer copyright periods. Copyright was originally An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned set down by the British in Statute of Anne and enacted from 1709/1710. This statute provided content providers (publishers in this case) 28 years protection of their works from being copied and thereafter the work would pass into what is known as the Public Domain. Since then content providers have lobbied governments to give them longer and longer copyright protection. So what started as 28 years is now up to (hold on to your hat and loose appendages) the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. The now more liberal Statute of Anne has allowed things like Project Gutenberg to exist. Imagine we would have to wait an average of 150 years until works become available for the encouragement of learning. All there is today is encouragement for companies to make money, unfortunately.

All this comes down to, of course, is whether the laws are made in the interest of the prosperity of the people, or in the interest of the prosperity of the corporate interests that donate money to our law-makers. The interest organisations for the music, software and movie industries are all trying to change the model of copyright, not into something we get (a CD, a program, etc.), but something we lease/rent from them. Something to which we have no rights. Something where we have to pay them money for each distinct place that we use it. This will, of course, be very interesting to these people as that will make them a lot of money. To make things a bit more concrete let us imagine that I want to buy the new Evanescence CD that is coming out in October. Now, I lease this once to be able to play it on my computer. But I also want to be able to listen to it at the stereo, so I have to pay again. Oh, and I’d like to put it on my MP3-player too, so I will have to pay again. This is the content provider’s dream. Imagine all the money they will get from those pesky consumers! The losers will, of course, become the consumers. The consumers would be you and me.

Now, I am not only saying this because I am a consumer and I think what the interest organisations are doing is immoral and against the benefit of society in general. I am also a content provider. I write books and papers. I have recorded music. I would get the same benefits. The difference is that I see no need to extort my fellow people of their every penny in order for them to be allowed to read my material. Imagine if publishers from 1710 had been given the right to lifetime plus 400 years. There would be no Project Guternberg. There would not be an encouragement of learning. The public domain would contain few of the great masterpieces of this world.

This made it into a fairly long post, which I had not intended, but I think society, and in particular our politicians, need to learn that copyright is a system that gives incitement for the content providers to invest money in providing content and at the same time, providing society with an enrichment of their culture, an encouragement of learning. There will be precious little new material for anyone to learn from for a long time with lifetime plus 70 years. We are hoarding our cultural legacy from ourselves by allowing these laws to be passed. I find it sad that interest organisations and politicians run free to ruin culture like this for some more money. Sad. Fortunately I am not alone in my perspective, in particular Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig is working hard in favour of returning to a copyright statute in spirit with the Statute of Anne. Limited protection for the content provider and cultural enrichment after this. Let us not sign away our culture to provide added revenue for a select group. Please?

Tags: digital rights management, legislation, movie

William Gibson

Sunday, June 4th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

Ever since I read Neuromancer by William Gibson, I have been hooked by the truly artistic writing style. His penchant for portraying a plausible, dystopian society in a setting not unlike present-day Earth, is envious. But we should not forget that his books are for the most part a commentary about contemporary issues, but you can, of course, ignore this aspect when reading them, though it does give the books an interesting other dimension to them.

A while back I took to rereading the books I had by him, and also picked up a few new ones. The long-standing classic, Neuromancer is, of course, the thing that really gathered readers for Gibson’s novels, and he hasn’t quite managed to write something that good for a long while. That is, until his latest book, Pattern Recognition, that I picked up recently. It is unique for a William Gibson book in that it is the first of his book that takes place in a contemporary setting, interweaving actual events such as the planes crashing into the World Trade Center in 2001. In the book we follow Cayce Pollard, who has an affliction that’ll make my lactose intolerance seem benign: she has allergic reactions to succesful brandings like the Michelin man. Cayce has found an avenue to exploit her curious allergy: high-level marketing consultancy. If she gets an allergic reaction, the customer has a good design.

Cayce does, of course, suffer from this allergy, so she lives in her own world, stripped of any style or fashion. She has only one hobby: the footage. The footage is mysterious segments of video that are released seemingly at random on the internet. As it has a lot of people interested one of her less-than-appealing clients, Bigend, wants to figure out who is behind the footage, and he wants Cayce to figure it out for him. Reluctantly Cayce is forced into it and is swept across Europe in a chase where it isn’t always apparent who is being chased. It is a classic William Gibson novel in style with Neuromancer where layer upon layer is added with no apparent connection, only to be completely unravelled at the end, bringing all the parts together in one big whole. One of my most-recommended Gibson books, by far.

Another William Gibson book I return to often is the short-story collection, Burning Chrome, which contains a long palette of fascinating stories. Some with more action than others. The two favourites of mine in the book are Fragments of a Hologram Rose by Gibson and The Belonging Kind that Gibson co-authored with John Shirley.

Fragments of a Hologram Rose is a meandering tale of a breakup, painted with words. It’s not that the story is great, it is actually rather benign, but it is just told in this very fascinating style that makes me reread the short-story again and again.

The other story, The Belonging Kind, is more atypical of Gibson as in it is set in what could be contemporary America or Europe. It is a fascinating tale of a rather boring and altogether uninteresting social interactions professor who hasn’t got the foggiest clue how to interact socially himself. To alleviate the boredom he visits nondescript pubs in the evenings where he drinks with himself, until, one day, he discovers something else pubcrawling a varied range of places. He discovers the belonging kind.

I still haven’t picked up a couple of the intermediaries like Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties. I will have to rectify that sometime soon.

Tags: book, book review