dretblog

Baseline Matters

in 1985, the music industry, more specifically, the RIAA, started marking albums (these were the days of vinyl records) with parental advisory stickers. they were intended to inform concerned parents that those albums had lyrics that they might not want to be heard by their defenseless and impressionable children. while this made concerned parents happy, because they could simply watch out for those labels, it also became almost a quality label for artists. as an artist from a certain genre, you really wanted to have this label on your album, unless you wanted to be regarded as a weakling. as somebody buying albums, i was mostly annoyed by the hard-to-remove stickers which were only there for people which did not like the music anyway. but it was just a sticker, and i either removed or ignored them.

then came the age of the CD, and the stickers survived, this time being affixed to the jewel cases. this was more annoying, because they were harder to remove (at least some of them), but on the other hand you could just get a new jewel case, if you really wanted to get rid of the sticker.

the came the age of the MP3. amazon.com now sells MP3, which is great, because i can download music without using Apple's DRM-crippled iTunes store. instead of getting a physical album cover or case, i get all music tagged with ID3 tags, so that MP3 players can use this information. what happens to the stickers? they are reborn as crippled tags, so if you buy an album that has such a sticker, the album title and all song titles have ID3 tags that say Title [Explicit]. only if you buy the censored version you get clean ID3 tags (here is an example). editing ID3 tags is possible, but i really don't see why i have to fix that data after buying the regular version of an album.

more importantly, this establishes censored versions as the canonical version, whereas the original version is tagged as being a deviant version. this presents the way the music is produced and then crippled for concerned parents as if it were the other way around: first the censored version is produced, and then a deviant version for non-decent consumers.

if i were an artist, i would object to sell censored songs in the first place. if for some reason i would have to agree to it, however, i would demand to tag the jesusland versions with Title [Censored] and use non-crippled tags for the original versions.

while this might seems like a minor issue (and in itself it is), it is one more example of how the moral majority uses language in a very smart way to establish the baseline of the public discourse. Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show is a great book by geoffrey nunberg taking a very close look at how controlling language influences culture and the political climate.

P.S.: the clean way of course would be to not embed the rating in text fields anyway. ID3 seems to have such a field (or not? comments appreciated...), but since support across various applications may vary, encoding the rating as text is probably regarded as the more robust way of doing it.

License to Scroll

microsoft has just been granted a patent for paged scrolling in documents. this is not a joke, this is U.S. patent 7,415,666. there probably is no point in dwelling on the obvious stupidity of such a patent, but it simply makes you wonder who (if anybody) is running the P.R. at the USPTO. bogus patents such as this are not isolated incidents, there is a steady stream of patents that obviously make no sense.

when patents such as this are granted, there are many asking for a reform of the patent law. however, the important thing here is that this kind of patent is not something that is the fault of the current patent law, it is the fault of how patents are granted, and the fact that there obviously is not any expert involved in granting them. however, there definitely is a challenge to deal with the deluge of patent applications that big corporations produce, and that is something that should be addressed by a patent reform.

but it shouldn't be too hard to find patent examiners who will realize that they have used paged scrolling in a variety of applications for quite a while now. and it also shouldn't be too hard to put some process in place that would avoid the steady stream of embarrassing bogus patents. is somebody keeping track of the really bad ones? if there is a site that collects memorable patents like this one, i'd be interested to hear about it! there is the EFF patent busting project which should have generated a fair number of good candidates for such a collection, but the page looks dysfunctional and does not even say which year they are talking about...

Blogging from China

i just arrived in beijing for WWW2008 and LocWeb 2008. working with the hotel's internet connection turns out to be interesting. of course, you are never sure whether the internet connection is just spotty or there is something else going on, but there definitely is some blocking.

for example, i can write my blog (i.e., use TypePad's web-based front-end), but i cannot read my blog (i.e., access http://dret.typepad.com/). and there have been reports about problems with TypePad access in china (and of course general reports about internet filtering in china). the thing that confuses me is that if there is a firewall, they must block by default all *.typepad.com domains, but explicitly unblock www.typepad.com to allow access to the application. that's feels a little bit like blogger-friendly censorship, turning blogs into write-only tools. btw, Blogger works just fine; i am wondering why TypePad is blocked while Blogger is not. are the user populations different in their criticism of china? or is it just because Google has been schmoozing the chinese government?

however, many other things i was expecting not to work do work, such as HTTPS, SSH, and SFTP. which means that tunneling through the great firewall of china is not too hard, it just takes some willingness to do it. and of course the time it takes to reverse the efforts the chinese government is putting into blocking access to information.

Kiva XO Mashup

Kiva is that great organization that allows everybody to make personalized microloans, by selecting who is getting money, getting in touch with them, and getting repaid by them (if things work out). Kiva does a great job of making loans less anonymous, and  it adds some feel-good factor for the lenders because they now have an actual personality.

we just received our XO Laptop (a.k.a. one laptop per child laptop). i am struggling a lot with the basic interface functions, but i am pretty sure it's just me, my decadent iPhone-driven expectations, and some getting used to this new toy. i'll figure it out, and i just love the green ears.

what i was wondering about: what if the give one get one promotion (through which we got our laptop) would have used Kiva's model to actually let me know who received my laptop? to let me get in touch with them, learn how my laptop is being used, and maybe help them if they needed to figure out things? i think this would have been just great; right now, the only thing i know is that my laptop probably went to the southern half of the globe, and that's about it. i would like to learn to better use the XO, maybe help others to better use the XO, and learn how the XO is being used.

give one get one is over now, but i am wondering whether it would still be possible to set up these partnerships. i know my serial number, and i guess there is some record of which laptop went where. and there is ning or other sites which support customized social networks. now that could be really cute, wiggling my XO's little green ears in sync with its brother somewhere else...

Bunny-Based Voters

today's NYT devotes quite a bit of space to Mitt Romney courting evangelicals. the basic Romney rhetoric is: look, i am a religious zealot, and you are religious zealots, so why don't we just get along, given the fact that most of the main characters in our favorite stories are the same?

of course, that does not go down too well with the real zealots on the other side, and the NYT even cares to explain that among the major differences with traditional Christianity, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon Church is officially called, do not believe in the concept of the unified Trinity; the Book of Mormon is considered sacred text, alongside the Bible and two other texts; and Mormons believe that God has a physical body and that human beings can eventually become like God.

in a secular state, such a discussion would probably be regarded with the same public interest as a passionate debate about whether the easter bunny's ears are more brownish, or more of a whitish kind of color. however, since secularism is a word that does not mean much in the U.S., the bunny voters and their ability to handle ear-color disputes will probably be important for the outcome of the presidential election, and will definitely be essential for the primaries.

Supporting Evolution

reading books such as the god delusion or god is not great is kind of mildly entertaining, but as a european, you don't quite see why they are necessary these days. it feels like people writing elaborate publications about the earth being round instead of flat. sure, it is true and the flat earthers are a weird bunch of lunatics, but why even care?

well, as soon as you enter the U.S., things start to look different. today, the NYT reports about a texas teacher being fired for supporting evolution. if it weren't so sad, it would be an excellent joke. thinking about grown adults supporting the idea of creationism and passing that kind of idiocy on to children really makes me cringe, but here it happens, and it is discussed with an earnestness that is discomforting. here is the core sentence from the article, stating the reason why she got fired:

She acknowledged forwarding to a local online community an e-mail message from the National Center for Science Education, a pro-evolution group, about a talk in Austin on Nov. 2 by Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, a co-author of Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse and an expert witness in the landmark 2005 case that ruled against the teaching of intelligent design in the Dover, Pa., schools.

you just gotta love the concept of a pro-evolution group! that says quite a bit about the state of affairs around here...

Spock Suckage

this Web 2.0 stuff really is getting on my nerves. you are in somebody's network, they play around with some stupid new service and as a result send messages to everybody. you get the message, see the name, play around with the stupid new service, and before you know it (or the stupid new service tells you), you are sending messages to everybody. this must be what always is referred to as viral. highly contagious and not good for the hosts.

so, the latest sucker that got me is spock. my deepest apologies to everybody who was just spammed by me/spock. i just hope you have better immunity against it, otherwise it will spread further...

of course, the most important thing (way more important than anything else, such as decent behavior) for such a service is to gain traction, which translates to email as many people as you possibly can. now, that doesn't sound too well, so spock tells you how you can Add to Trust Network. it does sound like a pretty local operation, but in fact it means spam everybody. so just say no to spock. and again: sorry if i spammed you.

Android and Java

when i first looked at the android documentation, i just wanted to find out what android was, in very technical terms. it looks a lot like many Java libraries, but in this case, it is a bit different. the whole story is available as Dalvik: how Google routed around Sun's IP-based licensing restrictions on Java ME, but the important lesson is that android is probably the first large scale attempt to subvert the holy trinity of how Java was used so far. usually, Java is three things:

• a programming language: Java is an object-oriented programming language such as C++ that defines its own syntax and semantics of how Java programs have to written and how they work. 
• a runtime environment: in addition to the basic programming language, Java usually comes with standard class libraries, and these are packaged in different editions, the most common being Java SE (J2SE), Java EE (J2EE), and Java ME (J2ME). the latter was the common Java runtime environment on mobile devices so far, and Sun collects licensing fees for every single phone which supports J2ME. 
• a runtime platform: Java applications are typically compiled into Java bytecode, which is then run on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). there is no reason why Java programs have to be compiled into Java bytecode, but this used to be the norm. not any more.

android uses apache harmony, an open source implementation of Java SE (this is the ominously named Core Libraries block in the android architecture), and adds to that the mobile-oriented android library. all of that then compiles into Dalvik bytecode (not standard JVM bytecode) and executes on the Dalvik virtual machine. by doing this, Google avoided having to license anything from sun. citing from the above blog post:

The trick is that Google doesn't claim that Android is a Java platform, although it can run some programs written with the Java language and against some derived version of the Java class library. Sun could prevent this if they had a patent on the standard class library, but they don't and, even if they did, I strongly doubt it would be enforceable since Android doesn't claim to be compatible (and in fact, could very well claim that their subset/superset is an innovation on the existing patent and challenge Sun's position).

interesting. i currently have a hard time figuring out whether that's good or bad, and until i do so, i just enjoy thinking about the legions of lawyers at Google, scurrying around to figure out a way how to safely design and build and release a non-Java Java platform...

Free iPhones!

yesterday, a german court ruled that the iPhone must be offered without contract restrictions in germany. this puts an end to the pressure that apple can put on consumers by bundling offers in a way which force consumers into buying something (such as a 2-year cellphone contract) even though they only want to buy something different (a cellphone).

now, i guess that for american culture, this kind of ruling looks rather weird. why can't apple do what it wants when it sells the iPhone? it simply is a question of how much control you want to give to powerful players (such as big companies), and how much you want to protect consumers from being exploited.

apple's innovative product along with its brilliant marketing has generated millions of new customers for AT&T, and even though the numbers are not made public, that probably translates into tens of millions of dollars AT&T is paying apple each month (rumor is that AT&T pays around $10 per iPhone per month). this money is taken directly from the pockets of the consumers, and ends up at apple, simply because they were powerful enough to do this kind of thing.

the question whether this is something that just happens, or whether you don't want to reward companies for the simple fact that they are powerful enough to do such a thing, is a question of society, culture, and politics. personally, i think apple would be doing fine without the additional dollars they can extract from customers by forcing them into contracts with one specific provider, but then again, the whole cell phone landscape is so full of schemes solely designed for being intransparent and tricking people, that it's hard to justify why only apple should be the subject of such a ruling.

apparently, apple and its german partner, t-mobile, have found a good way to somehow sabotage the ruling anyway: they sell the unlocked iPhone for €999 ($1'500), and EDGE will only work on the t-mobile network, which effectively disables all of the interesting features of the iPhone. so much for a nice clash of regulatory efforts and companies dealing with them...

XML Pumpkin

what else is there to do in the last week of october? when everybody is busy thinking of costumes and covering places with fake spider webs? in this situation, carving pumpkins is a very important activity, and being the one-dimensional figure that you inevitably become when working too much on the same thing, i decided to carve an XML pumpkin. i agree that pumpkin carving has seen more artful designs (see for example this guy with way too much time on his hands), but the XML pumpkin will make a nice front door decoration for the ischool.

and it will probably win the price for the best markup-related pumpkin carving this year worldwide, and probably for the whole decade! or are there any other markup pumpkins out there? some old-fashioned SGML pumpkins, maybe? invalid pumpkins? we briefly discussed creating an isomorphic JSON pumpkin, but then dropped the idea because the curly braces would have stretched our carving skills too far...