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The first trials against pirates sharing movies using directconnect and similar tools have just ended here in Sweden with the acused being sentenced to fines. As expected, this provoced a new wave of whining on how horrible the system of intellectual property is and that piracy should be legalized. Not only are these crybabies making a fool of themselves demanding unrealistic benefits for themselves while offering no solutions whatsoever, they always fail to see the real issues underlying this. Instead of trying to find solutions for micropayments or sustainable licensing schemes for immaterial distribution, they whine about how they should have more rights to the content being produced than the author. Now thats an intelligent suggestions, five points for stupidity. So lets take a small analytic look at their main argument.

Piracy should be legal :: The only way piracy can be legal is if we refuse to credit content (read: intellectual property) with neither value nor rights. In a situation like that piracy wouldn’t exist since an item without rights or value can be copied without anyone claiming any loss. This does in fact exists today already, vast amounts of data is generated without value or rightful owner, such as noise or electrical interference. The following implication is that in a world like this, neither need nor interest to copy anything exist since no value is accredited. This since an easy rule of thumb is that if anyone wants to explore the content, it has a value if only for one person. So for piracy to be legal, we need to lose all interest content and only regard raw data as a placeholder. This also justifies their second claim that digital piracy doesnt cost the businisses anything since they didnt spend anything making the copy, which in other words also means that since content is worthless, these brainies might as well buy blank CDRs and pop in their stereos.

In other words: quit bloody whining, grow up and smell the coffee for after all, it’s your own fault!. This discussion exists due to the system of economic democracy (capitalism) that we all agree on being The Right Thing, so learn the rules of the game or vote for an alternative solution at the next election. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Yet another uneventful and quite boring weekend passed, the days when one longed for weekend is way gone. Tried to do some hacking on a project for $work where I need to parse XML files as saved from Microsoft Visio. Seemed like an easy hack using Perl but in true Microsoft spirit the roadblocks were just around the corner. The first problem was that the Visio VDX files use a nonstandard schema which probably make sense if youre implementing a new Visio, but I just wanted to extract a few Text elements. The below hack solved the problem of XML::LibXML wandering astray.

open(my $vdx_fh, '-|', "sed -e 's/xmlns/xmlfoo/' $filename");my $parser = XML::LibXML->new();my $tree = parser->parse_fh($vdx_fh);

Next up was retreiving the PreviewPicture which turned into hairpulling as well. Getting the image written to disk is easy, using it is impossible however. Not only is it in a proprietary Microsoft Office format, it’s also saved as bitmapped vector in extremely low resolution.. Why anyone would want a 120×80 bitmap as preview of an A3 design is beyond me. The next question is why anyone would want that image with the pixels converted as vectors so they can resize the few pixels into a fullscreen 1280×1024 image.. great, 20kb wasted on an image that in decent format would have been less than 1kb. Microsoft should really start drugtesting their personnel. In the end I did however end up with a 50 LOC perl hack that parse Visio designs and extract Text elements based on a regular expression ruleset which is just what I need, try doing that in any Microsoft development product..

The one good news is that this sunday is the last day I need to eat double dose of my medication, starting monday I’m only eating 2 pills each day.. and that the weekend is over.

Due to my /var disk being full last night the software that I use to create this site freaked out and left me with a crapped index. Seemed like a good enough time to do some maintenance so I decided to update to the latest version, a process involvning too much painful handwork.. The most notable change is that the ability to comment has been removed, this due to increasing commentspam and some security issues with the commenting software. I’ll hack up a new comment script to restore that feature soon, you can always mail me in the meantime.



If you find anything broken on the site, please contact me.

I havent had a mobile phone for the past three years and for the entire duration been regarded as an anomaly and as reactionary (both of which probably is correct but thats beside the point). Now that my employer has supplied me with a mobile phone that I never turn off and carry around.. none of which who complained for three years never call me.. human nature will never cease to amaze me.

About 15 years ago I had to bury my own sister after she having passed away due to cancer all too early in life. The events from 1990 repeted themselves today.. Today was the funeral of Anders, a friend of the family who too died from cancer early in life, but I had two funerals at once.. the similarities are scary and I relived Annas funeral which made today even more painful. It did feel good to be there though even if a lot of painful memories came raining down on me, hopefully I’ve made up with some of the demons in my head.

Working as a project manager at a network services/broadband carrier company I get involved in everything ranging from ordinary ADSL connections to complex nationwide solutions. The past few weeks have been occupied with one in the latter category. Given that we do installations in our established backbone we can only do major things during maintenance windows in the middle of the night. Last night I had technicians working a window in the northern part of Sweden who called me at around midnight. After having spent some three hours on the phone we had established that the real world didnt map 1:1 to the documentation, or the other way around.. either way we had a mountain of fiber to climb to get things together. I went back to bed without a smile.. The plan was to keep working after a few hours of sleep having routed traffic away from the affected fiber. This morning a team of dedicated professionals was assembled who performed miracles, the effect of teamwork was beautiful and every member was totally comitted to doing the Right Thing. Being 800km from the site all I could do was “watch” over the phone and assist with a few calls here and there. At the end of the day the traffic was flowing just like planned and all problems had been solved, it’s days like these that make working a pleasure.

In the evening I received an invitation to Nordic Perl Workshop 2005 who line up talks that seem to be too good to miss. Perhaps a minivacation would be in order?

The latest testresults came back this week from the lab, the current medication using injections hasn’t helped at all.. and the cause of my disease still eludes the doctors. Along with the results came a prescription for new pills, 200 pills at a rate of no less than four per day. Getting this situation resolved and under control will be extremely nice, it’s currently eating a lot of energy, something I’ve had a huge shortage of lately..

Uploaded some new work in the gallery, quite crappy stuff but still..

Ever since working with computer monitor repair and reconditioning as a kid I’ve hated cathode ray tubes. They are simply too bulky for easy handling and too shitty to work with once they malfunction (and they ineviatably do). Today nearly every monitor sold is some form of flatscreen so in a few years the years of the crt will be a faint memory. One down, one to go.. namely the television set. A large TV requires floorspace equal to a mechanized squadron and flatscreen sets in large sizes are still expensive. The only option left is a projector which in itself is a great piece of hardware, but the problem is merely moved 90 degrees. Instead of requiring a lot of floorspace a projector consumes multitudes of wallspace. Back at square one. There is however ongoing research to remove the wallspace requirement from tomorrows projectors, making every surface a projectorscreen, even corners and cloth. Abstract:

Essentially video projectors enhanced with sensors to gain information about the environment, smart projectors do not require artificial canvases and allow correct projection of images onto many arbitrary existing surfaces, such as papered walls or curtained windows.

The entire paper, Embedded Entertainment with Smart Projectors is more than recommended reading. Download, print, enjoy.

A few hours ago I dropped off Maria at the trainstation, she’ll be backpacking in Thailand for some months doing cool stuff and generally be having a good time. It was however with mixed emotions I watched the train depart for copenhagen airport. I am of course happy for her sake and hope she’s going to have a great time, at the same time I miss her like crazy.. we’ve been hanging out quite a lot these past few months and this made me realize that I’m not only interested in here but that I actually do have very strong feelings for her, those tricky feelings called love. I never did tell her about my feelings though, mostly due to me being shy and a total fuckup regarding human relations, partly due to other things.. It all really dawned on me friday night when I was unable to see her, being stuck at a party thrown by my employer, how much I missed her and how short of a time we had left to be together.. now she’s a thousand miles away.. and in a few months I’ll be leaving for Melbourne. Too bad I needed to see her leave to realize my feelings for her.. So Maria, in case you read this: you are the best thing that ever happened to me and I do hope you want to continue happen to me.. and I do hope that you have the time of your life over there on the other side of the globe!

The evening was spent with another form of goodbye as we visited a friend of the family whose son passed away a couple of days ago in more or less the exact same way that Anna, my late sister, died 15 years ago. Anders too suffered from cancertumours in the brain which the doctors were unable to surgically remove. What makes things even more scary is that Anders brother and my sister were best friends as kids and he has recently returned from studies in Melbourne.. the destinies of our familes are a bit too similar for things to feel comfortable. Visiting and being able to repay some of the support given to us back then in our time of grief did feel very good though..

All in all a bit too many goodbyes for one day, the feeling of loneliness is considerable at the moment..