Nov 27, 2000

Election Day. Once again I walk into the voting booth and count the candidates, and figure out what rude words to write in the circles. This time I was able to fi in f*ck you all. Ten candidates and nobody to vote for. The results were just as dissapointing. Comparing the popular votes against the electoral results confirms once again that our current first past the post does not work as most people would like it to. A quick look at the Elections Canada website can confirm this. Personally I am absolutely disgusted that the Liberals were handed another majority government. I am appalled by the support shown by the west for the Alliance. As I write this, I'm watching the election returns get discussed. The general feeling I get is that most people were voting AGAINST a candidate as opposed to voting for a candidate. This is not how it's supposed to work. I for one would like to see a party that has a broad platform, which is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. when I did the world's smallest political quiz, I was put in the libertarian corner, and I doubt I'm alone. The libertarian party of canada is dormant, but I could see the Progressive Conservative Party swinging in that direction to differentiate themselves from the Alliance. Or maybe the west will just seperate...

I'm off to Ottawa on Thursday for my Grandmother's 100th birthday, but I'll be back on the 4th of December, just in case you're wondering where I am.

Nov 4, 2000

It's been a while since I last wrote anything here. Been busy. Work has been really busy, and so has the ret of my life.

Nobody to vaote for. Seems to be the theme of the elections both up here in Canada and south of the border. Rarely has the lesser of two evils been such a clear case of choosing between two truly **EVIL** things. Here in Canada we are choosing (basically) between Jean Chretien's Liberal Party which has shown a complete lack of understanding of majority rights in a democracy, and Stockwell Day's Canadian Alliance which shows a basic lack of understanding of minority rights in a democracy. South of the border, the same hands are being played by Bush and Gore.

While I agree with many of the rightists fiscal policies, I just don't trust them when it comes to their social policies. I see some merit in the social policies of the pseudo leftists/centrists of the Liberal/Democrat, but I don't want their hands on fiscal policies at all.

If I were an American I would probably be voting for Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party, but I'm not. <sigh> I guess that once again when I go to the ballot box I'll have to refuse my ballot. Or spoil it.

Aug 13, 2000

Today's rant is about copyright... specifically why we have copyrights in the first place. Copyrights exist so that society as a whole will benefit. They are not there to benefit artists or corporations. The compelling reason governments needed to create copyrights was so that society would benefit from ideas that were released. The carrot was that there would be a limited monopoly to allow the creator to benefit. The result was that it would eventually become public domain.
That social contract no longer seems to work. It has been three generations since anything came into the public domain. THREE FUCKING GENERATIONS!. This no longer benefits society folks. And that is why you are starting to see widespread civil disobedience to the concept of copyright. It may not be conscious, but I believe that is why twenty million people are ignoring copyright law to get their music on napster. It's why so many people pirate software.
People no longer even remember why copyright was given in the first place. Even some artists are beginning to question the legitimacy of copyright, mostly because they don't own the copyright on their own work; it's been stolen from them by the corporations. Courtney Love's well publicized rant caught many people's eye, but it was predated by Steve Albin's slightly mor realistic figures in his rant that caught my eye. Recently the american music industry finally got a clue that there was about to be a full revolt, and decide that fighting their top sellers at the same time as they were waging war on their best customers, and said that they no longer wanted to completely fuck over their roster by getting muxsic declared "work for hire".
I really think the time has come to revamp the laws. We need to go back and look at how long we need to give artists, companies and other people the limited monopoly that copyright provides. Do they really need a hundred years to make a profit on Britney Spears newest single? Does Microsoft really need that long to make Windows 3.11 a money maker? If things never make it into the public domain, then why give them this right? If they won't put it in the public domain, then I really think that people will put it there whether they like it or not.
That would not be the optimal result, as copyright as it was originally devised made sense. If we destroy the economic incentive to release ideas, be they expressed as a bad pop song, or an incredible piece of writing, then we may lose a lot. True, artists will continue to do what they do for love, but we may see subscription based releases to only the rich, or some other unintended result. The limited amount of time allowed in the original idea allowed the person creating an idea to derive some value from their work. Ideas do have value, and the scales tipping to far the wrong way may not be what we want to happen, and it will if things don't change ; twenty million Napsters can't be wrong, and if they are, well Gnutella, Freenet, Hotline, and who knows what else is waiting in the wings.

July 2, 2000

It's been a while since I put any work in on the website here. I've been hoping to get ADSL, so that I could legitimately bring it onto my own server, and have a bit more control. @home can't seem to configure their servers to respond to anything more complex than websites with pictures of peoples pets. Right now their website is choking on letting me change anything in a directory. Their permissions on the web server are just screwy.

On another note, we now have some Macs in the store, so I'm diligently learning the internals of MacOS (I am a geek after all), and I personally am waiting for MacOS X, because apparently it is more stable than OS9. That would be pleasant.

And, as if my life didn't have3 enough toys in it, I now have a Handspring Visor, which is basically a Palm Pilot for people who like aesthetics. The fun part has been getting everything to play happy with each other. After setting up netatalk for the linux box, the Macs can see my linux box, but I'm having difficulty gettting the linux box to see the Macs on the network. Getting the Visor to play happy was another adventure. after reading the usb-visor-linux pages, I finally succeded in at least getting the linux machine to recognize the visor, but I'm still gettting kernel oopses. One bright side of all this is that in the many kernel recompiles tthat all this entailed, I finally got my joystick working! I'm beta testing Descent3, so this was a good thing (tm)!
To completely change the subject, I recently attended the wedding of my nephew Casey to my new niece-in-law Rowda. I posted some pictures for friends and family to view.

April 30, 2000

I worked as a doorman for the first time in years on Friday night. It was kind of fun, and brought back a lot of memories. It was an all-ages ska show, so it really brought back memories of my misspent youth. My first job was working at an all ages club called One Step Beyond in Ottawa. I saw a lot of cool bands play there, until the police saw fit to harass us enough that one day the owner and staff sat down together and decided that this had ceased to be fun and we closed the place. From there we formed a cooperative that promoted bands at a variety of halls around town. Those were good times.
To completely change the subject, I've been thinking some more about MP3's and the law and morality. I've mentally been switching the words 'artists' with 'programmers' etc. and decding whether the parallels make sense. I think that the music industry is going to fall under the same pressures that the software industry is facing from open source. The question of whether musicians will be able to make money is one that will have to be face, but something that is consistently ignored in the debate is that with the current system 90% of musicians already lose money. the 10% that are making money are the rare ones. Most bands out there play for beer at the local club, and then go back to their day job. Ever since they broke the back of the Musicians unions, playing live music has not really been a money making proposition. One thing I've noticed is that whenever they are interviewing artists about their opinions about Napster, they are interviewing the people most likely to lose out in this paradigm shift. I would be really interested in seeing what artists at the fringes think.
that's enough ranting for today.

April 14, 2000

If you watch this page frequently (an audience of none), you may have noticed a few Mac OS related links in the new bookmark section to your left. The reason for this is that after three years of bitching about Windows, I made an offhand comment that maybe we should get an i-mac for the front office, as it is stylish, and good at graphics. The next thing I knew we were switching the whole business over to Macs. I now have to learn my fifth OS. It should be interesting.

I should take a second here to heartily recommend a few apps that have captured my heart and a piece of my desktop. First up is screem a Homesite like tool for web site development. While not as polished as Homesite, it has almost 90% of the functionality, and is more than enough for me. Second up is Freeamp an cross platform mp3 player. It's the only one I've found that is happy with my sound card for some reason, and I also really like it's play list editor and tag editor. It's very intuitive and skinnable to boot! So how do you get these mp3's you ask? You have two options.... Rip them yourself using Grip, or use a Napster clone, with a number of choices, Gnapster or Knapster or even a console based program! Last but not least, is a really useless but fun little KDE utility; kweather a dock applet that gets the weather data from an NOAA ftp site and updates regularly. Great if you don't have a window in your computer room, you still know what the weather is like outside!

April 8, 2000

Wow! I just read Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" and that's pretty much all I can say. There were surprisingly few plot holes, and it's probably the best book I've read since Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Blue/Green Mars series. There were a lot of very interesting concepts and ideas about Cryptography, freedom, and technology, and it will probably take a while to ponder it thoroughly. All in all worth the hours of sleep I missed in order to finish reading it. It was especially interesting in light of the many legal entanglements around cryptography recently.

On a completely different subject, if anybody out there reading this mess knows of a good book or better yet a web site that has a good easy primer on how to get started playing with database design, ideally under PostgreSQL, please let me know. I am tired of ramming my head into a brick wall.... thanks!

March 29, 2000

I've recently been looking into MP3's, and thinking about whether or not they're good for the artist. I have been a supporter of live music for twenty years, from booking and promoting live bands (out of pocket a few thousand dollars I might add), to DJ'ing, and as a consumer (literally thousands of vinyl albums, and hundreds of CD's). My purchases of music have dropped recently. Partially because I haven't been exposed to music I enjoyed. I was playing with Napster the other day, and checked to see if they had any 'Skatalites'... after downloading a song, I remembered how much I enjoyed their music. The next day I was out buying a CD.
When I was buying tremendous amounts of music, I was also making mixed tapes from the radio. I'm old enough to remember how worried the music industry was about the proliferation of cheap tape recorders. It was thought that if people could just tape the music, they wouldn't buy it. It never happened did it? The fact is, MP3's are the home mix tapes of the digital era. People are tactile by nature. They like owning things! In my mind, an MP3 on my hard drive is similar to a mixed tape. It's transitive. I'll probably get bored of it and tape over it at some point. The music that moved me, I have in hard copy, either vinyl (my preference) or CD. For these basic reasons, I have decided to participate in the MP3 revolution, and will download to my hearts content.... I suspect it might get expensive. I love music
In other news, they redid the sidewalk in front of the store and house this week. We put our logo in the sidewalk so it was kind of cool to watch. It's our financial year end on Friday so this will probably be my last update for a while. I'll rant more in mid April.

March 26, 2000

Lara and I have decided to become parents. I am really excited and scared. If more people read this I would be worried, but I doubt anybody I should tell will read this before I can tell them. I'm going to be a Daddy!!!!

March 23, 2000

I've fiddled around a bit with the page. I think I've made it a bit more legible. I've been busy at work so I haven't had much time to work on my projects. This website is the only thing I've been keeping up on! I have begun thinking about how to redesign the company web page, but that I have to come up with a concept first. It currently looks so 90's that it no longer is a good advertisement. I was never happy with the graphics, so that will be my first project. In other work related news, we're trying to figure out how to expand to the American market. we've got a few ideas, but that is why I've been 'silly busy'. I guess it's time to get back to the projects. I'll rant more later.

March 19, 2000

Had a really fun weekend, and therefore got absolutely nothing done. I will be working on my WTFM How-To this week, but it's going to be a while 'till I finish it. My other project is learning how to write QT/KDE applications. I'm going to start by creating a Financial style calculator. I'm going to convert the kcalc program, and modify it so that it works the way that us financial types expect it to. I have a realistic expectation of finishing the first version by the end of this calendar year.

March 17, 2000

Here's my mirror. I've got house guests so that's all the news today.

March 16, 2000

So Matthew got served today. I'll post more later today.

March 15, 2000

First things first. I fixed some spelling errors so it's not quite as embarrasing to read as it was.
In the news today, the makers of Cyber Patrol, in a bit of blind stupidity are suing Matthew and his partner for patent infringement. the story is here. Irritating? No. Enraging? Yes. I'll post a note here soon with news on how to fight this as I learn more.

On an unrelated note, i just realized that this isn't really a vanity page without a picture of my cat, so here it is:
Furleigh is a purebred Russian Blue

March 12, 2000

A few bugs need to be worked out. the search functionality isn't working on the web page .... yet. Probably not for a while, so don't bother. A big shout out to Matthew Skala. His web page is under friends and family. He recently reverse engineered some censorware. The press release etc. makes for an interesting read.

For those of you just here to find the beginnings of my RTFM-HowTo, How-To isn't up yet, but I'll post it when it's fit to be viewed by sane individuals.

As you might have guessed, I'm not terribly well organized, but I just realized that you don't know who the hell I am. HI! I'm Thom. Full name Thomas G. McVeigh, aka m0nkyman on a number of online forums. I'm a jewellery designer at idar . I also happen to be a bit of a radical, and a proponent of Open Source Software. I'm the treasure for the Victoria Linux Users Group, or VLUG and a big fan of linux in general. I like it for many of the same reasons that I fell in love with the Internet People were getting together to create something, without fear or greed motivating them (yes I have been on the internet long enough to remember when that described it). Way back when, there was even a parallel net called fidonet(which still exists), that was basically a bunch of BBS's routing email by modem (It was and is more, but that's the jist). Things like that interested me. Now, people are putting together new tools. I am of the humble opinion that this is a good thing.
That's my rant for the day. Check back later for more incoherent ramblings.

March 11, 2000

So, I finally put together a little web page. I'm basically a lazy guy, and I didn't want to have to update this page by hand too often, so I did what every good Open Source advocate should do. I found some cool code and bent it to my dark purposes.
This site is put together with two neat little utilities. The first is called bk2site which takes my Netscape bookmark file and turns it into a navigable site. The second is weex a reverse FTP mirroring script.
Voila; a couple of entries in my crontab, and I have a current web page that updates as often as I like.

take my poll at: Aptenobytes Poll:ææ

htmlGEAR.com

pmc 2.00 - A Perl/GTK mail client.
Finance::Quote 1.04 - Perl module to fetch stock quotes from American, European and Australian markets
eXtace 1.3.11 - ESD FFT visual plugin, eye-candy
X-CD-Roast 0.98alpha7 - A program-package dedicated to easy CD creation underLinux
gsmlib 1.5 - GSM mobile phone control library using AT command set
MIM 1.09 - A viewer for mpeg multicast streams on Linux/UNIX.
mfinance 0.4 - MySQL personal finance manager.
wtodo 1.0 - A Web-based todo program based on jtodo.
Pegasi Web Server 0.2 - A multithreading Web server written in Java.
CdUtil 0.1 - A utility to convert a CD database to HTML.

CONTACT ME at thom@idar.com

Generated by bk2site.