tag/rant

I don't accept donations

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 11:51:56 +0000

It is common to suggest to open source projects that they should ask for donations to fund development. My understanding is that this almost never works: very, very few people donate. I have other reasons to not do that.

I live in Finland. We have a law that requires prior permission from the police to appeal to the public for donations. That's why I don't ask for donations.

I also work full time, and I'm well compensated. I live comfortably, and have no significant unmet needs. I have a home, food, and healthcare, and so I'm lucky to not need donations. That's why I don't accept donations. I'd rather you donate to someone who needs it more than I do.

The law covers appealing for donations, not accepting donations.
This is why the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't fund raise in Finland.
The interpretation of the law by the police, the prosecutors, and the courts is sufficiently inconsistent and unpredictable that I don't want to try my luck. I'd rather avoid gray areas.
Don't ask me to explain why the law exists.
Don't ask me to interpret the law.
Don't ask me to defend the law.
Do ask me for my availability for your open source develompent needs.
I'm happy to sell my time to develop software. I have a company that I can use to invoice that work. Contact me privately if you're interested.

I asked a Finnish law firm to write up an expert opinion about funding open source projects in Finland. It's in Finnish, sorry.

(I've written and published this blog post so I have something to point people at, when the topic comes up in discussion.)

I don't like Docker or Podman

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 06:23:19 +0000

Docker) is very popular software to build Linux container images and running software in them. I don't like it.

Podman is a re-implementation of the concept, command line interface, and file formats that is very close to identical to Docker. I don't like that either.

I know I'm in the minority about this, and that's OK. I'm not trying to get anyone else to stop using it, but I avoid it myself. This blog post rant is a summary of why.

Merely installing Docker on a machine has broken its network configuration, more than once. I now refuse to install it at all, except in a virtual machine for that purpose. I don't know why things broke, and I'm not interested in finding out why, as I don't want to use the software in any case.
The command line interface is really badly designed. It's ugly, hard to learn, difficult to remember, illogical, inconsistent, and just makes no sense to me at all.
The design of the language in Dockerfile is ad hoc in a bad way. It's difficult to understand, for me, and easy to make mistakes.
The documentation for Docker and its file formats is difficult for me to find things in. I find the documentation to be generally unhelpful, and this includes both the awful, badly formatted, non-idiomatic manual pages, and the maze of web pages published by the Docker company.
The Docker Hub, where people publish container images they've built, has a problem with malware, and licensing of the software in the containers. I don't want to have to be super-duper careful when using containers to avoid installing stuff that causes problems. I'm spoiled by decades of Debian use, and I want to trust my sources of software.
The state of the Docker Hub and its images also tells me the Docker company doesn't take any responsibility to avoid causing or spreading harm to others.
The images that I tell the Docker software to download or build are stored in a hidden location in my home directory. The directory can easily grow to tens of gigabytes with minor use of Docker. That was another nasty surprise. I can configure the location, but first I need to realize I need to.

Podman is nearly identical to Docker, from a user point of view. It's implementation is a little less likely to break things on my machines, but it's otherwise exactly as unpleasant and inconvenient to use as Docker is. I avoid Podman as well.

I've used systemd-nspawn fairly extensively to run things in containers. It's a much simpler container system than Docker, and I do not find it objectionable. I built a CI engine on top of it. But I don't use it either, any more.

I prefer to use virtual machines. They're slower to set up, and start up a little slower too, but they're convenient for me, and I understand them well. They also behave more like a real Linux system running on bare metal hardware than containers do. There are fewer limitations that get in my way.

This blog post is not a request for you try to explain Docker, Podman, or containers to me, or for you to tell me how I can learn more about them. I am not interested.

Rant: year of Linux on the desktop

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 17:45:39 +0000

A rant about "year of Linux on the desktop" from a tired old man. I've been part of the Linux community since before Linux was called Linux. Over the years there's been many people telling me directly that Linux is silly or wrong or imperfect, or that free and open source software is foolish or pointless. A lot more people have, of course, pontificated along those lines in public, and not directed it at me. I'm not claiming to be targeted at that, but I've been around and active for long enough that things accumulate. It's the end of a long year for me, and I though I'd let off some steam myself. Hence this rant.

Over time, the goal posts of success keep being moved by the naysayers. I'm too tired to dig up all important milestones and dates, or references, but here's highlights of the timeline as I have experienced it (years may be a little off):

1991: It's not possible for a hobbyist to write their own operating system kernel.
1992: Well OK, you have a kernel, but there's no networking or a graphical desktop, so it's not actually useful. Anyway, ain't nobody got time to compile all their software.
1993: Fine, there's some kind of desktop, but it doesn't support drag and drop so it's a toy. Also, it won't go anywhere unless it fully and equally supports every graphics card ever made for the PC. Oh, and these pre-build distributions are insecure. Don't download code from the Internet and run that, that's just stupid.
1994: Linux is pointless, since it only runs on the PC and not on any other kind of computer.
1997: All these Linux users are just hobbyists, nobody will use it for anything important.
1998: Corporations will never put money into developing this free software thing.
2000: Linux and free software are a cancer on the IT industry.
2001: The dotcom bubble burst, so Linux will now die, since nobody can afford to continue to develop it, as there's no profit in free software.
2003: Uh, okay, Linux didn't die. But it's too hard to install.
2005: Ubuntu is just a toy.
2006: So Linux is used a lot, but only on servers. It will never work on phones or embedded devices.

(skipping ahead so I don't drag up too many bad memories)

2022: Linux runs all top 500 super computers, billions of personal devices, most servers on the Internet, on all continents, on all oceans, in the air, in orbit, and on Mars. Oh, and in the air on Mars. All big corporations use open source in some form.
Also 2022: Linux will always be a hobbyist toy, unless solves all these new problems we've just thought about.

Next year, 2023, will be my thirtieth year of Linux on the desktop, and the thirtieth year of being told it's not possible to use Linux on the desktop, or to only use Linux on the desktop. Some of the people telling me this weren't born when I started using Linux on the desktop.

Despite everything, it's been fun. I've been lucky to have been able to take part of this journey.

I miss inboxes

Thu, 07 May 2020 11:05:00 +0000

I don't like the "infinite scroll" or "never-ending stream" type of communication application. I prefer to have a clear "inbox", where messages go, and from where I can remove them when I'm done with them. The reason I like inboxes is that they make it easier to keep track of things and harder to miss or forget about things. With the stream, I have to capture the message into my GTD system or I'll miss it. Obviously I can do that, and I do, but it's less convenient.

(Note that for the purposes of this rant, whether all your incoming messages go into one inbox or are automatically filtered into many is irrelevant.)

Another reason is that in the streaming model it's harder to look at only the messages that have arrived since I last looked, say overnight while I slept, or while I was busy doing other things. This makes it even easier to accidentally miss important things.

Examples of inboxes: email, SMS.

Examples of streams: Twitter, Mastodon, IRC, Matrix, Telegram, RSS feeds.

You may notice that all "modern" applications tend to be streams. In this, too, I feel like an old man shouting at clouds.

Storing passwords in cleartext: don't ever

Sat, 07 Apr 2018 10:28:00 +0000

This year I've implemented a rudimentary authentication server for work, called Qvisqve. I am in the process for also using it for my current hobby project, ick, which provides HTTP APIs and needs authentication. Qvisqve stores passwords using scrypt: source. It's not been audited, and I'm not claiming it to be perfect, but it's at least not storing passwords in cleartext. (If you find a problem, do email me and tell me: liw@liw.fi.)

This week, two news stories have reached me about service providers storing passwords in cleartext. One is a Finnish system for people starting a new business. The password database has leaked, with about 130,000 cleartext passwords. The other is about T-mobile in Austria bragging on Twitter that they store customer passwords in cleartext, and some people not liking that.

In both cases, representatives of the company claim it's OK, because they have "good security". I disagree. Storing passwords is itself shockingly bad security, regardless of how good your other security measures are, and whether your password database leaks or not. Claiming it's ever OK to store user passwords in cleartext in a service is incompetence at best.

When you have large numbers of users, storing passwords in cleartext becomes more than just a small "oops". It becomes a security risk for all your users. It becomes gross incompetence.

A bank is required to keep their customers' money secure. They're not allowed to store their customers cash in a suitcase on the pavement without anyone guarding it. Even with a guard, it'd be negligent, incompetent, to do that. The bulk of the money gets stored in a vault, with alarms, and guards, and the bank spends much effort on making sure the money is safe. Everyone understands this.

Similar requirements should be placed on those storing passwords, or other such security-sensitive information of their users.

Storing passwords in cleartext, when you have large numbers of users, should be criminal negligence, and should carry legally mandated sanctions. This should happen when the situation is realised, even if the passwords haven't leaked.

Coming back to Finland after five years

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 12:11:30 +0000

It was a shock to be back in Finland after five years. The country had gone bad.

I was born in Finland, and lived here all my life, until January, 2010. I then moved abroad for five years, with my then-girlfriend, now wife. We lived in New Zealand, Scotland, and England. In October 2014 we came back, because my next job happened to be in Finland.

When we came back, I found that the country had changed, or I had lost my rose-coloured glasses. The Finland I left was a place where equality and solidarity were assumed, though not universal. The country I came back to turned out to be racist, scared, and quickly abandoning everything that used to be examples of why the country is a good place to live. Some of the change has, possibly, only happened during 2015 and the refugee crisis in Europe, but the change started earlier.

Examples:

Racist behaviour and violence is commonplace. Those who do not look like the natives are insulted, threatened with physical violence, and sometimes experience it.
Political violence is becoming commonplace. Refugee centers are burnt down, sometimes with people inside. Government ministers are attacked, albeit by throwing a drink on them.
Politicians get away with saying and doing clearly racist things, up to and including celebrating neo-nazism.
The government spends a lot of effort trying to break any power the labour unions have, so that the employers get to do what they want. The whole stabilising system of negotating between government, employer, and labour organisations is being torn down, and labour is being stripped of any power.
Prominent cabinet ministers talk condescendingly about science, universities, and cut down educational funding. Universities should concentrate on being R&D factories for business, forget about advancing civilisation, or the humanities, or the arts. Unless it's the type of arts that becomes best-selling games.

Now, it is clear that Finland was never the kind of idyllic utopia that I thought it was, back when I was young. The older I get, the clearer it is that I was naive.

The change over five years is still quite remarkable. I can't ever go back home. Now, I am sometimes ashamed of being Finnish.

On Norbert Preining, Sage Sharp, and Debian

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 16:58:27 +0000

I disagree with pretty much everything Norbert Preining says in his blog post about Sage Sharp in response to Sharp's blog post Closing a door about leaving Linux kernel development. I think Preining mis-characterises what happens on the Linux kernel mailing list, and in Debian, in free software development in general, and what Sage Sharp has said and done.

I do not wish to participate in yet another discussion on the Debian Code of Conduct, respect, appropriate behaviour, or whether these things result in worse software. I won't spend any further of my time on debating, point-by-point, the arguments and straw-men Preining makes. Those discussions have happened often enough, without any effect on Preining and those who think like him. Likewise, despite the many times he makes the arguments, I continue to think he is wrong about everything on this topic.

I do feel it is important to make it clear to the people reading Planet Debian, where both Preining's and my blogs are published, that his opinions are not mainstream in the Debian project, and that despite what he says, Debian development continues to be fun.

Amended in 2019 to not use Sharp's old name. They changed it in 2017. Justification: if people refer to this blog post now, it'd be nice if the post didn't lead people to using the old name.

The shape of a solution

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 15:31:32 +0000

Each software tool exists to solve some problem. For each problem, there are many possible solutions. Even when different programs basically do the same thing, they can have quite different shapes.

As an example, this morning I was wondering if it would be possible for me to use notmuch to index my entire mail archive. For that, I needed to convert a number of mbox folders to Maildir format. That's a resonably easy problem, given access to suitable programming libraries, but there's an existing tool for that, called mb2md. Unfortunately, it has the wrong shape for my needs.

mb2md doesn't just convert one mbox to one maildir. It's designed to for a mail admin converting all server-side mbox folders for a user into a corresponding structure of Maildir folders. This seems to be necessary when switching IMAP servers. That's a fairly specialised problem, and the program has been written to make it easy for a mail admin to do that.

What I need is part of the problem solved by mb2md and indeed it can do just that part. However, the overall shape of mb2md is such that my part is hard to do. The incantation is quite unintuitive and requires careful reading of the documentation.

The shape of a solution matters. mb2md could easily have been written in a way that provides a simple tool for the single folder conversion, and then a more complex tool for the mail admin's more complicated problem. This would have resulted in a much more general tool, and that would make it easier for more people to use it without much effort.

Mail folder format conversions are a fairly esoteric thing to do. However, the lack of generality is a frequent issue with how programs are designed. It is easy to fall into the trap of writing a highly specialised tool, instead of taking a step back and making a more general purpose tool. The specialised tool will help a small number of people. The general tool will help many people.

Examples of this are fairly common. Debian has a set of tools for making Debian live CDs; they are not quite able to make a bootable hard disk image as well (thus, vmdebootstrap). There's programs for computing cyclomatic complexity, which produce HTML reports, rather than something that can be processed by other programs without too much effort. There's tools for managing address books that are limited to specific cultures, e.g., by hardcoding assumptions of what a person's name looks like (thus, clab).

One of my favourite examples is xargs, which by default does the wrong thing by assuming its input is whitespace delimited. Any whitespace, not just newlines. Any sensible use requires adding the -0 option, which makes xargs that much more tedious to use.

Furthermore, I've often found that the more general tool is simpler. It's functional specification is simpler; it's implementation is simpler, and has fewer special cases; it's user experience is simpler. That's not always true, but often it is.

Sometimes the general solution shape is not worth it. But it's always worth considering whether it might be.

One of the parts of the Unix culture I really like is the preference for general tools that are easy to combine together.

Public libraries bad for authors and publishers?

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 20:48:44 +0000

Brett points at a Guardian article on Terry Deary and his opinion that libraries are no longer relevant. In fact, Mr. Deary goes further: he thinks libraries are destroying the book business by preventing authors, publishers, and bookshops from getting paid.

From the article:

As one of the most popular library authors – his books were borrowed more than 500,000 times during 2011/12 – Deary will have received the maximum amount possible for a writer from the Public Lending Right scheme, which gives authors 6.2p every time one of their books is borrowed, up to a cap of £6,600. "If I sold the book I'd get 30p per book. I get six grand, and I should be getting £180,000. But never mind my selfish author perception – what about the bookshops? The libraries are doing nothing for the book industry. They give nothing back, whereas bookshops are selling the book, and the author and the publisher get paid, which is as it should be. What other entertainment do we expect to get for free?" he asked.

He's making several of the same false claims that people in the media business always make whenever they see people enjoying any kind of cultural products without paying for them.

Every loan from a library is not a lost sale. More than 500 thousand loans does not mean 500 thousand lost sales. When borrowing a book is free, people will do it even if they aren't sure if they're going to like a book.

The cheapest book by Mr. Deary I Amazon UK is £4.27 when sold as new by amazon (I'll ignored used books for the moment). The threshold for buying a book at that price is much, much higher than borrowing on for free.
Letting people have stuff for free does not automatically mean they won't pay for other stuff. Indeed, they may well pay for the very stuff they got for free. See the several experiments to let customers set their own price for music, books, or computer games, or the success Cory Doctorow has letting people download e-books of his novels for free, and then letting people donate one or more hardcopies of the book to schools and libraries. This is not a model that will work well for everyone, but it proves the point: charging people money for each copy is not necessary to make good profit.

In fact, studies of "Internet pirates", or people who download music and movies (and books) more or less illegally from the Internet, show that such people tend to spend more money on music and movies (and books!) than the average person. That's not something the publishers want to talk about, or hear. (I am talking here about real research, not the propganda material that lobbying organisations produce.)
Why would people buy a book in the first place? They need to know they'll like it, but more importantly, they need to like reading in the first place. See point 1: if books cost any amount of money, the threshold for getting one is high. If you don't have easy, convenient access to books when you're a child, you're unlikely to be a reader of books when you're an adult. Public libraries are the perfect way to give people access to a wide variety of literature. In fact, they're about the most perfect marketing ploy in the history of media: the libraries pay for the books, and they pay each time they loan out a book, and every time a new future customer is brainwashed that much more into getting more stuff in the future.

Libraries are not just for children, of course. Adult readers use them as well, and they're just as important as children, as far as the marketing ploy is concerned.

It's a bit sad that bookshops are dying out. Public libraries have, however, nothing to do with it. Online booksellers are usually cheaper, and have vastly larger catalogues, and that's a much more likely culprit. Also, bookshops have no intrinsic right to exist: they're middle-men who make a living by making it more convenient for customers to get what they want, and if they get out-competed, that's business life.

Now, I neglected above to consider the possibility of buying used books. The reason for that is that media companies, and their lobbying organisations, would like to make selling of used books, music recordings, movies, and computer games not happen anymore. For example, Sony, and files patents for, stopping people from playing used games on its game consoles, even without Internet access.

Mr. Deary seems to be following the MPAA and RIAA checklist on how to talk about those evil people who enjoy something without paying for it every time. It can't be long before he starts asking for a ban on selling used books.

Let's hope, however, that reality and facts and sense win this time, and that we can let Mr. Deary live alone in his little horrible hallucination.

Helsingin kaupungilla liikaa rahaa

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 19:42:51 +0000

HS uutisoi (siteeraten Tietoviikkoa), että Helsingin kaupunki on hakenut ICANN:lta .helsinki päätason domainia. Tästä hakemisesta on kaupunki maksanut 185 tuhatta dollaria eli noin 148 tuhatta euroa.

Ei perkele pitäisi olla noin paljoa löysää rahaa kaupungilla keskellä lamaa verkkotunnukseen, kun ihmisiä näkee kaduilla asunnottomina nälkää.

Kaupungin ICT-päällikkö perustelee tätä sillä, että .helsinki "lisäisi kansainvälistä näkyvyyttä, sillä nykyinen hel.fi-domain on melko tuntematon". Tämäkö on tärkeää? Joo, ei ole.

Potkut tuollaisesta tuhlauksesta! En tiedä kuka päätöksestä on vastuussa, mutta jonkun pitää tästä vastuu kantaa.

Mitä muuta tuolla rahalla saisi? Pikaisella haulla löytyy seuraava tieto: kouluaterian keskimääräinen hinta oli 2,73 euroa vuonna 2010. Tuolla hinnalla laskemalla saisi siis melkein 55 tuhatta ateriaa. Siinä olisi vaikkapa asunnottomilla syömistä joksikin aikaa.

Missing roles in software: build engineers

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 10:22:55 +0000

The construction, deployment, and use of software involves a number of roles. I do not have an exhaustive list, but I have a couple in my list that seem to be surprising to some developers.

In the traditional Unix (mainframe) model, there are three roles:

developers actually create the software; they include architects, coders, documenters, testers, maintenance programmers, etc; their deliverable is a release tarball
sysadmins install the software on a host, and install new versions when appropriate; often, the sysadmin is expected to carefully read README files, and construct or tweak configuration files accoriding to the specific needs of their users; their deliverable is some files in /usr/local and /etc, plus perhaps an announcement e-mail to an internal mailing list
users use the software; they have no deliverable in this context

In my personal reality distortion bubble, this model is badly broken, and has been since the middle of the 1990s. Here's an updated model:

users control their own machines, and are not experts on the software, or on using computers at all, and requiring them to be would be to limit their freedom in important ways; the big change is that users now have much more control of their computing environment than before
sysadmins mainly work for companies or other organizations; they need not be experts on what their users do, and in fact often aren't, but they know how to handle systems that are by nature too complicated or hard for the layman to handle, because of performance, reliability, security, or other such needs
distro developers create a system consisting of thousands or tens of thousands of components (mostly provided by upstream developers), and integrate and adjust things so that they work together; they also monitor upstream projects and other news sources for updates, and provide those
upstream developers actually create the software; they include architects, coders, documenters, testers, maintenance programmers, etc;
their deliverable is a release tarball (no change from earlier)

A common misconception is that distro developers merely compile software and shove the binaries into glorified tarballs. That is, of course, part of the job, but it's also the part that most distro's tools completely automate. There's a lot more to do, though. For example, just keeping track of known security problems among thirty thousand packages, and making or finding fixes for them, and testing the fixes, and releasing updates for them, takes up quite a bit of effort.

Another thing distro developers have to spend effort on is dealing with the multitude of build systems upstream projects use. The freedom to experiment with different solutions is one of the cornerstones of free software development. However, when it comes to build systems, many of them are not serious experiments, and instead are quick hacks thrown together to imperfectly solve problems that sometimes should not exist at all.

This highlights one role prominently still missing: build engineer. Their task is to solve the problem of taking the upstream source code, dealing with build-time configuration issues, actually building the software, and then installing it in whatever location the person installing the software wants it installed. Further, their task is to provide the software to do this in a sensible manner.

Build engineers already exist, of course. For example, the developers of the autotools suite are such. Every upstream project also has someone who sets up autotools for their project, or some other build tools, or writes them from scratch for that project.

However, what's lacking, perhaps, is recognition that build engineering is an important part of software development. Mostly, build systems are set up (or, worse, written) by upstream developers to fit their narrow view of how things should work, a view anchored in the old, broken model of roles.

This attitude matters, because for the most part, build systems do not seem to be written to the same quality standards as the rest of the upstream software. For example, when an upstream developer writes a Makefile, and does not consider distro development, they'll often make it hard to differentiate between install-time location and run-time location of various components of the software. Thus, it might be hard for the Debian packager to get the software installed into debian/tmp rather than /usr/local, because the build system hardcodes debian/tmp/usr/lib/foo/plugins as the location of the plugins, since that's where the software gets installed, even if, in the Debian scenario, it's not where it gets run from.

Luckily for much software these problems have been solved or avoided. Indeed, as crufty as autotools is, it's one of the things that has kept upstreams sane about their build systems, by providing such good tools that it's more work to write a new, bad one than to use autotools.

We currently have roving bands of translators, who move from project to project and translate them into various natural languages. I would like to see a future where there are people dedicated to build engineering, who go from project to project and set up or fix their build problems. A good build system, once set up, should require a minimum of work to keep working.

I'd also like to see much improvement in the build software. As good as autotools has been to free software, I'm sure there's a lot of room for improvement. For example, autotools requires setting up a bunch of boilerplate files in each project, which seems like something that could be avoided by relying on specific conventions. However, those improvements are a separate topic. I might go into them some day, if I decide to start developing build tools myself, but until then, I'll let those who do that decide how they want to do it.

PS. There are lots more missing roles in my model of free software development, of course. For example, security engineers (find and fix problems, but also provide ways to prevent problems, or limit their scope), internal politicians (keep the project's human wheels from squeaking too much), diplomats (keep different projects from clashing too much), release engineers, etc. Someone should make an exhaustive list.

rm is too slow

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 08:42:02 +0000

Some weeks ago I noticed that one of my backup servers was not removing the old backup generations it was making. It had over 18 months worth of daily backups, done with rsync and "cp -al". This is not the world's greatest backup system, but that's entirely irrelevant for this rant.

The cron job that would do that did not exist: I had forgotten to enable it.

So I ran it by hand. Then fixed it, when I noticed it was buggy, and didn't remove any old generations prior to 2010. After that I removed years-old backups of machines that haven't existed for years.

Disk usage:

       Size  Used Avail Use% 
before 5.4T  2.6T  2.6T  51% 
after  5.4T  892G  4.3T  18%

Inodes:

          Inodes    IUsed     IFree IUse%
before 732577792 77645915 654931877   11%
after  732577792 16871789 715706003    3%

That's about 61 million files removed, over the course of three weeks, of which the machine was down due to crashes for about one week.

It should not take two weeks to copy a couple of terabytes (it's less than two megabytes per second). It should definitely not take two weeks to delete it. Almost all the time it was up, it was removing files. There were a couple of times when it finished one run and was idle until I woke up and started the next run. Say a day in total.

Why is "sudo rm -rf" on a large directory tree, or set of large directory trees, so slow? I suspect part of the problem is that the system call API is beautiful, but simplistic: you need to call unlink or rmdir on every file separately, and that means doing an inode lookup separately for each file. Having a system call to delete everything in a directory would have a chance of removing things more efficiently, I suspect. However, since I've not done any profiling, nor even analyzed the relevant source code in the kernel, I might be entirely wrong.

I wonder if anyone else needs to remove large directory trees frequently? I do that a lot, because of my backup software development hobby. But I may be in a unique position, and nobody else would benefit from fast removal.

(I'll note that my backup server is using ext3, and that ext4 is much faster at removing files, particularly large files, but it's still not fast enough.)

strncpy? just say no

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 08:59:38 +0000

This is a rant. I've made it in various forms in various places over the years, and I think it's time to put it somewhere so I can point people at it, and stop repeating myself.

Here's the pebble in my shoe: people keep claiming that strncpy is a safer alternative to strcpy. It's not. It's a slower function that is not going to make you significantly safer.

The problem with strcpy is that it's somewhat easy to overflow the target array:

char src[] = "hello, world";
char dst[5];
strcpy(dst, src); // Oops.

The suggested alternative with strncpy would be this:

strncpy(dst, src, sizeof(dst));

strncpy gets the size of the destination array as a parameter, and can therefore make sure the string will fit there. Problem solved? Not so much.

Every time you do any string handling with C's native string types and functions, you need to make sure you have allocated enough memory for each string, you need to keep track of how much memory you've allocated, and you neet to make sure the zero byte ('NUL', '\0') is put there correctly. This is a lot of details to keep track of, and it's not surprising things sometimes go wrong.

If your arrays are allocated statically, which is the simplest, but least useful case, you need to something like this with strcpy:

if (strlen(src) + 1 > sizeof(dst))
    panic(); // or however you want to handle your errors
strcpy(dst, src);

The +1 after strlen is to make room for the zero byte (NUL, '\0') that is used in C to indicate the end of a string.

With strncpy, your code is slightly simpler. This is its attraction.

Problem is, this only works if dst is an array defined within the scope of the code. If, as is common, you have received dst as an argument to a function, sizeof(dst) is the size of a pointer to an element of the array, not the size of the array. So now you need to track the size explicitly in a second variable:

strncpy(dst, src, dst_size);

Further, strncpy has an unfortunate error handling mode: it merely fills the destination array and stops. It does not indicate failure in any way. It does not terminate the target array with a zero byte. Since all C string processing assume the zero byte is there, as soon as you try to use dst as a string, you're in trouble.

But luckily you can check for that before you call strncpy:

if (strlen(src) + 1 > dst_size)
    panic(); // or whatever
strncpy(dst, src, dst_size);

By this time, the code is equally hard whether you use strcpy or strncpy. With strncpy you often waste some extra time, though, filling the unused parts of the target array with zero bytes: they're almost never necessary.

Alternatively, you can force the zero byte there yourself, silently truncating a string.

strncpy(dst, src, dst_size);
dst[dst_size - 1] = '\0'; // let's hope dst_size > 0

If your string handling is OK with strings being randomly shorter than they should be, possibly you could replace all of them with empty strings, and save yourself a world of pain.

Instead of strncpy, use snprintf. It has sensible error behavior, and is much more versatile:

n = snprintf(dst, dst_size, "%s", src);
if (n >= dst_size)
    panic();

snprintf still isn't very nice to use. It still requires you to allocate memory yourself, and keep track of the size of each array manually. It's also slower for small destination buffers (but faster for large ones).

The real solution is to abandon C's antiquated string handling, and use a more sensible helper library instead. There's a bunch of them around, though none have gained much popularity. I'm not going to name any of them, but just imagine how much nicer it would be to write code like this instead:

Dynstr *src = dynstr_new_from_cstring("hello, world\n");
Dynstr *cat = dynstr_cat_many(src, src, src, src, src, NULL);
Dynstr *dog = dynstr_substr(cat, 15, 5);

Let the library take care of memory allocations and related tracking, and concentrate on real problem solving instead.

We did this in Kannel, back in 1999, and it wiped out all the buffer overflow problems (until a co-worker decided it was "more efficient" to use native C strings instead, promptly introducing a buffer overflow).

All of this string handling is, of course, way nicer in higher level languages. In fact, whenever you need to deal with string handling in C, it is probably a sign that you should consider switching to a higher level language instead.

But whatever you do, stop claiming that strncpy is safe or solves any real problems strcpy has.

Update: Fixed "It does terminate" to say "It does not terminate". Thanks to Matthew Garrett for pointing that out.

Update2: Fixed example call to snprintf.

Update3: Fixed the test for snprintf example. Thanks, Redditor axylone. Also pointed out that snprintf is slower than the rest.

I'm a digital luddite, me

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:18:05 +0000

I'd like to buy most of my books as e-books, particularly novels.

I'd like buy to all of my movies and TV shows as downloads.

I'd like to buy maps for my Garmin GPS device as a download.

I can do none of these things, unless I consent to restrict my freedoms in essential ways. For example, I can buy books, but only if I read them on a Kindle or Nook or similar restricted device. I can buy TV shows on iTunes, but I can't watch them on my Linux laptop. I can buy the maps, but only if I get a Windows (or maybe Mac) computer so I can run Garmin's proprietary software to download the maps and put them on the device.

There are ways to circumvent these restrictions. Doing that is illegal in various countries I would like to live in. If I'm going to be breaking the law, the easier route would be to copy thing illegally.

I can choose to succumb to corporate enslavement, where they get to decide what I watch, and how. Even when I try do this, I fail: I installed Amazon's Kindle software for the Android, but it would still not let me buy anthing, saying that each title is not available in my country. It said this even for stuff long past copyright, while giving pointers to the same thing in Project Gutenberg.

Alternatively, I can choose to reject doing things digitally, and relying on paper for books and maps, and rental DVDs for video stuff.

I've heard rumors that there is a lot of good stuff legally downloadable for free. Maybe I should go find some more. I have a short list already, but finding the stuff that actually interests me is not easy.

Project Harmony

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:44:12 +0000

It seems that Project Harmony has finally taken itself public. From the website:

Project Harmony is a community-centered group focused on contributor agreements for free and open source software (FOSS).

In reality, this seems to be a closed group that in no way represents the community in general and mainly acts in the interest of various corporations. Their goal is to create a bunch of templates for contracts to make participating in free software projects even more complicated than it already is.

Look, we have a bunch of copyright licenses. They're not always easy to understand, and there's enough details and corner cases and interactions with the real world to make your head hurt. My head as well. (They're still easier, and more standardized, than contracts for proprietary software.)

Contributing to a free software project is easy enough, in most cases. You make a patch, and if the project accepts it, yay. Your patch will be licensed the same way as all the other code.

These Harmony agreements aim at making you give up your copyright to someone else, usually a corporate sponsor of the project. That's a bad thing.

If the corporation owns the copyright, or you give them a license to do anything they wish with the project, they can do all sorts of evil things with it. For example, they can release it under a non-free license, or enter into complicated patent agreement with someone else that will require you to pay protection money later on, or something else. There is no end to the evil corporations invent, when given the chance.

If, however, you refuse to give the corporation any ownership, or special powers, then their ability to do evil lessens, or at least you aren't helping them do that.

It might be possible to use the Harmony agreements, as they are currently written, in ways that do not directly allow evil. However, why bother? By sticking to well-known, court-tested free software free software licenses, there is no need for the Harmony licenses. You get to keep the corporations honest, without having to read piles more legalese.

Another way of looking at this: here's a bunch of corporations that want you to start using complicated legal documents for their benefit. Ask yourself, in what scenario is this going to be a good idea for you?

Just say no to copyright assignments.

Blackmail as an argumentation technique

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:44:56 +0000

Imagine a conversation where some people would like to try to make Debian better, and several people say things like this:

as soon as you make this particular change, I will stop using Debian and all my customers will stop using Debian too

Quite a number of different possible responses pop up in my head immediately.

you're trying to blackmail us; we're better off without you, regardless of who you or your customers are
you're about four years old
you're delusional: Debian is too hard a habit to get rid of, so you're going to be using Debian anyway, regardless of what we do

More seriously: should this kind of behavior be acceptable on the Debian mailing lists? Not only is it insulting and anti-social, but trying to influence purely technical decisions by threats is not going to make Debian better.

Truth in advertising

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 08:33:41 +0000

Sky has a new advertising campaign.

Looks pretty good. Unlimited broadband, not too big a price. I am tired of my bandwidth cap. But wait, let's check the small print, since it's fooled me several times already in this country.

Limited to 40 GB/month?

The about truth in advertising in this country are quite toothless. At least Sky's "unlimited broadband" is bigger than some other ISP's. But they're all lying scumbags.

On showing respect

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:47:10 +0000

On a private mailing list there was some discussion, and I had an outburst. Summarising very roughly, someone said bad things about their competitor, without (at first) offering any justification. Here's a version of my outburst, edited to remove references to the actual topic and identifyable people. I thought it might amuse me in fifty years or so to see how full of myself I was.

Oh dear.

I have no experience with this service. Or the person saying bad things about them. I am entirely ignorant about everything.[0] I am not biased towards or against any of them. There's another point I would like to raise. Or rather, an opinion I would like to express. I feel very strongly about this.

There are two reasons to not show respect. The proper reason is because the target has thoroughly proven themselves to not deserve it, by their words and action, or lack of them. The wrong reason is anything related to anyone else than the target: your own low self-esteem, your fears, your evil schemes, your own bad day.

Even when the right reason exists, it is a sign of respect to the audience to be respectful towards someone who does not need it: it avoids shoving the discussion down the drain. Showing respect, even when undeserved, indicates strength and moral high ground. (Please note the difference between showing respect to and agreeing with or approving of the other party.)

To me, as a total outsider, these remarks about the service give a bad impression, but not of the service. It may well be that they are a scammy corporation that gives lousy service. However, nothing in this discussion has given me a reason to think so.

They may be well-known in your circle. They may be well-known for their bad quality and bad service. But the rest of us don't know that. When you denigrate them, you just look like a whiner[1]. Especially someone who wants to promote their own service over that of a competitor, looks bad, because they're saying bad things about them, without giving any reasons.

If you're going to be criticising your competition, you need to be very careful of how you do it, or you'll look bad instead. Or also, since it's easy to make everyone in a discussion look bad.

If you'd like promote your company you can explain its virtues and benefits and the good deals it provides. You don't need to denigrate anyone else.

If you'd like to get people to avoid your competitor, because they are bad or evil, then show why they are bad, or evil, with examples and references.

[0] This is a true statement in every context.

[1] After decades of experience as a whiner, I have a finely tuned sensor for detecting fellow whiners.

Five seconds to display a text message?!

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:18:04 +0000

I have a Nokia E61 phone. It's one of the flat, wide ones, with a big screen and QWERTY keyboard. It's the second best phone I've ever extensively used. It has its problems, though. For example, it takes up to five seconds for it to display a new text message, timed from when I press the button to indicate that I want to see it.

Five seconds. To show a few dozen bytes of text. Five. Seconds. To. Show. A. Text. Message. Five. Fünf. Fem. Viisi. Five. Count them: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

It doesn't always take five seconds. Sometimes it only takes three. That's still a lot of time to wait.

The device can play MP3 files. Surely it should be able to show a few words of text in less than a second.

The best phone I've ever used was the Nokia 1631. In 1997. Everything was more or less instantaneous. (Also, every button had one purpose: you did not have to consult a menu to see what it does.) In a decade, no-one seems to have come up with a better phone. That makes me sad.

Älä kailota edes ilman puhelinta?

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:18:04 +0000

Digitoday uutisoi Viestintäviraston kyselystä kännykän käytön häiritsevyydestä. Kysely on jatkoa "Älä kailota" -kampanjalle.

Vastaajien mielestä häiritsevintä on puhuminen kovalla äänellä. Myös henkilökohtaisista tai luottamuksellisista asioista puhuminen sekä ruokoton kielenkäyttö ärsyttävät.

Minä kysyn: miten nuo liittyvät puhelimiin mitenkään? Ihmiset tekevät noita ihan ilman teknologian apuakin, silloin vain kumpikin osapuoli on samassa paikassa.

Häiritseekö tässä se, että ei kuule keskustelun kumpaakin osapuolta?

Vai olisko kyselyn tulos mahdollisesti värittynyt sen takia, että se oli ajoitettu juuri "Älä kailota" -kampanjan jälkeen? Jos oikeasti olisi haluttu tietää mitä ihmiset ovat asiasta mieltä, kysely olisi tehty myös ennen kampanjaa.

CC music spammer

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:18:04 +0000

I've just been spammed by a creator of music licensed under a Creative Commons license. I guess that means CC has really broken into the mainstream.

(flatmaxstudios seems to be the culprit, for what it's worth. I've now killfiled their entire domain. Blech.)

Doping. Genetics. Blah.

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:18:04 +0000

A new iteration of the Olympic games are about to start. I couldn't care less, except the RSS feed of my daily newspaper is half-full with stories about people dropping out because of doping, suspected or confirmed. So now I'm annoyed, and when I'm annoyed, I rant. This is my rant about the sports industry.

The whole conflict about doping is hypocritical. Doping happens because you get huge benefits if you well at the topmost levels in the world of professional sports. In other words, you can earn a lot of money, and get laid a lot, if you win.

It's a gamble: if you dope, and aren't caught, you'll get the big prize. If you don't dope, you almost certainly won't get any prize, since everyone else is doping. Of course, if you do dope, and are caught, you will suffer, sometimes a lot.

The hypocritical part is that the whole system is set up to favor those who dope and don't get caught. The prize is so big that it's inconceivable to even try to compete without doping. When someone gets caught, everyone goes "bad athlete, bad, bad, spank, spank". And then they continue doping everyone else.

To fix doping, you have to fix the system. Remove the big benefits of winning, and people will suddenly no longer feel it's a good bet to take huge risks with your health and career just to win one game. Make sports be again about having fun while getting fit, or maintaining fitness. Or change the rules so that doping won't help you win.

That's never going to happen, of course. Sports is a huge industry, and entangled in all sorts of political issues. No multi-dozen billion dollar industry is going to decide that it's unethical and close up shop. They'll lie and cheat to protect their business, and if people get hurt in the process, they don't care.

The sports industry, including the Olympic games, knowingly and intentionally maintains a system which makes people bet their health, even life, on winning on being swifter, going higher, or being stronger than everyone else. This causes large amounts of needless suffering.

I'm letting the athletes off the hook, though. They, too, knowingly and intentionally participate in the system. I'm sure there are a few innocents who are doped without knowing. For them, I'm truly sorry. For the rest, they chose their fate.

The audience is also firmly on the hook. Their money is ultimately the reason sports is such a huge business. If you watch sports, at least the kind of sports perpetrated by the sports industry, you support the system. If you do that knowingly, intentionally, fair enough, to each their own evil. If you are blissfully ignorant, please wake up and think about your choice.

There's another hypocritical aspect to the whole sports and doping issue, though. Doping, or enhancing your performance via a list of unallowed methods, is against the rules. It's not allowed to take this medicine, or get that kind of medical operation. Quoting Wikipedia:

The reasons are mainly the health threat of performance-enhancing drugs, the equality of opportunity of the athletes and the exemplary effect of "clean" (doping-free) sports in the public.

Frankly, at least the middle third of that is utter bull. If you disallow drugs, there are only two ways that determine which of two athletes are better: luck and genetics.

In the highly optimized world of training of today's top athletes, the differences between the training any two athletes do are due to either stupidity or chance. All top athletes have the same strength of will, and they can train full time, in good conditions, and have good trainers. If they don't have that, they're unlucky.

What remains is genetics, and perhaps early upbringing. This athlete is born with just a little bit better genes for running, and that one got to play football with other really good players all day every day as a child.

Everyone without that luck, and without those genes is unable to compete at the top level.

Luck and genetics, those do not give equal opportunity to all athletes.

A healthy sports system which really treasured the values

the current sports industry claims to have, but doesn't really, would look completely different. The existing rules could certainly be tweaked to allow a healthy sports system. Golf has handicaps, which is one good model for that.

Blah. I don't even like sports, and here I've written way too much about it. The whole thing is just blah. There's more important things to worry about.

Valtakoneisto: Ei sananvapaudella ole mitään väliä

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:18:04 +0000

Suomalainen valtakoneisto osoittaa taas, kuinka vähän se välittää sananvapaudesta. Mikä tahansa hyvä tarkoitus kelpaa syyksi kaventaa sananvapautta.

Helsingin Sanomat uutisoi, että sosiaali- ja terveysministeriössä valmistellaan lakiehdotusta, jolla tupakoinnin esittäminen kielletään. Tarkoituksena on kitkeä tupakoinnin suoraa ja piilomainontaa.

Ei sitä toki täysin kielletä. Mikäli ajankuvan esittäminen tai muu painava syy vaatii, tupakointia saa esittää. Muuten tupakointia saa esittää vain negatiivisessa sävyssä.

Lisämausteena sopassa se, että tarkoitus on käyttää tapauskohtaista harkintaa: tämä asiasta päättävän komitean puheenjohtajan saunakaveri tekee taidetta, mutta tuo punapäinen dokumentaristi vakiintuneiden piirien ulkopuolelta on tupakkateollisuuden kätyri! Kyllä kannattaa maksaa kokouspalkkioita verorahoista taas.

Ennustan: Kimmo Sasi johdattelee perustuslakivaliokunnan olemaan sitä mieltä, että tässä ei ole mitään perusoikeuksien kannalta oleellista rajoitusta, joten laki voidaan säätää normaalissa järjestyksessä. Ja miksipä eivät sitä mieltä olisi, kun kerran ennakkosensurikaan ei ole perusoikeuksien kannalta merkittävä rajoitus.

Tässä on hieno esimerkki tilanteesta, jossa sananvapauden puolustamiseksi pitää puolustaa vastenmielistäkin käytöstä. Neil Gaiman kirjoittaa asiasta selkeästi ja vakuuttavasti. Tai kuten joku muu on sanonut: vain vastenmielinen puhe kaipaa puolustamista.

Minä olen sitä mieltä, että tupakkateollisuus on tahallaan vahingoittanut maailman ihmisten terveyttä. Minä olen sitä mieltä, että tupakointi antaa ihmiselle luuserin leiman otsaan. Mutta perkele sentään, jos tupakointi on tarkoitus lopettaa niin kielletään se, eikä siitä puhuminen.

Nykyinen linja on, että hammastikulla kaivetaan hautaa tupakkateollisuudelle. Se on täysin naurettavaa ja johtaa juuri tälläisiin ääliömäisyyksiin kuin tämä valmisteilla oleva lakimuutos. Hammastikun käyttö lapiona on niin turhauttavaa, että haudankaivajat turhautuvat eivätkä enää ajattele selkeästi ja epätoivoissaan ehdottelevat mitä tahansa purkaakseen turhautumistaan. Kaikki suhteellisuudentaju katoaa.

Lisäys 8.13: Leena kirjoittaa asiasta myös, paremmin kuin minä ja vähemmillä kirosanoilla.

My home directory, my name space

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:18:04 +0000

GNOME, and GNOME apps, and I expect other graphical desktops, want to usurp parts of the home directory name space. I detest that.

For decades, in Unix, it's been the tradition that in the home directory, programs may use dot files for their configuration files, saved state, and so on. The rest of the name space in the home directory belongs to the user.

Graphical desktops violate this. For example, in GNOME in Debian and Ubuntu, when you log into a fresh account the first time, several directories get created in your home directory. Applications then assume that they can use directories of those names.

This meant that when F-Spot found a directory called Photos in my home directory, it assumed it could use it as the place to store photos I manipulate with it. This violated my name space in rather graphic ways: I had been using Photos for years for completely unrelated things. F-Spot got confused and, if I remember correctly, segfaulted. I got confused and uninstalled F-Spot. (To be fair, this was years ago, and F-Spot has been fixed since.)

This kind of stuff is going to happen more and more. There's Public for things that are automagically shared with the world, via whatever protocols. Ubuntu is going to add Private, as a per-user encrypted directory, which gets virtually mounted via some mechanism when the user logs in.

These names are chosen to be clear, user-friendly, and generic. They're also the kinds of names many people already use. What's more, the names are insufficient indication that magic things are going to happen if something with that name exists. If you remove ~/Private, and then later create it, something or someone is going to get confused.

Many of these names are automatically translated to the user's langauge. As a result, on one computer, I have them in three languages: I have tested several languages, and moved the home directory around across several computers for a few years now. Worse, one of the langauges has the directory with two different names, since they changed the translation.

Worse is the fact that these default directories suggest bad ways to arrange one's files. For example, they suggest that files should be stored based on their type: music in ~/Music, photos in ~/Photos, videos in ~/Videos. Next I guess we'll have ~/Text for text files, and ~/Cats for any files that are about cats.

I think this is insane. It's time to stop it.

Such magic directories should go in some magic place. The ~/.local directory tree seems suitable. For GNOME, Nautilus can then treat those locations in a magic way, the way it treats connections to servers.

This would let people retain control of their home directory.

Huey packaging

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:18:04 +0000

I recently bought a Huey screen color calibration device. I haven't yet had time to set it up, but I opened the packaging. There was a lot of it.

From top right (and outside in, when unpacking):

The cardboard box it was delivered in.
Bubble wrapping to protect things from bumps during transport.
A second cardboard box, this time with branding.
A clear plastic box, with branding. I have no idea why.
A third cardboard box, with more branding.
A second plastic box, to keep things in place inside the third cardboard box.
A couple of screen wipes. This is for marketing: they want me to try them so that I will buy more of them. Note that the two wipes are tightly packaged in, I guess, plastic, and then put inside a plastic bag, just to be sure.
A manual, on paper.
A CD-ROM.
A USB cable.
A desk stand.
The actual calibration device.

The only necessary things are the device and the USB cable. The desk stand is probably useful, and the CD-ROM probably contains useful things for many people.

The rest, however, is waste. Utter, total waste. Most of it is pointless waste: why are there five boxes protecting the little device?

NRJ Cash or Crash: typerä vai pahis?

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:18:04 +0000

NRJ-radioasemalla on meneillään tempaus, "Cash or Crash". Aikovat joko tiputtaa auton nosturin nokasta tai antaa sen arvonnan voittajalle. En osaa päättää, ovatko järjestäjät typeriä vai pahiksia.

Auton valmistamisella on kohtalaisen iso ekologinen kustannus. Uuden auton romuttaminen mainostempauksen takia on puhdasta tuhlausta. NRJ antaa siis ymmärtää, etteivät he välitä vähääkään luonnon ja ihmiskunnan tulevaisuudesta. (Siitäkin tulee tietysti iso ekologinen kustannus mikäli voittaja ajelee uudella autollaan turhan päiten. Mutta se ei ole suoraan NRJ:n syytä.)

Auton tiputtamisen sijasta olisivat voineet antaa ihmisten äänestää tiputetaanko nosturin nokasta NRJ:n joku juontaja, vaikkapa turvalliselta korkeudelta veteen. Tai joku turhisjulkkis, jotka varmasti olisivat innoissaan tilaisuudesta päästä esille.

Mutta ei, pakko on pilata luontoa, kun kerrankin voi. Jos tekevät tuota ymmärtämättömyyttään, niin ovat typeriä. Jos tekevät tietoisina ekologisista vaikutuksista, niin pahiksia.

Oikeusministerien luotettavuudesta

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:18:04 +0000

Kirjoitin eilen oikeusministeriön luotettavuudesta. Sen kirvoitti oikeusministeriön virkamiehen eri lausuntojen ristiriita.

Tasapuolisuuden nimissä on mainittava, että virkamiehet eivät suinkaan ole ainoa ongelma oikeusministeriössä. Kuten tämän päivän Helsingin sanomien pääkirjoitus huomauttaa, oikeusministerit ovat kieltäytyneet korjaamasta vaalirahoitusjärjestelmää:

Jääskeläisen vastaus on tyhjentävä: hän on valittanut asiasta sekä ministeriön johdolle että lehtihaastatteluissa vaaleista vaaleihin jo vuodesta 2003 lähtien. Lisäksi hän on tehnyt aloitteita järjestelmän kehittämiseksi, turhaan.

Jääskeläisen vastauksen perusteella katse kohdistuu ministeriön silloiseen johtoon, viime kädessä ministereihin. Vuosina 2003–2007 oikeusministerinä toimivat Johannes Koskinen (sd) ja Leena Luhtanen (sd). Ehkä heiltä pitäisi seuraavaksi kysyä, miksi epäkohtiin ei puututtu, vaikka oma virkakunta niistä huomautteli.

Hesari lopettaa pääkirjoituksensa nasevasti:

Se poliittisesta vastuunkannosta.

Samaan aikaan poliitikot päivittelevät erityisesti nuorison alhaista äänestysintoa.

Äänestysaktiivisuus ei lisäänny iän myötä kuten ennen, vaan usein äänestämättömyys jää pysyväksi. Braxin mukaan ikärajaa alentamalla äänestäminen voisi tulla nuorille tavaksi. Aktiivisen kansalaisen identiteetin on kuitenkin synnyttävä jo huomattavasti ennen äänestysikään tuloa.

Ikärajan alentaminen ei toki ole ainoa keino, jota harkitaan:

Vähiten Suomessa äänestävät nuoret miehet. Aktiivisuutta voisi nostaa esimerkiksi internetissä äänestäminen.

On epäselvää, onko tuo viimeinen lause Hesarin omaa keksintöä vai jonkun heille syöttämää. Se taitaa kuitenkin olla haihattelua ja toiveajattelua. Kuten Effin Sähköäänestys-FAQ toteaa:

Aihetta on tutkittu ja tulokset kertovat, että etä-äänestysmahdollisuus (jonka erityistapaus nettiäänestys on) ei aktivoi äänestämään.

Demokratian toteutumisen kannalta on oleellista, että useimmat kansalaiset äänestävät. Poliitikoilla on äänestysaktiivisuuden nostamiseen vain temppuja ja kikkakolmosia: äänestysikärajan laskemista ja äänestysmenetelmien vaihtamista.

Onko muka tosiaan niin, että äänestäminen ei ihmisiä kiinnosta vain sen takia, että ei ole pienestä pitäen äänestetty? Tai että äänestyspaikalle on liian hankala kävellä noin joka toinen tai kolmas vuosi?

Vai olisiko niin, että äänestäminen ei kiinnosta sen takia, että annetulla äänellä ei ole juuri mitään väliä? Samat poliitikot porskuttavat joka tapauksessa ja mitään oleellista ei yhteiskunnassa muutu. Kun ilmiselviä epäkohtia on, käy ilmi, että edes oikeusministeri ei halua niitä korjata. Kun kansalaiset aktivoituvat ja yrittävät ajaa omaa etuaan, kulttuuriministeri syyttää masinoinnista?

Eduskunta ja hallitus kaventavat kansalaisoikeuksia, rajoittavat sananvapautta, sensuroivat nettiä ja ihmettelevät kovasti, kun asiasta nousee poru. He kieltäytyvät korjaamasta vaalirahoitusta eivätkä näe mitään ongelmaa siinä, että poliitikot saavat liikemiehiltä kymmeniä tuhansia euroja.

Mitä tästä pitäisi päätellä? Mitä tälle voi tehdä?

Järkeviä vaihtoehtoja on kolme:

Kansalaisjärjestöjen kautta vaikuttaminen. Ainakin isot puolueet näyttävät olevan liian konservatiivisia ja omia saavutettuja etujaan suojelevia, jotta mistään muutoksesta olisi toivoakaan. (Ehdotus: Effi tarvitsee kipeästi lisää aktiiveja. Niinkin arkinen asia kuin graafikko tai graafinen suunnittelija auttaisi paljon.)
Tärkeiden asioiden pitäminen julkisuudessa. Vaikka kansa mieluiten tiiraakin viimeisimmän missin bikinikuvia mukalehdistön ulosteissa, he tarttuvat anakasti myös oikeasti tärkeisiin asioihin, kun se eteen tuodaan. Vaalirahoitusjupakkakin olisi hautautunut, mikäli blogit ja nettikeskustelut eivät olisi pauhanneet siitä tarpeeksi, jotta valtamedia olisi tarttunut aiheeseen myös. (Ehdotus: blogatkaa, kirjoittakaa lehtiin, kansanedustajille, euroedustajille, webifoorumeille... Käyttäkää sananvapauttanne, joka päivä. Mieluiten hankalista asioista.)
Oikeasti politiikkaan meneminen, asettumalla itse ehdokkaaksi. Tämä voi olla sielunsa myymistä, mutta muutama sielu voisi olla sen arvoista.

Tuosta viimeisestä kohdasta en voi antaa mitään ehdotuksia. Jyrki Kasvi on esimerkki siitä, että se voi onnistua. On huomattavaa, että kun eduskuntaan viimein saadaan edes yksi IT:tä ja modernin maailman teknologiaa ymmärtävä ja hyväksikäyttävä ihminen, se tapahtuu nimenomaan pienpuolueen eikä ison puoleen kautta.

Oikeusministeriö on luotettava

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:18:04 +0000

Arto Jääskeläinen, oikeusministeriön vaalijohtaja, perustelee Helsingin sanomissa 25.1.2008 tapaa, jolla sähköisen äänestyksen toteutusta auditoidaan:

Jos tässä asiassa meidän puolueettomuutemme asetetaan kyseenalaiseksi, voidaan samalla asettaa kyseenalaiseksi kaikki toimittamamme vaalit.

Arto Jääskeläinen, oikeusministeriön vaalijohtaja, perustelee TIEDE-lehdessä, 23.4.2008 vaalien tarkistuslaskennan puuttumista sähköisessä äänestämisessä:

Pilottijärjestelmä ei anna äänestäjälle varmentavaa paperikuittia; tämä olisi Arto Jääskeläisen mukaan liian hankalaa ja kallista. Äänestäjän tulee luottaa siihen, että ääni lasketaan oikein – aivan samalla tavalla kuin hän on joutunut luottamaan, ettei posti kadota ennakkoääntä ja että hänen äänestyslippuaan käsitellään huolellisesti.

Arto Jääskeläinen, oikeusministeriön vaalijohtaja, selittää Uudessa Suomessa 14.8.2008 sitä, miten hän ohjeisti väärin kansanedustajaehdokkaita vaalirahoitusilmoitusten tekemissä:

Kuten aina, laadin kirjeen ”vanhoille pohjille”, mutta epähuomiossa otin pohjaksi vuoden 2003 eduskuntavaalien vastaavan kirjeen, jossa kyseistä tekstiä ei vielä ollut. Olen tästä kömmähdyksestä, joka on käynyt ilmi vasta tätä selvitystä tehtäessä, pahoillani ja kannan siitä täyden vastuun,

On oletettavaa, ettei Jääskeläinen tahallaan tehnyt ohjeistuksessa virheitä. On myönnettävä, että ensimmäisessä kahdessa lainauksessa hän puolustautuu tahallisia väärinkäytösepäilyjä vastaan. Lopputulos on silti sama: oikeusministeriön vaaleja järjestävät ja valvovat viranomaiset ovat jo tehneet virheitä, eivätkä he siis ole täydellisen luotettavia.

Tässä ei tietysti ole mitään uutta tai paheksuttava. Ihminen on erehtyväinen. Vaalit pitää kuitenkin toteuttaa siten, että tämä erehtyväisyys otetaan huomioon.

Opastusvirhe tuli ilmi, kun asiaa tutkittiin. Miten tutkitaan sitä, ettei sähköinen äänestyskone laske ääniä väärin, kun tarkistuslaskentaa ei voi tehdä ja laitteiden toiminta on valmistajan liikesalaisuus?

Tällä hetkellä oikeusministeriön vastaus on, että äänestäjien on vain luotettava siihen, että oikeusministeriön valitsemat audioijat ovat löytäneet kaikki ongelmat ja että oikeusministeriön valvonnassa koneiden valmistaja korjaa ne oikein.

Koska oikeusministeriö on luotettava.

Screensavers are evil

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:18:04 +0000

A screensaver is, in theory, a program to prevent a static image to burn onto a screen. This was could happen with CRT screens. What would happen is that when the same image is displayed for a long time, it would "burn" into the phosphor.

To prevent that, screensavers were invented. They blanked the screen if the computer hasn't been used for a while, and unblanked it when the user pressed a key or moved the mouse.

One day someone came up with the idea of putting an animation on the screen instead of just blanking it.

Turns out, this is evil. It makes the computer use more power. Screensavers cause pollution without having any benefit than a very minor amusement effect.

Also, amusingly, the more a screen is powered on, the shorter it lasts. Thus, screensaver animations actually do the opposite from saving screens.

To prevent that, modern desktop environments have controls to specify how long the screensaver animation works before the screen is turned off. That's an unnecessary bit of complexity.

If I had my way, screensaver animations would be removed from all operating systems. People running their computers off of solar power could add them, if they wanted, but everyone else would be better off without them.

Suvi Lindénin oma pikku maailma

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:18:04 +0000

Aamulehti kertoo, että ministeri Suvi Lindén on sitä mieltä, että työnantaja saa vaatia riisumaan alasti tietosuojasyistä.

En tiedä missä ministeri asuu, mutta meillä täällä Suomessa tuo ei päde.

Eikö jo olisi aika todeta, että Lindén on niin pihalla, ettei hän voi toimia ministerinä enää?

E-kirjoja, kiitos

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:11:40 +0000

Olen käymässä vanhassa kotikaupungissani, Helsingissä. On ihastuttavaa nähdä kuinka jotkin asiat muuttuvat ja toiset pysyvät. Akateeminen kirjakauppa on yhtä loistava kuin aina ennenkin ja Café Aalto on edelleen mielikahvilani Helsingissä.

Mielenkiinnolla huomasin myös, että Akateeminen on ruvennut myymään e-kirjoja. Näin maailmalla nyt jo parikin kertaa muuttaneena pidän kovasti e-kirjoista, niitä on muutoissa helppo kantaa.

Akateeminen, kuten melkein kaikki muutkin kaupat, valitettavasti myy e-kirjansa kopionestojärjestelmillä varustettuina. Tätä en sulata.

En halua kopioida kirjoja laittomasti. Sen sijaan haluan kopioida niitä laillisesti, eri tietokoneideni ja puhelimieni ja muiden värkkieni välillä, eikä minusta ole hyväksyttävää se, että julkaisija tai kauppias päättää, millä ohjelmalla ja laitteella saan kirjani lukea.

Lisäksi, jos ostan kirjan nyt ja se on kopioestetty, millä minä luen sen 20 vuoden päästä, kun kaikki laitteet ovat erilaisia, nykyiset ohjelmat eivät toimi ja Adobekin on konkurssissa?

En siis käy kauppaa Akateemisen kanssa, muuten kuin kahvilassa kaakaosta (kermavaahdolla ilman sokeria, mutta makeutusaineella).

On mahdollista, että Akateeminen myy myös e-kirjoja ilman kopioestoa. En sellaisia kirjoja löytänyt. Sen sijaan löysin e-kirjaversion Jules Vernen sukellusveneklassikosta, kolmen euron hintaan. Kirja on kuitenkin tekijänoikeusvapaa ja löytyy toimivana, vapaasti kopioitavana, ilmaisena versiona Gutenberg-projektin arkistoista. Olkaa hyvä. Tuo kopioestetty rikkoversio on huijausta, sanon minä.

In defense of Nicole

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:25:58 +0000

In the real world, David does not always win over Goliath. That's sad, but it's true. Particularly in the case of a big corporation using its wealth, influence, and minions to stomp down invividuals, to prevent them from reducing those all-important profits. A corporation must profit, by any means necessary. Profit is more important than people.

A corporation has exactly as little ethics, morals, conscience, and good behavior as it can get away with. It all pretty much rests the officers, and their personal balance between greed and being good people.

While most CEOs and managers and other decision makers in a corporation aren't going to do big evil, say, have people killed, they might not mind being a little bit nasty occasionally. If you have a large corporation, with a culture of profit-worshipping, you'll have a large number of people willing to be a little bit nasty, and that amounts to a lot of nastiness.

That's all a long prelude to this: earlier this year, the PTFS corporation bought Liblime, a competitor. They did this to get a controlling interest on Koha, the free software librarary mangament system. Much to their surprise, you can't buy a healthy free software project like that.

The community of users and developers of Koha has resisted PTFS's strongarm tactics. PTFS wants control of the code base, version control systems, mailing lists, domains, web pages, wikis, and decision making, but the community doesn't let them.

Right now they are attacking Nicole Engard, the documentation manager for the Koha community, spreading lies about her. Nicole is one of the Koha community members who has spoken against PTFS's actions. She also works for a PTFS competitor, another sin against PTFS.

This is an unfortunate situation for Nicole, for Koha, and for free software in general. If corporations like PTFS manage to silence their critics by nastiness, then nastiness is a working strategy and will be used more in the future. We need to squash this every time it happens, so it does not spread. However, for PTFS to lose, Nicole will have to have the courage to stand up against even more aggression.

In the old world, before the Internet, this would have been quite hard. She would have had to get newspapers interested in her case. PTFS would almost certainly have been able to prevent that, by using their PR muscle to conduct a smear campaign against her.

However, with the Internet, it's easier. Anyone can step up and help defend Nicole.

That's what this is. I've never actually met Nicole, but in my brief involvement with the Koha community, she was always helpful and professional. She has, personally, helped Koha and free software spread farther than it would otherwise have. She does good.

Like pretty much everyone in the Koha community, she is considerate, polite, and just to a fault, even when dealing with those attacking her.

PTFS, on the other hand, has done only one honorable thing that I am aware of: they finally released their version of Koha. Every other action from PTFS seems to be an attempt to gain an upper hand by underhanded stratagems. Luckily, they seem to be failing.

Let's see if giving more publicity to the attack on Nicole will make it, too, fail.

See Nicole's post about this for more information.

No orange dents

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 14:38:53 +0000

I am currently relying on netcafes and Orange prepaid to get online. Orange does not let me access identi.ca without jumping through hoops.

Them dastardly free software developers, always corrupting minds of children.

Glass's Fact 19 and open source

Tue, 11 May 2010 10:07:26 +0000

I'm reading Robert Glass's "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering". He presents Fact 19:

Modification of reused code is particularly error-prone. If more than 20 to 25 percent of a component is to be revised, it is more efficient and effective to rewrite it from scratch.

Then in the discussion of that fact:

Note that this same problem has interesting ramifications for the open-source software movement. It is easy to access open-source code to modify it, but the wisdom of doing so is clearly questionable, unless the once-modified version of the open-source code is to become a new fork in the system's development, never to merge with the standard version again. I have never heard open-source advocates discuss this particular problem. (One solution, of course, would be for the key players for the open-source code in question to accept those in-house modifications as part of the standard version. But there is never any guarantee that they will choose to do that.)

Let me express that in bullet points, in a slightly snarky manner:

Open source gives you access to source.
Modifying that source is therefore easy.
This results in a fork that you have to maintain.
There is no guarantee upstream will accept the change.
Open source loses.

Well, duh. If you're going to be making modifications to upstream code, and upstream does not accept them, of course you're going have to maintain those changes yourself. It doesn't matter whether it's open source or not.

However, even though there is no guarantee, if the change is sensible, well made, and relevant to others than you, most upstream projects will accept the change.

In fact, the very reason open source flourishes is because upstream routinely, frequently, nay incessantly take changes others have made for their own purposes and incorporate them into the upstream code base.

It's not unheard of that a proprietary project will accept patches from its users, but since those patches are so hard to make, and all sorts of licensing issues and financial considerations come into play, it's hard, and therefore rare.

This sounds to me like Glass either does not really understand open source software development, or is spreading some FUD about it.

Update: In fact 34, in the context of using tools such as coverage testers, Glass discusses Linus's Law, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", as follows:

Open sourcers expect that users of their software will read and analyze it, thus finding the errors themselves.

This is a subtle, but possibly poisonous distortion of the law. The poison is in the implication that every user of free software is expected to participate in code reviews and debugging, which is tedious and time-consuming. That is not at all the case. Instead, only if users want problems to be fixed are they expected to do anything, and the expectation is to report the probem, and provide sufficient information to find the cause.

It is entirely true that this only works for popular projects. Unpopular projects do not benefit from Linus's Law.

Autojen GPS-urkinta etenee

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 05:21:13 +0000

YLE uutisoi, että Sunnuntaisuomalainen uutisoi, että Ajokilometreihin perustuva autovero altis huijaukselle:

Kilometreihin perustuva autovero ja Helsinkiin kaavailtu ruuhkamaksu ovat alttiita huijaukselle, kirjoittaa Väli-Suomen sanomalehtien Sunnuntaisuomalainen. Molemmat perustuvat autojen satelliittipaikannukseen, mutta internetistä saa tilattua laitteita, joilla paikannuksen voi estää.

Välineitä GPS-vastaanoton häiritsemiseen saa ostettua mistä tahansa rautakaupasta. Riittää, että antennin ympärille pistää metallipurkin.

YLE kirjoittaa myös:

Kilometreihin perustuvasta autoverosta ei ole päätöstä, mutta liikenneministeri Anu Vehviläinen (kesk.) on ehdottanut sellaista.

Pelkkien ajokilometrien seurantaan GPS on monimutkainen ja virheherkkä ratkaisu. Kaikissa autoissa on jo valmiiksi paljon yksinkertaisempi väline: kilometrimittari.

Monimutkaisen, virheherkän ja kalliin valvontajärjestelmän rakentamisen sijaan olisi helppoa vaatia, että ajoneuvon vuosittaiset kilometrit rekisteröidään katsastuksen yhteydessä.

Vielä helpompaa olisi nostaa polttoaineveroa. Se ei vaatisi minkään uusien järjestelmien rakentamista.

Tätä ei kuitenkaan tulla tekemään, koska Suomen poliittiset päättäjät ovat joko teknologiayritysten nenästä vedettävissä tai ovat ymmärtäneet kirjan 1984 aivan väärin.

Edelleen YLE:n uutisesta:

Öörni uskoo, että häirintälaitteiden kitkemiseksi joudutaan rakentamaan tekninen valvontajärjestelmä. Todennäköisin vaihtoehto on rekisterikilpiä kuvaavat liikuteltavat kamerat.

Totta kai on järkevää ensin rakentaa monimutkainen, virheherkkä, kallis GPS-valvontajärjestelmä ja sen jälkeen toinen monimutkainen, virheherkkä ja kallis järjestelmä valvomaan ensimmäisen toimivuutta. Tämä on järkevää nimenomaan siksi, että kumpikin järjestelmä on omiaan ihmisten valvomiseen.

Tämä on tärkeä pointti: kaikki nämä järjestelmät tähtäävät viime kädessä siihen, että autojen kaikkia liikkeitä valvotaan mahdollisimman tarkasti. Koska melkein kaikki autot ovat yhden tai kahden kuljettajan käytössä, tässä valvotaan siis ihmisten liikkumista.

Jos hallituksessa olisi yhtään yksityisyydestä välittävää henkilöä, nämä hankkeet ja puheet loppuisivat lyhyeen tai ainakin niiden hyödyistä ja haitoista käytäisiin julkista keskustelua. Nyt pelkästään puhutaan siitä, miten mahdolliset järjestelmää huijaavat saadaan kiinni.

Computer driving licenses

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:58:51 +0000

Various countries have a training programme called the "computer driving license". The training aims to give basic computer using skills (word processing, spreadsheets, the web, etc). It's good for people unsure of their skills, but I object to the name.

I think it's worrying that it's called a license of any kind, since that implies that there is an entity whose permission people need to use a computer. Licenses to own and operate copying machines or typewriters have existed, and it's always a sign of political oppression. It's just a word, but words have power, or at least they give leverage to those in power.

On free software parenting

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 07:58:36 +0000

I believe Jeff Atwood is fundmentally wrong in his recent blog article Responsible Open Source Code Parenting.

In his article, Atwood bases all criticism of John Gruber's behavior with regards to Markdown on this premise:

As Markdown's "parent", John has a few key responsibilities in shepherding his baby to maturity. Namely, to lead. To set direction.

When someone releases some free software, they have no obligation whatsoever to do anything with or for it again. No legal obligations, and no moral ones. Unless there is some kind of explicit contract the author is free to forget anything ever happened.

It's obviously nice if the author assumes responsibility for further development and leadership and whatever, but it has to happen voluntarily or be compensated.

This is an important difference from the proprietary world Atwood is more familiar with. With proprietary software, the user is pretty much always a customer, and a customer has rights, one of them being that the software works and problems get fixed. With free software, the user is a receiver of a surprise gift.

Now, as far as the Markdown situation is concerned, the facts seem to be that Gruber does not develop the specification or reference implementation, but other people would like things to improve.

In the free software world, the best thing to do in this scenario is to gather the people who want to make improvements, have them collaborate and take over development, thank Gruber, and make the world a better place. Or, vigorously waving a spatula, fork, fork, fork.

There's a whole bunch of people using and relying on Markdown now. Atwood's Stack Overflow site is one of the prominent ones. There's implementations for many programming languages. There's other sites using Markdown. All of these people could (I am reluctant to say should) start a "Markdown Foundation", so to speak, and get to work.

Stop sending e-mail?

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:16:01 +0000

Jeff Atwood writes about e-mail in Email: The Variable Reinforcement Machine. He's right: people are using the e-mail system badly.

E-mail is not suitable for all sorts of communication: anything that requires high bandwidth or is easily misunderstood is probably best handle face-to-face or on the phone. Success e-mail use does require attention; but then, so does all other form of communication.

Like many others, part of his solution is to convert people to use other conduits for communication, and in this he makes a mistake. He suggests people switch to proprietary silos such as Twitter, and Facebook. This is an utter abomination. It ruins the ability of people to reach each other, unless they all agree to kiss their privacy and freedom goodbye.

In the end, the real problem with e-mail is not the technology, and it's not other people. It's you. If you waste much time on e-mail, you're doing it wrong.

The amount of time you spend on e-mail is only marginally dependent on the amount of e-mail you get, and mainly dependent on your own skills in processing e-mail.

The top seven skills in efficient processing of e-mails:

Archive e-mail automatically. There's no point in wasting time doing it manually.
Delete e-mails from your inbox(es) as soon as you're done with them. If you've read it, delete it. If you need to respond to it, or need it to do some task, move it to a dedicated folder. An inbox is only for stuff you haven't read yet. (http://inboxzero.com/ really works, as does the full GTD system.) If your e-mails are archived upon arrival, you can always safely remove them from your inbox.
Respond at once. If it takes less than a couple of minutes, do it at once, then delete the e-mail and never bother with it again.
Stop useless e-mail. Unsubscribe from mailing lists, unless you really need them. Stop people from sending jokes to the company-wide list (set up a separate joke list?). If you can't stop them from sending useless stuff to you, learn to filter it so you never see it. (If you do the filtering after archiving, you can filter pretty freely, safe in the knowledge that you can dig up a mis-filtered e-mail from the archive if need be.)
Skim. Almost always, important e-mails are easy to spot and everything else can be quickly skimmed and then discarded. Often whole novels' worth of e-mails can be discarded based on the subject line.
Do e-mail in batches. There is no point in monitoring your inboxes constantly. E-mail by nature is not speed critical (and anyone who treats it as such will lose). So read e-mail every morning, lunchtime, and evening. Or whatever schedule works for you. You don't have to have fixed times: you can do it between other tasks, or while waiting for the computer to run a test suite, or whatever fits you. Just don't keep the e-mail app open and demanding attention all the time.
Use a competent spam filter. At best, I've received over 4000 e-mails per day, around 80-90% of it spam. Either bogofilter or crm114 are able to get rid of all but a dozen or so spams, with no false positives for weeks, at best (that's when I stopped keeping track).

Use e-mail for what it's meant for: asynchronous, non-time-critical correspondence. Moving that stuff to some other system will only solve problems temporarily. Eventually the new system will have useless time-wasters flooding it, too.

Viimeinkin jotain rajaa holtittomalle sananvapauden käytölle mediassa!

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:00:33 +0000

Keskisuomalaisen entinen päätoimittaja Erkki Laatikainen on rohkea mies. Hän astui lauantaina riskeistä välittämättä esiin ja ehdotti Suomeen sitä, mitä pitkään on kaivattukin: lakia, jolla median holtitonta sananvapauden käyttöä suitsitaan.

Laatikainen nostaa pöydälle ison kissan: media, saa kritisoida päättäjiä miten lystää. Tähän on saatava loppu. Miten voimme ikinä nousta sellaisten maailman suurvaltojen joukkoon kuin Italia tai Valko-Venäjä jos poliittiset päättäjämme eivät saa tehdä mitä huvittaa.

Sarkasmi sikseen.

Laatikainen on oikeassa siinä, että medialla on valtaa ja se voi käyttää sitä väärin, joten se tarvitsee jotakin tasapainottamaan itseään. Hän on jopa oikeassa siinä, että viime kädessä tämä tapahtuu lakien ja oikeusistuimien kautta.

Hänen esittämänsä tapa on kuitenkin aivan järkyttävän karmea. Hän esittää uutta kiihottamisen vastaista lakia tai pykälää ja käyttää mallina olemassaolevaa kansanryhmen vastaisen kiihottamisen pykälää. Tämä pykälä kuitenkin toimii huonosti: koko kiihottamisen käsite on epämääräinen ja niinpä syytteitä ja nyt tuomioitakin tulee vähintäänkin omituisin perustein.

Vaikka pykälä toimisikin hyvin, tuomioistuimet eivät millään ehdi käsittelemään kaikkia tapauksia, eivätkä tarpeeksi nopeasti. Koska medialla on kuin onkin demokraatiassa vallankäyttäjien vahtikoiran rooli, se kertoo mahdollisista väärinkäytöksistä usein, jopa päivittäin. Oikeustapausten käsittelyajat ovat kuukausia tai vuosia.

Me emme tarvitse lisää anti-kiihottamista. Me tarvitsemme journalistisen muutoksen, jossa media huomaa, että se on itsekin vallankäyttäjä ja sen tarvitsee siis toimia myös itsensä vahtikoirana. Jos YLE töpeksii ja väittää perättömiä pääministerin talonrakennuksesta, muun median pitää paljastaa tämä. (En tiedä mikä tilanne YLEn ja Vanhasen kohdalla on. Tiedän sen, että pääministeri järjesti poliittisen teatterin voittaakseen luottamuslauseäänestyksessä.)

Tätä itseään vahtivaa vahtikoiraa ei saada aikaan lakeja muuttelemalla aina, kun vallassa olevaa puoluetta julkisesti epäillään väärinkäytöksistä. Se saadaan aikaan oikealla kilpailutilanteella suomalaisessa mediassa ja sillä, että kansaa kiinnostaa muukin kuin Big Brother.

Outi Mäkelä vihaa minua

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 06:40:56 +0000

Seuraan monen kansanedustajan blogi edustajamme.fi-palvelun kautta. Sinne on erittäin kätevästi kerätty monen kansanedustajan blogit yhteen paikkaan. Tarkemmin sanoen siellä on blogien RSS-syötteet.

Kansanedustaja Outi Mäkelä on mukana. Hän kuuluu siihen luokkaan bloginpitäjiä joiden mielestä on tärkeämpää houkutella lukijat hänen omille sivuilleen kuin antaa heidän lukea tekstit kätevästi RSS-lukijan kautta.

Tämä tarkoittaa sitä, että RSS-syötteessä hän julkaisee vain pienen alkupätkän kustakin blogikirjoituksestaan. Loput pitää käydä lukemassa selaimen kautta: RSS-syötteessä on linkki koko kirjoitukseen.

Tämä tekee lukemiseen yhden ylimääräisen askeleen lisää. Mutta itsekkään bloginpitäjän kannalta oleelisempaa on saada käyntejä sivustolleen, jotta voi leuhkia suosiollaan. Ja antaahan se myös mahdollisuuden kerätä tietoja lukijoistaan.

Outi Mäkelä menee askeleen pidemmälle. Hänen www-sivunsa vaativat Adoben Flash-ohjelman käyttämistä. Mikäli sitä ei ole selaimeen asennettu, sivut käskevät asentamaan sen. Muussa tapauksessa ainoa asia, mitä sivuilta näkyy, on tämä:

Arvoisa vierailija,

Outin uudistetun sivuston käyttö vaatii selaimeltasi Flash-laajennuksen (vähintään versiota 8), jonka viimeisin versio on asennettavissa Adoben sivustolta, johon tämä sivu ohjaa selaimesi automaattisesti 15 sekunnin sisällä.

Kiitos vierailustasi ja tervetuloa (päivitetyn laajennuksen) kanssa uudelleen.

Minä käytän Linuxia ja vieläpä 64-bittisessä muodossa, koska käyttää kaikkea muistia koneessa ilman ongelmia. Adoben Flash-kikkare toimii tässä ympäristössä huonosti ja aiheuttaa selaimen kaatumista kymmeniä kertoja päivässä. En siis voi käyttää sitä.

Outi Mäkelä ei halua, että luen hänen blogikirjoituksiaan. Hän on nähnyt paljon vaivaa, jotta en voisi lukea niitä.

Outi, miksi vihaat minua?

Olen mies, olen siis pedofiili

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:53:57 +0000

Minä olen mies. Kaikki miehet ovat pedofiilejä. Kysykää vaikka Air Francelta. Tai British Airwaysiltä.

(Tasa-arvo olisi hieno asia, puolin ja toisin. Pedofilihysteria voisi sen sijaan loppua jo.)

The Pirate Bay kills online music business

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:20:53 +0000

Antti Kotilainen, from TTVK, says that The Pirate Bay has prevented the development of a viable music business in Finland. (From Digitoday, in Finnish.)

I think he's lying. TPB has not prevented a viable music business from happening in, say, the United States (the iTunes music store being just one shining example).

The real reason there is no viable large-scale online music business in Finland is that the record companies have stopped it, by making it hard to negotiate (if you're small), or too expensive. See, for example, how hard it was for The Ground to start. Record company greed, not consumer greed, is the stumbling block here.

On the Okularm DRM feature

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 07:27:40 +0000

John Goerzen filed a bug on Okular for arbitrarily enforcing DRM in PDF files. Much hilarity resulted.

This incident makes me angry. I am now going to blow off some steam.

I fully agree with John on the core issue: Okular should not restrict its users regardless of what PDF authors and the PDF say.
If Okular upstream disagrees, Debian should patch its version. Especially so since it is a one-word patch.
The feature is a copy restriction, but it is not DRM. Calling it DRM is clearly a bug and only serves to advance the agenda of the copyright mafia.
Making it easy to disable is nice. Requiring the user to realize it can be turned off, and having to navigate to the settings dialog to do it, is not onerous, but it is user-unfriendly.
It is claimed (without references) that some corporations require the feature for nebulous legal reasons. They don't seem to require it with xpdf or evince, though. If they do require it, the corporations should change things to suit them. Serving the supposed interests of unidentified corporations over the actual, stated needs of prominent users is simply wrong. It's so mind-bogglingly, hideously opposite of anything sensible that it is clear it's not a real reason.
I claim, based on their behavior in the discussion, that the real reason Okular upstream and Debian KDE maintainers still oppose changing the default is that this became a battle of egos and they don't want to lose face by giving in now.

The last point is what annoys me most: that we, in Debian, still dig trenches so deep we can't see the other side, that we twist the entire world to protect our egos. Clearly, John shares some blame: his initial bug report was needlessly aggressive, but that doesn't excuse everyone else.

Including myself, for writing this blog entry. I have no excuse.

Kaupan portti sanoo piip!

Tue, 12 May 2009 10:39:49 +0000

Sattumoisin tulen välillä kuljettaneeksi repussani lähiverkkokaapelia. Jos tällöin käyn melkein missä tahansa kaupassa, niiden ovella oleva laite sanoo piip. Ulosmennessä sitten tulee yleensä perään juoksemaan kaupan myyjä, joka hengästyneenä vaatii minua alistumaan tavaroideni ja henkilöni tarkastukseen. En kuitenkaan suostu: kaupalla ei ole oikeutta sellaiseen vain sen takia, että he hankkivat laitteen, joka sanoo piip.

Tämä on myyjille usein hankala paikka. Jos mukana on vartija, homma menee yleensä helpommin: vartijat sentään saavat ainakin viisi minuuttia koulutusta siitä, mitkä heidän oikeutensa ovat.

Elettyäni parikymmentä vuotta Helsingissä, en ole kertaakaan nähnyt kenenkään myymälävarkaan jääneen kiinni piip-laitteiden ansiosta.

Olen nähnyt kuinka Asematunnelin Anttilasta on porttien läpi juossut ulos resuinen, pahalta haiseva yhteiskunnan tukirakenteiden ulkopuolelle jäänyt mieshenkilö, toisessa kädessä makkarapaketti ja toiseessa olutpullo. Piippaamisella ei tuolloin ollut mitään vaikutusta siihen, epäiltiinkö häntä varkaudesta (näpistyksestä?) vai ei.

Vähän väliä sen sijaan näkee kuinka rehelliset ihmiset ahdistuvat, kun heidän kantamuksensa aiheuttavat piippauksia.

Onko kukaan itsenäinen taho missään ikinä tutkinut kauppojen ovilla olevien varashälyttimien hyötyä?

Control-D confusion

Tue, 05 May 2009 18:12:07 +0000

In Epiphany, my preferred web browser, control-D adds a bookmark.

In Evolution, my preferred e-mail client, control-D deletes an e-mail.

Some combination of laptop slowness, lagging window manager, and bad luck sometimes results in me and the computer having a disagreement over which window has focus, and e-mail gets deleted.

I'd vote for a UN resolution outlawing using control-D for anything except delete.

Luckily, my e-mail setup is resistant to accidental deletions. It's still annoying.