Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
One little thing I'd like to comment on:
To most people (I hope!) the law is an uncrossable line. A solid boundary of ethical and moral behaviour.
Really? I'd wager that this is a serious exaggeration. The law in itself is not more than the codification of morals and ethics. It is those morals and ethics which most people abide by, not the letter of the law. There are many laws which stray from common morals and ethics. This being slashdot it should be sufficient to point out the DMCA or the current implementation of patent law to show examples of law which often are not seen as moral or ethical.
So assuming that people in general try to stay on the right side of morals and ethics they tend to be law-abiding as a consequence of that. In business (big or small, does not matter) morals and ethics often seem to take a back seat to the pursuit of financial gain. As success in business is often defined by the amount of money made it should not be surprising that those who are emotionally capable to push morals and ethics aside for financial gain tend to rise above those who are less inclined to do so.
And here we see again what happens when laws are made by lawyers, for lawyers. Anyone who looks for the lawyers in shining armour who will knock these leeches into pulp come the next day fail to see the point. As far as the lawyers are concerned the law does fullfill its intended purpose by making society fully dependent on their 'services'. Kind of like the way rat catchers in days gone by might have spread rats through the city, thereby creating panic and calls for their service.
A politician who wrote a law which stated that from this point in time on anyone who wished to engage in economical activity could not do so until he paid due to his party would immediately be recognized for what she is. A lawyer writing a similar law telling the public to pay due to their caste is for some strange reason not recognized for what he is.
In many countries it is practice to have a civilian head the armed forces. This is supposed to ward off the danger of having those armed forces take over the government. A similar construction might help to avoid creating the current abysmal state of (parts of) the legal system which has turned into a sort of social security for the legal caste. Sure, lawyers will still be needed to work on the nitty-gritty details - like soldiers deployed on the battlefield. But in the same way as most societies do not tolerate those soldiers to impose a constant state of emergency and military rule those societies should not tolerate a constant state of legal emergency.
Laws should be written to benefit society as a whole. Not just to feed part of it.
There does not seem to be that much difference between a laptop and a brick given that (re)installing Windows on either does not lead to increased capabilities...:-)
KISS comes to the rescue... Volume control not working anymore, parts to fix it unavailable or overpriced?
Just take a potentiometer, find a good place to insert it in the circuitry (physical as well as electrical - preferrably between the pre-amp and power stage I'd say) and create your own unique analog volume control. Make it look nice and everyone's happy - everyone except for the retailer who wants to sell a new gizmo because the old one hiccuped that is...
I'd think that if Microsoft wanted something to run on the OLPC the best candidate from their current lineup would be Windows CE (or whatever that is called nowadays). It is supposed to be lightweight an so should fit the hardware nicely. Software would have to be ported for it but they might as well face the fact that OLPC is not made nor meant to run Office & friends...
I actually tried to buy the album. I entered all the sensitive data the site told me to, only to be presented with an empty order. It is still unclear to me whether my card will be charged or not as I clicked the OK (or whatever it was called) button to proceed with the transaction, but I have not received any details about how and where to download the album. Needless to say I did not try again as I do not want to be charged several times for something I might not even get. Yes, charged - I told them I'd pay 5 UKP for the album. Not a lot but a lot more than they'd get through the label...
I have not downloaded the album in any other way yet. There might be others with the same experience out there who decided that the hassle of going through the official channel was not worth the effort - a regular P2P download is still a lot easier.
If you're not happy with my iPod example, how about OpenMoko? It's like somebody went out of their way to make an iPhone clone that totally misses the point.
You do realize that the OpenMoko project was around while iPhone was nothing but a rumour, do you? And I hope you also have not been affected so much by the reality distortion field that you do not realize that the iPhone was in fact not the first touch-panel pda phone? That it, in fact, shares many features with PDA-like phones which preceded it? Phones which actually have features which the iPhone lacks? Mind you, I'm not talking about looks here - on that front the iPhone has most if not all competitors down on the floor.
Comes time when Apple adds those features to the iPhone will you then berate those which came before it for 'going out of their way to make iPhone clones' as well? They must have had spies looking for Jobs's diaries or how would they otherwise have been able to come up with those features which Apple clearly thought of first?
Communism is evil. A harsh statement, granted. But when you see the 100s of millions of people it has enslaved for the benefit of the few people at the top, there's no other word for it but evil.
Mostly true (as in 'true for anything over the scale of a small community') but not relevant in this situation. Putin is not a communist.
Reminds me of the 'Vild' from David Zindell's 'Neverness' (go find it at $your_friendly_search_engine or $2ndhand_bookstore), a wavefront of exploding stars which spreads and spreads...
That is why the two should be combined... Water-cooled Photovoltaic panels give the best of both worlds: cooler PV panels which are more effective PLUS warm/hot water for heating, hot water or - indirectly - cooling. The technology is out there. It is simple. It works. As to why is is not used that much yet? Good question.
A search on 'water cooled pv' gives some interesting documents about experiments done with this combination. Read them and then go and build something like that. My 2 puny 11 watt panels are somewhat to small for this application but anyone who has (plans for) panels on the roof AND a need of warm water does him/herself a disservice by not looking in to this IMnsHO...
Some years ago I made a set of patches to the Dillo browser to support tabs and frames and other such things. I kept logs of the increase in memory use, binary size and other metrics. While the binary size and memory use went up a tiny little bit (several kilobytes) this should be offset against running several open windows or instances of a program. Compared to that using tabs actually saves memory, not to mention hassle when not using a tabbed window manager.
Check the Received: header and see for yourselves:
Received: from 209.86.89.64 (EHLO elasmtp-curtail.atl.sa.earthlink.net) (209.86.89.64) by mta103.mail.re3.yahoo.com with SMTP; Mon, 14 May 2007 05:09:00 -0700 Received: from [65.37.133.42] (helo=NewLaptop.eathlink.net) by elasmtp-curtail.atl.sa.earthlink.net with asmtp (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256) (Exim 4.34) id 1HnZMJ-0001Gv-Hd for xxxxxxxxxxx@yahoo.ca;
A lawsuit announced through an earthlink account? With a typo in the domain name? helo=NewLaptop.eathlink.net? Eathlink?
If ideas aren't property, how can knowledge be valuable?
If I give you the cookbook used by the most famous cook in the world, does that make you as 'valuable' an asset to a restaurant as that cook would be?
The answer to that question is most likely a resounding 'no'. You lack something the cook has, namely skill and experience.
Like fire, it takes three components to pull off a successful project: an idea, knowledge and skill. Take one away and the chance of success diminishes greatly.
Your ideas, once expressed, become common knowledge. Any construct which turns ideas into property has to battle against some of the most basic human (and other species') traits such as curiosity, inquisitiveness and the will to learn. Your skill and experience are your own to rent out or sell. If you want your ideas to be your property, keep them to yourself. Anything else would run afoul of the often misused proverb as you cannot eat your cake and have it too...
This is not my experience. I installed Vista on a virtual machine on a machine which also runs 2000 in a VM. Even with all the bells, whistles, blinkenlights and such turned off Vista was unusable while 2000 just works fine. The VM's were similarly configured except for memory: Vista got more than twice as much as 2000. The actual amounts of memory were 256 MB for 2000, 612 MB (the maximum I had) for Vista. If this is progress than call me a Luddite but I don't want any of it. Vista might have a few features missing from 2000 but who cares?
Running W2K and WXP in VMware (only reason for their survival here is that I sometimes help people solve Windows-problems so performance is not of paramount importance) run reasonably well when given 512 MB and one of the two 466 MHz Celeron processors in the ageing BP6-server.
Vista in the same virtual machine is an absolute dog. Vista with access to both processors is still an absolute dog. It pegs the memory and processors doing absolutely nothing, even with all fancy effects turned off so it should resemble WXP/W2K. Well, it does not.
Is the machine to slow for Vista? Yes, it is. I would accept the fact that it runs slow. I don't see why I should accept the fact that it does not just run slow but runs like Windows XP would run on a 32 MB machine.
The offspring of all this is that I will not be able to help those friends and family with their Vista-problems. Sorry folks. I can recommend some alternatives which run perfectly well on my old machine. They should run even better on anything new you throw them at. Most of them are free to boot (pun intended)...
Hm, I've paid and paid and paid again for driver development but all those companies churn out is drivers for other operating systems. Paying does not seem to help to get drivers written...
...with my original N-Gage when I use it as a book reader. It fits nicely in my hand, with the D-pad above the screen where I can use it to flip the pages. The book reader software takes care of rotating the screen in whatever direction I want i to be...
...but have only done so once after this nonsense of treating visitors as suspects of unknown crimes really got hold. And you know what? When I feel unwelcome I will probably refrain from visiting unless I really have to. That means I will not spend my holidays in the US anymore, something I've done quite a few times before. That means I will have to forgo on visiting some friends who live over there but who knows, they might want to come and visit us here in Sweden instead?
Europe-USA: 1-0
I hope that false feeling of security is worth it for all you USsians. But maybe next time before you go to the poll booth you should read up on what of your founding fathers had to say on the subject of trading liberties for 'security' (quotes are mine).
Oooooh, I developed something like that in my spare time in 1998 when I worked at the Netherlands' biggest telco helping them build services on top of their internet backbone. A database which contained information on known vulnerabilities, exploitable versions of software, exploit traffic, locally installed software, network traffic (from monitoring agents), network architecture and the relevant QoS and security policies. All the information was used to produce router/firewall scripts, upgrade warnings (for locally installed, exploitable software), intrusion warnings according to security policies, violations of the security policies (eg. telnet open on *nix, etc.), performance warnings etc. The information was regularly updated from agents on all local machines. It never got deployed as far as I know but still...
I guess I'm not the only one who made something like this either. It is, well, sort of obvious given the common use of computers and software to automate recurring tasks (eg. configuring firewalls for blocking vulnerabilities). In 'my' case the firewalls/routers could be configured to block traffic only to systems which had exploitable versions installed.
Nice that Microsoft Labs does something similar but it is not really worthy of the term 'research' IMnsHO, more application development.
That depends on where you live and what you do for a living. If you live in a highly litigious country and you make your living doing something which might be cross to Microsoft's purposes they could sue you whether they have grounds to do so or not. You will have to arrange defense in some way, either by taking the effort and spending the time to defend yourself or by paying someone (ie. a lawyer) to do so for you.
Now the likeliness of Microsoft suing an individual for patent infringement is small but what about a small company? Lawsuits are expensive... and can last a long time... possibly longer than that small company can afford...
Have they done so? As far as I know they have not. Is this a guarantee for future beheviour? Of course not.
Oh, but if I were a tourist^Wterrorist I'd just get me a GSM phone which I knew I could change the IMEI on plus a stack of prepaid SIM cards (or a SIM card programmer and a list of IMSI numbers). That way I could use the same phone while making it much more difficult to track me. Unless the operators implement some other tracking method based on individual handset radio 'fingerprints' (similar to Wi-Fi Fingerprints) or something fancy like that of course...
...a program I wrote some 6 years ago for this purpose. It runs on anything that walks, quacks and looks like unix and maybe, just maybe you can get it to run on Windows...
George lives out on Sourceforge and has not been maintained (by me) in many years. It does need some maintenance by now I'm afraid...
Here's the blurb I wrote when I launched the thing:
What's the Problem?
The problem is simple. You just ripped all your CD's, albums, cassette tapes and 8-tracks to MP3 files, and have a stack of blank CD's waiting to be enscribed with the fruits of your labour. All that is left is to organize your files in such a way that albums do not get mixed up. And that artists are sorted, sort of. All the while keeping an eye on available CD-space, which you'd like to use efficiently. You can use one of the myriad of existing CD pre-mastering tools, but these tend to be less efficient for this specific job. What you really want is a tool which can deal with multiple sources and CD's at once, which knows how to select directories non-recursively (without including all subdirectories), which creates `cuesheets' (lists of files to include) for your favourite CD-mastering software. And it had better be free software, since you might like to learn a bit in the process by looking at the code (or teach the author of the program how to write better programs...).
A possible Solution
Presented with the aforementioned problems I sat down to hack up some Perl code to automate much of this process. A few cups of tea later, George was born. It did not have a name then, but it performed its tasks to satisfaction of the owner by scheduling a sizeable amount of CD's out of the scattered MP3-populations on various networked boxen. "Hmmm..." I thought, there's bound to be other people in a similar situation, having their files all around waiting for that `big cleanup' which for some reason gets postponed indefinitely. And since I've got this thing for Free Software, why not polish up this program a bit and release it to the ravenous masses on the 'Net? An since all good software has a name... George was born. There's nothing more to that name than a somewhat corresponding subset of characters, really.
Anatomy of George
* George is written in Perl. Perl works the way I do. It is convoluted, messy and noisy, but it produces results.
* The GUI-endowned version uses the Gnome libraries. And Gnome needs a lot more, like GTK and friends. It also uses the Glade-Perl extension, since this saves me from a lot of repetitive work. If you don't know Glade and you (intersted in) programming for GTK, try it. It is an interface builder for GTK (and Gnome) which allows you to cobble together an interface in a few minutes. And Glade-Perl in turn depends on GTK-Perl, also commonly known as gnome-perl (in the Gnome CVS repository) or perl-GTK. Get the latest version and save yourself some headaches...
* George is probably `Unix-only' (where the term 'Unix' is used for everything which looks, quacks and walks like a Unix. Linux is fine, so is FreeBSD or OpenBSD or Solaris). The command line version might work on Win32 (with some working version of Perl) as well. If I feel so inclined, I'll even combine both versions in one program (whee... something I should have done in the first place but remember, this was a simple hack...).
* George does not do its own premastering, nor does it directly control the CD-writer. For these purposes it relies on mkisofs and cdrecord. You can probably also use mkhybrid to create Mac CD's, but for lack of a Mac I hve not tried this. If you try this, you'll need to add some mkhybrid-specific flags to the preferences hash in George. You'll have to know some Perl to do that.
* George is licensed under the Gnu Public License. That means that George is what is called `Free Software'. You c
Of course there are only so many names you can construct using a given language, but given that Palm has been marketing a LiveDrive for some time now that name sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Almost every time I order something from the US to be delivered to Sweden or the Netherlands I have to battle the seller to send the goods through USPS instead of UPS. Given my experience with UPS - they managed to damage an oscilloscope beyond repair, the shipping box was almost round when it arrived - and their exorbitant prices I will not do any business with them anymore. USPS on the other hand has always worked flawlessly and the packages can get delivered to my doorstep here in rural Sweden (UPS makes me go and get them at their depot). So, no USPS automatically means no deal as far as I'm concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? I'd wager that this is a serious exaggeration. The law in itself is not more than the codification of morals and ethics. It is those morals and ethics which most people abide by, not the letter of the law. There are many laws which stray from common morals and ethics. This being slashdot it should be sufficient to point out the DMCA or the current implementation of patent law to show examples of law which often are not seen as moral or ethical.
So assuming that people in general try to stay on the right side of morals and ethics they tend to be law-abiding as a consequence of that. In business (big or small, does not matter) morals and ethics often seem to take a back seat to the pursuit of financial gain. As success in business is often defined by the amount of money made it should not be surprising that those who are emotionally capable to push morals and ethics aside for financial gain tend to rise above those who are less inclined to do so.
And here we see again what happens when laws are made by lawyers, for lawyers. Anyone who looks for the lawyers in shining armour who will knock these leeches into pulp come the next day fail to see the point. As far as the lawyers are concerned the law does fullfill its intended purpose by making society fully dependent on their 'services'. Kind of like the way rat catchers in days gone by might have spread rats through the city, thereby creating panic and calls for their service.
A politician who wrote a law which stated that from this point in time on anyone who wished to engage in economical activity could not do so until he paid due to his party would immediately be recognized for what she is. A lawyer writing a similar law telling the public to pay due to their caste is for some strange reason not recognized for what he is.
In many countries it is practice to have a civilian head the armed forces. This is supposed to ward off the danger of having those armed forces take over the government. A similar construction might help to avoid creating the current abysmal state of (parts of) the legal system which has turned into a sort of social security for the legal caste. Sure, lawyers will still be needed to work on the nitty-gritty details - like soldiers deployed on the battlefield. But in the same way as most societies do not tolerate those soldiers to impose a constant state of emergency and military rule those societies should not tolerate a constant state of legal emergency.
Laws should be written to benefit society as a whole. Not just to feed part of it.
Hmmm...
:-)
There does not seem to be that much difference between a laptop and a brick given that (re)installing Windows on either does not lead to increased capabilities...
...means 'tuber' or 'turnip', also 'nag' (the horse, not the action). Not exactly synonymous with the fountain of knowledge IMnsHO...
KISS comes to the rescue... Volume control not working anymore, parts to fix it unavailable or overpriced?
Just take a potentiometer, find a good place to insert it in the circuitry (physical as well as electrical - preferrably between the pre-amp and power stage I'd say) and create your own unique analog volume control. Make it look nice and everyone's happy - everyone except for the retailer who wants to sell a new gizmo because the old one hiccuped that is...
I'd think that if Microsoft wanted something to run on the OLPC the best candidate from their current lineup would be Windows CE (or whatever that is called nowadays). It is supposed to be lightweight an so should fit the hardware nicely. Software would have to be ported for it but they might as well face the fact that OLPC is not made nor meant to run Office & friends...
I actually tried to buy the album. I entered all the sensitive data the site told me to, only to be presented with an empty order. It is still unclear to me whether my card will be charged or not as I clicked the OK (or whatever it was called) button to proceed with the transaction, but I have not received any details about how and where to download the album. Needless to say I did not try again as I do not want to be charged several times for something I might not even get. Yes, charged - I told them I'd pay 5 UKP for the album. Not a lot but a lot more than they'd get through the label...
I have not downloaded the album in any other way yet. There might be others with the same experience out there who decided that the hassle of going through the official channel was not worth the effort - a regular P2P download is still a lot easier.
You do realize that the OpenMoko project was around while iPhone was nothing but a rumour, do you? And I hope you also have not been affected so much by the reality distortion field that you do not realize that the iPhone was in fact not the first touch-panel pda phone? That it, in fact, shares many features with PDA-like phones which preceded it? Phones which actually have features which the iPhone lacks? Mind you, I'm not talking about looks here - on that front the iPhone has most if not all competitors down on the floor.
Comes time when Apple adds those features to the iPhone will you then berate those which came before it for 'going out of their way to make iPhone clones' as well? They must have had spies looking for Jobs's diaries or how would they otherwise have been able to come up with those features which Apple clearly thought of first?
Mostly true (as in 'true for anything over the scale of a small community') but not relevant in this situation. Putin is not a communist.
Reminds me of the 'Vild' from David Zindell's 'Neverness' (go find it at $your_friendly_search_engine or $2ndhand_bookstore), a wavefront of exploding stars which spreads and spreads...
That is why the two should be combined... Water-cooled Photovoltaic panels give the best of both worlds: cooler PV panels which are more effective PLUS warm/hot water for heating, hot water or - indirectly - cooling. The technology is out there. It is simple. It works. As to why is is not used that much yet? Good question.
A search on 'water cooled pv' gives some interesting documents about experiments done with this combination. Read them and then go and build something like that. My 2 puny 11 watt panels are somewhat to small for this application but anyone who has (plans for) panels on the roof AND a need of warm water does him/herself a disservice by not looking in to this IMnsHO...
Some years ago I made a set of patches to the Dillo browser to support tabs and frames and other such things. I kept logs of the increase in memory use, binary size and other metrics. While the binary size and memory use went up a tiny little bit (several kilobytes) this should be offset against running several open windows or instances of a program. Compared to that using tabs actually saves memory, not to mention hassle when not using a tabbed window manager.
Sure. Nice try. Next time don't be so gullible.
If I give you the cookbook used by the most famous cook in the world, does that make you as 'valuable' an asset to a restaurant as that cook would be?
The answer to that question is most likely a resounding 'no'. You lack something the cook has, namely skill and experience.
Like fire, it takes three components to pull off a successful project: an idea, knowledge and skill. Take one away and the chance of success diminishes greatly.
Your ideas, once expressed, become common knowledge. Any construct which turns ideas into property has to battle against some of the most basic human (and other species') traits such as curiosity, inquisitiveness and the will to learn. Your skill and experience are your own to rent out or sell. If you want your ideas to be your property, keep them to yourself. Anything else would run afoul of the often misused proverb as you cannot eat your cake and have it too...
This is not my experience. I installed Vista on a virtual machine on a machine which also runs 2000 in a VM. Even with all the bells, whistles, blinkenlights and such turned off Vista was unusable while 2000 just works fine. The VM's were similarly configured except for memory: Vista got more than twice as much as 2000. The actual amounts of memory were 256 MB for 2000, 612 MB (the maximum I had) for Vista. If this is progress than call me a Luddite but I don't want any of it. Vista might have a few features missing from 2000 but who cares?
Running W2K and WXP in VMware (only reason for their survival here is that I sometimes help people solve Windows-problems so performance is not of paramount importance) run reasonably well when given 512 MB and one of the two 466 MHz Celeron processors in the ageing BP6-server.
Vista in the same virtual machine is an absolute dog. Vista with access to both processors is still an absolute dog. It pegs the memory and processors doing absolutely nothing, even with all fancy effects turned off so it should resemble WXP/W2K. Well, it does not.
Is the machine to slow for Vista? Yes, it is. I would accept the fact that it runs slow. I don't see why I should accept the fact that it does not just run slow but runs like Windows XP would run on a 32 MB machine.
The offspring of all this is that I will not be able to help those friends and family with their Vista-problems. Sorry folks. I can recommend some alternatives which run perfectly well on my old machine. They should run even better on anything new you throw them at. Most of them are free to boot (pun intended)...
Hm, I've paid and paid and paid again for driver development but all those companies churn out is drivers for other operating systems. Paying does not seem to help to get drivers written...
...with my original N-Gage when I use it as a book reader. It fits nicely in my hand, with the D-pad above the screen where I can use it to flip the pages. The book reader software takes care of rotating the screen in whatever direction I want i to be...
...but have only done so once after this nonsense of treating visitors as suspects of unknown crimes really got hold. And you know what? When I feel unwelcome I will probably refrain from visiting unless I really have to. That means I will not spend my holidays in the US anymore, something I've done quite a few times before. That means I will have to forgo on visiting some friends who live over there but who knows, they might want to come and visit us here in Sweden instead?
Europe-USA: 1-0
I hope that false feeling of security is worth it for all you USsians. But maybe next time before you go to the poll booth you should read up on what of your founding fathers had to say on the subject of trading liberties for 'security' (quotes are mine).
Oooooh, I developed something like that in my spare time in 1998 when I worked at the Netherlands' biggest telco helping them build services on top of their internet backbone. A database which contained information on known vulnerabilities, exploitable versions of software, exploit traffic, locally installed software, network traffic (from monitoring agents), network architecture and the relevant QoS and security policies. All the information was used to produce router/firewall scripts, upgrade warnings (for locally installed, exploitable software), intrusion warnings according to security policies, violations of the security policies (eg. telnet open on *nix, etc.), performance warnings etc. The information was regularly updated from agents on all local machines. It never got deployed as far as I know but still...
I guess I'm not the only one who made something like this either. It is, well, sort of obvious given the common use of computers and software to automate recurring tasks (eg. configuring firewalls for blocking vulnerabilities). In 'my' case the firewalls/routers could be configured to block traffic only to systems which had exploitable versions installed.
Nice that Microsoft Labs does something similar but it is not really worthy of the term 'research' IMnsHO, more application development.
That depends on where you live and what you do for a living. If you live in a highly litigious country and you make your living doing something which might be cross to Microsoft's purposes they could sue you whether they have grounds to do so or not. You will have to arrange defense in some way, either by taking the effort and spending the time to defend yourself or by paying someone (ie. a lawyer) to do so for you.
Now the likeliness of Microsoft suing an individual for patent infringement is small but what about a small company? Lawsuits are expensive... and can last a long time... possibly longer than that small company can afford...
Have they done so? As far as I know they have not. Is this a guarantee for future beheviour? Of course not.
Oh, but if I were a tourist^Wterrorist I'd just get me a GSM phone which I knew I could change the IMEI on plus a stack of prepaid SIM cards (or a SIM card programmer and a list of IMSI numbers). That way I could use the same phone while making it much more difficult to track me. Unless the operators implement some other tracking method based on individual handset radio 'fingerprints' (similar to Wi-Fi Fingerprints) or something fancy like that of course...
...a program I wrote some 6 years ago for this purpose. It runs on anything that walks, quacks and looks like unix and maybe, just maybe you can get it to run on Windows...
George lives out on Sourceforge and has not been maintained (by me) in many years. It does need some maintenance by now I'm afraid...
Here's the blurb I wrote when I launched the thing:
What's the Problem?
The problem is simple. You just ripped all your CD's, albums, cassette tapes and 8-tracks to MP3 files, and have a stack of blank CD's waiting to be enscribed with the fruits of your labour. All that is left is to organize your files in such a way that albums do not get mixed up. And that artists are sorted, sort of. All the while keeping an eye on available CD-space, which you'd like to use efficiently. You can use one of the myriad of existing CD pre-mastering tools, but these tend to be less efficient for this specific job. What you really want is a tool which can deal with multiple sources and CD's at once, which knows how to select directories non-recursively (without including all subdirectories), which creates `cuesheets' (lists of files to include) for your favourite CD-mastering software. And it had better be free software, since you might like to learn a bit in the process by looking at the code (or teach the author of the program how to write better programs...).
A possible Solution
Presented with the aforementioned problems I sat down to hack up some Perl code to automate much of this process. A few cups of tea later, George was born. It did not have a name then, but it performed its tasks to satisfaction of the owner by scheduling a sizeable amount of CD's out of the scattered MP3-populations on various networked boxen. "Hmmm..." I thought, there's bound to be other people in a similar situation, having their files all around waiting for that `big cleanup' which for some reason gets postponed indefinitely. And since I've got this thing for Free Software, why not polish up this program a bit and release it to the ravenous masses on the 'Net? An since all good software has a name... George was born. There's nothing more to that name than a somewhat corresponding subset of characters, really.
Anatomy of George
* George is written in Perl. Perl works the way I do. It is convoluted, messy and noisy, but it produces results.
* The GUI-endowned version uses the Gnome libraries. And Gnome needs a lot more, like GTK and friends. It also uses the Glade-Perl extension, since this saves me from a lot of repetitive work. If you don't know Glade and you (intersted in) programming for GTK, try it. It is an interface builder for GTK (and Gnome) which allows you to cobble together an interface in a few minutes. And Glade-Perl in turn depends on GTK-Perl, also commonly known as gnome-perl (in the Gnome CVS repository) or perl-GTK. Get the latest version and save yourself some headaches...
* George is probably `Unix-only' (where the term 'Unix' is used for everything which looks, quacks and walks like a Unix. Linux is fine, so is FreeBSD or OpenBSD or Solaris). The command line version might work on Win32 (with some working version of Perl) as well. If I feel so inclined, I'll even combine both versions in one program (whee... something I should have done in the first place but remember, this was a simple hack...).
* George does not do its own premastering, nor does it directly control the CD-writer. For these purposes it relies on mkisofs and cdrecord. You can probably also use mkhybrid to create Mac CD's, but for lack of a Mac I hve not tried this. If you try this, you'll need to add some mkhybrid-specific flags to the preferences hash in George. You'll have to know some Perl to do that.
* George is licensed under the Gnu Public License. That means that George is what is called `Free Software'. You c
Of course there are only so many names you can construct using a given language, but given that Palm has been marketing a LiveDrive for some time now that name sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Almost every time I order something from the US to be delivered to Sweden or the Netherlands I have to battle the seller to send the goods through USPS instead of UPS. Given my experience with UPS - they managed to damage an oscilloscope beyond repair, the shipping box was almost round when it arrived - and their exorbitant prices I will not do any business with them anymore. USPS on the other hand has always worked flawlessly and the packages can get delivered to my doorstep here in rural Sweden (UPS makes me go and get them at their depot). So, no USPS automatically means no deal as far as I'm concerned.