Technophile Monkey

Roman Haefeli and band recorded a short Ubuntu song yesterday.

They lyrics are simple, so sing along: “Ubuntu – no Windows” Well, you gotta get the timing right as well, which might be harder.

This weekend I joined the Pirate Party Switzerland. I feel that the pirate parties of the world best represent my political interests as a digital citizen. Some of the green or green-liberal parties in Switzerland also have a reasonable technical agenda, but I think what they lack a bit is know-how. The Pirate Party is full of geeks like you and I, we can do something about the short-sightedness of tech decisions by the other parties.

Some of the core ideas that I believe this party will add to the political playing field:

• Stop Big Content and the Copyright Mafia from taking away even more of people’s rights. Big Content has been crying like a sissy ever since digital copying became possible. Instead of realizing that their business model is outdated, they used their massive lobbying power to influence and bribe politicians into cutting further into people’s rights, all in the name of holy entertainment profit. Even though their claims of losses due to “piracy” are based on a calculation that doesn’t make sense (they assume that each copied work represents one lost sale, which is nonsense), they seem to receive more laws the louder they trumpet these numbers. This has to stop.

  The games industry is facing a similar transition (no more games sold in boxes in a store, things are moving all digital now), but the games industry has foreseen the trend and is adapting its business model. Why should the governments of the world change laws just because the content industry was too stupid to react in time?

• Support a totally transparent government. We need to know about politicians’ conflicts of interest, we need to know government people’s wages, we need to see exactly how a decision was ignited, how it was changed and by whom and how it is put into place. The Pirate Party can not only supply ideas and start motions in this direction, but its members can also serve as technology counsellors to make this possible.
• Fight the erosion of privacy. Governments and corporations are increasingly removing people’s privacy. CCTV/camera systems, biometric passports, easily trackable RFID tags, genetic fingerprint databases. Read a bunch of science-fiction books to see where this could be leading us. But governments aren’t the only ones to blame, with people cheerfully surrendering their most private details to companies like Facebook, Inc. Laws need to be in place to severely punish abuse of personal data. Any activities by the government that would lead to even further loss of privacy, without any clear benefit, need to be opposed. The terrorism craze has made people gullible and blindly accept giving up privacy in the name of “fighting terrorism”, but people don’t stop to think about whether the laws imposed on them actually work in this way.
• Oppose patents and monopolies. Microsoft’s OS dominance isn’t the only globally harmful monopoly that is in place right now. Software patents pose a threat that we can’t even estimate at this time. Monopolies must be reduced, patents must be reexamined.
• New copyright laws. The developments of the last ten years have shown that current copyright laws are completely inadequate to deal with humans’ ways of treating copyrighted works. Sharing (for non-commercial purposes) of copyrighted material must be as legal as it used to be, or even more. DRM systems and region coding, which gives content producers artificial muscle to discriminate against certain areas of the world, must be forbidden by law.
• Violence in media must be discussed, not forbidden in a blind panic. Violent video games are not satan. Violent films and books have been around for hundreds of years before these video games appeared, yet overall violence in society has decreased. The current witch hunt against “killer games” is nonsense. Instead, we need to sit down and talk about a reasonable approach and solutions to violence in media, and we need to work on systems to find out why people feel so mistreated by the current school system or by their work environments that the only solution they see is to kill others and end their own lives. We need to treat this problem at its root. Most politicians’ strategies around violence in media have all the grace of a panicked chicken.
• Open standards. Because closed ones are none.

If you’re curious about these and other issues on the Pirate Party’s agenda, please see our Parteiprogramm on the Pirate Party wiki. It’s also available in French, but not in English, unfortunately.

I believe the Pirate Party brings a perspective to politics that has been woefully underrepresented so far and that none of the other parties can cover adequately, because it’s outside of their focus.

Yaarrrrr!

Update: If you want to join a Pirate Party in your own country, see the list at Pirate Party International.

Even though I read most of my blogs in an RSS reader and never even see the page, I updated my own with a new theme

No need to like it! Some requirements were: em units for fonts (for good scalability), liquid content area and the words are the most important thing. That’s why they’re the biggest thing on the page. Nothing should disturb the reader while reading the article. Even the post metadata (author etc.) is nearly invisible until hovered over.

Also, slightly new color theme. You don’t have to like that either, although that’s easier to change and I’m happy about color recommendations!

As usual, grab the source and fiddle with it if you like. URL is in the page source.

On the off chance that anyone reads this, I need to find a little more time for real-life things and I’ll be very busy until about the end of 2010. So I thought I’d cut down on the blogging a little. That means this blog and the one at FSFE won’t get much love anymore.

If you’re really interested, I will have time to write short things on Twitter and identi.ca:

http://twitter.com/psyq123
http://identi.ca/psyq123

identi.ca is more for the geeky topics (Free Software etc.), Twitter more for my gaming habits. All dents (from identi.ca) get tweeted as well.

Don’t you love this newfangled net vocabulary? Radical!

See you in 2011 or so!

I’m planning to write a PC configuration manager for an online shopping system, but I can’t decide between adding my own module to a PHP-based shopping system and writing a standalone app in Rails.

It’s the horror. Let’s see:

If I write a module in PHP…

• I have to deal with a frankly idiotic plug-in architecture and the mess of spaghetti code that is (insert well-known Free Software e-commerce system here).
• I get multilingual product descriptions for free, but don’t know how they’re implemented in plug-ins yet.
• I have to write PHP. Yes, this isn’t that bad anymore, but ever since I had to learn Java I’m really fed up with languages that have a C-style syntax, which PHP has.
• I may have to write some utility functions myself that I take for granted in Rails (linking around between controllers etc.)
• The thing would run on any installation of (popular Free Software e-commerce system), it would be easy to deploy even on cheapo hosting plans that don’t have Rails.

If I write my own in Rails…

• No C style. Less braces. Funky Ruby constructs. Collections. ActiveRecord. Rails helper functions. Nice file layout. Yum!
• I accomplish more per line of code.
• I have a reason to dig deeper into current Rails, since my Rails knowledge is about four years old now.
• I would ignore the body of work already done in (insert ugly PHP-based e-commerce solution here).
• Deployment would require a Rails hosting plan.
• I would eventually have to extend this to be a full e-commerce system, but for my limited feature set, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal to do this.

If I list these points, it seems that I really, really want to do things in Rails, but somehow in my heart I’m not quite sure. I’m split 50/50 between both solutions, no matter how rationally I try to look at them.

Bah. Dilemmas.

Edit: I just discovered Spree, a framework for e-commerce on top of Rails. This seems great, especially since it’s a gem, not something that uses Rails Engines. Maybe I can kickstart development using that.

Edit 2: I talked to the Spree guys, read a lot of their documentation and had a look at the code. This is a really cool project with lots of potential! For now I just contributed a locale for Switzerland (in German), but I’m seriously looking at migrating my store to Spree and perhaps help with the features that are necessary for a PC configuration system inside it.

Woohoo

Rivella, the traditional Swiss drinks manufacturer that makes soft drinks based on milk serum, has the same kind of competition entry codes on their bottles as other drinks manufacturers like Coca Cola. But they don’t seem to filter their codes for nasty words, that’s why my girlfriend was told to AJAGFUCK by a drink bottle:

Thumbs up from me!

Maybe you remember that back in March, I ordered broadband and phone service from Cablecom after all other phone/broadband carriers gave up and said they couldn’t manage to hook me up on time.

Just to give you an update: Cablecom managed! Right on time, on the first workday after May 1, a little package from Cablecom arrived containing a miniature cable modem with Ethernet, USB and two phone connectors. I hooked it up in the new apartment, and boom, it connected and worked immediately. Speeds are exactly as advertises, 10 MBit/s down and 1 MBit/s up. I couldn’t be happier. Proves that sometimes you should root for the underdog.

My girlfriend was baking easter bunnies, but I wanted an easter octopus. Or even better, a Cthulhu. Look at him! Isn’t he cute with his widdle shawl for when the cold times come?

With lactose free butter of course.

Wow. What a colossal disappointment. And it’s not what you expect, if you’ve only read the title.

I did some calculations and found out that for my Internet and phone needs, the cheapest possible combination is Sunrise Free Internet (5000/500 DSL) and Sunrise fixed line phone: CHF 30/month if combined with a mobile contract, such as Sunrise flat classic. This would put me at CHF 60.00/month. Add 7.50/month and you get 250 MB of mobile 3G Internet use — perfect! To compare: A similar offer at Swisscom is at least 109.25/month, but they give you no rebate at all for a bundle deal and charge you 49.00 setup fees for the line. Plus, their mobile prices are a lot worse.

Of course I can trick a bit by signing up through my employer, which puts Swisscom at 91.25. Still 23.75 more than with Sunrise.

Anyway. I really hyped myself for Sunrise, emitting little bleeps of joy on my way home. So I marched into the Sunrise store in Zürich main station and proudly announced that I’m their bitch, and to please sign me up for Free Internet plus mobile plus the 250 MB 3G data deal. I wanted to sign up early so that when I move into my new place on May 1, my ADSL is already there.

But none of this is possible. Can I take my home phone number with me? Sorry, no can do. Well, then give me a new one. That takes six to eight weeks too? Oh. Can I take my mobile number? Certainly not. And you’re saying that there’s no way my DSL will be installed by May 1 (think July instead). So I can’t keep any of my numbers and will have no Internet connection for over a month, plus signing up early does nothing to help the situation. Thanks a lot.

Seeing that none of the things that are supposed to work (number portability, unbundled last mile for ADSL, unbundled phone products…) actually work in Switzerland, I went home and cried a bit. But there is hope! There’s one competitor that many Swiss people forget. Cablecom.

No one likes Cablecom, but they seem to be able to do all of the above. They will transfer my home number and they’ll make sure I have Internet access on May 1. So I ordered a 10000/1000 line, with phone, for 69.00/month. The first 4 months are completely free, that’s how desperate they are. For mobile, I’ll go with my 17/month contract from work that gives me 250 MB mobile data. 86.00 is not quite 69.00, but my cable is twice as fast and they throw in flatrate calling to landlines as free bonus.

That’s how I became the man who ordered from Cablecom, in a world where no man orders from Cablecom.

Will they manage? Watch this space.

Edit: They managed! Right on time, on the first workday after May 1, a little package from Cablecom arrived containing a miniature cable modem with Ethernet, USB and two phone connectors. I hooked it up in the new apartment, and boom, it connected and worked immediately. Speeds are exactly as advertises, 10 MBit/s down and 1 MBit/s up. I couldn’t be happier. Proves that sometimes you should root for the underdog.

I will be giving a short-ish (1 – 1.5 hours) presentation and a workshop about text-based gaming at the Open Saturday Switzerland this Saturday.

I’ve rambled on and on about this topic before, but I think it doesn’t convince anyone if it’s just given in text. Which is weird. So I’m going to give people a small intro into roleplaying game mechanics theory (it’s even more boring than it sounds!) and then foam out of my mouth in front of a 2 x 1.5 meter MUD client display.

There will be live workshops after the presentation where we sort of play a MUD together or drink mead from hollowed-out animal horns and yell “’tis so” and “for sooth” from time to time, like proper medieval dual-wielding rangers did.

If you want to witness any of that (or just have a beer on the house), come to the Silhquai 131, the rooms of the Vertiefung Mediale Künste of the Zürich University of the Arts in Zürich on Saturday, 14th of February. Doors open at 14h, presentations start at 15h and you can bring your own laptop and typing skills if you want to try the stuff.

The presentation is in Swiss-German unless the majority of the audience objects. All games shown are Free Software or at least free.