People tell me my Slashdot comments are repetitive. I'd appreciate some hints as to how to be less repetitive.

Sometimes it looks like I'm reminding other users of an unsolved problem, but the problem has in fact been solved. Perhaps the real problem is that the solution hasn't been well publicized. For example, one solution to a lot of problems with home entertainment is to put a PC in the living room, but almost nobody knows about this.

If it looks like I'm reminding other users of an edge case too often, consider that a solution that covers more edge cases will appear better thought out and more robust than a solution that covers only the common cases and leaves the edge cases unnoticed.

And sometimes I get confused as to which is the common case and which is the edge case. For example, h4rr4r has pointed out that whenever someone brings up Netflix as an alternative to cable television, I often bring up the fact that Netflix lacks sports. I try to phrase it like "Netflix is fine for people who aren't into sports", recognizing that both non-sports-fan and sports-fan markets exist but apparently putting undue emphasis on the sports-fan market. This goes back to discussions that I've had with heads of household in my survey sample. They tell me they don't see how Netflix would be worth an extra $7.99 per month on top of what they already pay for TV. So I try to make room for Netflix in their budget by suggesting how much they could save by switching from cable Internet+cable TV or fiber Internet+satellite TV to their current Internet+Netflix, and then they mention sports. I guess the survey sample of households in my extended family with broadband access must be a biased sample with more sports fans than the general population, and thus I have a biased view of the relative size of the sports-fan and non-sports-fan markets.

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For the last couple of months I have been working on a secret project which involved using liqbase to create an interactive controller on the new Nokia N900 which was used at last weeks onedotzero adventures in motion festival.
This involved getting to know the device and its capabilities and making sure we were able to give the best experience possible.

Its been quite a ride and together with the guys at Nokia, Weiden & Kennedy and Karsten Schmidt from Postspectacular we pulled off an impressive digital feat!
The Identity is an incredible ultra widescreen 3d message with flowing ribbons of text taken from tweets and messages and can be manipulated and controlled by the N900 device. It was a sight to behold everyone who played with it did so with a massive smile on their faces!
The onedotzero festival is a collaborative coming together of creatives, digital artists, executives and technical folks and hope the connections everybody made will continue far into the future.
This installation took place at the BFI on Londons Southbank and will continue now on its tour around the world, hopefully evolving and growing in strength.
The Nokia device performed flawlessly, allowing the public to smoothly control Karstens vision and everyone left everyone with a smile on their faces!

Amongst the excitement and buzz there was a more humble symbolic achievement, this onedotzero application the first liqbase application to reach 1.0 status. Those following my work will realise how proud I am of this moment :)

There were exciting new applications discovered and different inventive ways of working which the Nokia N900 device will allow us to achieve.
I came away excited about the future and hope the connections we made will expand and prove fruitful in the future.

Whilst at the festival, Nokia also unveiled a new initiative called the Nokia Push N900.
A bunch of hardware hackers from tinker.it were given a brief of making inventive applications using the Nokia N900 device and the team did not disappoint coming up with some cool hacks - from a speak and spell which sent text messages, to a view master 3d and even an old school radio and a rolodex linked to the local contacts on the device - they looked like they had a great time creating these examples, but that is only the start - they want YOUR ideas for inventive hacks and if chosen, the best will be displayed in flagship Nokia stores around the world, so hardware hackers - get involved and make a proposal!

Video overview here:
http://maemo.nokia.com/videos/

Photos from the amazing 3d identity software Karsten created:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/toxi/sets/72157620899002878/

onedotzero info, find out whether it will be coming to a city near you
http://www.onedotzero.com/home.php

liqbase information:
http://liqbase.net

I've received at least three, now four replies to my current Slashdot signature:

USA already has other public options: public schools and USPS Priority Mail over private schools and UPS 3 Day Select.

My signature points out that the United States has a history of public and private sectors competing in a given sector. For example, an engineering student in Indiana can go to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (private), or she can go to Purdue University (public). An online hobby store can ship packages to customers with United Parcel Service (private), or it can ship them with United States Postal Service (semipublic, funded by an exclusive contract with the US Government for mailing letters).

As of the third quarter of 2009, health insurance for United States residents under age 65 is mostly provided by employers, who make insurance available to their employees. But not all employers are large enough to qualify for group insurance plans, and some employers even restrict employees to part-time hours so that they don't have to offer coverage. Some insurers offer individual plans, but these are known for refusing to cover people with any of several sorts of preexisting conditions. Estimates of the number of documented U.S. residents without health insurance range from 8 million to 47 million.

The legislature of the United States, called the Congress, has recognized that the lack of universal coverage is holding America back compared to other highly-developed countries. Its members have been debating whether to form a public health insurer to compete with private insurers; this hypothetical insurer has been nicknamed "Public Option" or "Obamacare" in the news media. Some more fiscally conservative members of the Congress argue that any public option would distort the market, and people would leave their current plans and end up on Obamacare. Yes, some people will switch from their current insurer to Obamacare, but that's to be expected: people switched from UPS 3-Day Select when USPS introduced flat-rate shipping boxes.

And the so-called "death panel" is actually called iMac.

Discussion forked from here:

The elements of copying are access and similarity. The plaintiff shows some similarity between the works. Then the plaintiff shows that the defendant should reasonably have had access to the work because the work was on the pop charts. This creates a rebuttable presumption of copying. My question: how would one rebut this presumption?

CheapBytes distributes copies of free operating systems for a fee.

What's the difference between an FTP mirror and an HTTP mirror in this case?

Google failed me on SUP, but it found Background Intelligent Transfer Service. That uses only 20 percent of bandwidth anyway, and the article is about throttling to 33 percent (or, alternatively, letting HTTP burst to 300 percent).

Any encoder for MPEG-4 Part 2 violates U.S. patents if not licensed by MPEG-LA, and as I understand it, MPEG-LA's standard license terms are incompatible with the four freedoms that define free software.

Yes, the ISP is trying to do so.

I have played at least three Nintendo DS games over Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. Animal Crossing: Wild World copies the map from the server to any client that joins, but that's only 88 KB of data.

In this discussion, godrik and I were discussing the relative merits of web applications that use AJAX techniques compared to local applications. I brought up the advantage that web apps can run even on machines where the user isn't allowed to install new software, such as someone else's PC, a set-top web terminal, or a video game console.

Godrik countered that he'd never buy a machine that didn't let its owner install software, and that when he wanted a console to play games on, he bought a Wii and jailbroke it using Bannerbomb. He mentioned plenty of established PC titles that have been ported to libogc, the library used by Wii homebrew: source ports of Id Software's Doom and Quake, emulators such as FCE Ultra, ScummVM, and VisualBoyAdvance, and various Linux-original games that had been ported to about everything, such as SuperTux. These games had presumably recouped their costs of production entirely on the PC.

In general, there are four routes to being able to run code on a closed platform:

1. Make a web application that runs in the console's web browser. These browsers are usually severely limited in performance and in how much of the system's capability the browser exposes through the DOM. Some can't even read more than one gamepad at once, and they're impractical for playing handheld games away from Wi-Fi coverage.
2. Make a pay-per-download game and sell it through the console maker's online store. This is cost prohibitive due to various artificial overheads imposed by console makers such as Nintendo, such as the requirements of a separate office and a prior commercial title on another platform.
3. Make a native game that ships on a retail game disc. This is even more cost prohibitive than download.
4. Make a "homebrew" game that relies on a jailbreak. This is the solution that godrik appears to prefer, but it has problems.

First, jailbreaks break the console's warranty or worse. There are anecdotal reports that Nintendo charges more for out-of-warranty service, such as disc drive replacement after the first 12 months, if a jailbreak is detected than if not.

Second, Nintendo can break Bannerbomb at any time by fixing the defect in a new version of the Wii Menu and IOS. Nintendo would install the fix on newly manufactured consoles and require an update before people can connect to Wii Shop Channel (workaround: WiiSCU) or start newly manufactured Game Discs normally (workaround: Gecko 1.8+). It could take weeks for a new sploit to be developed and released on sites such as WiiBrew, just as it took weeks from Wii Menu 4.0 to Bannerbomb.

But finally, the homebrew community frowns on charging for anything, especially the jailbreaks (Twilight Hack, Bannerbomb) and the launchers (BootMii, Homebrew Channel). That doesn't look good for somebody who wants to feed his family but isn't rich enough to afford the overhead of a license to develop on a closed platform, or even someone who just wants a little economic incentive not to abandon his projects.

One could develop for an open platform such as the PC, but as I mentioned in my last journal entry, not all genres fit well on such a personal computer. For example, a developer might want to make a social game designed to be played with gamepads, a big screen, a sofa, and three friends, such as Nintendo's Mario Party series or Super Smash Bros. series. But four adults can't easily fit around a PC's comparatively small monitor, and a lot of PC gamers seem to be keyboard-and-mouse fanboys who would make other players take turns if they're not old enough to work and buy their own PCs and their own copies of the game. One could go the "home theater PC" route, running gamepads through a USB hub and a VGA or DVI-to-HDMI cable to an HDTV, but two-thirds of U.S. households still have an SDTV in the living room, most PCs don't come with an S-Video output, and the PC to TV adapter isn't sold in stores. Likewise, music games with key sounds, such as Beatmania and Guitar Hero, can feel unresponsive on PC sound cards with their much higher audio latency.

But then, godrik wasn't referring to free as in free beer but instead to Free as in free speech. One way an author can rely on Free is to make the game a massively multiplayer online game based on subscriptions or micropayments. This has its drawbacks: more complexity, requirement for lag-tolerant game play design, cost of administering the game server, need for a separate PC per player, generally no opportunity for children to play due to COPPA and foreign counterparts, failure to reach people who regularly game away from a reliable Internet connection (such as laptop users or people living in the country), and the fact that a lot of people prefer to buy rather than effectively rent their games.

Another way is to make the game engine Free but to charge for the data files, much like Doom and Quake after their GPL release. But are there any success stories of shipping a retail or pay-per-download game whose engine is free software from day one?

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since starting liqbase one of the most important aspects for me is how my Nokia device feels when using it.
I am pleased to say it feels good!

the entire liqbase playground is shaping up even better than I could imagine and everything I am attempting to achieve is slotting into place.

I have now restored the core mechanics into the system and everything flows as before, but now with the framework operating at peak efficiency I can take a step backwards and admire the bigger picture:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt7qB37sLLo

I can now draw again and I have an awesome calendar and image viewer. theres also an extremely friendly tagcloud system which is simply a joy to use. the zooming works exactly like I thought it would, obviously work will continue and I will have all original functionality and more in the release.

A tremendous search capability has emerged with a natural organic layout bringing different components together which will literally blow your mind!

I still have lots to do, but I am getting help now from numerous quarters.

zach has just started his google summer of code residency and has begun creating his network monitor skeleton and is helping document the framework.
kot is constantly reminding me about linux in general and how stupid I am for putting fixed paths in the app :p
keesj has started to publicly track the .git and is looking at the packaging and how to actually bring liqbase into a more standard debian layout.

the encouragement I receive from all quarters lets me know I am doing the right thing :)

its gaining stability and strength now, I can see more of what I would like to do with it. :)

Last week (23rd April) I arrived in Finland to visit Nokia.
I spent a full day with the Maemo team and some of the Fremantle stars participants we were leaving the building when an accident occured.

I got to the large all glass front doors at the entrance to the building.
They had a very small handle on them.
I pushed on one of them and found it to be locked
so I pressed the button just below the handle thinking it was an unlock.
when I reached back up and put my hand through the handle it started to move outwards.
it sliced the end of my finger open - like opening a banana.
my bone was exposed and the finger nail is destroyed and skin around it torn.

After running outside (the door was open now) and jumping around and yelping in pain the Nokia guys and other members of my party were looking at me wondering what had happened.
It was only when I turned round that they noticed something serious had happened - a CSI'esq spurt of blood went up and across my face.

I got to the hospital and had many stitches to get my finger back together.

Every single person who has heard has been mortified and Nokia have to date done everything possible to help me and to prevent this kind of injury occuring again.

I want to give a big thank you to Jussi and to the ambulance drivers and the doctors and nurses in the hospital and also to the hotel receptionist who upon hearing apologised as if it was her personal fault.

Since the accident the door handles have been taped off then removed, every employee in the building has been notified of an incident, the doors are being redesigned and warning signs placed onto every automatic door.

it is with a certain sense of irony that i say I am helping nokia ovi to become finger friendly :)

xray image: http://liqbase.net/fingerfriendly.jpg

Now I am just about to have my stitches out, I have had the most painful week of my life to date.
As a software developer working with touch devices I find my fingers are most important.

Since arriving home, a lot of people have asked me why haven't I sued Nokia for pain and negligence.

My initial answer was because I am not American, I am British and I have a stiff upper lip.
But it goes beyond that - I don't need to sue anybody, my experiences to date have been that Nokia are an honourable company and will do the right thing anyway.

I might have considered it had there been no reaction to my injury, but I have seen the cogs of a corporate machine work quickly and effectively to take care of a problem they didn't think they had. As the event has gone through I have heard about events and notifications effecting the building as a whole and people from different departments working together to find a permanent solution to the problem. I am certain once it gets high enough an official apology and further recompense will be made.

That doesn't take my pain away though, I have a poignant reminder of my time in Helsinki and when I return I will just beware of the doors.

liqbase is my vision for a usable touchscreen interface.
over the last 9 months it has started to take shape into a really comfortable home for all my (and yours too soon!) applications.

During the last couple of months I've had my head down coding towards curing the hacks and making liqbase into a polished nice framework for all the applications I want to write for my nokia tablet.

I have split the code into 3 main pieces and created a library of the core graphics elements and a host applciation containing the ui manager.
The third part is dynamically installable compiled application widgets and dialogs.

I can create and use entirely new items quickly and easily and try out ideas without having to even think about the core library or ui application.

A new video has been placed on youtube showing my progress.
Its by no means finished but its taking shape nicely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMXp0Dg_UaY

I have started to bring in the current applications and will be creating new ones (i need that camera..) and we will have a playground that will make us all smile soon enough :)

it was exactly 12 months to the day since my nokia internet tablet arrived.

I've started to bring together the ideas and principles I've thought about for many years into a cohesive and compelling touch based framework.

I'm coding in C again! Its so different to the visual basic I've spent the last few years using, but its kept my mind sharp by having to think in extremely optimized units.

Best of all this year I've made loads of new friends and been to new places and I've learnt about all the cool things we can do in linux and talked about everything we want to do in the future.

What a year its been!

I'm really looking forward to the Christmas break to get some time to spend on liqbase, theres a lot to do but the classes are gelling together nicely.

Merry Christmas everybody, hope you are safe.

Should I be worried about software patents?

I have thought about touch screen user interaction for a long time now, and have written numerous visualizations and interactive controls over the years.

I have a kickass collection of functions and algorithms for all areas of the system but I have never specialized in one specific place.
This year I have started to open my source and release these little ideas and have sent coded up implementations into the wild.

Some of the code is novel, some of it is mundane, other pieces are just weird but give a pretty effect :)
I've found a nice home within the nokia maemo linux community and my software has been well received amongst its members and beyond.

I bet somewhere I've stepped on somebodies toes and have their patented algorithm in my code.
In reading up about them this evening I find out that the chances are, if you have done anything more than hello world you will have too!

How would I find out what patents I have in my code?

Should I be checking every single function I write against the central registry?