Aquarionics

• Random gird of LJ Icons
• The AntiWikipedia
• Boots Catalogue Doh
• Think of the children
• Blunket has problems with trial by jury
• Matt Jones forced to take down interesting article
• The Helix Loaded
• The Digital Archive Project
• Self-evidenct security
• The Instruction Manual Archive
• Net::NNTP
• Didn’t think this through
• Games & Puzzles

• A whole new world of rating systems.

  Some of these might have been from Slashdot, except:
  
  Hmm

Nothing to see here. Move along

Today, I’m going to take a minute out of my working day and rant at you about software development.

I work for a company that does Cool Things With Data. That’s all you know, that’s all I’ll tell you. When we are looking for testers, I shall mention what it is, and you can all go “oooh”.

One of the things I’ve done in this is created the method by which RSS data is put into the program (Our automated statistics are generated into RSS, because I was fairly sure it would be easy to get it out again). Now I want to get it out again, so I’m going to have to write an RSS-Reading Thingy.

This is not my desire. The last thing I want to spend x amount of my life doing is writing RSS parsers. Far better minds than mine have spent ages on the problem of parsing the amount of really, truely horrible things that people do with RSS, and they have released these things.

The best and most respected that has been released in PHP, which is the environment I’m doing this in, is Magpie RSS, which you give a URL and it gives you an object containing data. So far, so hoopy. I installed it, integrated it, loved it and forgot about it.

Now we come to Second Stage stuff, and I’m looking at the licences of the bits we’re using. The sections we grabbed from Epistula are fine, because they’re BSD licenced. Magpie isn’t, because it’s GPL, and the GPL specifically states that I can’t include a GPL library if my code isn’t going to be GPL’d.

It isn’t. Not because of any “We want to trap our users” stuff, but simply because out continued existance of a company involves people paying us for our services. With this money, they can pay me. With this payment, I can write more software. And eat. And buy broadband. And spend my weekends making free software. And I realise that in the ivory tower of the Free Software Movement it doesn’t matter, because All Non-Free Software Is Evil.

Out of interest, any Free Software Zealots in the audience know how we programmers are supposed to earn our food?

This shouldn’t matter. This is Politics, and I don’t care that ESR supports Baring Arms, nor which direction Linus voted last election, nor what RMS thinks of his country’s economic prospects.

What I care about, as a user and a developer, is that I am currently unable to use the best tool for the job because of the politics of making something free.

So, the next time you decide you want to release under a free licence, remember there are other licences than the GPL that even Debian likes.

And now, Back to XML parsing. Yay.

It’s been an Interesting Week on Planet Aquarion. The big news is that my SO is – finally – in permenant work after over a year of searching. The bad news – from my point of view – is that it’s in Letchworth, about half an hour north of London. We are in Reading, about a half an hour west of London. Going across London is about a half hour, and, generally, it’s too far to commute. So LoneCat is living with her Grandparents near Letchworth, and we are planning to move again.

We’ve only lived here six months, and we’re now moving back to almost where we moved from. Great.

My current plans involve a certian paranoia in not, under any circumstances, allowing what happened last time to happen this time too. Last time we moved out of Cambridge on 1^st April. We finally moved into Reading in mid-May. A month and a half sleeping on sofas with 90% of my belongings in storage was unpleasant, and I have no intention of doing it again. The other down side is that this house requires 60 days notice on moving out, as opposed to the 30 days the previous house required, which means even if we move out tomorrow (unlikely) we will still be paying rent until the end of January. (Probably. I may have a way around this).

On top of all this, our Letting Agents decided not to honour LC’s letter of intent from Reading Council to pay her housing benefit (It was delayed by 12 weeks by the time it was delivered last week) by sending us a letter stating this fact, and then a week later with an eviction notice. This was also sorted.

Last friday was the final deadline for the first version of my project at work. I dislike 12 hour days, but when I was unable to go into work on the Thursday because I was too ill, I didn’t get much choice.

Oh, and apparently it’s nearly christmas. Yay.

But yesterday I went to Cambridge and met people, and played fun games, and saw LoneCat, and this was Good.

Now, everyone should watch University Challange tonight (BBC2, 8.30) because my friend is on it (Warner, Caius).

And Ccooke and Ruthi are engaged. Congratulations :-)

Content soonish. Promise.

If music be the food of love, here we have sprouts marinated in marmite.

I present, for your delectation and possible fear, The video of Lenoard Nimoy’s classic single: ‘The Ballard of Bilbo Baggins’

(Requires Quicktime)