Aquarionics

Creative Commons.

So, in summery, then. The SFWA, who are a guild of writers, saw that the annoying-yet-apparently-popular site Scribd was hosting a large number of eBooks of works by its members which are still under copyright.

They compiled a list of offending articles, constructed – by looking at the list – by searching for famous authors – Asimov, as an example – and listing all of those.

Unsurprisingly, this took out some innocent texts, like various lists such as “These authors write good scifi, read them”.one of which was Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom”, which he released under a Creative Commons Licence and is therefore miffed it’s been shot down, and is kicking up a major fuss about the entire thing.

The problem is that there are two worlds.

In Doctorow’s world, which I share to a large extent, you give away your wares for free, and if people like it they will give you money. Also, they will give you money for better quality versions, like a real book. You make money over the long term because the people who can’t afford to pay lots are balanced out by the people who can, and therefore do.

In the SFWA world, if you give something away for free, you don’t get any money for it. Also, that person won’t need to buy the physical copy, and so you actually lose a sale. This position assumes that any “honour” style payment system is flawed, because most people don’t demonstrate any.

The BoingBoing article is entirely factually correct. It misses out the bit that the takedown list is of thousands, but only three innocent books have been positively identified so far. The major problem is that the DMCA is a blunt instrument, designed so that corporations can get actual pirate material off the net ASAP without faffing around with lawyers. The major downside of this is that it means there isn’t any incentive to be very careful any blanket notices, as there isn’t any legal penalty for doing so. The only way to convince the corporations – which the SFWA count as in this instance – is by making sure that mistakes on the lists result in a PR disaster.

Addendum: As Cory points out in the comments, and as is further explained in something I linked to in the next article, the number of ‘Overenthusiastic’ items on the list is far greater than 3. As Ben points out, lying in the DMCA takedown notice is perjury, although there hasn’t been a complete legal stand for that quite yet.

But the writers – some of whom authorised the SFWA to do this – deserve to make their own decision on the whole “Giving my stuff away for free” issue, and for those who want people to have to buy the books to read the stories – which is 99.9% of them – it is entirely justified for them to want places like Scribd to come down like a ton of bricks on people who blatantly abuse the copyright.

We’ve just got to make sure innocent people don’t get caught in the crossfire.

Heisenbugs are bugs that vanish when you turn debugging on.

Schrodinbugs are bugs that don’t manifest until you read the code and realize they could never possibly have worked, whereupon they don’t. These are impossible, yet happen despite this.

Vizzinibugs are the single most common type of user interface bug. They are when the user follows an action path inconceivable to the original programmer. These include things like “What do you mean ‘Esc’ isn’t part of ‘Press Any Key To Continue’”, “I always fill out the password field first”, “I put in October in the ‘From’, and March in the ‘To’ so they’d come back in the opposite order” and the all-time classic, “But what if I want to put commas in my titles?”.

Okay, not an all-time classic, but one bug that Epistula doesn’t have anymore. I’m not sure why anyone would want commas in titles, but there you go. Vizzinibugs are such not because they are inherantly stupid requests, but more that the programmer just didn’t even conceive someone might do that.

But my favourite Vizzinibug of all time was actually my fault. It was in a piece of software for a company I worked for ages ago which, as part of the signup form, requested the date of birth for the customer. It was part of a batch of changes, so I duped another column, built some Crazy drop-downs to input it & change it, take the result, format it and dump it into the date column in the database. So far, so hoopy.

I tested it. Over the next couple of months my coworker tested it, the line manager of our traditional-webdev no-person-over-35 team tested it, the young, hoopy client tested it and ran though the whole thing, and it went into internal beta, all were happy.

A little while later, we started getting back some reports. Apparently some people couldn’t get the thing to save their birthday. The young, hoopy client tested it, and couldn’t reproduce it. My line manager couldn’t reproduce it. Neither could me or my coworker.

Humm.

Okay, could you send us the user id of an affected user please? Meantime marked as WTF.

From us to manager to client contact to users to contact to manager to us, and we had an example. Time to go database diving…

… This user has a birthday set. Oh, that’s a coincidence, it’s January 1st 19… oh. Nineteen seventy.

January the first 1970 is an important date in the Unix world. It’s zero. The Unix Epoch time format is defined, in fact, as seconds since then, and quite a few things work in it. My dropdowns didn’t. The database didn’t. But the functions to format the dropdown results and make sure they were a valid date, and not allow the 31st Feb?

Yeah.

Clicky, Clicky, Fix.

The thing is every person who tested it, from us right to the client, used their own birthday. And since not a single person had a birthday before 1970 – one person was _in_ 1970, but didn’t trigger it – we entirely missed the problem. One of those things that makes you look twice at data validation things, really.

And testing, of course.

Originally, The Plain White T’s, whose preferred punctuation upsets me, released a simple and catchy song called Hey There Delilah

Of course, writing a simple song that sounds like you’re stalking someone which mostly requires a guitar is just asking for someone to parody it, so:

Via ElevenWords we have Hey There Delilah

and via The Fump comes Robert Lund’s better parody Re: Your Song About My Client Delilah.

Do you know what never get old?

Reflections.

I accidentally bought a new camera today, and one of my resolutions since I did so is to take more photos, which seems like a good reason to bring the gallery back into the main site. For those of you not long term readers, or had forgotten, the “Pictures” link didn’t used to go to my Flickr account, but instead to AqCom’s very own Gallery system which was created, and then had stuff bolted on to the end of it, and then began to get to the point where making fixes meant a day of broken things. So I abandoned it a bit. Flickr is a far better photo management system anyway (So long as I keep all the originals) and has the community stuff as well. The best of both worlds would be, then, for a page on this site to reflect my latest exploits in the world of Flickr.

This is NewGallery, which contains not only the most recent photos, but a list of my flickr photosets (See the icons on those? you have absolutely no idea how long it took me to make that work, and it’s still not perfect. Playing with GD is fun, it really is).

And because of the way the Epistula Development Environment is funded, the code’s already online