Canadian Copyright

It looks like the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in Canada is plan­ning on chan­ging the copy­right law. If you’re con­cerned about the issue of copy­right, and par­tic­u­larly if you’re liv­ing in Canada and want to do some­thing about this issue, read the details on Michael Geist’s blog. He has a whole series on why he thinks the pro­posed new bill is not neces­sary (includ­ing items such as arrests being made under the cur­rent Copy­right Act, which would there­fore appear to give the police all the powers they need, and the need for more con­sulta­tion).

Hibernating Ubuntu

I’ve had Ubuntu on my laptop for a while, and it nev­er hibern­ated. I’d do what looked like the right things, but it just did­n’t work. So a couple of days ago I decided I should try to track down the prob­lem. I was par­tially suc­cess­ful; hibern­at­ing a laptop prop­erly seems to be dif­fi­cult. Here’s what I did to track down (some of) the problem.

When it comes back after fail­ing to hibern­ate, the sys­tem politely tells you to check the help file for com­mon prob­lems. So you bring up the help file and it con­tains a defin­i­tion of hibern­ate, with no hints as to what might be going wrong, but a point­er to the Ubuntu sup­port for­ums as well as to laptop test­ing pages which sup­posedly con­tain ideas of what to try. The laptop test­ing page claims that hibern­ate works for the Toshiba Tecra M2 that I have, so that did­n’t help much.

Watch­ing closely the next time I tried hibern­at­ing revealed an error mes­sage flash­ing by about not enough swap space. Search­ing for this reveals that the swap space the installer gives you by default may not be enough to man­age hiberna­tion. You need the same size swap as RAM, which I did­n’t have. OK, out with the gpar­ted livecd to recon­fig­ure my par­ti­tions. For­tu­nately I had some spare unused room next to the swap par­ti­tion to grow it into. The next error mes­sage I saw flash­ing by on hibern­at­ing (read­ing it involved hibern­at­ing mul­tiple times, star­ing fix­edly at the right point in the screen, hop­ing that the last mes­sage I saw might be of some use; why can­’t these error mes­sages by default be put in a nice error dia­log box so I can actu­ally read them?) was that the sys­tem could­n’t find the swap space. Pok­ing around the Ubuntu sup­port for­um reveals that each time the machine is rebooted, the swap par­ti­tion gets a new UUID, thereby killing the con­fig files for any scripts that were set up to use the old one. More details here; fol­low­ing the steps in that post­ing finally made hibern­ate mostly work, albeit with a ton of error mes­sages about the USB device (the mouse, I pre­sume, since that’s the only USB device I have con­nec­ted) which I’m ignor­ing. The mostly refers to the fact that the sys­tem often won’t actu­ally come back to life after being in hiberna­tion until I hit the power but­ton and restart from scratch. I have yet to fig­ure out what’s going on there; any hints are welcome.

Yearly Rethink

One of the reas­ons I like going to North­ern Voice is that it always gives me lots to think about, in terms of what to write about on my blog, what tech­nic­al tricks to try out, and how to write bet­ter. Oth­er people choose their blo­giversary, or maybe New Year’s Day, but I find North­ern Voice to be bet­ter. One reas­on of course is the num­ber of enthu­si­ast­ic people there talk­ing about blog­ging and social media and how they use them.

All of which is a long way of say­ing that this year I’ll be look­ing for more of that spark, that enthu­si­asm in the speak­er sub­mis­sions. What talks will make me happy to be blog­ging, will give me incent­ive to make my blog bet­ter, will tell me of inter­est­ing things to try? What talks would make me want to start blog­ging, if I wer­en’t already? The dead­line is Monday, Decem­ber 10th, so you don’t have long to pol­ish those ideas (and we can­’t take late sub­mis­sions as we’re select­ing talks that same week and we do need to read them first). For oth­er views on what we’re look­ing for, check out Dar­ren’s post­ing, or Bri­an’s. Bri­an also has some pho­tos of the party spot for the Thursday even­ing as an added incent­ive to go there and read what he has to say. Once you’re ready, sub­mit your idea while it’s fresh and before you forget.

Bad Behavio(u)r

If you use the Bad Behavior/Bad Beha­viour plu­gin for Word­Press, you will need to update it imme­di­ately if you don’t want to be blocked from access­ing your own site (which is rather dis­con­cert­ing). More details at Bad Beha­vi­or 2.0.11. Simply over­writ­ing the old files with the new should work; anoth­er option is to rename the bad-behavior-wordpress.php file to some­thing else, which will dis­able it, so you can then log in to the admin pages as usual.

Kudos to the plu­gin author (Michael Hamp­ton) for find­ing and fix­ing the prob­lem quickly!

Editing Photos

I see Flickr has announced online photo edit­ing, some­thing that will be really use­ful for those times when I just don’t hap­pen to have some oth­er pro­gram handy. In par­tic­u­lar when I’m try­ing to get the col­our bal­ance on my stash pho­tos right, of course <grin />. I won­der wheth­er the tempta­tion to punch up the col­ours and bright­ness on pho­tos to make everything more inter­est­ing will increase? And wheth­er that will make people start to see the real world as a poor sub­sti­tute for the view seen through a cam­era lens? One reas­on I don’t take a lot of pho­tos is because you can doc­u­ment exper­i­ences (by pho­to­graph­ing), or you can be part of the exper­i­ence. It’s hard to do both at once. But I’m still glad that touch­ing up pho­tos I do take to make them more real­ist­ic will be easier.

Basketball Musings

Tim and I went to Port­land for a couple of days. Apart from the oblig­at­ory vis­it to Pow­ell’s and a couple of micro­brew­er­ies, we also went to an NBA game. Tim likes live sports, and there isn’t a pro­fes­sion­al bas­ket­ball team in Van­couver, so it seemed like a chance to do some­thing we would­n’t nor­mally do. No, we did­n’t go to Port­land to go to the game, it was a last-minute decision. The team isn’t doing very well, so we could eas­ily buy last-minute tick­ets. Pro­fes­sion­al games in North Amer­ica are run quite dif­fer­ently to the rugby games etc. that I went to grow­ing up; here are some of the things that struck me.

First off, kudos to the city of Port­land for mak­ing the game really easy to get to from down­town hotels. You hop on the light rail, the Rose Garden sta­di­um where the game took place is with­in the “free” zone, you get off the train at the obvi­ous stop and walk a couple of minutes to the box office. Get­ting back to the hotel was equally easy.

We had seats a little high­er up than was optim­al, but they were cent­ral, so it was easy to see everything that was going on. The main emphas­is seemed to be on con­tinu­al fren­et­ic activ­ity to enter­tain the crowd; in fact the actu­al game often seemed flat in com­par­is­on to the enter­tain­ment in between the peri­ods or in the timeouts. I was some­what bemused by the enter­tain­ment at the first break being a duck mas­cot and a beaver mas­cot play­ing foot­ball (at a bas­ket­ball game, isn’t that a little insult­ing?) until Tim told me they were the mas­cots of the loc­al uni­ver­sity foot­ball teams. There seemed to be more interest in people show­ing which foot­ball team they were fans of than in sup­port­ing their loc­al bas­ket­ball team whose game they were actu­ally at; I gath­er there was a game com­ing up. 

I don’t get cheer­lead­ers; I guess I’m not the tar­get audi­ence. The ones at the game seemed to be divided into two groups. There was the acro­bat­ic group, with women and men, where the women did acro­bat­ics and obvi­ously had a fair amount of gym­nast­ic tal­ent, while the men were good at catch­ing them as they came down from the vari­ous flips and turns. Then there was the dan­cing group, all women, with much skim­pi­er cos­tumes than the first group. For this group the require­ment on tal­ent and dan­cing abil­ity seemed to be less than the require­ment to be skinny with long hair. At half-time there was a ridicu­lous show that involved the dan­cing girls throw­ing balls at each oth­er in a dodge­ball game rep­res­ent­ing the two uni­ver­sity foot­ball teams. I got a fair bit of knit­ting done dur­ing that time.

The game itself was shown in close-up on a big screen hanging over the court. Which meant that for some of the time the game was con­tinu­ing while they showed the replay on the big screen; most people were obvi­ously watch­ing the screen rather than the game giv­en their reac­tions. And there was the seem­ingly oblig­at­ory loud music on at all times to add to the feel­ing of fren­et­ic activ­ity. Towards the end it was coupled with a few appar­ently sev­en-year-olds in the seats dir­ectly behind us scream­ing their heads off to egg on the loc­al team. 

Over­all, it was inter­est­ing to go to an NBA game once, but I’m not sure it’s some­thing I’d repeat often. It cer­tainly isn’t cheap entertainment.