I hate Java; along with notes on other things

Annoying fact of the day: Java has no easy way to right align numbers, so creating a table like this:

  
  34  127
 234   23

is pretty much impossible without doing a lot of work (or at least, much more work than I'm willing to put in). You'd think the NumberFormat and DecimalFormat classes would do things like this, but you'd be wrong; I'd never imagined that I would find a language that would make me long for printf().

The Atlantic has a very interesting article this month by Richard Clarke called "Ten Years Later". It's told as a lecture given ten years in the future reflecting on the increase in terrorist attacks on the United States and what we could have and should have done to prevent them. In short, our foreign policy and our focus on making ourselves feel good instead of actually doing something about terrorism will cause serious problems in the years ahead. Definitely worth reading if you can find a copy.

Finally, yet another argument against excessively long copyrights: Beatallica. Lessig has it right - the future always builds on (or "steals from") the past, and it's a damn shame that most of the great rock in the past 50 years won't enter the public domain until I'm old and gray. I don't mind people making money from their "intellectual property" (I certainly do), but if you really can't think of something new within 14 years, do you really deserve to continuing profiting off your one good idea? Maybe a lot of these artists could do better for themselves if they learned some financial management.

The thing of it is that this goes far beyond music, movies, software, and TV shows (though a Daily Show archive would be nice). I think the greatest loss comes from the books, newspaper articles, and papers that never enter the public domain. Perhaps, part of my annoyance is my inability to easily get papers that I need for my thesis, many of which were published in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Granted part of it is that digitizing much of this material is difficult at best, but I'm fairly sure that the AIP (American Institute of Physics) would come after me if I started circulating these papers; so much for research for the general good. How small does the public domain have to get before people really start paying attention to this problem?

Xen; Copyright Issues

Been playing with the Xen virtual machine monitor over the past couple days, and I must say that it's really cool. The claim that performance is near native is pretty much true, and thus far, I've managed to run multiple Debian and SuSE machines off a single box without too much of a performance hit. As far as I can tell, it's the closest thing we're going to get to zVM on commodity (read "x86") hardware. The only things I have left to try is getting NetBSD to run properly (which really shouldn't be an issue except for the fact that the NetBSD fdisk and disklabel program are really weird - counting sectors, cylinders, and what not) and getting specific hardware like sound and video capture cards working on specific machines. Just for laughs, I may also decide to run VMWare inside one of the Xen virtual machines to see what kind of performance I get; well...that, and I need to learn Solaris but don't want to pay for a SPARC box right now.

Another thing I've discovered: You can (sort of) stream music to yourself by tunneling it through the Windows remote desktop service. It's does fairly well without consuming too much bandwidth (or at least with SSH compression on), but it does skip fairly often. As I said, not immediately practical, but it's always good to build a repertoire of stupid tricks.

In more serious news, there's a good article in Wired called Bleary Days for Eyes on the Prize which discusses the problems PBS has (re-)releasing the Eyes on the Prize because they failed to secure the proper licensing for archival footage. While this sort of news isn't really anything new to those who have followed the recent debate over IP law reform, I found especially interesting because of the discussion I had with my family over the holidays. In particular, I think this article well illustrates why we need a public domain and why the privatization of our common culture is a bad thing - even beyond building on existing art and science, the closing of the intellectual commons means hiding a part of our past for contemporary evaluation.