Author: john

Catching up

Catching up on the news feed today. It seems to take so much longer when there’s lots of interesting stuff to read.

The bill is intended to “promote competition, to facilitate trade, and to ensure competitive and non-discriminatory access to the Internet.”

It does so by outlawing discriminatory fees for providing content, applications, or services over the ‘Net. Internet providers also have to interact fully with the networks of their competitors and provide equal access to all users and any devices they wish to put on the network. Network providers would be allowed to provide favored service to specific types of data but, if they do, they have to provide that same favoritism to anybody transmitting the data, and couldn’t charge for it.

  • FCC 2.0: Change we can believe in? (Ars): An interesting overview of what could happen at the FCC should a democrat Obama be elected (here’s a riddle: who was president in 1996?).
  • Chief RIAA Litigator Named Colorado Judge (Wired): The RIAA’s “top litigator” as an appeals judge. This might not seem as troublesome (he’s said to be a top notch lawyer) if the tactic of suing thousands of file sharers weren’t so legally and socially controversial.

Billboards outlawed?

Yesterday’s Times had an article about a dispute over a billboard that ran afoul of Vermont’s ban.

In February, a state board ruled that the painting, finished in October, runs afoul of the state’s billboard law, and must be removed. In response, the legislature passed a measure on Saturday that exempts this mural and ones like it — hand-painted signs that urge drivers to visit a designated downtown — from the law.

I had no idea 4 states had outlawed billboards entirely. This seems like an example of two problems frequently experienced by a complete speech ban such as this: first, that this is a classic example of a type of speech a majority would prefer to ban, and second that someone always wants to make an exception. I have to claim ignorance on the history and details of billboard bans, but it seems like a good old “time-manner-place” speech restriction might work better here.  Sure, nobody likes seeing billboards on a senic drive, but it might avoid the “exception game” and it would better stand up to Constitutional scrutiny.

Rsync backup with Growl

Edit: Somehow the sync isn’t starting, so I’ll need to figure out what the trouble is and update this post. Any ideas?
Edit 2: It would seem using rsync to back up is no longer covered under the terms of service for BlueHost users.  I actually haven’t been doing my backups this way for some time, and would highly recommend using a service like Dropbox instead (especially since it has a nice web interface and syncs between multiple computers). I’ll leave this post up for users of other hosting providers.

I’d call myself more of a tinker-er than a programmer, but I thought I’d open a new chapter in my blogging repertoire: sharing tech solutions I’ve come up with. I’m a dissertator, which means I need frequent off-site backups, and a BlueHost user, which means I have a convenient place to upload to.

This post taught me everything I needed to know to get rsync working with Bluehost (the instructions are for Dreamhost, but you get the idea). Be sure to check out the part for running a backup without logging in. Up until recently, I’ve used the terminal to periodically run a backup–yet there’s always room for improvement.

I dig Growl, and thought it would be great to schedule backups for every-other hour, and to have notification of when (or if) it completed successfully. I never quite worked out the completing successfully part, but the attached AppleScript is a start. It checks for a network connection (be sure to enter the IP address of your host), and sends a growl when the backup starts (just be sure to wait a bit for the backup to complete). Here is some advice on scheduling via iCal.

I realize this (admittedly unedited) post didn’t quite live up to my reputation as a decent technical writer. I’d be happy to answer questions or take suggestions in comments.

rsync
 (AppleScript download)

Dishes with Yochai

I took a great suggestion this morning and did my dishes while watching Yochai Benkler’s TED talk on Open-source economics. He finished his talk with a point that I’ve brought up before–the new importance of communication law to everyone on the Internet. He says (around the 17 min mark):

So, next time you open the paper and you see an intellectual property decision, a telecoms decison, it’s not about something small and technical. It is about the future of the freedom to be as social beings with each other and the way information, knowledge, and culture will be produced. Because, it is in this context that we see a battle over how easy or hard it will be for the industrial information economy to simply go on as it goes, or for the new model of production to begin to develop along side that industrial model — [to] change the way that we begin to see the world, and report what it is that we see.

Guess it’s time to take another look at the Wealth of Networks (or, if you prefer, a free copy).