Apparently DJs in the UK need to pay £200 per year for the right to copy their own CDs onto a harddisk. This is on top of public performance licences.

It doesn’t matter where the CDs are from, either. The money is gathered by the PPL and fairly distributed to “the artists” using magical telepathy to calculate who gets what.

I intend to move into this growing business of nonsensical intellectual property extortion. I will collect £5.00 per year from every photographer with photos featuring buildings that are posted to sites like Flickr.

Architects designed those buildings, they worked hard, and they deserve the money! How dare people use their creations for free! I will of course distribute the money carefully, after taking a small amount for myself to cover administrative costs.

This is quite reasonable. “Rather than saying stop it, don’t do it, I’ve actually tried to embrace what people want to do and come up with a licence to be able to do that.”

All I need is a government to pass a law for me. Sadly this doesn’t come cheap. If you are an architect and want to get the ¬£1.00 per photo that is rightfully yours, please send me large sums of money to spend sending MPs on fact-finding tours, buying MPs lunch, and providing drugs to journalists.

Link: BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Digital DJs ‘unaware of copy law’

(I would never claim that the entertainment monopolies do such things, of course. Perish the thought)

I bought myself a Mac Mini in August. Development with Perl somehow still feels better with Linux and JED, but for Rails development and my normal evening time wasting I’ve really taken to Mac OS X.

I’m using the Mac with a switchbox and my trusty Cherry PS2 keyboard, but the default UK keymap didn’t work well at all, and I couldn’t find a good replacement. It’s odd that Apple promotes the Mini as being usable with a PC keyboard, but don’t include a suitable keymap for British users.

Fortunately there is an excellent keymap editor called Ukelele, which I used to make my own, almost-perfect keymap. I’ve been meaning to post this somewhere for months, so I may as well put it here.

To use, just drop this into your Library/Keyboard Layouts folder, then select in System Preferences.

Link: UK PS/2 Keyboard Layout for Mac OS X (You’ll also need a USB adapter!)

We’ve just watched the DVD of ‘Steam Boy’, an anime by the chap who did ‘Akira’, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s not groundbreaking or particularly original and doesn’t rival Akira, but if you enjoy watching pseudo-Victorian engineering explode then it’s got everything you need. This is steam-punk with a lot of steam. It seems to lose its way a bit towards the end and characters are rather thin (some names are terrible) but it’s definitely a film I’d recommend to anime fans.

The first part of the movie is set in Manchester, something I didn’t expect. Surely Victorian England only had one city, called London? They’ve not done a bad job too, despite the alternative-history setting there are recognisable skylines and buildings, scenes in Victoria Station, and in one definite ‘what-the-’ moment, a reference to Coronation Street.

Last year NPower decided to bill me £136 for months of electricity use in a flat that I had only stayed in for three weeks (with almost no electrical items), for a period after I had left. They finally dropped their demands after the intervention of Energywatch, but not before admitting a mistake twice, and lowering their demand to £17.

Months later, out of the blue, I’ve received a debt collection letter demanding the original amount again! I have replied with the following:

I was quite surprised to receive an urgent letter from JB Debt Recovery on behalf of NPower, threatening legal action for a sum of ¬£136.19. NPower originally requested that I pay them that amount in March 2005, for a period at which I was not living at the property in question. I am still not willing to pay this amount. I was particularly impressed by this part of your letter: “Our clients have instructed us to collect the above outstanding debt as you ignored all previous correspondence.” For the record, I have explained why I am not paying this amount using a variety of methods: * I have phoned NPower a number of times over this issue. * I have written three letters to NPower over this issue. * NPower admitted their mistake a number of times but continued to demand various other seemingly random amounts, finally settling on a demand for ¬£17.14 instead. * I have emailed Energywatch to complain about NPower’s strange behaviour. * Energywatch have investigated and NPower have accepted that they had made a mistake, and that they would drop the claim. Which makes getting another debt recovery letter months later quite a surprise. From this I infer that your claim that I have “ignored all previous correspondence” is either: a) A lie, with the intent of intimidation b) A result of NPower’s incompetence c) The written word and human speech are not acceptable means of communication for NPower, and I must use some other, unspecified method. If NPower insist that I must appear in court in order to explain myself again (perhaps through interpretive dance, sock puppets, or by holding up a series of explanatory cartoons, since other methods have failed) I will do so. I will also bring with me a series of letters from myself, NPower and EnergyWatch, bills, and other evidence. Thank you for warning me of the additional legal costs and damage to my credit rating that may occur if I refuse to pay an amount which NPower have already admitted is incorrect. I appreciate your kind concern. I am not contacting NPower again. As you are able to communicate with them, I would be grateful if you could inform your client on my behalf.

Hugh Thompson, hero of My Lai, has died aged 62.

(via Metafilter).

I often have dreams featuring beaches, coastal towns and the sea, but over the last couple of weeks I’ve been having many more dreams about the sea: twilight seascapes with distant lights, beaches of slate-grey sand stretching away into the darkness, mist flowing over rolling, inky seas, me walking along deserted piers at night while waves crash underneath…

Today I realised why. My evening web wanderings include Flickr, and the excellent photos of two ex-colleagues: Ray Byrne and Gary Shrimpling. You might notice the recurring theme recently.

I will now feel responsible if either of them has nightmares about penguins or 1980s game characters.

I tend to use XFS for most Linux partitions, and Reiser4 for /tmp and filesystem databases with tens of thousands of files, as it won’t run out of inodes.

In these benchmark tests XFS performs as I would expect, but the Reiser4 and JFS results surprised me. Reiser4’s handling of actions on big trees doesn’t live up to it’s reputation, and I’ve always viewed JFS as well-built but slow, no-where near as fast as the benchmarking indicates.

I suppose this shows the value of research over conventional wisdom.

Link: Benchmarking Filesystems Part II

A nice summary of Perl goings-on last year.

Link: The Year in Perl 2005

I feel compelled to list my favourite albums of last year.

• Congotronics and Congotronics 2 - a raw, new musical movement from Kinshasa, featuring distorted electric thumb pianos. Like danceable punk for acid house fans.
• Acid Brass - an old album I found by accident. Classic late-80s house music played by a brass band, but much more than a gimmick album, this is lovely stuff.
• Labyrinth - A best of Juno Reactor compilation. Some strange, haunting and beautiful tunes, and some dark powerful goa trance, often at the same time.

I have to confess I quite enjoyed The Best of Johnny Cash too.

I don’t like the Narnia books. They are sexist, racist, dull, full of the worst type of dangerous moral messages, and Narnia itself doesn’t make any sense. I can suspend disbelief enough to accept magic and fantastic creatures, but giant talking beavers eating sausages? ‘Alice in Wonderland’ works, and Tolkien’s books work, but Narnia hangs somewhere inbetween.

Of course, you could (and should) point out that HP Lovecraft’s works are racist, sexist, and so on, and I couldn’t really disagree, but I enjoy them all the same. Something shines through. Narnia doesn’t shine for me at all.

Anyway, my dislike for Narnia means that “Narnia” is one of the trigger words that can set me off on a rambling bore session:

Today we saw Chronicles of Narnia. It literally made my stomach sick. Christian movies equal much violence. I want peaceful Buddhist movies. Violence makes me ill

The funny thing is that although the Narnia books are commonly thought to have a Christian theme, they might not…

CS Lewis was a Christian, but was also interested in ancient Roman history. Mithraism was a very popular pre-Christian religion in the Roman Empire. Mithras was known as “The Lion”, “The Untamed Lion”, and “The Lord of the Wide Pastures”. Mithra dies and rises from the dead. Mithraism originated in Persia.

“Aslan” is Persian for ‘lion’. Aslan is killed and rises from the dead. In the Narnia books he is referred to as “not a tame lion” and “Lord of Open Pastures”*. Mithraism had many similarities to early Christianity, and as Christianity grew it ate Mithraism and absorbed many of its beliefs and festivals, including one on 25 December ;-)

Aslan might be a fictional Christ, but his character is nicked directly from another religion altogether.

I can see what you mean about the violence. Have you seen ‘Princess Mononoke’? It presents conflict from a very Buddhist-influenced perspective; evil things happen (and plenty of violence) but there are no evil villains at all. The hero begs people not to fight him and runs away whenever possible. The cursed scars in the hero’s arm symbolise how hatred and aggression can eat away at people from inside. Maybe if kids were raised on films like Princess Mononoke, rather than all the crude “Good Triumphs By Slaughtering Evil” stuff, adults might be a bit smarter.

On the same theme (I’ll shut up in a moment) I have to recommend the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. The author describes them as “anti-Narnia”, and they are absolutely superb.

• that last quote might not be correct but I can’t check as I’ve not got the Narnia books due to their general crapness. That’s the trouble with trying to validate stuff you remember vaguely. Use a pinch of wikipedia brand salt.

Article on Lewis: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/051121crat_atlarge

Article on Pullman: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051226fa_fact