Tube worker suspended over 'rant'

Well, well. Someone has caught a member of Tfl staff bullying a member of the travelling public:

BBC NEWS | England | London | Tube worker suspended over rant

This is the kind of awful treatment which was dished out to Justina in an incident for which I, sadly, did not have a video and which the London transport bureaucracy buried with process.

A key quote from a Tfl spokesman about this recent incident is:

"We do not tolerate members of the public being abusive to our staff but neither will we tolerate members of our staff abusing members of the public."

Hmmm. Perhaps Tfl will at last update the posters they have at stations to reflect that, because at the moment they only tell customers it's not OK to abuse Tfl staff, not the other way around. Both are bad, of course.

To end on a happy note, friends of ours recently lost a wallet on the tube with quite a bit of cash in it. Well, the wallet was handed in and the staff at the Baker St. lost property office were really nice and helpful about the whole thing ... and all the money seems to be there. Most people really are good.

Who should contribute to the copyrights debate?

The UK government have decided, persuaded by the unelected industry secretary Peter Mandelson, that it would be a good idea to make criminals of people who infringe copyright, thus clearly taking sides against the general public in what should be a purely civil matter.

It's OK, though. They did engage in consultations first, or so it is reported.

But who did they consult? The public? No. The creative individuals who made the works? No. ... they seem to have consulted only with lawyers and the "recording industry".

The public have voted largely with their feet, and here is a report on the position of creative individuals in The Register:

Pop stars tell labels to FOAD • The Register

Perhaps time for MPs to listen to the people who voted for them rather than non-voting corporate entities ... and then perhaps the government might even listen to the MPs?

Hope springs eternal.

What should be taught

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity, and I agree.

The link is to a light-hearted but right-on-target talk he gave for TED.

In GemStone selectors >>true and >>false not allowed

Lesson of the evening ...

While moving Slaps (the Smalltalk LDAP library) to GemStone I found that while VisualWorks is quite happy if methods have the selector >>true or the selector >>false, GemStone is not. Darn.

Oh, well. Easily fixed.

Adding UDP sockets to Sport

I am looking at adding UDP socket support to Sport (the Smalltalk portability interface), specifically so I can run the Syslog library in Gemstone.

I have posted some initial proposals to comp.lang.smalltalk (cls), so if you are a Sport maintainer for a Smalltalk dialect or if you are just interested, please respond to my post there.

BTW, we use cls for Sport because cls is a forum for all Smalltalk dialects and Sport applies to all dialects. There you go.

Popeye the Sailor copyright free 70 years after Elzie Segar's death - Times Online

Here's a rare thing. Something of value actually enters the public domain (in some parts of the world):

Popeye the Sailor copyright free 70 years after Elzie Segar's death - Times Online

... though I fear that Popeye will now be portrayed as a victim of 'weak' copyright protection legislation and used to encourage law makers to extend copyright terms yet again.

I hope, instead, that we see some excellent derivative Popeye works over the next year that show value in the economy, and that this strengthens the arguments for resisting copyright term extension, and perhaps even for shortening those terms to more useful levels for the wider economy.

New version of Hyper

Hyper is a Smalltalk library available under the LGPL which implements RFC 2616 and friends aka HTTP. You can use Hyper to build a web server or a web client. As an example, you could use Hyper as an HTTP server underneath Seaside (a rather cool website content library).

The new version is 1 340 and can be found in the Cincom public Store repository. This version picks up a number of changes made by Dale Henrichs of GemStone. Thanks Dale!

There are no big changes here, but if you happen to want to run a robust HTTP server for Seaside from within your Gemstone database, then this is the version for you.

Have fun :-)

An interesting detour or three

Well, I've had a very interesting second half of the year. Unfortunately 'interesting' has not included as much OpenSkills and open source coding as I would have liked, but it has included:

• Home hunting
• Home buying
• A rather exciting trip around the Med' and through the Suez Canal to see Petra, Luxor and Cairo among other things
• Getting the new place ready to live in
  
• Moving into our new home
• Dad's 8oth (happy birthday dad)
• And some fun with my paid-for work as I'm engaged with a bank at the moment

But now we have the boxes unpacked in the new place. The Internet connection is good. So, no excuses. I must get on and do the things I have been promising myself and others. The list is long. ... but there are still some pictures to hang and shelves to put up ... ah, well.

PDF and Smalltalk

PDF is a very handy way to deliver documents over http and there are a number of ways to do this from within Smalltalk. A write up of several techniques can be found here:

seaside.st: PDF in Seaside

I'm one of the main authors of the SPDF library, so it's nice to see it listed among the options. SPDF was developed for use in the insurance industry where 'forms' needed to be produced on the fly, sometimes including TIFF images. SPDF did it's job well enough for the problem at hand, but it's capabilities are rather, ah, narrow.

Having said that, the library is an implementation of the PDF spec, so the terminology of the spec is reflected in the Smalltalk implementation (e.g. data structures and class & method names) ... so it should not be too hard to implement more of the spec as and when needed.

As a case in point, on a recent project I used the SPDF library to produced documents that required automatic line breaking and breaking over pages, and even using the Frame classes to have text flow from a rectangle on one page to the same rectangle on the next page - which happens to addresses some of the weaknesses of SPDF (correctly) identified in the write up.

The current version of SPDF is available from the Cincom public Store repository.

Reasonable article, silly spin

A recent Computing article looked at the dangers of using externally sourced software when 'selling' a software 'product'. They pointed out that the terms of licenses for the 3rd party software may be problematic when selling-on bundles, or even when selling a company which made money that way.

Absolutely. Think what might happen if a company did not comply with a license from Microsoft, Adobe or Oracle ... swarms of lawyers may well blacken the skies, or perhaps just the BSA.

But the unfortunate thing about this article is that it does not promote general diligence when it comes to software licenses, instead it takes a pot-shot at 'open source' software:

Open source's dark side by David Boutcher & Bob Stankey

Their silly stance rather dilutes an important message, i.e. make sre you understand the licenses of the software you depend upon.