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Back in the heady days when Cluster File Systems was not a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 corporation, a near-constant thorn in my side were people who did not come anywhere close to understanding the protections (not) provided by copyright.

One partner got so worked up that I think they’d have actually sued if we weren’t so valuable to them, essentially because we reimplemented one of their APIs (and naturally, they wanted to claim copyright on our code). That they managed to find lawyers willing to litigate that claim was, I thought, impressive enough to let it go forward, but even a frivolous lawsuit costs so much in the United States that I never could have. In the end they decided it was not worth it.

Reading Wendy Seltzer’s “No Copyright for Games” today took me back to those days. Not exactly the same issues, but I feel for the Scrabulous guys.

Some friends came over last weekend, and said that the inner courtyard of my apartment building reminds them of a prison cell block. Of course they’re completely right, and now it’s all I can think about when I step outside.

I’m willing to put up with it for these few months — though Milhouse’s father would not look out of place in this apartment — but one thing I could tolerate no longer: the knives.

After enduring for weeks knives that were so dull that they were long past being dangerous, I discovered that they could not cut cold butter and my bottomless patience was exhausted.

It was suggested that if I were limiting myself to exactly one knife, it should be this 18cm santoku:

Using the Global santoku is like watching girls make out. I thought that I was keeping my knives sharp in Boston, but I was badly mistaken, and I cannot rest until I’ve learned to replicate this factory edge.

I bought a bushel of tomatoes, just to cut them up.

I sang a song while I did it.

I am shocked — shocked! — to learn that, as Bostonist put it, more people than expected chose Massachusetts’s subsidized health insurance, and now the commonwealth is wondering how to pay for it all.

Even without rehashing my two-years-ago commentary about how The Massachusetts Solution does nothing to address the fundamental unaffordability of health care, imagine the surprise it must have been when they subsidized something and got more of it.

I bet none of the fat cats on Beacon Hill saw that coming.

Fortunately, they have Ted Kennedy to do his usual trick, and try to get the rest of the country to foot the bill. You’re welcome.

I like the idea of using metal beads to clean your decanter — that’s clever. Cleaning a decanter is a pain in the tuchus.

Even more clever? Figuring out that someone (else) will pay $20 for fifty ball-bearings, if sold in the wine department.

See also: four nails for $5. I especially like that there are six nails in the photo.

I was going to write about it yesterday, but I’m glad I waited, because two people got the job started for me.

As seems to be typical with aviation news, the coverage of this story has been idiotic. One of Perth’s local news stations even drummed up a Qantas A320 captain to give a sound bite about how great their airmanship was. If that is what passes for superior judgment at Qantas, their world-best safety record may be in for some rough times.

Elevating the crew to hero status overlooks the fact that they put the plane and passengers into that awful situation in the first place. This wasn’t a sudden and unforeseeable loss of power on short final, as happened at Heathrow in January. This was a string of poor decisions, probably hours long, that almost killed 131 people.

The crew decided to leave Munich knowing that a hurricane was blowing through Hamburg; they decided not to divert once they arrived and conditions hadn’t improved; they decided to use runway 23 instead of 33, and accept a 50% stronger crosswind (wind from 290); they decided to attempt a landing after an unstabilised approach. The pilot’s skill, and probably a bit of luck, saved them from disaster.

It is often suggested that the prudent pilot will ask himself how confident he would feel explaining his decision-making process to a judge, or how it would read in an NTSB report. I think the final report on this one will not be nearly as kind as the pundits’ sound bites.

Well, another summer of international cricket has ended in a close and exciting, but ultimately disappointing, fashion. Just like last year they couldn’t get the job done when it mattered, but this time it was fairly predictable. The batting hasn’t been in form since the middle of the Test series, and having lost six veterans to retirement in 14 months, it will be a very different side that takes the wicket in the West Indies in May.

Not that there wasn’t enthusiasm. That picture doesn’t really make clear the knock that guy took; Symonds is built like a brick shit house.

Sometime between 22:30 Friday night and noon Saturday, my — I say my, but in fact I was borrowing it — 50cc scooter was stolen. From off-street, underground parking!

This would not have been completely trivial. It has a steering lock that keeps it held in a steady left turn, as well as one of those D-shaped bike locks through the back wheel. We reckon a handful of burly guys just picked it up and put it on a ute, to deal with the lock via an angle grinder someplace where the noise wouldn’t be noticed.

I’ll find out on Tuesday if the apartment building’s public liability insurance will cover it. Either way, I guess I’m going scooter shopping this week, but I have no idea how to store it more securely than last time.

To my surprise, the woman who took the police report said that if it’s found, I might not get it back right away if they need to go over it for forensic evidence. Either there’s so little crime in WA that they’re desperate for practice, or they like to make people feel unrealistically optimistic about the odds that these crimes are ever solved. And they’ve never seen The Big Lebowski.

At least there were no contents to steal this time.

I’ve been growing steadily more ill the last two days. It is safe to say that this is shaping up to be the worst weekend of 2008.

This was going to be the latest in a no-doubt seemingly-interminable series of aeroplane posts, but our destination this weekend is the one part of Western Australia that gets reliably lousy weather, even in the summer: the southern coast. In that regard, this weekend was predictably disappointing. In almost every other regard, it was an excellent diversion.

The conditions were fine for an IFR arrival, but my American instrument rating can’t be applied to my 3-month licence validation, probably with good reason — I imagine that IFR flying in Australia is more like far northern Canada than the US, in the sense that radar coverage is virtually nonexistent.

As you plan your Denmark holiday, keep in mind that searching for information about this 2,500-person town, whose nearest major town is Albany, is predictably difficult. These destinations are not the typical results for those search keywords.

Along the way and in Denmark itself are fabulous wine country, for which accommodations must be made. Just as in the Barossa Valley, it is the little wineries nobody’s heard of that occupy both ends of the spectrum. Some are a bit of a disaster, but others are a delight.

The last winery we had time for was Mariners Rest Wines, whose somewhat campy nautical theme was eventually revealed to have a more tasteful origin: the winery is owned and run by an ex-Naval officer and his wife.

The first round of tastings were nothing to write home about, and indeed we may not have stayed if we hadn’t been unceremoniously marshaled out to the rear porch for cheese and bikkies, whereupon we discover a veritable grove of tangelo, walnut, and avocado trees.

We sat outside and talked to the owner-wife for a while, who was crazy as a bat, but very nice. She periodically darted into the main room to gather samples of their other offerings — a couple of which were in fact quite good — giving us time to offer hypotheses regarding what the poor people might be getting on to at that stage of the afternoon.

Regular listeners will have already made the mental leap to the end of the story, in which my arms are laden, overflowing like some kind of vegetarian Scrooge McDuck, with avocados in various stages of ripening. I ate a ripe one with supper that night, another on bread for lunch the next day, and they were the most perfect and delicious butter ever to come off a tree, blemished in none of the ways that avocados trucked two thousand miles from the source tend to be. All store-bought avocados of the past and future will be judged against these, and inevitably fall short.

Do not be fooled by his aesthetically pleasing yellow bucket: those waters are antarctic, from the glacial oceans of the deepest south, unfit for man nor beast.

Which is a shame, because Green’s Pool is very effectively sheltered from the raging ocean by a series of boulders 50-100m out to sea. If only it were warm.

These are the famous Elephants’ Asses Rocks, which the local tourism bureau is very pleased about.

On our way out of Denmark, we detoured to nature’s own Treetop Walk, a literally more pedestrian and accessible version of what was to follow (and what has come before). Although it’s somewhat lacking in adrenaline when compared to its sister sites, it is every bit as shockingly beautiful to be up in the canopy.

The gigantic poles that hold up the structure are made from a particular steel blend that’s designed to rust superficially, to complement the environment as much as possible. This is not one of those poles. This is one of those poles.

(complete photoset)

The return journey is nothing if not long, but there was another tree-related attraction located conveniently near the midpoint of our travels.

It’s called The Dave Evans Bicentennial Tree, but there is no explanatory material of any kind, so I’m going to assume it’s dedicated to the original 1973-74 lead singer from iconic Sydney band AC/DC.

This is not to be confused with the Gloucester Tree, but you would be forgiven for doing so. They are both in Pemberton, and internationally tall.

The internet cannot even begin to get its story straight about how tall the Gloucester and Bicentennial trees are, but the preponderance of the evidence seems to suggest that, at any rate, the Bicentennial tree is taller. The top platform may or may not be at a height of 72 meters.

Unlike the Gloucester Tree, there is a little platform about 20 meters up, where you are advised not to proceed further if you’re pregnant, have a heart condition, or are not at least this tall.

Please enjoy the aforementioned instrument conditions.

We wonder if anyone has ever fallen to their death. It seems hard to imagine that it’s never happened, but the internet turns up no relevant facts.

(complete photoset)

I’ve been in Perth for twelve weeks now, but so busy that I haven’t left the city at all.

There is plenty to see and do in Western Australia, but those sights are almost all very far apart from one another. Enter the light aeroplane.

It was a busy day at Hyden airport.

INVISIBLE AIRPORT

You don’t get the reference, and that’s fine; it doesn’t make you a bad person.

It’s hard to believe after the flying of last summer, but I’m pretty sure that Wave Rock is the first time I’ve operated on an unsealed runway. It’s extremely well-maintained, the kind of nice, flat runway that is probably almost effortless in a climate that never experiences frozen water.

I think it gets a daily commercial flight from someplace, probably Perth, so at 1000m long it’s about three times as much runway as I need. Not that I’m complaining.

the walk from the airport is through a dead, barren wasteland

I live in the desert that is Perth, I spent a few days last summer in the eastern deserts, but this is the most desolate place I’ve ever been. It looks like the bush was torched and then salted, lest anything ever grow again, which is probably not as far from the truth as it sounds. Farmers are constantly fighting a war on salinity.

It’s almost all you could see in any direction, except for the road back to the airport, and it radiated death.

the famous wave rock, object of my visitation

There are many internet web home page sites that will tell you all about the rock itself, the algae that adorns it, and the catchment area of which it forms a part.

I will tell you that it is very tall, about 15m, and a pretty interesting rock. There are a lot of details, for someone with enough forethought to bring a macro lens. But I really preferred the climbing around on top part.

The aeroplane is a tiny speck.

February in the Australian desert is very hot

Please let there be no misunderstandings, false impressions, misconceptions, or misapprehensions. It was 38 earth degrees in the shade, of which there is none.

I had a short delay clearing security on my way out.

Would I drive four hours in a car, each way, to see Wave Rock? Probably not. Maybe once. Almost certainly not twice.

But 90 minutes each way was a pleasant journey (its own reward, it is said, and rarely truer than in the aeroplane) and an interesting destination. It has the important benefit of the airstrip being 500m from the main attraction.

(Complete photoset)

For a political science professor (and, according to Wikipedia, “publicly professed Libertarian”) Dr. Allan Saxe is either stupendously misinformed, or boldly deceptive. It doesn’t especially matter which.

His article You may like Ron Paul, but would you like his America? was held up by a friend as his explanation for why the Congressman’s presidential platform doesn’t sit well with him. Which would be fine — I’m as excited about a good debate as the next person — except that it is difficult to find any true statements in the article.

In almost every instance, he takes an accurate constitutional position about the role of the federal government, then twists it to assert that Ron Paul would eliminate all levels of government. Needless to say — owing to the constraints of the newspaper column format, no doubt — he cites no sources for these assertions.

A representative example:

At all levels of government, the elimination of programs, agencies and government support would be massive. … All compulsory public education would be erased. If you wish to educate your child, do it yourself, or send your child to a voluntary private or church school. … There would be no state financing of higher education. All education would be divorced from government.

I’m not sure where Dr. Saxe gets the idea that the Congressman wants to end public education in the 50 states. Fifteen seconds of browsing the Issues pages of the campaign web site leads to an article that is exactly on-point, in which he writes, “…under the 10th Amendment public education should be purely a state and local matter.”

The fact is that a prominent plank of the Paul campaign is to reduce federal spending and regulation to those areas permitted by the Constitution. And while, ideally, the federal Department of Education would be eliminated, he writes clearly (and repeatedly) that neither the president nor Congress have any authority to dictate anything about how states provide education.

That is, you will notice, the entire point: to remove federal government intrusion from what should properly be state issues.

Saxe repeats this straw man assertion again and again, about education, transportation, the minimum wage, eminent domain, sports stadiums (!), zoning laws (!), and so on. The nice thing about having a consistent philosophy is that I can state with certainty that Saxe is as wrong about all of those as he is about education. The ways that state and local governments address those issues are simply not matters that a Paul administration would seek to influence.

It’s hard to believe that a political science professor could manage to get tenure and write peer-reviewed papers and eat breakfast without aspirating Cheerios, yet make such an obvious blunder. But it’s also not clear why a Texas libertarian would want to write a misleading article to smear Ron Paul. Maybe Wikipedia is lying to us, and he’s really a socialist.

Can he really be so confused about basic federalism? I doubt it; it reads like a hatchet job. If my friend’s reaction is typical, apparently an effective one.