Skip to content

Month: March 2005

Reorganisation, and ancient history

Published March 23, 2005

Life: Alec Muffett quotes an Economist opening line:

We tend to meet any new situation in life by reorganising, Petronius Arbiter, a 1st-century Roman satirist, is supposed to have remarked. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.

As apt today as it was then.

(I was recently talking to a mate who’s a post-grad in the classics. She noted that classicists aren’t the fastest-moving academicians around, speculating that maybe it was because, in studying the classics, you realise the same problems and the same solutions have been around for over two thousand years regardless of change in other aspects of life.)

Massive topographical map of Ireland

Published March 21, 2005

Mapping: NASA’s Earth Observatory has put up a 4 MB high-res topographical image of Ireland. A rough calculation indicates that each pixel is under 0.1 of a mile on a side. It’s fantastic. ;)

Best of all, since NASA operate under the US’ enlightened copyright and licensing policies for government-funded data, it’s free — the masthead notes ‘Any and all materials published on the Earth Observatory are freely available for re-publication or re-use, except where copyright is indicated. We ask that NASA’s Earth Observatory be given credit for its original materials.’ Copyright is not indicated on this image as far as I can see. So go ahead and save a copy for future use, too.

(via EirePreneur in turn via Irish Typepad)

Open API for online group-based services maintainance

Published March 19, 2005

Web: I’ve been doing a little thinking about group-based networking and services.

Here’s the situation. Let’s say you have a small group of people, and want to offer some kind of online service to them (like a private chat area, mailing list, etc. etc.) That’s all well and good, but maintainance of ‘who’s in the group’ is hard. You need:

  • the ability to let other ‘admins’ add/remove people
  • a nice UI for doing so
  • a nice UI for people to request to sign up
  • possibly, multiple groups
  • privacy for group members
  • possibly, some public groups
  • decent authentication, username/password
  • the usual stuff that goes with that — ‘I’ve forgotten my password, please email it to my listed address’
  • did I mention a nice UI?

The traditional approach is to code all that up myself, in my copious free time presumably. Urgh, talk about wheel reinvention on a massive scale.

I’d prefer to use something like TypeKey, a web service that exposes an API I can use to offload all this hard work to. Initially, I was in the ‘ugh, Typekey 0wnz my auth data’ camp, but I’ve eventually realised that (a) they’re not quite as evil as MS, (b) they’re not quite as stupid as MS (deleting Passport accounts if you don’t log in to Hotmail, which is only one of the supposedly many services, including third party services? hello?!), and (c) it’s actually really convenient having a single-sign-on for weblog commenting after all.

Having said all that — TypeKey’s out. Unfortunately, it only does authentication, without dealing with group maintainance.

However, social networking services are all about groups and group maintainance.

Running through the options — LinkedIn, Friendster and Orkut are all grabby and gropy and ‘my data! mine!’, so they’re out immediately.

The next step was to take a look at Tribe.net, which seems kind of nice and had a good rep for open APIs — but as far as I can see, all they’ve got really in that department is FOAF output, and a simple server-side-include thing called TribeCast. I could list all the group members in a FOAF file, but without authentication, that’s pretty useless since anyone could claim to be one of the FOAFs.

That leaves Flickr, which has a great set of APIs. Using that is looking quite promising. If you’re curious, I’ve gone into detail on this at the taint.org wiki.

DCC no longer open source

Published March 19, 2005

Patents: DCC (Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse) is a venerable, and widely-used anti-spam system created by Vernon Schryver; we’ve supported it in SpamAssassin for yonks.

It now appears that DCC is now no longer open source software; it’s still free for personal and noncommercial use, but this clause has been added to the new license text:

This agreement is not applicable to any entity which sells anti-spam solutions to others or provides an anti-spam solution as part of a security solution sold to other entities, or to a private network which employes DCC or uses data provided by operation of DCC but does not provide corresponding data to other users.

So there’s talk that those commercial users should now license it — interestingly, from another company called Commtouch, not Vernon’s Rhyolite Software. (More info).

It appears that the license change is part of an agreement with Commtouch, owner of US Patent 6,330,590, a patent on the idea of hash-sharing antispam techniques. (I haven’t read the patent due to ASF and other policies so I can’t tell you what it really covers.)

It looks like we’ll be disabling DCC’s use in SpamAssassin by default, as we did with Razor, as a result. (Our policy is that the default ruleset used in SpamAssassin be usable by anyone who can use our software, so that the normal usage is open source by default, rather than subsets of the overall functionality.)

Greasemonkey: transcoding extension for Firefox

Published March 16, 2005

Web: Now this is very cool stuff: ‘Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (“user scripts”) to any webpage to change it’s behavior.’

In other words, you can rewrite any page viewed in Firefox, as it transits between the server and your client’s display; a form of transcoding.

Traditionally, transcoding is performed using a HTTP proxy which applies the transformation, or a specialised HTTP user agent which transcodes and outputs a whole new set of documents with the results.

That was all a little hacky for full-scale integration into your web browser, though, so Greasemonkey is a big improvement for that use-case.

Some good links:

And some demos:

Remember, these are single, sub-100-line JS scripts, running entirely locally in the user’s web browser. The last one gives you an idea of what coolness is possible…

My contribution: an ad-removal script for Metafilter. It took some 30 seconds of hacking to produce this — soooo easy. It’s a whole new world of site customisation and hackable filtering. You thought AdBlock was good, this is ever niftier ;)

Taxation: a Happy Ending

Published March 15, 2005

Tax: Following on from the previous entry, I’ve had a stroke of luck. It turns out that I did indeed quality as a US resident for tax purposes, and therefore could use Turbotax.

20 minutes later, both state and federal forms were e-filed with the very minimum of fuss — computers and the net illustrating their worth as labour-saving devices quite nicely. ;)

(Oh — also — a PSA for Google’s benefit: I’m pretty sure that form 6251 had incorrect instructions. It claims that the items it refers to in form 1040, can also be referred to in form 1040NR by the same numbers. In fact, parts of 1040NR are radically different in numbering than 1040. It’s a bug in the form!)

Taxation Ventage

Published March 14, 2005

Taxes: it’s that time of year again, when every inhabitant of the US, resident and ‘non-resident’, gets The Fear. Yep, it’s tax time. (Warning: this is a long and protracted vent.)

In the US, every worker is required to prepare and file their own taxes, in detail. Nowhere outside of India can do bureaucracy quite like the US, as far as I can tell — even the brits have embraced simplicity to a greater degree — so this is no trivial undertaking; however, they do have a few outs, if you’re eligible.

Naturally, given my luck, I’m not. ;)

Now, I’m no slouch when it comes to form-filling; I’ve had to deal with messy forms many times before. But these are masterpieces. Check out this gem:

The ATNOLD is the sum of the alternative tax net operating loss (ATNOL) carryovers and carrybacks to the tax year, subject to the limitation explained below. Figure your ATNOLD as follows.

Your ATNOL for a loss year is the excess of the deductions allowed for figuring AMTI (excluding the ATNOLD) over the income included in AMTI. Figure this excess with the modifications in section 172(d), taking into account the adjustments in sections 56 and 58 and preferences in section 57 (that is, the section 172(d) modifications must be separately figured for the ATNOL). For example, the limitation of nonbusiness deductions to the amount of nonbusiness income must be separately figured for the ATNOL, using only nonbusiness income and deductions that are included in AMTI.

Your ATNOLD may be limited. To figure the ATNOLD limitation, you must first figure your AMTI without regard to the ATNOLD. To do this, first figure a tentative amount for line 9 by treating line 27 as if it were zero. Next, figure a tentative total of lines 1 through 26 using the tentative line 9 amount and treating line 27 as if it were zero. Your ATNOLD limitation is 90% of this tentative total.

Enter on line 27 the smaller of the ATNOLD or the ATNOLD limitation.

Any ATNOL not used may be carried back 2 years or forward up to 20 years (15 years for loss years beginning before 1998). In some cases, the carryback period is longer than 2 years; see section 172(b) for details. The treatment of ATNOLs does not affect your regular tax NOL.

That pretty much appears as-is; there’s no additional explanation of those acronyms elsewhere, it’s just a big block of jargon. Obviously not intended for human consumption. There’s also this:

Medical and Dental. Enter the smaller of Schedule A (Form 1040), line 4, or 2.5 % of Form 1040, line 37.

That seems well and good, and according to the instructions, the 1040NR is 100% compatible with the 1040. Except Schedule (Form 1040NR), line 4 is:

Gifts to U.S. Charities. Gifts by cash or check.

What do charity donations have to do with medical and dental expenses? WTF? (I suspect the compatibility claim is incorrect.)

Last year, I hit up H&R Block for their help; it saved a lot of hassle, but was pretty expensive, costing over $200. Overblown TV advertising alert: of course there was no great refund, despite what their ads claim. However they did recommend that I donate old clothes to thrift stores, keep the receipts, and claim that back as a tax contribution. I’m serious. Given my wardrobe, that should net about $10.

This year should be a lot simpler, since I’m just a US nonresident working visa holder doing nothing but paying plain old income tax — so I was intending to just fill out the forms myself.

I think I’ll tick that idea off my list and check out the online options.

All I can say is, no wonder quite a few US citizens seem to think that government involvement is something to be minimized if at all possible. There are alternatives though — I’d happily take an Ireland-style ‘nanny state’ which will compute my tax liabilities for me if I so choose. It’s not like I’d be in a position to argue with them anyway, aside from the common case of hiring a tax attorney, if we disagree; so why not let the government do the heavy lifting? ;)

(PS: the good news is it now appears I may qualify as a resident. This means Turbotax.com is a viable option… yay!)

Back in the US, and Daniel’s interview

Published March 8, 2005

Misc: So I was travelling last week — a very productive trip to the UK visiting the main work dev office, and getting a little socialising in too while I was at it. A pretty good trip overall, especially since I seem to have figured out how to use my frequent flyer miles effectively to get great seats! ;)

Here’s a good interview with SpamAssassin PMC chair, Daniel; well worth a read if you want to see what we in SpamAssassin think about the state of the onion in spam-filtering.

In not-so-good news, it seems Charlie McCreevy has managed to push the software patent directive through, despite massive EU Parliament unhappiness. Third time around at the Fisheries meeting, naturally; and there’s some serious questions about the legitimacy of the procedural rules invoked by the Commission in refusing to take the directive off the A-item menu. Now that’s what I call democracy…

It can still be defeated, but it’s an uphill battle now — for it to be thrown out in the second reading at the European Parliament, it’ll need a two-thirds majority of all MEPs (not just the MEPs present), reportedly.

In the meantime, thanks to the FF and PDs’ bullying tactics, Ireland’s small but growing pool of homegrown software developers are being ignored, and the Irish software industry looks more like a lame import operation for the likes of Microsoft. Our reputation is dragged through the mud for a few multinationals, and the rest of Europe resents us for it. Wonderful.

BTW, even if it does pass, there are ways to fix it — directives must be implemented into national law in each country. This means that Ireland could still write their implementation of the directive to exclude software inventions (even the ones where it’s supposedly a patent on hardware like ‘a CPU connected to a hard disk, with such-and-such software running on the CPU’). However, given McCreevy’s obvious bias in favour of getting this specific text into place, how likely is that going to be?