I just read a very long rant by Asger Leth in the danish paper Politiken about Film Making and Piracy.

The gist of the rant is this: Download is stealing, We should make more laws that prevent this and “It is not a human right to have a particular movie exactly when it suits you.” ¹

I find this to be a very selfish, narcissistic and uneducated view of the problem at hand. You think that the content industry suffers because of illegal downloads and each download is a lost sale.

If people couldn’t download your movie for free,
chances are they would just watch something else instead…

The content industry suffers because the market is full. There is so much great content out there that when people are given the choice between paying a huge amount for new content and a small amount for older content, people generally chose the cheeper one. To make matters worse the content industry has continuously degraded the user experience by adding more and more crap to prevent us from copying their precious content or consuming it in any other way than the one they had envisioned many many years ago.

Just this last weekend, I had to waste 30 minutes stripping out the DRM on a DVD I bought legally in the US. I had to do so because it was region restricted to region 1, and I live in region 2. Region codes and trailers² you can’t skip are just some of the annoyances you have to endure when buying DVDs legally.

Most people want to be honest, but the content industry continuously makes it harder to be so. Matt Gemmel said it best in this piece where he describes what he calls The Piracy Threshold.

I know it is illegal to download content you haven’t paid for, but there comes a time when you have to be pragmatic even though you know your are right.

SOPA and ACTA have nasty side effects that will push us back into the digital dark ages. One of the more notable side effects is that site owners and internet providers can be held accountable for actions performed by its users.

I can post a link to some illegal content on your website
…and you will have to pay the consequences for my actions.

Each website or service provider will have to police the use of their service vigorously or suffer the consequences. More likely they will just stop providing their service… Say goodbye to WiFi in your favorite cafe, say goodbye to free internet at the public library, say goodbye to things like the Wikipedia… and welcome to the digital dark ages curtesy of the content industry trying to combat a perceived³ problem.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing code.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are not smart enough to debug it.

A while ago I upgraded from Gitosis to Gitolite. I’ve been using Gitosis for a long time and while there is nothing wrong with Gitosis, Gitolite just does so much more.

One of my favorite features is wildcard repositories which makes it super easy to have normal users create as many repositories as they can imaging without having to bother a git-admin.

To setup a sandbox for each user you must first enable wildcard repositories in ~/.gitolite.rc. You do this by setting $GL_WILDREPOS to 1.

After that you just need to configure the userspace like this¹:

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repo user/CREATOR/[a-zA-Z0-9_\.\-]+
    C = @admins CREATOR
    RW+ = @admins
    RW  = CREATOR

Note the use of CREATOR, this is a variable signifying the user that creates and accesses the repository. The CREATOR can even delegate permissions² to other users if needed.

To get you locally created repository up on the new upstream you first add the new remote and then you just push it up. For convenience you can also make you local repository track the new upstream using git branch --set-upstream³ which will save you a lot of key strokes⁴ in the long run.

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git remote add origin git@git.domain.com:user/<$USER>/<$REPO>.git
git push origin master
git branch --set-upstream master origin/master

That’s it! - Hope you enjoy wildcard repositories as much as I do.

Yesterday a prominent Atheist died of pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer. Christopher Hitchens was the author of a book called “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”, today we are reminded of just how right he was.

The death tonight of Christopher Hitchens is an excruciating reminder of the consequences of unbelief.
We can only pray others will believe.

The above quote is an insult to both believers and non-believers, and represents everything that is wrong with religion today.

Is Albert Mohlers god really so petty that he will inflict cancer on those who do not believe? and why is Albert Mohler using fear to make people believe?

Let those who believe, believe
…and let those who do not believe, not believe.

Be a guide and lead by example, don’t force your beliefs¹ on others.

Yesterday I updated my iPhone 4S to the new iOS 5.0.1 pre-release version which is supposed to fix the horribly battery life¹ everybody have been complaining² about since the release of iOS 5.

Unfortunately it also broke my secret iCloud dance and no matter of fiddling with the options would make my Documents & Data sync work again.

After some browsing through device logs I found this error:

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com.apple.Dataclass.KeyValue is enabled for more than one account

I have been a long time subscriber of Apples MobileMe service. The migration process from MobileMe to iCloud, promoted my MobileMe email address to a full Apple ID. This really sucks as I already have an Apple ID that I have used to buy Music and Apps with since the dawn of time.³

On my iPhone I had added both iCloud accounts and just turned on the services I needed from each.⁴ Apparently this is a bad idea, and deleting the old MobileMe account made above error disappear and iCloud have been syncing my Documents & Data happily ever since.