Family Holloway

Linux.com did a story on Docvert,

I tested DocVert on old Word Doc files from emails and miscellaneous files from HR departments (none of my real co-workers have sent me a .doc file in years). I wasn’t able to trip it up
…
it is exactly those elements that cause most Word Doc to HTML converters to produce such horrifyingly-bad HTML output. DocVert, in contrast, converts the document to an intermediary format that preserves its overall structure: headings, relative positioning, indentation, and so forth. It then uses XSLT to transform between the intermediary format and the selected final output, in a clean and predictable way.

Read more of Nathan Willis’s article at Linux.com.

Docvert converts Office files to DocBook and HTML. This is the second release of the Python rewrite of Docvert.

Version 5.1 comes with improved list handling, unit test coverage, an easier UI, and finally feature parity with Docvert 4.0 (for conversions).

Download here.

This is quite basic but so many don’t know to freeze the ginger or the ratios and so here’s a refresher.

Ingredients

• Honey
• Lemon
• Ginger

Instructions

1. Freeze the ginger solid (for at least 24 hours)
2. Snap off about 100g of ginger per cup and grate it with a fine parmesan grater because we’re trying to maximise the surface area, like tea leaves
3. Put it in a microwavable container and add 300ml of water for each cup
4. Bring to a boil in the microwave then add 100g of honey per cup, stir until dissolved, and leave it be for 60 minutes. Bring to boil again and leave it for another 60 minutes
5. Add lemon juice to taste and then strain with a sieve

19th Century settlers took a leap of faith when they purchased land in Wellington, site unseen. Today’s real estate industry uses similar strategies to sell a dream with properties that are unbuilt or inaccessible, playing to desires for an idealised lifestyle. Pioneer-City.com builds on these past and present observations to offer a leap into the future.

Bronwyn Holloway-Smith will present an impostor inner-city real estate showroom that promotes a future lifestyle in Pioneer City on the Utopia Plains of Mars. With NASA scientists aiming for a human mission to Mars in the next 20 years, and private innovators also paving the way, a Martian colony is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Open for one month only,
80 Taranaki Street, Wellington.
Weekends 10am-2pm between 18th June — 10 July 2011.

Submissions on the Infringing File Sharing regulations discussion document are due on Friday, and here’s the CFF’s response (PDF). The introduction follows,

DOWNLOAD CFF SUBMISSION

The Internet is the most efficient copying machine the world has ever known. Most copyright law was written for the century when copying music (and books, and movies) was expensive but possible. Now it’s inexpensive and widely accessible. Rather than being a threat, new technologies offer artists new avenues and opportunities to export their work to broader audiences. It would be unsustainable to allow private entities to rely on Government intervention to support their outdated business models, at the expense of those who generate and consume creative works.

Copyright has shifted from regulating an industrial manufacturing process to regulating what people do in their homes. Laws targeting people’s behaviour within the four walls of their homes, on private internet connections, will always present unique challenges and trade-offs. New Zealand’s recent amendments to the Copyright Act 1994 (“the Act”) have constituted a significant change, which must be borne in mind when considering the wider impacts of the proposed regulations.

We support copyright policy that reflects the interests of both the public and artists

Given the ease of copying that the internet affords, copyright law depends more than ever on public awareness of not only the obligations it imposes, but the justifications for those obligations. Reasonable, transparent and straightforward enforcement processes and sanctions will be integral in maintaining and building public understanding of, and respect for, copyright. Unmeritorious infringement claims, unfair processes or disproportionate sanctions can be corrosive to the public trust in copyright. This in turn harms the artists that benefit from copyright’s protections, in two ways:

1. the public will consider artists’ legitimate interests as being contrary to their own and refuse to recognise them; and
2. at the same time, the sphere of artistic expression available to those who create will be limited by the expanding reach of copyright.

A recent HorizonPoll¹ showed that 89% of New Zealanders were opposed to having to prove “valid reasons” for their innocence. To assume these statistics are illustrative of the response of infringing file sharers would be naïve. Rather, the opposition to this approach is based on a more fundamental concern for the preservation of natural justice. This being the case, we remain deeply concerned by the premature optimisation in s122MA and that Internet Termination remains (albeit in an inactive form). As we do not view these elements as being essential to the law we submit that this law has unnecessarily caused harm to public respect for copyright which is detrimental to artists.

A copyright regime that is insensitive to the public demands of modern copyright law will continue to erode public trust in copyright, proving to be easily bypassed and as ineffectual as alcohol prohibition.

[1] http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/89-oppose-guilty-until-proven-innocent-file-sharing-law-aw-91574

Over at Github you’ll be able to see my efforts porting Docvert (a formerly PHP/Python project) to using solely Python.

The original Docvert began in 2004 and it’s still got some considerations for PHP3 (ugh). It’s become more difficult to maintain (partly due to old code, partly due to PHP not having suitable libraries) so I decided to move it to Python because so much of the code was already in that language. Thankfully most of Docvert is in XSLT which is language agnostic. It was a difficult decision and it’s not one that I made lightly.

So far the Github version (which I’m calling Docvert 5 alpha) supports arbitrary office files and transformations. It doesn’t yet support looping, zip responses, and so on but progress is going well and I should have most of the features done in about a week. It has a new, easiser to use interface and it’s faster, easier to extend, and so on.

For existing users with XSLT pipelines there should be no changes necessary, it will just work[tm]. For those with custom PHP plugins I’m considering supporting that via PHP-CLI (e.g. instantiating a PHP environment that mimics a custom pipeline stage).

Docvert converts .DOC to HTML. Version 4.0 has,

• EMF/WMF to SVG support
• DocBook XML and HTML improvements
• Many speed improvements

Subaccounting is free and simple personal accounting software that supports Kiwibank, TSB, ASB.

Changes:

• Improved support for EMF/WMF (requires PyODConverter with OOo Server)
• Replacing crappy homebrewed XML parser with SimpleXML. Should work identically, if you need the old behaviour then there’s deprecated_xmlStringToArray()
• Minor bugfixes to PyODConverter.

Go download it!

On Wednesday we published a lot of information about s122MA, a return of Guilt Upon Accusation in the new copyright law. Rick Shera has just written an article about it, “Back in 2008, after the Parliamentary Select Committee had removed section 92A from the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill, it was reintroduced unannounced on April Fools Day in an SOP just a week before the Bill was passed into law. The problem with section 92A was an ISP was almost certain to treat an internet account holder as guilty as soon as the ISP received an accusation from a rights owner. [...] Well, despite the many improvements proposed in the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill (section 92A’s replacement), at almost the last gasp the Select Committee has reported back with a completely new provision – a provision that creates a presumption heavily favouring the rights owner. Section 122MA –  without any warning, no public consultation and out of kilter with the balanced approach that has gradually developed. Groundhog day – the scales are being unfairly tipped again.  For reasons that are not immediately apparent.”

Update: CW Magazine also have an article on s122MA, saying that “the three points … establish very narrow criteria for a challenge. They do not, for example, leave room for a challenge on the grounds that the work was not copyright or that the way it was handled constitutes legal “fair dealing”.“

Sam Harris has released a book called The Moral Landscape book that talks about morals coming from an analysis of the natural world.

(direct link to video)

QUOTE:

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world—and there clearly are—then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.
– http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-moral-landscape-q-a-with-sam-harris/

I haven’t read the book yet but as I understand it the axiom is about defining morality as an IS that’s the “well-being of conscious creatures” rather than satisfying supernatural commandments. Morality has been a wishy-washy concept with religious overtones or distortions (ie condom use is immoral) so this is about trying to define morality in terms of neuroscience and other scientific fields. There is no compulsion to OUGHT but rather a refocusing and removal of unnecessary ambiguity around the IS of morality.

He may advocate OUGHT but I don’t think he says that it’s derived from IS