The Substantially Similar Weblog

Here are the first three programs I wrote in Python:

• addMIMETextToHTMLEmail — if you hate HTML-only email (e.g., from Hotmail) because you use a text-based mailreader like mutt this will turn HTML-only email into a MIME multipart message with a text part and an HTML part. Other utilities I’ve found will strip out the HTML or convert it to text, but this leaves the HTML as a separate part in case you need it. Typically you would use this as a procmail filter:
  

   :0fw * ^Content.*html | addMIMETextToHTMLEmail.py 

  (download).

• addTitlesToLinks — this program will take HTML snippets (or a whole web page) and look up each tag that doesn’t have a ‘target’ element for the title of the webpage referred to. It will then add the title to the tag. You can either use the program as a module and call the function addTitlesToLinks, or use it as a filter (and pipe HTML through it). (download).
• fetchPageAndImages — you can feed this program a URL, a file containing HTML, or pipe HTML into it, and it will go and get each web page that is linked, as well as images on those pages, and pack it all up into a single pickled object. It can also take this object and restore it back to something that could be served to a user. So it’s a simple web caching program. It’s primarily intended to be part of something larger, but it has some command line options to try it out as a stand-alone program. (download).

NewScientist.com has an interesting interview with Patrick Ball, deputy director of the Science and Human Rights Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The interviewer asked Ball about the importance of free and open-source software to his work.

I assumed that free/open-source software is useful to human rights groups in the same way that it’s useful to any nonprofit—or really anyone—high quality software that doesn’t have to cost money. But Ball points out a particular benefit to human rights work that I hadn’t considered:

The other part of the copyright problem is piracy – or, more appropriately, unauthorised copying. The beauty of this argument, from the point of view of, say, the government of Burma, is that they can say to the World Trade Organization, OK, we’re going to crack down on piracy – and then they go arrest a bunch of human rights groups. If we use free software, that all goes away. Also, living in miserable poverty is not a human rights violation, but it’s clearly not in the spirit of human rights law. I don’t think any intelligent person thinks that better standards of living are coming to any place without computing. And one of the impediments is paying a huge tax on every computer sold in the world to a rich company in the state of Washington. The way out is a fundamentally different approach to software, but freedom comes at a price. As a human rights guy I accept lower salary, longer hours, more difficult travel schedule and using free software. These are all costs I pay in order to live according to a set of principles.

ZUG (“the world’s only comedy site” (?)) has an excellent guide about how to avoid tolls on the Massachusetts Turnpike. I highly recommend it, at least to Massachusetts natives. I’m not sure this method will work in other jurisdictions.

I’ll be back in Boston late Friday night until next Wednesday (October 22). I’m returning to do several interviews for postgraduate judicial clerkship positions (both state and federal). My internship here in California at Altshuler, Berzon doesn’t end until Thanksgiving, but that would be too late for interviews.

If anyone has advice about inteviewing for a judicial clerkship, please let me know.

I’ll try to make some time to see my Boston folks while I’m home, although I’ll be pretty busy with the interviews and trying to telecommute to my job here. But let me know if you’d like to meet up.

The United States Supreme Court refused to hear the White House’s appeal in Walters v. Conant, a case Altshuler, Berzon (the firm I’m currently working for) has been working on for several years. The case involved the question of whether the federal government can punish doctors for recommending or discussing marijuana with their patients. The Supreme Court’s denial of cert means that the Ninth Circuit opinion stands, upholding a permanent injunction preventing the federal government from punishing physicians where the basis of the punishment is solely the physician’s professional recommendation of the use of medical marijuana. This is a major victory for the medical marijuana movement here in California and elsewhere.

I’ve started using blosxom to generate this weblog, rather than my own home-spun code. I considered making the transition invisible by keeping an identical layout, but the calendar looks better on the right. I’ve also spruced up the stylesheet a bit. I’ll be working in more stuff over the next few weeks, but most of the archives from the old weblog should already be here.

Immediately visible improvements include an RSS feed for those of you who prefer to read this weblog through an aggregator, as well as the ability to comment on individual posts.

SunnComm Technologies says it will sue Alex Halderman, the Princeton University graduate student who recently published a paper showing how SunnComm Technologies’ MediaMax CD-3 Copy Protection could be defeated by pressing the “shift” key. Says Halderman:

“I’m still not very worried about litigation under the DMCA, I don’t think there’s any case. I don’t think telling people to press the ‘Shift’ key is a violation of the DMCA.”

This just in from BNA’s Internet Law News:

NO SHIFT IN CD COPYING
A Princeton graduate student says he has figured out a way to defeat the MediaMax CD3 software, which is supposed to keep music CDs from being copied on a computer. John Halderman said the MediaMax CD3 software could be defeated on computers running the Windows operating system by holding down the Shift key, disabling a Windows feature that automatically launches the encryption software on the disc.

More details from news.com and Wired. Pretty amazing stuff—defeat DRM with the “shift” key!

Weather

I’ve been in the Bay Area for 33 days so far, and i don’t think it’s rained once yet. Although I did play bicycle polo in Golden Gate Park as the fog set in, which was almost like rain, except it wasn’t coming from the sky. September was about as sunny and pleasant as any place I’ve ever lived. Somehow, the climate seemed to know that the month was over, and now there’s a thick cloud blanket over the whole state. At least the part that I can see.

BART

It took me about two weeks to figure out a social norm around boarding BART (one of several non-integrated rail transit systems here). People were always lining up in certain places when there was no train. I hadn’t really paid attention and just walked up to the door and entered. I only recently realized that there are black spots painted on the platform every 15 feet or so to indicate where the doors will be when the train stops, and I was essentially cutting in line every day, probably pissing people off. People were too nice to say anything, though, and I finally figured it out. I’ve talked with some other folks who said they had similar experiences when first moving to the area.

Two Buck Chuck

Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck is all the rage here. Being able to buy drinkable wine for $2 is a privilege I thought was reserved for the French. Although many myths abound about how Trader Joe’s can sell the wine so cheaply (including the apocryphal story that American Airlines could no longer carry corkscrews on flights so they had to dump their whole collection), apparently it’s just a matter of oversupply. It also appears that California is the one state where the “Two Buck Chuck” really is Two Bucks. It’s practically an institution here; I had never heard of it back east.

So those are some of my naive East Coast first impressions. You are now prepared for your first trip to California.