UPDATE 2 There’s now a site up dedicated for thanking Poland for their extraordinary courage. Please, go ahead and express your gratitude. It’s well worth it.

Software Patent Directive on Agricultural Council List of A-Items

Dear EU Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries,

At the Agricultural Council’s meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Directive’ COM 2002/0047 (COD) “On the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions” (Software Patent Directive) is likely to be inserted into the list of A-items in the last minute.

This list should not be accepted.

Please object when the Council President asks for confirmation of the agenda (at the beginning), and demand the removal of the software patent directive from the list of A items.

The Council’s rules of procedure demand that the provisional agenda be sent 14 days in advance. In this case, the software patent directive was set on the agenda no earlier than 2 working days in advance.

According to Article 3 Items 7-8 of the Council’s Rules of Procedure, it is enough if one country objects to this late tabling, but support for removal may be expected from several countries.

The proposed text does not enjoy a qualified majority. It has been inserted into the agenda on the basis of questionable interpretations if not violations of the Council’s Rules of Procedure.

1. The Dutch government has been obliged by its parliament to withdraw support. A proposal can not be adopted without a vote, and if it is voted, the Dutch presidency must abstain. If the Dutch presidency does not abstain, minister Brinkhorst may face a motion of distrust and be dismissed. This means that, given the continued opposition from Spain, Italy, Belgium and Austria, even without Poland’s abstention, the current Council Proposal no longer enjoys a qualified majority.
2. On 19th of May and on 16th of November the Polish government has stated that it can not support the Council proposal. However the Polish EU minister, who is not in charge of the dossier, has so far, under pressure from the Council presidency, been reluctant to execute the decisions of the Polish government.
3. The Council proposal has been criticized by all groups of the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag) as being deficient. As the inter-group resolution of the 30th of November 2004 points out, it does not satisfy the demands for clarity and balance that a proposal with such significance must fulfill.
4. The Latvian Government has made it clear in a unilateral statement that it does not support the proposed text. The French and Hungarian governments have also expressed reservations. In Slovenia, Slovakia, Portugal and Hungary there is practically no support for software patents anywhere in the industry or government, except in the narrow circles who dominate the Council’s patent working party.
5. The new vote is needed because the Rules of Procedure of the Council demand a qualified majority at the time of the formal adoption of a Common Position. A political agreement can only be adopted, if it is supported by a qualified majority of governments at the time of the vote. “Adoption as an A-item” means “adoption without discussion”, not “without vote”. There can be no adoption without vote.
6. The change in voting weights on 1 November means that the Council proposal now lacks a qualified majority if either the Netherlands or Poland abstain.
7. The explanatory documents for the Council draft were made available only very recently so that at the time of this Council meeting only half of the six-week period reserved for the consultation of national institutions will have elapsed. The urgent scheduling of a parliamentary special session in the Netherlands after the COREPER meeting on December 15 shows the importance of this consultation period. This text rejects essential amendments by the European Parliament, arguing that they are “incompatible with the TRIPs treaty” or that they would not reflect “established practice”. These arguments are new, not covered by any “political agreement” and in clear contradiction to the resolution of the German Parliament and can not be adopted without a vote.
8. The Protocol on the Role of National Parliaments in the Treaty of Amsterdam explicitly encourages participation by national parliaments in the EU legislative process. It does not exempt the Council of Ministers. Accordingly, attempts to thwart the integration of the positions of several national parliaments (NL and DE) at this stage would be illegitimate.

The software patent directive is creating great difficulties for the Council because the Council has been nominating the goats to be the gardeners. The “Intellectual Property (Patent) Working Party” consists of the very national patent administrators who in personal union also run the European Patent Office. They have been unwilling to deal constructively with the questions at hand. They have ignored the substantial amendments of the European Parliament without justification and without addressing the problems of economic policy which the Parliament tried to address. They have in fact merely restated their previous agreement of November 2002, in which they had recited recent doctrines of the European Patent Office. These doctrines, in effect, authorise the monopolisation of business methods, algorithms, data structures and process descriptions in the same way as in the USA, without any effective limitation. The gap between these doctrines and the Parliament’s proposal is so wide that it will be impossible to overcome it within the procedure of a second reading. The Council has yet to begin a real first reading and to deliver a text which at least shows some willingness to face the issues. Now is the opportunity to take this first step. If it it is not taken in the Council’s first reading, then the directive is unlikely to get anywhere in the next steps of the co-decision procedure.

In Summary:

• The current Council Proposal can not be passed as an A-item, and there is no need for any minister in the Agriculture Council to accept it.
• Any attempt to pass the proposal as it stands is higly hazardous for information society and democracy in the EU and incompatible with the Rules of Procedure of the EU Council.

Yours sincerely,
Jarkko Laine

My other programming language of choice, TCL (Tool Command Language), has had its own merchandise for a long time, so I guess it was about the time to find something for Ruby, too. So, here you go, folks, enjoy my new breakfast juice of choice (??With juicy bits??, of course!):

<img src="/images/21.jpg" style="height:422px;width:317px" alt="Ruby Breakfast Juice" title="Ruby Breakfast Juice" />{=html}

I’m a news junkie, and not the only one. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a working feedreader I’d unconditionally love.

First there was NetNewsWire. Nice, but didn’t feel quite right. Then came Shrook, with the great feature of ordering the feeds according to the latest entry. Rulers marking the time from the posting, 1 hour, 1 day etc. Very cool.

When Shrook 2 was announced, I was in heaven. The first version was already great, if not quite there, so I could hardly wait for the next revision, which seemed to promise me the moon. And what did I get? Blah. Squeesh. Bummer. A christmas tree.

Now the creators of Shrook didn’t obviously recognise that if people wanted to slice and dice and organize their feeds in what way ever, they would choose NNW. Putting all the features on earth in one product can make it great, but few can make the software simple, intuitive and super-powerful simultaneously. Shrook 2, unfortunately, failed miserably. Only looking at the interface makes me feel sick.

I don’t want four equally wide panes in a feed reader. I want a decent way to navigate between feeds and articles but the most important thing in the window is the article. In Shrook 2 this wasn’t anymore the case, so I looked elsewhere and found NewsFire.

NewsFire hits the market segment that other feedreader manufacturers seem to have totally forgotten: people who want a clean, lean, fast and intuitive way to read their news. I currently subscribe to about 75 feeds and the figure is increasing. There’s no way I can easily follow them with NNW’s static subscription order. You say organize them in folders. I say balderdash. I subscribe to a few mailing lists that Mail.app automatically filters in their own folders. I never read them. Out of sight, out of mind.

Dave Watanabe, the creator of NewsFire, seems to have an excellent sense of how my mind is working. The feeds are organized just like in the original Shrook (although the timeline rules are missing), so the most current feeds are always shown first. That’s the way it should be. Plus, the user interface is really simple in any way, so the app is a real joy to use.

So where’s the catch? It crashes. NewsFire and Quicksilver, two mighty good applications, seem to have two things in common. They are both ground-breakingly innovative and user-centered — and they both crash after 10 minutes to 2 hours after their launch. What really pushed me to find another solution until NewsFire matures (yes, I have reported the bug) was that when it crashes, NewsFire always loses the sense of which posts I have already read.

Today I downloaded both NetNewsWire 2 and PulpFiction, two apps that both have quite a few major proponents. Here’s a few quick observations:

NetNewsWire

• It now has in-built webkit so you don’t have to switch to safari to read the full posts.
• While many of the shortcomings in the 1.X have been addressed, the most important flaw to me, static order of the subcriptions in the left panel, is still there (as far as I can tell), making it an instant no-go for me.

PulpFiction

• The UI is clearly innovative, more post- than feed-centric, making it look more like Mail.app.
• The posts can be sorted by date, which is great (and natural), but it’s harder to keep track of whole feeds than with other readers.
• Because of the previous point, didn’t really click to me.

Anyone (Dave?), relieve me from my pains. Why does NewsFire crash? Why can’t any other of the players understand how the feeds should be served? Any products I’ve missed? Anyone? I’m sinking…

I’m proud to announce that we’ve released the version 1.0 of Simulation package for OpenACS (Open Architecture Community System).

The major part of the package was developed by the nice folks at Collaboraid and my job was to finish the project and to make minor modifications to the system to get it ready for launch.

The Simulation package was developed for and financed by Project RechtenOnline, a Dutch project to facilitate and improve virtual learning in law schools across the country.

I seem to have a tendency to find a hotel room right on the edge of an open wireless signal. Last time I was in Leiden my laptop could detect the signal by itself and keeping the Powerbook in right position meant unlimited surfing.

This time, in the same town but in another hotel, the situation is a bit worse. The hotel hasn’t yet finished its WiFi project so I had already given up on surfing when the owner of the hotel called me today. She told me that the guy living in a room below me had left a message this morning telling that he had surfed the whole night using an open signal.

I of course had to find the signal, too, and I found it strongest in the middle of the first floor aisle. I could stretch the signal all the way to the door of my room, but never quite to my room. Until I got the brilliant idea that if the signal is stronger in the first floor, it has to be at its strongest on my hotel room floor. Well, unfortunately the best coverage seems to on the floor of my closet, and I have to lie on the floor outside the closet with my hands inside. Not quite comparable with an Aeron chair, is it?

I’m proud to announce my first commercial Ruby on Rails project, which is AFAIK also the first ever in Finland. I will be developing a simple content management system for a firm in the fashion industry (whose name I cannot yet publish) that offers the firm an easy way to publish new product lines and product pages.

The system will allow them to connect products with as many product lines they want to. It will also contain an extranet with which they can inform their b2b clients about their stock situation.

I will start the project in the beginning of December and the system should be ready for launch before you open your New Year Veuve Cliquet’s.

I’ve now officially made my first purchase from iTunes Music Store. I bought the whole Rammstein album Reise, Reise. I would’ve liked to buy the physical album (since I bought the whole album anyway) but couldn’t find it from the Amsterdam airport. So I just grabbed it from iTMS. Convenient. Very convenient.

However, I still think the most of my iTMS öhases in the future will be individualögs. If I want the whole album, I also want the leaflets. And as the store has now landed in Finland, how about making some contracts with Finnish music producers? Wow, they got me, there already is some Finnish music. Not a whole lot, though, so it would certainly be an aspect where they could improve. And for christ’s sake, please don’t mix ö with o. If I search for songs from Yö, I really wouldn’t like to browse through all yo yo rap son

For some reason some files in my CVS checkout sometimes end up without write-permissions for myself. I can easily change them in emacs shell buffer, but if they’re already open in emacs, I still get <buffer is read-only> nags. Here’s how to get rid of that: meta x toggle-read-only or C-x C-q.

Thanks to Andrew Grumet and blighty at #openacs who helped me out with this.

When I for a few years ago was still in PC land, there was a neat little app called PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). It uses a public key method to encrypt/decrypt mail messages. The problem with the app was that I never got around to coupling it well with a mail application. Besides, I never knew which messages I should sign or encrypt and which not, and these reasons together effectively made me not to use PGP at all.

Enter Mac world. I started getting mails with Signed tags on them. I checked the Mail.app help to find out how I could do the same. The cool thing was that OS X Mail has indeed built-in support for digital signatures and encrypting and provides a switch to encrypt a message when appropriate. Unfortunately, despite saying how easy things were, the help file never told how to get things up and running in the first place. The procedure for this isn’t hard, it just can’t be done inside Mail.app, so a step-by-step guide for getting a mail certificate working came in very handy.

Go ahead, check it out. I find this a very useful and cool feature of Mail.app that has for some reason been neglected by the Apple marketing (and help/tip writing) staff.

Just went and bought a new iMac for my parents this Monday. It’s the 17” model with superdrive and 512MB RAM.

I’m pretty excited, not just because it probably means a lot fewer unpaid pc support person hours for me :)

What puts me off a bit, though, is the shipping time of up to 8 weeks. Yeah, you heard it just right. I guess someone else is in the process of switching, too.