jcm's blog

I feel the need to re-explain my aversion to the current Identity Card legislation going through the UK parliament at the moment. Central to both my argument and that of the two main opposing political parties (who rightfully stand against Labour in this matter) is the issue of compulsion. While I don’t condone Identity Cards on principal (the government have no right to this information – treating your citizens like criminals a police state creates), I have fewer reservations about a voluntary system that I can opt out of on a personal basis (there would need to be protections in place to prevent compulsion by the back door). When I do strongly object is at the point now reached – one where Identity Cards are to be forced upon us.

And don’t tell me that’s not true. As the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats may well point out to you, around 85% of the British population have passports (and many more have other documents that are apparently also to be linked to the database). Thus, at least 85% of the British population will be forced to have an identity card over the next few years. We don’t have an option about passports either – although many travel on vacation, many also work overseas or need to travel on an occasional basis to visit family, or even for emergencies if a friend, colleague, or family member is taken ill. No, passports are not something we can just do without.

My passport is due to expire early in 2007, just before the mandatory Big Brother system is activated. I called the UK Passport Office[0] the other day to check on how I can expedite the renewal process. I also asked them about Identity Cards. I was told that the only briefing they have right now is to refer us to a government website – they have no other information to offer to callers. It is fortunate, then, that my replacement passport should see me through another 10 years without an enforced Identity Card. I have ten years to upgrade this passport to a better one and/or to rescind my British Citizenship in order to be removed from such a database.

Remember, the issue of compulsion is what bothers me. Iff the ID card was voluntary then my whinging would likely go away (or be substantially along the lines of it just being a waste of money) – I might even consider getting one some day if life became too hard without them. But since the government has decided to throw the right to choice within the UK down the toilet, it’s necessary to resist Identity Cards as much as is possible.

Jon.

[0] Who immediately ask you identity questions before speaking with you, regardless of the topic, just like modern banks (you may recall the situation I had with Barclays after refusing to give them such information in order to find out general information about Barclays that had nothing to do with my account). They seem to default to wanting to know your inside leg measurement before talking to you.

I’m writing a book at the moment, for which it’s useful to have Microsoft Word kicking around from time to time. So, I installed an old copy under (the otherwise absolutely fantastic – go buy it now!) Crossover Office so I could check things before they’re sent to the publisher. It’s been working great for a month or two. Until I tried to play around with my regular wine.

Here’s ticket 77817 from the Codeweavers tracking system, which I just filed. Notice two bad design decisions here:

• the broken assumption that it’s a good idea to go looking for replacement dlls randomly, not using the standard cxoffice defaults whenever possible (that have been tested).
• not providing a graphical error message with descriptive text on systems running graphical applications.

This is very bad, because the average Joe using this software isn’t likely to fire it up under strace or a debugger and see why it’s failing and then report that to Codeweavers – they’re just going to think it’s broken. Now I think cxoffice is a fantastic product, but it could be better if it handled this stuff and didn’t just break if a user stuck a file in their home directory. That kind of stuff is what puts some people off using FLOSS and it shouldn’t have to be this way.

Folks,

Can someone patch up cxoffice not to default to looking for dll’s in the current directory?

I’ve been recently playing with getting Google Earth to work under regular wine (I don’t know about cxoffice support thereof) and had an ole32.dll kicking around in $HOME. When I came to launch cxoffice to run Microsoft Word, it spewed a bunch of errors and fired up the debugger (without enough useful output – it just died, no cxoffice error dialog).

I removed and re-installed various bottles and cxoffice before I finally started shouting at it and wound up running the whole thing under strace. I then manually went through the output to see what was getting loaded and found the offending dll that way. In any case cxoffice *should not* do this – it might be something wine does, but cxoffice should not.

Thanks for an otherwise great product. Keep up the good work – and please add an error dialog wrapper so users can /see/ when this happens as the default experience on cxoffice 5.0.1 is “Word started to launch but nothing happened”

Jon.

England is to ban smoking in enclosed public spaces from the summer of 2007, playing catch up with several other countries in the UK, who have already taken positive action over the past few years. This is fantastic news and mirrors the actions of many other states over the past few years, since it finally became politically correct not to endorse these little death sticks and all of their evils.

Smoking is an evil, horribly disgusting activity, which adversely affects me as a non-smoker. I don’t want to inhale smoke passively and risk acquiring lung cancer just because somebody else wants to smoke next to me. In fact, in the past I have been known to carry face masks around in public to remind those who decide to smoke that I very much don’t consider their actions to be reasonable. This being said, I’m not against people smoking (if they want to kill themselves, then that’s entirely their own decision – I’ll even support their right to free treatment on the NHS because of the tax they pay) but I am against them doing it in enclosed public spaces and in places where I am going to be eating. If people want to smoke then they should do it somewhere else – at home, outside where there’s less risk, etc. We don’t let people walk into bars waving guns in the air, so it’s a good idea to stop them from waving death sticks too.

This isn’t a civil liberties issue either because my rights as a non-smoker outweigh those of smokers in this matter. Nobody is going to convince me that this ban is anything but a good idea.

Jon.

I like Fedoras, I think I’ll wear them more often.

It’s official. I have jumped ship and will be moving to work for a super cool Linux vendor and supplier of fine haberdashery. As I result, I’m planning to relocate to Boston later in the year and work with some fine folks over in the Westford, MA office once we get all of the paperwork sorted out. See, there was a reason for my short trip to Boston a few weeks back after all

Jon.

ajh invited me to swing by Ottawa next month, so I’ve decided to look at combining that weekend visit with a little day trip over to the West Coast, to visit friends. Deepak tells me he believes that I’d seriously take a day trip from the East Coast to Portland for some coffee and of course, he’s not wrong.

Jon.

It’s that time again. I watched the news, it was bad. Stories about human rights violations never make me feel great in the evening. So, I decided to up my donations to human rights organisations and signed up to the American Civil Liberties Union while I was at it. As if that wasn’t enough, I decided I probably should be a card carrying member of the Free Software Foundation, so I did that too. Yes, all I really want is RMS’s voice on my answerphone.

[UPDATE] For an example of my concerns about identity cards and government collected information about citizens, see the excellent pizza commercial on the ACLU website.

Jon.

According to the BBC, MPs in the British parliament have voted to oblige people applying for passports to be put on the ID card register.

Apparently, identity cards will reduce identity theft, cure all disease, rid the world of terrorists and evildoers, whilst simultaneously earning every bearer a free Nobel peace prize. Wow! With the kind of crap this government is churning out, who wouldn’t want to get one? Not me. Thing is, I’m not a complete moron so I’m able to see beyond this to the police state they want to create in the United Kingdom. Identity cards won’t do anything to remove terrorists and evildoers (they’ll just get fake documents as they always have done) but they will cost citizens very real money that could be spent curing diseases and building world class hospitals. I expect identity theft to increase once there’s a single point of failure.

On days like this, I’m actually almost quite thankful for the (unelected) peers in the house of Lords because they at least seem to see some kind of folly going on here. Too many people have fallen for the terrorism hysteria, so it looks like the UK is going to shortly give in and just throw civil liberties out of the window. Some of the human rights organisations I contribute to (Liberty, Amnesty International) will try to undo this nonsense, as will my political party (the Liberal Democrats) but I fear it’s too late now.

It’s a shame that British citizens don’t have any constitutional rights to speak of. For a country that’s been around as long as this one, it’s very much stuck in the stone age.

[UPDATED] Decided it was about time that I also joined the ACLU.

Jon.