Quoderat

Here’s a genuinely heartwarming story. The RIAA is after David Greubel of Arlington, Texas for having 600 downloaded songs on his family computer, and is trying to get him to pay USD 9,000 to settle out of court. Greubel’s 15-year-old daughter wrote an e-mail about the case to the punk rapper MC Lars (Download this song), and Lars passed the e-mail on to his management company, the Nettwerk Music Group, which also manages Sarah McLachlan, the Barenaked Ladies, and Avril Lavigne, among others.

Terry McBride, the head of Nettwerk, decided to help Greubel, and says he has the support of all the artists he manages (including those whose songs were found on Greubel’s computer). He has offered to pay all of Greubel’s legal costs to fight the RIAA and all of his fines if he loses. He says that he does not necessarily agree with downloading ripped songs (which happens to be legal here in Canada, where Nettwerk is based), but that suing fans is just bad business:

My hope is that this (Nettwerk’s support) will create a positive concrete conversation between the artists, their managers and the record labels as to what the future is . . . The fan is the future. Suing the fan is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Note: I don’t read Slashdot any more — I’m sure this is also there, so apologies for any duplication.

I scan documents for two main reasons:

1. to have backup copies of my airplane’s technical logs (a plane can lose tens of thousands of dollars of value if the logs are lost); and
2. to allow me to submit expense claims to customers by e-mail, using scanned receipts.

It’s very easy to scan individual pages to just about any format in Linux using graphical frontends like XSane or The Gimp, but when there’s more than one page, nothing beats PDF for ease of use at the receiver’s end (especially when you’ll be sending the file to an admin assistant running Windows and reading e-mail in Outlook). After a bit of experimentation, I found a few steps that actually work:

• In the XSane preview window, preset the area to Letter size, choosing any resolution you want (150 or 300 dpi are probably the best choices).
• Save your scans in the format of your choice.
• Use the convert utility from ImageMagick to merge all of the scanned pages into a Postscript file. It is critical to use the -density option with your scan DPI so that the pages come out the right size, e.g. “convert -density 150 *.tiff output.ps”.
• Use the ps2pdf utility from Ghostscript to convert the Postscript file to PDF, eg. “ps2pdf output.ps output.pdf”.

I’ve tried many other approaches (including using the libtiff utilities with all compression options, and using convert to go straight to PDF), and they all result in either huge or malformed PDF files. This is the one approach that works for me.

There must be a tool out there, GUI or command line, that willallow me to batch scan multipage documents straight into PDF without all this messing around. I haven’t found it, but I’ll be happy to hear about such a tool in comments.

(Updated to include MSN response; updated again for the China thing.)

According to this CBC article, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL have all willingly handed over search records to the U.S. government (they claim that no personal information is included, but personal information can often be inferred from search URLs). Google said ‘no’, and is now taking the fight to court.

The request is unrelated to national security — instead, the government is gathering background evidence to defend an anti-porn law in court.

Update: Ken Moss defends MSN’s action (via Dare Obasanjo). Ken’s comment repeats the point made in the CBC article that MSN believes it released no personal information.

Update #2: And now, Google has agreed to censor search results for China.  It guess this pulls Google back down to a karmic break even: defender of privacy rights in North America, but anti-free-speech collaborator in Asia.

[Update: comments are now fixed -- if you have any comments about XML 2006, please feel free to leave them.]

I am chairing XML 2006 this fall, taking over the conference after five successful years under Lauren Wood.

This year’s conference’s time and place has changed since the announcement at XML 2005. The main conference will now take place from Tuesday 5 December to Thursday 7 December, 2006 at the Sheraton in Boston, MA. Tutorials will be held immediately before the conference, on Monday 4 December. Friday 8 December will be available for organizations to hold meetings, BOF’s, and so on.

Please update your calendars now. If you have a blog with readers who might be interested in XML 2006, I would be grateful if you could pass on this update, so that it reaches as many people as possible. Ditto for any mailing lists.
The planning committee is about to begin work setting up themes and tracks, so if you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave them as comments or to send me a private email. We’re looking forward to reading your paper submissions, and to seeing you in Boston next December. In the meantime, don’t forget to take a look at XTech 2006 in Amsterdam this May, and Extreme Markup Languages 2006 in Montreal this August.

(Technorati: xml2006)