Within a few months, I started getting notices in the mail about my subscription ending soon (or so it appeared). I checked online, and all was well, I was good until April of 2012. So why am I getting notices about my subscription ending? Online support didn’t answer that question.

Today, I get a letter with big arrows around it, and “third notice” underlining it, in big, important, threatening text. I look online and I’m still good until April, so what the hell is going on? Well, lets talk to a human.

Easier said than done. Looking online, all of the references for support are email or snail mail. No phone numbers. I dug for 20 minutes or so, and finally came across the answers.com wiki which actually had…*gasp*…a phone number! So I called, and of course got a lousy IVR. I kept saying, “operator”, until it finally sent me to a human being.

A very nice girl explained that the letter was just a promotion, and that my subsription was not being cancelled. I asked then, why the letter gave no indication of this, and she insisted that my actual cancel date was on the letter. Damned if I can find it. The letter says,

ATT: MICHAEL SOULIER. IN case you didn’t realize it, the end of your subscription is quickly approaching. And without your renewal instructions, there’s not much we can do.

We just want to confirm the continuation of your subscription while our

discounted rates

are still in effect.

To avoid missing even one fabulous issue of CAR AND DRIVER, you must act quickly. Simply complete the Account Renewal form above and return it in this envelope we’ve provided. The regular Canadian subscription price includes postage and handling plus GST/HST (registration no. *********).

So please return your renewal instructions before the cut-off date. Thank you.

** THIRD NOTICE **

Now, I’m no expert, but I don’t think that I can be blamed for interpreting this as anything but a notice of the end of my subscription. Draw your own conclusions.

Lets just say that I won’t be renewing. I have no time or patience for this nonsense, and I don’t reward this behaviour, or have any desire to have anything to do with a company that goes to such lengths to not provide a phone number.

Dead trees do what they’re told. You turn the page, and it turns, unlike say, DVDs which tell you that you can’t skip something that the content producer deemed important, like a useless ad, a company logo or the FBI warning…in Canada.

But, books take up a lot of space, and take resources to produce. I love them, but there are definitely cons to all of the pros of dead trees. I have over 100 books on my Kobo right now, so if I go on vacation and finish my current book, I have plenty more. Many of them are copyright-expired free books, and one is from the library, as they’re trying to stay current in this revolution. Good for them. The world of ebooks is motivating me to read more than I usually would, and catch up on the classics that I’ve been meaning to read. As my eyes get weaker I can even increase the font size. Nice.

But, I recently bought a couple of books from the Kobo website, and this turned my attention to the topic of ownership. In buying the book, the books synced via the Kobo software are in “kepub” format, a Kobo extension to Adobe’s DRM Epub format. So they’re not only DRM-protected, but they’re non-standard. It’s like buying a book, but having it wrapped up a lock that needs a key that I don’t own, but can only borrow. And I’m paying money for this? Shouldn’t I be able to do whatever I damn-well please with my own property? A quaint idea in this digital age perhaps, but I think so.

Not to mention the fact that Maria and I normally donate our read books to the library when we’re done with them and sure that we’re not going to read them again, and we loan books to friends too. Thanks to DRM, our friends and the library lose out.

So, what’s an open-source hacker to do in a world of digital books and DRM? I could abstain, of course. Stick with dead trees, and stick my head in the sand and pretend that ebooks are going to go away, while shouting, “la la la” whenever someone mentions them. I’d rather explore the technology though, and understand the problem, before pretending to have a solution.

The Kobo website permits a download of Adobe DRM Epub books for anything that you’ve bought, so you can import them into Adobe Digital Editions. As it turns out, there are tools to remove the DRM from those files. As I’ve paid for the books, should I not be allowed to make legal copies for my own use? Like copying the book onto my phone in case I want to read it there? Or onto my Linux desktop? I think so. I suspect there are many who don’t agree with me though, because they want to charge me for a copy of the book on every platform that I want to read it on. Not to mention that they’re not willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, and they assume that if I can copy the book then I will copy it illegally and put it up on the piratebay or something similar.

Alternatively, if I buy a physical copy of a book, what if I don’t read it, and instead scan it into digital form so that I can read it on my Kobo? IANAL, but I think that would be a legal copy for my own purposes under Canadian copyright law, and when I’m done I can still loan that book to a friend and donate it to the library. Once donated I would even delete my digital copy, but of course no content producer would trust me to do that. I’m guilty until proven innocent.

Perhaps all print books should include the ability to download an epub version, for this very reason, or all epub versions should allow you to print off a copy for donation reasons.

The world of ebooks is far from perfect. Publishers want to impose old, obsolete ideas from the print world onto the digital world, like limiting numbers of copies, and limited loan times for libraries, when these limitations don’t actually exist in the digital world unless you create them artificially. I am positive that this world will evolve over time. I just hope it evolves into something fair for consumers.

Coming from Perl, when I find that I must do something simple like taking a string, delimited by pipes, and split it into a hash/dict/associative array/whatever.


mystring = foo|1|bar|2


So I want to take that, and split it into name/value pairs in a mapped data structure. This is trivial in Perl


%map = split /\|/, $mystring;


Now, in my language of choice, this should be simple too, right? Umm, not so much.


map = dict(zip(mystring.split('|')[:-1:2], mystring.split('|')[1::2]))


Geez, if I wanted to type that much, I’d use Java.

To be fair, there are tasks in Python that are trivial and are much harder in Perl, but this is just one of those cases that I find could be made much simpler. Why not just allow dict() to take a list?

Ruby seems to have learned that lesson, even if the syntax is a tad ugly.


msoulier@anton:~$ irb
irb(main):001:0> mystring = "foo|1|bar|2"
=> "foo|1|bar|2"
irb(main):002:0> Hash[*mystring.split('|')]
=> {"foo"=>"1", "bar"=>"2"}


Not a bad medium between the two really. I like Ruby’s design, too bad the docs suck horribly.

Elastic falling out of my door

That can’t be good.

I contacted Kanata Honda and they said that they don’t know what it is either, so they suggested that I drop by and they’ll take a look at it. Sounds good to me.

Update Jul 13: They took a wild guess that during some promotion someone tied a balloon to the car and lost the elastic string inside of the door. Too funny.

Since the beginning of time, the ignorant had always screamed the loudest,
herding the unsuspecting masses and forcing them to do their bidding. They
defended their worldly desires by citing Scripture they did not understand.
They celebrated their intolerance as proof of their convinctions.

The Amazon Kindle does nothing for me. The proprietary format is wrong and they want to build a silo of technology just like Apple. I’d rather support EPUB, built on open standards. I haven’t liked any other ebook reader that I’ve played with while browsing Future Shop, until I came across the Kobo.

It’s Canadian, kinda-sorta, it runs Android, it’s internal database is SQLite, and it pushes epub. The desktop only runs on windows, which totally blows, but some have made it work through Wine.

It’s a pure e-reader, no apps, and the wifi version has no annoying touchscreen, just some simple soft buttons. Something that I personally love in a world where too many damn devices are trying to do far too much and sucking at everything.

Kobo is coming out with a “Touch” version, unfortunately, but fortunately it brought the price of the non-touch wifi version down, so I bought one.

More to come.

I’m pretty sure it’s intended to be temporary, but after a few months it doesn’t feel very temporary. My car’s suspension doesn’t appreciate it.

Last night I foolishly left it on but unplugged it, so by the morning the battery was dead. I didn’t realize this until I turned it on, unplugged, and found that it wasn’t working. The battery indicator clearly showed that the battery was too depleted, but oddly the box didn’t even attempt to boot. I plugged it in and it didn’t help. Nothing on the screen, not even a bios screen.

Calling ASUS tech support was no help, they finally concluded that I needed to send it to them. Meanwhile I was doing research online and found this extremely helpful thread that suggested a corrupt CMOS and a simple short-circuit technique to clear it.

So, before sending it to ASUS I pulled out my multimeter probes and shorted the CMOS terminals as described. Lo and behold, it booted. I’ve powered it down and back up repeatedly to confirm, and it’s good now.

So, ASUS tech support, 0. Eeeuser community 1.

Thanks guys!

For example, when I close my laptop lid, the netbook no longer suspends. I’ve assigned a hotkey to this but maybe I want it to be automatic. This got me thinking about how to make this work. Well, it’s done through DBUS of course.

DBUS has become ubiquitous on Linux systems, providing a sub/pub model for events in Linux, which is a good thing given that the POSIX spec provides very little to make this kind of thing happen. I’m more of a fan of files, directories and symlinks myself, but I can understand why some programmers would want something a little more sophisticated, even if I don’t.

Being a Python hacker I want to use the python dbus module, so I install python-dbus and I’m off and running, albiet with little to no documentation. Google allows me to find enough clues that I’m led to qdbus to query the system bus, and I find org.freedesktop.DeviceKit.Power, which exposes a LidIsClosed property and a Changed event.

So, looking at some examples I manage to get this far…

#!/usr/bin/python

import dbus, gobject
from dbus.mainloop.glib import DBusGMainLoop

power_iface = None

def main():
    global power_iface

    DBusGMainLoop(set_as_default=True)

    bus = dbus.SystemBus()

    proxy = bus.get_object('org.freedesktop.DeviceKit.Power',
                           '/org/freedesktop/DeviceKit/Power')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

As the object that I want is not available in my process, I must instantiate a proxy to it via dbus. To get this proxy I call get_object on the bus object, passing the name of the object and then, somewhat redundantly, a path that seems to represent a namespace of properties, signals and methods.

Ok, so now that I have the object I can just check the LidIsClosed property and register for that signal, right? Wrong. For no apparently reason now that I have the object, to call methods on it I need an interface object, representing one of the interfaces that this object implements. That’s just so…Java, that it rubs me the wrong way, but I forge on.

I want the interface that allows me to query properties, and apparently all objects in DBUS implement some common interfaces, because this is how I get the interface I need:

power_iface = dbus.Interface(proxy, 'org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties')

My take on this is that I am asking for the standard freedesktop DBus Properties interface on the DeviceKit.Power object, so that I can query its properties. Overly complex when simple would do? Absolutely. Does it work? Sure, but why would anyone choose to work this hard deliberately? Oh, Java programmers. I forgot.

Now I want to register a listener for any changes from the Power object, which includes the lid being closed. You do this like so, via a callback:

    bus.add_signal_receiver(handle_lidclose,
                            dbus_interface="org.freedesktop.DeviceKit.Power",
                            signal_name="Changed")

Why you don’t use the existing proxy object to DeviceKit.Power is beyond me. Maybe you can and I simply don’t understand the API. I would have envisioned something like…

proxy.Changed.listen(handle_lidclose)

…but that’s me. I guess some people really like typing.

Now, we finish this off by writing our handler…

def handle_lidclose(*args):
    closed = power_iface.Get('org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties', 'LidIsClosed')
    if closed:
        print "lid is closed"
    else:
        print "lid is open"

…and starting our main loop via…

    loop = gobject.MainLoop()
    loop.run()

All that’s left is to write the call in my handler to suspend the laptop if
the lid is closed, but honestly, my fingers are tired. I particularly love the
way that I need to pass the full interface specification in the Get() method
even though I’m calling it via…an interface object. Can you say redundant?
No wonder Java programmers need IDEs.

I hope this situation improves. Unix used to stand for power through simplicity. Less code is less to break, and simple APIs leave developers free to worry more about bugs in their code than try to comprehend a needlessly complex API. Maybe I just don’t get it. These are first impressions, afterall, so perhaps I’m being overly judgemental. Perhaps there’s beauty and simplicity and elegance to be found in this overly wordy API requiring redundant information.

For now though, I just don’t see it.

Oddly though, from the point I drove the car off of the lot I noticed that it made a bit of a squeak when releasing the brakes in gear. I figured that it would go away, probably due to being a new vehicle. It hasn’t gone away, so I emailed the service department. The guy answering me said that he wasn’t sure without more information so I called, and was told that they’d need to hear it. Ok, so last monday I ended up at Kanata Honda’s service department much sooner than I’d planned.

I didn’t plan to pay for anything, the car’s under warranty, and the guy I talked to pointed out that if it didn’t turn out to be a warranty issue then I would have to pay for any time spent on it. Makes sense but I just wanted their opinion on what I was hearing, not for them to hoist it up and pull the wheels off.

I pointed that out, and the manager there had no problem with that, calling over one of the techs to listen in while I reproduced it. He said, “oh, that?” and proceeded to explain that it’s a combination of metal in the brakes in place of the asbestos I’m mostly used to from my 1999 Saturn, plus the sound of the transmission and engine twisting as the car is first put into gear. Nothing to worry about.

What can I say? 10 years driving one car makes you used to that one, and that one only. Good to know there’s nothing wrong though, I hate hassles. The car is good, they kept good will and now hopefully I won’t see them until that first oil change in another 5000km or so.

So far so good.