Doodads and Whatnot

The following is a letter I sent to the Random House Australia. As you can tell from reading it I am unhappy that it is not possible for me to buy the books I want from them in the format I want.

27th October 2009
Ebook publishing.
Random House Australia
Level 3
100 Pacific Highway
North Sydney, N.S.W., 2060
Australia

Dear sir or madam,

I have followed with keen interest the international launch of the Kindle electronic reader from Amazon.com. When I had established that a minimum of books which interest me are available I placed an order and am now a very satisfied user of the device. It is the second e-ink device I have owned and without a doubt its best feature is the ease with which content may be sampled and purchased.

It was with some irritation however that I noticed many if not all books from your catalogue are not available for purchase in Kindle format within Australia. This is despite them being available from the Kindle store for other regions. I appreciate that this is due to the way that publishing rights are negotiated but, as I will outline, this doesn’t matter to me.

I shall also outline why I have come to the conclusion that the greatest piracy threat publishers face is themselves.

Let us look at the example of Terry Pratchett’s recent book Unseen Academicals. I would very much like to read this book but I don’t necessarily feel the need to own a paper copy. In the event that I might desire to own a paper copy I still may not bother because of a simple truth: I am lazy. I want to take the easiest route to reading the novel at a reasonable price. The less effort involved the more likely my purchase.

Were the book available via the Kindle store I would have bought it within a few moments with not much more than a quick taping of a few buttons. It wouldn’t even have been necessary for me to get out of my hammock or comfy chair. However, the book is not available to me in this way. What am I to do?

There are a few options. For the sake of making my overall point plain I shall list them in order of ease, starting with the easiest.

1. I could not read the book. You get nothing, Mr. Pratchett gets nothing, and I get nothing.
2. I could pirate the book. A few quick Google searches suggest that it’s definitely available. The quality is likely to be variable but from the comments of the people who have pirated it would appear to be readable.
3. I could create a fake U.S. address and have the book “shipped” there. You get nothing, Mr. Pratchett gets paid, and I get to read the book.
4. I could go to the library. This is closer to my house than any decently sized bookstore and reserving the book online is often as fast as ordering it. You get a small amount of money per reader, Mr. Pratchett gets a small amount of money per reader, and I get to read the book.
5. I could go to a physical bookstore. The outcome of which is obvious.

Critical in all of this is the observation that by not making the title available for the device I use you’ve made several options which don’t net you any income more attractive than buying from you. Obviously, given my writing to you, I have significant objections to piracy and would not want to deprive Mr. Pratchett of the income but as for you? I’m not sure it upsets me as much. If the author is paid and some publisher continues to make future titles available it doesn’t seem that it would change my enjoyment of the books significantly.

Much of the chatter on internet forums regarding the Kindle launch has focused on ways in which users may access the U.S. Kindle store. This is a very positive sign that people are willing to pay for the content they consume. I doubt however that they will be return exclusively to paper books should this “loophole” be closed. They will instead move to the next easiest option, piracy.

It is to be hoped that what you see as the solution to this is making your catalogue available in formats for which people have shown a desire. If your position is that electronic book formats require more protection or better region controls then I have little sympathy for you and hope that you see the error in this before you find your ebook offerings replaced by foreign or illegitimate markets.

If you are currently negotiating with Amazon or preparing your content for sale in Kindle format please disregard this letter.

Yours sincerely,

Name Removed.

The following is a letter I sent to the Minister for Housing. I also sent slightly modified versions to my local member and to the Prime Minister.

The Hon. Tanya Plibersek MP
Minister for Housing
Minister for the Status of Women
111-117 Devonshire Street
Surry Hills, N.S.W., 2010

Dear Minister,

I have read with interest the Prime Minister’s recent comments regarding the possibility of the boosted First Home Buyers Grant ending as scheduled. As a person saving for my first home I am very much in favour of ending the grant as it appears to me only to push up prices and encourage people to enter the property market before they are ready. I would urge you to consider ways in which the grant might be minimised, applied only to new construction or withdrawn in the future, if this is not already planned. I would also ask you to consider how negative gearing for existing dwellings may be removed in the future or made to apply only to rental profits.

The First Home Saver Account scheme is in my opinion a far better initiative than grants to people entering the property market. I believe it would be in the best interests of people entering the property market to increase the government contribution percentage, increase the cap on the government contributions, provide a grant only to those who have met the withdrawal criteria or have a proven savings history, or some combination of these options.

I look forward to seeing how the upcoming budget and future policy will address my interests in this matter.

Sincerely,

Name Removed.

As you can guess I’m not happy with the meddling that is happening in the property market.

The following is a letter I wrote to the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy which I penned in response to the Australian Government’s unworkable internet filtering scheme.

Senator the Hon. Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne
Victoria, 3002

Dear Minister,

As an employee of an Australian company which provides secure internet based communications and transaction exchange software, and an internet user I am deeply troubled by plans to introduce mandatory internet filtering.

Such filtering has been shown in countries where it is used to be largely ineffective. The massive and ever growing amount of information available means that it will never be possible to eliminate inappropriate content from the internet. It would be better to focus on efforts such as law enforcement and education which would help reduce the instances of this content being created or sought in the first place.

The size of the problem will mean that only known and high profile items will make it to the list of inappropriate content in a timely fashion. The ability to effectively filter only these targets will make us a target of ridicule. It has become a not uncommon activity to show a ‘Chinese view’ of a website beside a ‘normal view’ of the same site. I doubt it will do Australia’s reputation good to be added as the third party in these comparisons.

The technical realities of the problem will adversely affect the cost and performance of internet services in Australia. As well as being a nuisance to Australian internet users it will also force internet based services operating out of Australia to relocate hosting and technical operations to foreign countries.

Furthermore, as an employee of an Australian company which provides internet based secure transaction exchange services, I have serious security concerns with the implementation of this plan. The sales of our communications products rely in large part on the level of privacy and security we can offer our clients. The use of ‘man in the middle’ attacks, required by the tested filtering software for Secure Sockets Layer connections, will remove our ability to assure customers that their security has not been compromised. The correct operation of the proposed filters will be indistinguishable from a hostile party performing ‘man in the middle’ attacks.

While Australian customers may in time come to accept this as unavoidable (since online banking and other operations will suffer the same problem) it will make our products unmarketable to foreign customers without moving our hosting and server infrastructure overseas. This will make a number of our Australian staff redundant.

I regret that the nature of the plans became clear to me too late for it to have been a factor in my voting choices for the recent election. I do not doubt that these plans are ultimately motivated by good intentions but I fear that the originators have bought snake oil and wish to continue applying it to gain the favour of a few ‘key’ politicians.

Please consider how the money for the filtering scheme may be better spent. I would suggest that increasing funding to education and law enforcement would better meet its objectives and the requirements of all Australians.

Sincerely,

Name Removed.

I received the same form letter reply as everyone else who wrote to the minister.

To be fair to the MacOS team that works on Skype they’ve got a lot of things spot on. Skype for MacOS X is a Cocoa app and it feels good, it works well with other programs and on the whole it fits in. There are a couple of things about it which annoy the socks off me though and out of them there are two that really stick out in my mind.

One of the problems could probably be blamed on the Mac developers working for Skype but the other is probably beyond their control.

Whinge #1 – The splash screen

UPDATE: Turns out there is an option in Skype’s preferences for this but there is no way to set it using the GUI. You can set the option using the standard defaults tool by running “defaults write com.skype.skype SKShowSplash NO” or, if you are living dangerously, open ~/Library/Prefences/com.skype.skype.plist in the property list editor and change SKShowSplash there.

Splash screens are something you rarely see on a Mac and they’re specifically listed as being a bad idea by Apple’s user interface guidelines. Despite this Skype throws one over the top of whatever you might be working on and, to make matters worse, doesn’t provide a way to get rid of it again. Even if you focus on another window it will remain hidden until the splash screen finally goes away.

It’s not as though the splash screen achieves anything, you already know the program is loading from the way its icon bounces gently in the Dock (just like any program that’s starting up).

The splash screen also makes the option to have Skype start when you log in useless since it throws up its always-on-top-let-me-just-hover-in-front-of-what-you’re-doing splash screen right when you most want to start working on something.

Sadly, it looks like we’re out of luck as far as disabling it goes, at least for the time being. Windows users can start Skype with the /nosplash option and it will remain politely silent until it has something useful to tell the user. I tried editing the splash screen’s NIB file to move it or at least make it smaller but it seems that Skype checks the integrity of its files before launching. Very annoying.

Whinge #2 – Video support

The Mac client still doesn’t support video calls despite the length of time it’s been available in the Windows client. I don’t think this is really something that the developers can be blamed for though. It seems likely that who ever is in charge of deciding what the developers work on just doesn’t see platforms other than Windows as being very important.

I can live without video support but it’d be nice to have it as an option and there are times when it would be very handy. If it were feasible I’d just use iChat for video calls but that’d more or less throw cross platform use out the window, and if iChat was a decent cross platform option I wouldn’t bother with Skype at all.