Abortion is Legal, Pictures are Not

Interesting story in The Register, Veronica Connelly’s guilty conviction was upheld. It appears that she had sent pictures of aborted foetus’s to pharmacists that sell the morning-after pill (which technically induces an immediate abortion).

Without discussing whether or not Veronica was intending to be malicious, or how closely the action of the morning-after pill resembles that of a surgical abortion we have an interesting case:

Jewish Holocaust pictures from Nazi Germany (begone, Goodwin!) were not considered more offensive than the actions they documented, although they are acknowledged to be "disturbing." Does this mean that it is or would be illegal to send these pictures or show these pictures to the perpetrators, knowing that it would - and in order to - cause offense? How else should one convict the perpetrators with a sense of their own guilt?

Now consider Veronica’s intentions; was it merely to distress or cause anxiety to the recipient, or to convict them of their "guilt"? - which indirectly but very connectedly leads to distress!

How will Oxfam stimulate my guilt over my greed without decidedly distressing me with imagery of poverty and dispair? Will their mailshots be replaced with advertising billboards instead, thus becoming legal?

I see animal-rights display stands in the streets at times, showing disturbing pictures of the results of shocking treatment of animals. Are the animal-rights activists forbidden from sending these pictures to the perpetrators but permitted to display them in public?

Will I be unable to disuade jihadists under criminal law because my arguments distress them? Or will I have to send only open letters generally published?

I guess the law is to save us from personally communicated harassment when others who are offended by some aspect of our legal activity try and convey that offense to us.

At the moment some forms of abortion are legal, but some ways of talking about it are not, and this puzzles my morals; perhaps Veronica was harassing those who were not directly involved in abortions - though this was not relevant to the judgement; BUT it seems it would still have been illegal for Veronica to have sent those pictures to anyone who had been practicing illegal abortion, even if they were photo’s of the very same aborted foetuses - would this lead to "Yes, I broke the law, but now I’m offended by pictures of it"

I can see this as a good defense for speeding camera tickets.

Don’t confuse the message

Design should not obscure the message.

Here’s a web page whose purpose is to help parents and carers in Yorkshire know if their children’s school has been closed due to bad weather.

How many parents or carers do you think will suppose that the school is closed?

In fact the "closed" message is just fancy artwork and conveys no particular information about any school. There are no schools closed at all.

The actual URL was: http://www.ridingsfm.co.uk/pages/home.asp?pageid=275&servername=www.ridingsfm.co.uk

You have to wonder why servername is part of the url… maybe it is to support vhosting for no-cookie http 0.9 clients?

HP48 Skin for M3100 / Hermes

Here is horizontal (landscape) skin for Christoph Gießelink’s PPC HP48 emulator.
See: http://privat.swol.de/ChristophGiesselink/emu48.htm

The skin is for the HTC Hermes model phone running WM5 in keyboard-open mode, to support use without the need to touch the screen at all.

Installation

Just download the zipfile and unzip in your emu48 directory and start a new emulator session with HP48-m3100-horizontal.kml

The bitmap and layout is based on the PPC skin done by Dave / Murray.

This is landscape but not in the same sense as Dave / Murray landscape which is landscape on a portrait screen. Hermes keyboard-open mode is a landscape screen.  When the keyboard is closed and the Hermes resizes the screen to be portrait, it all goes skewy. Really we need to be able to switch between two different skins when they keyboard is opened or closed.

I had to take a few pixel rows out of their layout to make it fit.

Anyway….

I also fixed up the scan-code conversions to deal with the Hermes keyboard, so some Hermes specific keystrokes work as expected, like ! and - and _.

Some new mappings

The TAB key is mapped as the ALPHA key.
The SYMBOL-UP is mapped as SHIFT-R
The SYMBOL-DOWN is mapped as SHIFT-L
(Symbol is the key with a round DOT).

Sadly I could not map SYMBOL-LEFT or RIGHT, because the emulator does not intercept these and probably can’t unless it is signed as a privileged application.

BONUS

Included is an XML based build system to make skin building easier.

I used kimagemapeditor to add hotspot rectangles to my bitmap and then my build-system created the button and annunciator layout file for me. This greatly speeds up the process when modifying or designing new skins.

Note that the kml file Includes a a kmp file which includes all the button positional information, and also a kmi file containing scan-code mappings and fixups.

I generated the kml file like this:

xsltproc HP48-generate.xslt HP48-m3100-horizontal.htm > HP48-m3100-horizontal.kmp

xsltproc comes with gnome on my Ubuntu linux. Maybe there is a windows xslt processor that could do this too??

Of course that htm file has to be valid xml too, I had to make the img tag self-closing.

The xslt relies on HP48-attributes.xml, that defines the annunciators and keys that the emulator expects.

The id attributes refer to the numbers in the Annunciator or Button statements, and the name attributes refer to the anchors in the html.

Annunciator anchoes begin with #~- to show where the annunciator should be displayed, and #~+ to show where they should be copied from.

Buttons, of course have only one imagemap entry.

TO-DO

Add scan-code conversions for a lot of the accented characters.

I intend to make this fun by having an HP48 specific xml which defines HP48 button sequences needed to generate each ascii character. I then intend to have a host-specific xml which specifies the scan-codes generated during the entry of each ascii character.  I shall spot multi-scan-code sequences, and automatically allocate flags and generate IfFlag code.

Thus, with a fixed calculator specific button-code-map, a per-skin bitmap and imagemap, and a per-platform scan-code specification, I can generate any skin for any calculator emulator on any platform. Hurrah!

Find out or write IfAnnunciator for the kml scripts.

Counting nodes

I had a problem where I needed to assign a unique integer to each node in a tree, as it was processed; using XSLT 1.0

XSLT 1.0 doesn’t have user definable functions, the only way to return values is as output which can be captured in an

<xsl:variable name="captured"><xsl:call-template name="generate-output"/></xsl:variable>

And, naturally, the tree recursion was already generating output and could not easily be used to return a count of nodes processed so far as well.

After a couple of hours of struggling and some syntax checking with my brother Ben (for things like $node/ancestors::* - thanks bro) we have a fragment that does the trick in one line!

count($node/preceding::rule[ancestor::*[generate-id()=$ancestorid]])

This is more clearly excodessed as:

count($node/preceding::rule[count(ancestor::*[generate-id()=$ancestorid])])

and in english reads as: to find the sequence number for $node, count all preceding nodes who are contained by the common ancestor identified by $ancestorid. Without the codedicate, it would count all preceding nodes in the entire document, instead of those with a certain ancestor.

However this is not complete. preceding does not take into account open nodes, i.e. the node to which it is being applied, nor any of it’s ancestors; so this correction is added:

+ count($node/ancestor::rule) - count($ancestor/ancestor::rule)

as the number of non-counted nodes is clearly the difference between the number of ancestors of $node, and the number of ancestors of $ancestor.

The full statement is:

count($node/preceding::rule[ancestor::*[generate-id()=$ancestorid]])

+ count($node/ancestor::rule) - count($ancestor/ancestor::rule)

I leave it to the reader to produce a version that reports the total number "rule" nodes under the current ancestor.

Finally I used this recipe:


  <xsl:template name="rule-number">
    <xsl:param name="name"><xsl:message terminate="yes">rule-number called without name</xsl:message></xsl:param>
    <xsl:param name="rules-node" select="//dbam-bandwidth-rules"/>
    <!– take the first occurance of each rule (no preceding of same ancestor) –>
    <xsl:variable name="all_rules" select="$rules-node//rule[not(@name = preceding::rule[count(ancestor::*[generate-id()=generate-id($rules-node)]) &gt; 0]/@name)]"/>
    <xsl:for-each select="$all_rules">
      <xsl:if test="@name=$name"><xsl:value-of select="position()"/></xsl:if>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:template> 


Kenneth Cope

Greater Than us All is a great album.

I just shelled out some dosh (hard earned cash) to buy the CD version having played my casstte album to oblivion.

I was interested to see some tracks were re-recorded; and it comes to this:

Do you have an original CD album you could send me?

I don’t like the new recordings. They are not what my mind has become adjusted to, and even worse it starts to follow a trend set by the mormon tabernacle choir which seems to be to put inappropriate expression into the performance.

I probably should explain this last accusation a bit more, and I’ll use the tabernacle choir to explain.

I think the choir get bored singing the same old hymns and such so they try and jazz them up and put a bit more emotion into it, but that doesn’t make it better, it only makes it weird. Oh, but its probably more fun to sing.

(Did I mention I’m finding it hard to get decent mo-tab music lately? I’m thinking of downloading all the conferences and ripping the choir out of the middle ot build up a new compilation).

I want "Mo-tab: The same boring old hymns" type stuff, you know, "like momma used to bake" so to speak.

Now you haven’t done a bad job on the new cut of Greater Than Us All, but you are following the trend; a bit more unexpected desparation or wonder in the voice, delay the vocalists entry slightly by half a beat, drag out a middle phrase note for no good reason, it drives me mad. Not every phrase of the song needs to sound like some kind of epiphany or revelation; the song has to do that as a whole, but these days each phrase is trying to compete with the whole song.

It ends up sounding like the emotional expression of some other song overlayed onto this one. (Its nice variety for folk who have sung the song to death no doubt)

Please, be a nice man and send me what you hooked me on, not this slghtly freaky stuff. I like my music straight: A CD of your original cut of Greater Than Us All.

ASCII character conversion

The od command can be used after a fashion to convert from a character to its character code:

 echo -ne "A" | od -t u1 | sed -e "s/^[0-9]* *//"

But more awkward is converting from a decimal character code back to the character, but this does the trick, and took about 3 minutes to come up with:

$ X=65
$ HEX=(0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f)
$ echo -e "x${HEX[$(( $X / 16))]}${HEX[$(( $X % 16 ))]}"

It works by converting which is less than 255 to hexadecimal, and then making use of echo -e which interprets \x as indicating an 8 bit character expressed in hexadecimal.

Online Textbooks

Like many geeks I collect knowledge so that I will be able to do things if the need comes up, whatever things they are. Here’s a good list of refererences books supplied by nTensify who wrote:

There are a lot of free textbooks out there, some of them are better than others, but a lot are quickly becoming very good.

Plain and simple, everyone should have access to education, money shouldn’t dictate how educated someone can become.

Some other free books:
http://www.physicsforfree.com/ (three physics books from beginning physics to general relativity).
http://www.lightandmatter.com/area1.html (six physics books, variety of topics)
http://www.motionmountain.net/ (notably one of the best free physics books ever "published").
http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html (intro to calc book under Creative Commons)
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/ (a really cool free circuit design book I ran across a few years ago when I was leaving college).
http://www.gutenberg.org/ (obligatory gutenburg link, aggrigator of books out of copyright or otherwise set free).

(there are plenty more, but to spare you the boredom of a huge list here… go to google and search for digital library books, you’ll have a few million hits to look through ;) )