Now that’s just silly. It’s a bear, not a person. It doesn’t share our moral values and we shouldn’t expect it to either.

What’s next? Charging dogs with public indecency for mating in public? Or cats with assault for scratching the vet?

I despair :–)

TalkTalk’s CEO, Charles Dunstone, on the recent suggestions that U.K. ISPs should ban illegal file sharers:

“Our position is very clear, we are the conduit that gives users access to the Internet, we do not control the Internet nor do we control what our users do on the Internet. I cannot foresee any circumstances in which we would voluntarily disconnect a customer’s account on the basis of a third party alleging a wrong doing. We believe that a fundamental part of our role as an ISP is to protect the rights of our users to use the Internet as they choose. We will fight any challenge to the sanctity of this relationship with every legal option available to us.”

Translation: We make a lot of money from letting our customers steal your copyrighted material. We firmly believe that it is the right of our customers to use the Internet to steal your stuff if they so wish. If you try to force us to stop them, we will sue.

“The music industry has consistently failed to adapt to changes in technology and now seeks to foist their problems on someone else. Rather than threatening us, the BPI’s time would be better spent facing up to the reality of our times and adapting its business model accordingly.”

Seems a bit of a cheek to me talking about business models. TalkTalk is one of the low cost broadband providers whose business model really depends on the fact that there are a large number of cheapskate consumers who are happy to steal music, software, games and more recently films over the Internet. i.e. their business model is built on the ability of their customers to break the law.

TalkTalk, like the other consumer ISPs, knows damn well what its customers are getting up to, and will quite probably do or say anything to deflect the authorities from drawing the conclusion that ISPs are being unjustly enriched thanks to mass-scale copyright infringement.

OK, so as readers of my blog will know, my company is trying to recruit a Junior Software Engineer.

We’ve got adverts in all the usual places, as well as on CocoaDev and the obligatory post to cocoa-dev. So I decided that it’d be good to advertise through the U.K.’s university careers services, which you can do via Prospects Net.

Since posting that advert, a couple of the careers service people have refused the ad unless I change the job title so it doesn’t use the word “Junior”, citing the “Age Discrimination Act”. Now, I’m obviously not in favour of unnecessary discrimination, and leaving aside for a moment the obvious stupidity of a blanket ban on taking factors like age and sex into account when considering employing someone (a stupidity on which Minette Marin recently expounded in the Sunday Times, no less), I broadly agree with the goals of the various pieces of legislation.

However, there are a few points that are worth mentioning here:

1. There is no such thing as the “Age Discrimination Act”. What there is, is a Statutory Instrument (not an Act) called “Statutory Instrument 2006 No. 1031: The Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006” (which you can read on the Office of Public Sector Information website).
2. The Statutory Instrument is quite clear, in Part 1, as to what is and is not covered by the regulations. Part 1 Section 3 is the section dealing with “discrimination on grounds of age” and makes it perfectly plain that what is covered by the regulations is actual discrimination, not some wording in an advert.
3. The word “Junior” is nothing to do with age. It is merely a designation to describe the level of experience of the holder of a post, just like “Senior”, “Consultant”, “Principal” et al. None of them have anything to do with age, though because of the way some companies promote their staff over time it is certainly true that the average age of Junior staff will be lower than that of Senior staff and so on. For our part, we will be hiring the person best qualified for the job, and if that means that we have found an older person with the enthusiasm and skill that we are after, so be it.
4. There is in any event no liability for an advertiser listing an advert for an employer or agency. All liability rests with the person doing the discriminating (and even then there are get-out clauses; for instance, if you instruct an agency to discriminate in some way and they could not reasonably be expected to have known that it was illegal to do so, the liability rests with you).

What annoys me the most, I think, is that this kind of petty, small-minded rule banning the use of the word “Junior” has been invented by someone who almost certainly hasn’t read the legislation. Instead, it is based on rumours, press coverage and general misinformation.

The same thing happens frequently with the Data Protection Act, which we are often told is the excuse for a company behaving in an unhelpful manner towards its customers. Sometimes those self-same companies are actively breaching the actual rules at the same time as enforcing pointless, petty-minded echoes of the legislation on their real customers.

Anyway, a plea: If you are running a business, or indeed an institution of some sort, please review the legislation yourself before inventing pointless nonsense of your own. The British Government kindly makes all of its legislation available over the Internet at the Office of Public Sector Information website¹. If you can’t understand it, ask a lawyer to help you! But whatever, please don’t make stuff up.

DoxyGen output somehow never looks as good as Apple’s docs. headerdoc, Apple’s own tool, doesn’t seem to match the Apple docs by default either (which is surprising as I’m sure Apple uses headerdoc to generate them).

Anyway, Matt Ball has written a program called DoxyClean (via Jonathan Rentzsch) to take DoxyGen’s XML output and make it Apple-tastic. I haven’t tried it, but it looks interesting so I thought I’d write a short blog post so that I don’t lose the URL :–)

OK, so Matt Gemmell twittered (and blogged) about Sebastiaan de With’s new iconresource.net site, which hosts a set of video tutorials on icon design.

I do all the artwork for the Coriolis Systems products myself, icons included, so seeing how other people go about designing icons is always interesting… making even passable icons for Mac OS X is really hard, because the bar now is way up in the sky somewhere thanks to the talent of the icon designers at Apple and elsewhere. Indeed, a lot of expensive pro apps’ icons now look below par on Mac OS X; Adobe’s icons for CS3, for instance, are distinctly uninspiring IMO.

Anyway, it was interesting and very informative to see how Sebastiaan designs icons. It’s different to how I do things; I usually either use a 3D package or Illustrator, depending on the look of the icon and how it’s going to be used. Recently I’ve been veering towards using Illustrator where possible, because it’s then fairly easy to save icons that are entirely resolution independent (almost all of the artwork in iPartition is now scalable vectors as a result, even the yellow hard hat icon in the Preferences pane, which was originally a 3D rendering).

For 3D work, I use Carrara; there isn’t really anything else on the market at that price that has anything like the same feature set… Maxon’s Cinema 4D is probably the closest, but a lot of the functionality you get for free with Carrara (at least Carrara Pro) is only available in expensive optional packages with C4D. I suppose you could also use POV-Ray, which can produce very high quality results if you’re masochistic enough :–)

Yesterday I had a go at creating a pencil similar to Sebastiaan’s, but using Illustrator rather than Photoshop, just to see how I would go about it and how that would differ from his Photoshop-based workflow. The answer is that a lot of it is basically the same; the only things I did differently were:

• I used clipping paths to help with the shading of the scalloped edge of the pencil tip (Sebastiaan’s scallops are in the wrong place, incidentally; the perfectionists amongst you will realise that the reason they occur is that the pencil has flat faces, and so the sharpener cuts more material away at the face corners than it does at the centre, which tells you where the scallops should be).
• The shading on the eraser, where, again, I used a clipping path and a black object with a Gaussian Blur effect applied to it.
• Illustrator doesn’t have the Fibers filter. Not a problem; just make the texture in Photoshop and drop it across. Of course, that means the result is no longer totally scalable…
• Illustrator doesn’t have a distort tool that exactly matches the one in Photoshop. Or if it does, I couldn’t find it. You can, however, use a mesh warp set to 1 x 1 to achieve the same effect.

Otherwise his pencil tutorial maps fairly straightforwardly to Illustrator. I think the same should be true of the paintbrush also.

One other comment I have is that I’m slightly surprised that Sebastiaan didn’t use a layer mask (or in Illustrator a clipping path) to do the document icon. If I was making such a thing, I would have had the background as one layer, with a clipping mask inside it that let me position my content without running off the edge, and then the page curl as a separate layer. That would have saved messing around redoing the page curl after putting the content on the paper.

I also thought some of the fiddling with the pixels of the 16 and 32-pixel icons was unnecessary. I would concentrate on making the edges clean; the attempts to tweak the pencil and paintbrush were always going to fail, IMO, because neither implement was at an angle that can be represented cleanly with so few pixels.

Anyway, I thought Sebastiaan’s tutorial was excellent, and well worth a look if you need icons, aren’t too artistically challenged and want some hints. I know it’s given me a couple of ideas that I didn’t have before. You do, of course, have to pay to access it, but IMO it’s well worth it. I recommend that you check it out.

(I might post a few pictures later.)

Yes, it’s official:

And what’s more:

So I’m dorkier and nerdier than Rainer Brockerhoff, except in history/literature where Rainer beats me by 10%, but I think that’s more than made up for by the 23% extra on sci-fi/comic. Result!

James Duncan Davidson on how U.S. copyright law favours large corporations (via Daniel Jalkut).

Thankfully here in the U.K. we don’t need copyright registration, but I think the copyright system is, because of the international nature of copyright infringement, still prohibitively expensive for the users who would benefit the most from it (that is, small businesses like mine). There’s still value in copyright protection, though for software in particular I think it is rapidly being eroded by the rise of Internet piracy and the implicit pro-piracy stance adopted by privacy campaigners and ISPs.

If you prevent enforcement of copyright and systematically stick roadblocks in the way that make it too expensive to clamp down on infringement, there does come a point when the benefits outweigh the “fair use” rights and the fact that your work will eventually enter the public domain. That is, it becomes a one-sided deal and is no longer operating in the favour of the creator.

I am, to an extent, of the opinion that that point has already passed, which is why we’re seeing things like DRM which are only necessary because copyright is not working. DRM and copy-protected files don’t really need copyright in order to function; it could all be handled through the contract between producer and consumer, and in that case fair use rights and the public domain requirement no longer apply—they are solely a feature of copyright, not some more fundamental right as I think people sometimes assume.

The irony is that the people stealing copyrighted material think that copyright is a bad thing (or they tend to say that they do), when at present it actually gives them more rights than they would have without it.

The Seed Conference site (via DF) harks back to the typographical masterpieces of yesteryear.

I think I would have made the paragraphs at the top fully justified rather than centred, if only to force the browser to square up the edges, and the very top line of each section is letterspaced a smidge too tightly IMO, but I very much like the sense of style that the page conveys.

This is just awful. The girl’s parents should publish the name of the letting agent concerned; I can’t honestly see any landlords or tenants wanting to be associated with someone who would take this kind of attitude.

In case anyone is interested, we’re hiring.