Sean Flynn from the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University has sent some questions on ACTA, the “Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” to Techdirt who wrote about it. These questions are based upon the interpretation of the current state of ACTA from the perspective of someone concerned about the availability of generic medicines especially to less developed countries.
But those people are not the only ones concerned about ACTA! A growing number of technologists such as Simonand authors such as Cory Doctorow have parsed ACTA as well and are mightily concerned about both the method of negotiations as well as the actual contents of the proposed treaty.

When I myself have read parts and reviews I was involuntarily reminded if the US Declaration of Independence. I that document the American finders claimed:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It seems to me that several supposedly democratic governments of the present are forgetting about these fundamental rights and their fundamental obligation to protect them. If ACTA continues on its present course a case could well be made that the governments of the ACTA member nations will have crossed the line.

So the one question I would add to the catalog of questions by Sean Flynn would be:

Are you aware of the fact that you are leading your nations directly into legitimate revolution?

After all the claim of “No taxation without representation” is much weaker than the claim of “No criminalization without representation”. I see a clear and present danger to our fundamental liberties presented by ACTA and call on my fellow human beings to let their governments know that ACTA is a no-go. I call upon you to act like our American predecessors. They have aired their grievances for several years before declaring their independence:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Now is the time to let our leaders know that or freedoms are not transient causes. It is time to state clearly that we will neither stand for the methods of negotiating ACTA nor will we accept the proposed contents.

All in all, if that is the only short-coming, then that is something I can live with.

- Posted from my iPad

Now I by no means claim to be the first person ever to come up with this. After all there are a myriad of web-based HTML editors out there. And some software even has the ability to edit code inside a browser (such asCouchDB). but to generalize this to interact directly with an SVN repository may well be a novel idea. One would then have to simply put the editor code on the same server as the SVN repository in order to allow the Ajax components to have access to the repository URLs and presto you could edit files directly in the repository. This would solve the editing part of the equation and be sufficient for web-developers. To facilitate even more interaction server-side code could be added to facilitate even more actions (think compiles, restarts, and the like). This bundled with apps like iSSH (which could be used for even more server side processing) would create a pretty powerful web based IDE.

Of course this would require the user to be always on, but then that is why I bought the 3G iPad. But this still means a few more short comings,such as being unworkable on most airplanes and many railway trips, but it also solves a lot of problems.

I don’t quite know when (if) I will find the time to work on this, but I definitely think this would be a worthwhile open source project.

- Posted from my iPad

P.S.: why oh why does AirSharing HD not include an editor? That would be so damn close to solving my particular itch, I’d buy it all over again.

Of course the original bounty and rues still hold. All I would like to do is enhance the offering so that the criteria can be met in a slightly different way.

I have come to realize, that the iPad actually has a great way for applications to share documents. It does that without exposing a full fledged structured file system. This is no mean feat and I admire both the courage and ingenuity on Apple’s part for devising this scheme. It is done by applications registering to handle files of certain types. Once that is done, other applications can send files to those applications for further treatment.

This opens a new possibility for solving the issue at hand for me (developing software not for, but rather on the iPad). The bounty asked for a single app. However the same aim could be achieved with 2 (or more?) smaller dedicated apps as well.

One of them would simply need to be able to handle SVN repositories. It would need to do checkouts, updates, checkins and all the other neat SVN stuff. Of course it would need to handle both http as well as https (including SSL-Client-Certificate authentication). To be useful it would need to be able to send files that have been checked out to other application(s) for viewing and editing. This has been implemented already by the guys at DropBox, so it is definitely possible.

The second dedicated application would then be a code editor that supports that same mechanism of accepting files and saving them back to their original location. The actual editor could then focus on one thing, editing code, and do that well. I have already bought one app that does the editing part fairly well, called “for i”. However as it cannot currently accept files from other applications it is not quite there yet.

As this now requires 2 distinct applications, each smaller in scope, I propose to alter the terms of the bounty to the following:
For each of the above described constituent applications a bounty of $500 is on offer. In total a sum of $1000 is being offered for solving the entire problem. However each part is already useful on its own and as such a partial pickup of the bounty should be possible

I sincerely hope, that someone will write these apps soon. Most of the parts already exists after all. There is an app called iVersion for the iPhone, which handles SVN, so that is almost there. All that remains on that fro is to port it to the iPads larger real estate and enable the sharing of files with other applications. The editor is, as mentioned above, almost there as well, all that remains there is to enable the receiving of files from other apps.

Oh and just to make this clear, I am not a patient person. So this bounty has an expiration date. If it is not claimed by September 1st 2010 00:00:00 UTC it expires not to come back again!

- Posted from my iPad

Given my experiences so far I feel that I can only recommend the iPad to anyone that wants to expand their digital life. The experience is such a pleasure that I am willing to forgive Apple their closed model policy. After all, one can always jail-break the iPad and add whatever to it. Whether that is the route I will choose remains to be seen.

- Posted from my iPad

But what about the other 20%?

Well the task it cannot accomplish is to provide me with an interface for doing web-coding. To do that an application would be required that can sync a folder structure (Subversion for example) with a server and enable me to navigate that folder structure. It would then have a built in editor with which I can edit the text files in that structure.

Well I really want that app, an it might take an incentive for someone to build and publish it beyond the pure business possibilities. So I want to pledge a bounty of $1000 (US) to the first person to contact me witht the followig:

An application that has been submitted to th iTunes App Store that has the following features:
1. Subversion Management of multiple projects (i.e. from multiple repositories)
2. Browsing of these project folders
3. Text editing of Text Files in these projects.
4. Syntax highlighting while editing for at least HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript (possibly extendable think TextMate)
5. Code folding while editing (again think TextMate)

Upon receipt of this notification I will immediately get in touch with the developer and arrange for an test install on my iPad via XCode to verify that it matches this specification.
As soon as the application features are verified the bounty will be paid. The bounty includes a license to the Application transferred via an iTunes Promo Code that enables free download of the Application for 1 iTunes account.

I have named some of the love aspects above, but that isn’t the topic of this post. The topic of this post is about what I really don’t like about v8. Here are some off these things:

• Ooodles of static variables!
• What would you want threads for?
• Deterministic variable destruction, what for?

Static variables abound in v8; they are everywhere; they are so many and so wide spread that even v8′s developers claim that they are so many to find that they consider it nigh impossible to find them all. Well that makes it hard to fix the other problems with v8.

One of those other problems is that it’s nigh impossible to compile a dynamic library with it. (Actually it may not be impossible, but really harder than it should be.)

It’s pretty obvious that the people at Google don’t really care much about the usability of V8 for anything other than the Chrome web-browser. And in all honesty, that’s OK! Yet it is still disappointing; I would so much have liked to use V8, now I ‘ll have to rethink my project using SpiderMonkey.