I admire him for that. And I’m more than a little disgusted to hear about Jobs’ ‘visionary’ genius from the likes of Ballmer and Gates – who, not to put too fine a point on it, wouldn’t know a good design if it slapped them in the face with a dead salmon.

Who the fuck are they to judge? And who the fuck are we to listen?

No, the thing we need to admire about Jobs – the thing we need to LEARN about Steve Jobs – is how he thought, how he never stopped trying to make things simpler, how he utterly refused to compromise, how he refused to accept ‘improvement’ as the criterion for success. It was necessary, of course, and relentlessly pursued, but it was the means to another end….

And that was good design. Something the technological world knows far too little about. And with his passing, most of its collective knowledge and ability pass with him.

If you really want to show respect and admiration for Steve Jobs, understand him.

Emulate him. Let them call you arrogant and impolite if they must, but be a perfectionist. Be unforgiving, cruel even, to yourself and others. But be simple and clear, too. If you do that, then one day you might – just might – do one perfect thing.

Turns out that finding duplicate attachments is fairly easy. First create the view:

function(doc) {
  if (doc._attachments){
    for (var i in doc._attachments){
      emit([doc.collection, i], doc._id);
    }
  }
}

Which returns JSON output that looks like this:

["collection name", "filename.rtf"]

So all I have to do to find the duplicates is query that view using the composite key and see if it returns any rows:

http://my.couchdb.server:5984/database-name/_design/my-listings/_view/attachment-exists?key=["collection name","filename.rtf"]

I could do the same with MD5 checksums, too, but I won’t. The problem is that even a single character change is enough to make two documents different. So if someone opens their copy of a file and Word changes the metadata in it, it’s no longer byte-for-byte identical, even though the text has not changed. This means that the number of false negatives (i.e. duplicate files that are NOT found) would be too high for people to rely on.

What I’d really like to find is an algorithm that determines whether the textual content of two documents is significantly similar….

If you must recommend Ubuntu Linux to others, recommend nothing later than 10.04, the last LTS release.

10.10 saw a number of minor but irritating bugs creep in that show a significant shortage of testing and forethought. There were countless small things like context menus no longer working after returning from a suspended state or new window positioning that’s completely counter-intuitive. Some of them, like changing sides for window buttons or listing indecipherable package descriptions above package names in Update Manager, were deliberate (and conceivably, in some universe, necessary), but most of the changes were clearly mistakes. When these are combined with long-standing bugs (like Network Manager arbitrarily deciding to disable the Save button) and inconsistencies, they begin to weigh against Ubuntu’s many virtues.

In 11.04, Unity, combined with an increase in the number of stupid bugs (that spiffy state-of-the-machine motd message is FUBAR’ed now on console login) clearly indicates that Ubuntu is more interested in new and shiny than they are in quality. A quick scan of Launchpad (itself a new product designed to simplify bug maintenance and supplant the competition, but which has done neither) shows that there are, on average, 100 open bugs per project.

Ubuntu is slipping out of control. Canonical have stopped listening and – more importantly – working with the community. The number of defects is growing, but Canonical’s response is to make it harder for mere mortals to submit bugs. They seem to think that strong guidance is needed for their product to grow in new and interesting ways. Fair enough, but they’re confusing leadership with control. They’re simply imposing their views because they don’t value the discussion. They’re treating criticism as opposition and shutting themselves off from valid feedback.

Worse, they simply don’t have the number of skilled developers they need to achieve their goals. When I look at the bug queues on some packages, I shudder in sympathy with the poor souls who are expected to wrangle them. Canonical is clearly embarked on an impossible task, but nobody’s either got the guts or the vision to spell this out to Shuttleworth and co.

Getting buy-in and active participation from the community is a pain in the arse at the best of times, but the alternative is far worse. Heaven knows that the GNOME dev camp are… special, to be nice. But it’s clear that, given the choice between getting a partial but workable success through compromise or taking their ball and going home, Canonical has consistently chosen the latter.

This cannot end well. It will, however, end sooner than later.

Just yesterday, Minister Regenvanu was kind enough to respond to my column of last week, in which I expressed more than a little impatience at his silence over the March 4 attack on Marc Neil-Jones. He thanked me for my views and asked, “But who’s done more for good governance and transparency in Vanuatu: you or me?”

It’s a fair question –more than fair, actually– one that bears serious consideration.

My first instinct was to reply, “Your colleague beat the crap out of my friend. I said something about it; you didn’t.” That has the benefit of the truth, and it’s a fairly good summation of how I felt at the time I was composing the column.

But it’s not at all satisfying, nor does it do anything to further the goals that I know Minister Regenvanu shares with me and with an ever-increasing number of voters.

More importantly, tit-for-tat point-scoring rhetoric only contributes to the decline of political dialogue, making enemies and sowing confusion in the very places where clarity and unity should be most easily achieved.

So let’s dig a little deeper and see what more we all could be doing to make things better.

First off, let me state that any man of principle who embarks on a career in politics is a better man than I. (Any woman of principle who does so is probably a better man than any of us.) From the very first step, compromises must be made. As I said in last week’s column, the calculus of power is byzantine and counter-factual.

If you’re looking for easy answers to anything, look elsewhere. If someone promises you easy answers, don’t trust them. They’re either naive or they’re deceiving you. To his credit, Minister Regenvanu made a point of not promising anything but the sweat of his own brow during his election campaign.

In my afternoon convos over kava, I’ve often said that politics is a muddy road, so throwing out a politician for having soiled his feet is silly and wrong. It’s the ones who roll around in the middle of it like pigs in a slough – these are the ones we should be objecting to.

It’s easy for someone like me, who won’t even qualify for citizenship for another two and a half years, to sit on the sidelines and imagine that I could outplay those on the field. So it’s healthy to consider from time to time what things look like from the ground, to understand the pressures and exigencies that impose themselves from minute to minute.

The price is a heavy one. It’s impossible, in politics at least, to have friends without having adversaries. If you don’t have any rivals, that’s because you don’t have any power yet. So every choice, every compromise comes laden with the knowledge that, even if you’ve pleased some people, you’ve upset a few others. Victories are measured in inches and the goal line is often miles away.

The question then –the impossible question– is this: When do you stand and when do you sidestep? Which are the battles that must be fought, and at what cost?

Conventional wisdom has it that, following MP Iauko’s assault on Daily Post publisher Marc Neil-Jones, PM Kilman was handcuffed by the fact that removing Iauko from his portfolio would effectively topple the government. So, like it or not, this marriage of inconvenience had to continue.

To make matters worse, the prospect of a successful prosecution was vanishingly small. There was nothing to indicate that the Public Prosecutor and the Police wouldn’t be just as ineffectual in this instance as they’d been on countless occasions in the past. Not only would a powerful man be given grounds for vengeance, he’d likely have the means and opportunity to exact it, too.

Better, then, to bide one’s time and wait for an opportunity further down the line. Iauko’s rather incendiary rise has not made him a lot of lasting friendships, and anyway, his countless pre-election promises would soon be coming home to roost. Why fight an overt battle, possibly at significant cost, to achieve something that Iauko seemed to be perfectly capable of doing to himself?

Viewed through the lens of political calculus, there’s some merit to this line of reasoning. One could even be so bold as to argue that the baroque architecture of parliamentary rules and precedents that govern behaviour in other nations using the Westminster form of government are neither appropriate nor desirable here in Vanuatu.
But just for the sake of argument, let’s consider what might happen if things played out differently.

What if PM Kilman had required his Minister for Infrastructure and Public Utilities to resign his portfolio, pending a police investigation? He’s shown he’s capable of moving inconvenient Ministers out of the way. At the same time as the Iauko scandal was unfolding, he manoeuvred the Labour party out of power. This in retaliation for having signed an Opposition confidence motion.

In that case, the immediate goal was to remain in power, to live another day in order to achieve the policy goals that comprise the very reasons for governing in the first place.
Let’s apply the same logic to the Iauko debacle.

On the one hand, sharing power with people who care nothing for policy and are willing to fight every minute of every day for a bigger piece of the pie, people who, more to the point, are willing to stop at nothing… well, you have to ask yourself: Are you making things better or worse? On the other hand, you can’t get into government without them, and they know it. More to the point, perhaps it’s better to have them using these tactics against others than against you.

As the author of the Godfather famously put it, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

The problem with this equation is that it allows the worst excesses to continue unchecked. In other words, there will never be a better calibre of MP in this country, because the others either drag them down or elbow them aside. You either learn how to scrap or you don’t play at all.

So how do we improve governance, then? The only way to maintain one’s integrity is to be able to exert enough power over the other players to force them to play nice. And there’s no way to gather that much power, because of the disunity and distrust that’s endemic in Vanuatu’s political landscape.

It would take a grand, unifying goal, something about which the entire population of Vanuatu could agree, to achieve –even momentarily– the kind of unity of purpose and energy that Fr. Walter Lini managed during the first days of the Republic.

What if taking a stand, even allowing a government to fall, were enough to galvanise such a movement? What if it could be made clear to voters that there are certain kinds of behaviour that simply cannot be tolerated, and that this behaviour is the cause of so many of Vanuatu’s afflictions?

That’s not an easy task. Many voters don’t think in terms of policy and long-term reward. Some are willing to choose self-gratification over nation-building every time. Given Vanuatu’s voting districts, you don’t need more than a few hundred of these to get yourself in the running. Pony up a bit of cash to run some stalking-horse candidates and you can split the vote small enough to get in with the support of a single village.

So the risk, then, is that you take a principled stand, try to galvanise the electorate into an unprecedented level of support, only to find yourself standing on the sidelines, come Election Day plus one.

Worse, you could actually succeed in garnering an unprecedented level of the vote, only to discover that you’d been equaled by, and forced to share power with, the very kind of candidate you were elected to turf out.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

I’ll say this again, in all sincerity: A principled man who’s willing to walk that muddy road is a better man than I, because I would always take that principled stand, keep my conscience clear, and fail entirely as a politician.

That may sound back-handed to some. It’s not. Life is a complex and messy thing; there are no simple answers. And sometimes staying pure and principled means staying powerless.

For my part I’m willing to abdicate that power, because once in a while things need to be said at any cost.

It’s easy for me to say this, but I don’t say it lightly. I say it because others can’t:

If a Government Minister resorts to political violence and coercion and the government takes no action to remedy this, that government deserves to fall.

My name is Dan McGarry. I’ve been using the nom de plume of Graham Crumb since 1995, but today I have decided to draw aside the literary veil. I do so in solidarity with Marc Neil-Jones, publisher of the Daily Post, in order to make it clear that violence and threats have no power to silence the media.

In past columns I’ve dealt with fairly complex topics: technology, society, politics, culture and history. Today’s, however, is a simple one. It can be summed up in a single sentence:

Violence and intimidation only work when we let them.

For reasons that remain unfathomable to me, politics and power always seem to attract those who are most willing to take advantage of others. Vanuatu is no exception. Over the years, we’ve seen a long succession of Ministers and MPs who seem to value personal indulgence over everything else. We’ve seen thievery, deception, coercion and violence used so widely and so often that it’s hard to perceive what moral compass –if any– guides our political leadership.

So when a particularly unscrupulous character such as Harry Iauko arrives on the scene, it’s hard for our political leaders to know what to do. In fairness to the MP, he’s only slightly further beyond the pale than MPs Korman or Vohor, to name only a couple. As a group, it seems our leaders really have come to believe that the rule of law, respect and kastom are nothing more than useful tools, to be picked up and cast aside as convenience dictates.

Let’s be honest with ourselves: There won’t be any criminal prosecution for what Iauko did. There may yet be retribution, but it will be that special political kind that avoids doing any actual harm to anyone.

Iauko will not be punished for doing wrong; he’ll be pushed aside because he’s given his rivals an opening. In political terms, his fault is not that he’s broken the law; his mistake will have been that he overstepped and so exposed himself.

And that is why I find politics both fascinating and repugnant at the same time.

So, unlike some, I’m not going to demand action from this government. I’m simply going to do what journalists do: I’m going to bear witness.

It may be that MPs feel they have some special exemption from the law and kastom. But it is equally true that in a free society, everyone has the right to form –and to state– their own opinion. And the best way that we can do that is to remain informed, to encourage a public dialogue, to confront people with the facts.

Let the MPs think what they want; we retain the right to think what we like about them, and to say so publicly. And these days, it’s not going to be very flattering.

Violence and unlawful conduct don’t persist merely because our politicians do nothing to stop them. They persist because we allow them to. They persist because we’ve accepted the fact that the only time we ever hear police sirens is when some dignitary is being ushered around town. They persist because we allow politicians to separate themselves from us. Because we allow them to seduce us with paltry gifts and promises.

But most of all, it’s because we all –white and black alike– love to have access to the corridors of power.

No sooner are we given a glimpse of this separate, special world than we begin to fall prey to its allure. Witness how even principled members of government like the PM and Minister Regenvanu have suddenly, inexplicably, found themselves at a loss for words.

In the face of a torrent of international condemnation, the best PM Kilman was able to muster was a statement by his spokesman he would let the courts decide Iauko’s fate. No mention of the fact that in most parliamentary democracies, any minister under investigation immediately steps down – at least until the issue is resolved.

From Ralph Regenvanu? Not a peep. This from the man whose election slogan was ‘Inaf!’ Maybe he’ll amend it next time to ‘Klosap inaf. Wet smol.’

In a canny bit of manoeuvring, however, the PM pulled his Minister out of the fire just days later by shuffling him from Lands to Justice, thus enforcing his silence. No matter that this is his third portfolio in about as many months. No matter that actually governing is near-impossible while the Cabinet is playing musical chairs. No matter that, despite all these portfolio changes and all the problems he’s caused, Iauko remains at his post.

And what of the Opposition, whose job it is to challenge and question? Even Iauko’s VP arch-rivals Natapei and Molisa have yet to say a word.

Let’s forget the politicians, then. They’re obviously powerless to act, except according to the byzantine, counter-factual logic of power.

They don’t matter, anyway. They can bluster all they like, but as we’ve seen in recent months, they can’t dominate and control us all the time. Inevitably, the people win. Throughout North Africa and across the Arabian Peninsula, people have demonstrated that strong governments which rely on coercion to enforce their will can be rendered fragile as paper in the wind.

All it takes is for people to leave their fear behind them.

It’s almost comical to see how quickly bullies like Iauko can be deflated when people cease to fear them, or conversely, how police and other state officials can be rendered worse than useless when they allow their fear to cow them.

The staff at the Daily Post –and Marc Neil-Jones in particular– learned years ago that they were free to tell the truth once they left their fear behind. It’s a small act, and a fairly simple one, too. But its effects are immense.

I remember visiting the Daily Post offices a couple of days after Police Commissioner Joshua Bong had sent his thugs around to give Marc a thumping. In spite of the bashed-in nose, cracked ribs and bloody lip, Marc managed a quirky smile and a chuckle when I voiced my concern. “I’ve been deported, jailed and beaten up before,” he said. “This isn’t the worst I’ve seen.”

“I am getting a bit old for this, though,” he added wryly.

I would have thought our ministers of state had matured beyond these schoolyard bully tactics too, but apparently they’re not too old for tantrums.

We should all learn from Marc’s example: We have only to free ourselves from fear and the power of these bullies evaporates in an instant.

My name is Dan McGarry. If you don’t like what I’ve got to say, I’m okay with that. I’m not afraid.

The freedom that we experienced on the Internet of the ’90s is waning. Governments and commercial interests take ever-increasing steps to circumscribe people’s ability to communicate digitally. The only way to change this tide from ebb to flood is to fulfill a promise that was first made in the ’90s.

We need to disintermediate the network. It’s an ugly duckling of a word, but cutting out the middle man matters more now than ever.

As long as the cables, wires and frequencies over which we communicate are susceptible to being controlled, curtailed or even disconnected when the things we say -or the way we say them- become upsetting, we will find ourselves increasingly confined.

As I said during an Internet policy session yesterday, if you ask anyone -anyone- whether there should be limits on Behaviour X on the Internet, the answer will always be a resounding Yes. That’s not a problem in and of itself, because X is usually anti-social and contrary to the public good. The problem is that anything capable of curtailing Behaviour X can be brought to bear on Behaviours A through W as well.

The only way out of this is to provide the technical means to do what we have always done in democratic societies: Keep our private discussions private and our public discussions free.

For the former we at last have all the ingredients we need:

1. Gigabit wifi – We can finally start thinking about getting decent performance out of wireless data transmission, meaning that we can worry a little less about putting a lot of people onto a single wifi network;
2. Wireless Mesh Networks – Enough with the telcos; we can now start looking at creating ad hoc, self-organising networks, relegating the role of the data carriers to one similar to power and water utilities;
3. Secure Voice Communications – Security expert Moxie Marlinspike (yeah) and a crew of like-minded individuals have floated a very useful service recently, allowing secure VOIP and SMS communications between phones. By building encryption into the bones of the app, they’ve created software that looks and acts exactly like normal calling and texting. The only difference being that, if the other person is using their RedPhone service, the entire communication remains a secret shared only by the two of you.

The idea behind these things have been floating around for some time (the protocol underlying RedPhone has been with us since 2006), but now they’re all here in usable form.

I’ve said it before: The story of freedom of Internet freedom and online privacy will be the defining social conflict of our generation. As the peoples of the Middle East are discovering, the narrative of freedom is suspenseful, dramatic and exciting in the best and worst ways.

Whoever manages to blend these three technologies together seamlessly and easily enough for anyone to use them will assuredly be one of the main protagonists in this unfolding drama. They may not garner the celebrity of a Jobs or a Gates, but they will have the impact of a Gandhi or a King.

“Some of us might like to believe that the genie is out of the bottle and that we all have access to an unstoppable decentralized network. In reality, the internet is entirely controlled by central authorities.”

Arrgh! This kind of thing drives me crazy. If we could stop conflating the Internet (which is a combination of networking protocols) and the physical network (which is a bunch of cables and antennas and switches), we might be able to have a useful dialogue about how to reduce the Internet’s vulnerability to coercive measures by changing the shape of the network.

In the end, that’s what Rushkoff advocates; I just wish he wouldn’t muddy the water so.

Stay with me, kids; I’m going to say this again slowly: The network is the wires and antennas and stuff. The Internet is the way information is organised to travel across it.

More to the point, the Internet is a very specific way for data to travel across it:

• It doesn’t rely on a middle-man. I might choose to use Facebook for chat, but I don’t have to. I could connect straight to your computer or phone and chat away.
• It doesn’t need a road map. In effect, the data packets just go hitch-hiking across the network with a sign saying ‘San José’ – or whatever.
• It doesn’t see borders the same way some other network protocols do. In fact, that’s why it’s an Inter net: Because it routes traffic between different networks.

Once more:

• Internet = you & me talking.
• Network = the road system that allows you and me to get together to talk.

There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Oh, as long as I’m being pedantic: It’s Internet-with-a-capital-I. It’s a proper noun referring to a very specific thing. It’s like a country with all the geography taken out. It still has to have a capital.

Which led me to a little though experiment: What if retailers could change the price of a product spontaneously for each shopper? What if they did away with even the pretense of fixed prices and rewarded certain kinds of shopping behaviour in order to guarantee allegiance to their store?

• First-time shopper gets ridiculous discounts (maybe even a few freebies) as an enticement;
• Long-time shoppers get small but consistent discounts on selected items;
• One shopper is publicly penalised with higher prices – retailers (ab)use fear of scapegoating to keep shoppers in line;
• Shoppers induced to say or do things they would not normally in order to qualify for perks.

I think there’s a cute but fundamentally plausible (and scary) short story in there….

The week before last, Vanuatu witnessed an unprecedented event in its political history. Parliamentary Speaker George Wells instructed the members of the Police and the Vanuatu Mobile Force to bar all members of the public and the press from entering Parliamentary precincts.

Then, with no one but the MPs themselves to witness, the government changed.

We are told that a vote was held on a pending no-confidence motion. We are told that certain members of the Government crossed the aisle to vote with the Opposition. But we don’t know precisely what happened, what words were spoken and what actions were taken to ensure this outcome.

Were Police or soldiers present inside Parliament as well as outside? Were any threats, implicit or explicit, made to Members before the vote? Were any blandishments or other incentives offered?

I’m not suggesting any of these things took place. I’m suggesting that they could have, and we would never know. Anything could have happened during that session, and unless we find some way of getting corroborated evidence of what did happen, a question mark will always lie over the proceeding.

The Inter-Parliamentary Union, a United Nations organisation that works to strengthen democracies worldwide, lists five key attributes of a healthy democracy:

It is representative; it is accessible; it is accountable; it is effective. And it is transparent.

Without transparency, none of the other attributes are measurable.

Secrecy runs counter to kastom as well. It is frankly unimaginable that any change in the customary power structure could take place beyond the view of the people.

Arguably, MP Wells had the legal authority to clear the public and the press from Parliament. Whether he had the moral right to do so is not so easy to determine.

While the Constitution clearly states that the proceedings of Parliament are to be public, it leaves room for extraordinary circumstances. The Standing Orders of Parliament, the rules by which the Speaker is legally bound, state, ‘The Speaker may order the withdrawal of visitors [from Parliament] in special circumstances.’

The Orders further state that, ‘In exercising his duties, the Speaker may request assistance from officers of Parliament or if necessary, members of the Police Force.’

‘… If Necessary….’

So, MP Wells need only explain what ‘special circumstances’ required that Parliament be barred to the public in order to reassure the citizens of Vanuatu that he acted legally.

And then, of course, he would have to lay out the reasons why the use of Police was necessary. The Standing Orders only allow the use of Police ‘if necessary.’ Any reasonable definition of necessity requires the presence of an obvious and otherwise unavoidable circumstance. It should therefore be easy for MP Wells to explain what threat to public order existed that required the presence of armed soldiers at Parliament’s gates.

Was there danger of insurrection? A coup? Violent criminal activity? I’m not being facetious here; I’m genuinely asking. Mr. Wells obviously didn’t just decide out of the blue that these measures were necessary. I trust that he had his reasons.

I only ask that he share them.

It is critically important that the ex-Speaker justify his actions and demonstrate to the people of Vanuatu that he acted lawfully and with reason. If he does not, then the legality –and the legitimacy– of the vote is called into question. If the vote is called into question, then so too is the government.
That’s not something anyone wants.

This is not a trivial issue, a slip-up in a young democracy that’s just finding its feet. If indeed it is the case that the public and the press were barred for no good reason, then a terribly dangerous precedent will have been set that cannot be allowed to continue. It is anti-democratic, and it is anti-kastom.

The only thing that could excuse this behaviour is if MP Wells can demonstrate that he did not overstep.

By all accounts, nothing happened during the vote that had not happened before. This should not make us complacent. It should have the opposite effect.

If indeed, the threat of force was used to bar the public and press from a session of Parliament in which a change of government took place, and there was no compelling reason for this action, then Vanuatu’s politicians, no matter how inspired or high-minded their intentions, have led the country away from its roots.

Transparency is not just the name of a local political gadfly. It is a real thing. It is crucial to the country’s well-being. And it is not possible to like it on Monday, ignore it on a Tuesday and promise to be back Wednesday.

As the recent WikiLeaks controversy has shown us, a shining light can be discomforting, even embarrassing at times. It can actually make it more difficult to get things done. But –and here’s the key– it makes it more difficult for us to do wrong, too.

Newly-minted Prime Minister Sato Kilman has already voiced his reservations about the measures taken by the Speaker. That is commendable. He should introduce changes to the Standing Orders in the next sitting of Parliament to ensure that if these rules are ever again invoked, they will not be applied frivolously and with little cause.