Seventeenth Century Print Culture

"Away ungodly Vulgars, far away, Fly ye profane, that dare not view the day, Nor speak to men but shadows, nor would hear Of any news, but what seditious were, Hateful and harmful and ever to the best, Whispering their scandals … " The advent of the printing press in 16th and 17th century England was the subject of today's BBC Radio 4 programme, In Our Time. Within a length of 40 minutes or so, a lot of ground is covered and no single subject is explored in depth, as can be expected. However, it touches on many interesting aspects of this period, such as the Levellers, the Ranters, and the Diggers, besides others. All in all, an interesting, if not over-enlightening, chat between four people.

The programme can currently be downloaded in MP3 format from http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/radio4/inourtime/inourtime_20060126-0900_40_st.mp3.

Yesterday's edition of The Guardian newspaper contained an 8-page comic strip, Trauma On Loan, by Joe Sacco, in its Weekend magazine supplement, which looked rather out of place next to advertisements for BMWs, properties, personal hygiene products and articles such as Seven Pointers To A Perfect Smile, fashion – the right coat can add more than a touch of style this Spring – and reviews of expensive London restaurants.

Trauma On Loan is based around Sacco's time spent with Thahe Mohammed Sabbar and Sherzad Kamal Khalid during their visit to the USA to appear as plaintiffs in a lawsuit. The lawsuit charges U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with legal responsibility for the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody in Afghanistan and Iraq, and was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First. Both Sabbar and Khalid were detained by the United States military in Iraq and were subjected to physical abuse, torture, and other cruel and degrading treatment. They were eventually released without charge.

The filed complaint is available online at http://www.aclu.org/safefree/rumsfeld/23378lgl20060105.html.

Joe Sacco's Trauma On Loan can be downloaded as a PDF from here: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2006/01/20/fullsacco1.pdf.

pc-news.org has conducted an interview with Eben Moglen, an attorney representing the Free Software Foundation, in which he discusses the differences between version 2 and the forthcoming version 3 of the GPL. The changes, which he describes as an evolution of the license with no fundamental change, are aimed primarily at the legal environment and patent laws. He says that patent laws are a form of legal subsidy to business, and goes on to be critical of companies and their usage of free software, like TiVo, who try to straddle the line between freedom and un-freedom just a little too closely, the movie industry, and others.

What TiVo needs to do – what everybody needs to do who makes electronic devices – is to stop injuring users to help movie companies. We don’t want our software used in a way which batters the head of the user to please somebody else.

Read the whole interview:
Defender of the GPL

Gerrard Winstanley – Fire in The Bush – 19 March 1650
(Collected in Winstanley – The Law of Freedom and Other Writings – Edited and introduced by Christopher Hill – Pelican Classics 1973)

The cover text mentions Winstanley's mastery of colloquial prose and superb use of imagery, although possibly the former is better represented, the latter is well expressed in Fire in the Bush. Out of context, slices of text would lose the force and weight they have when reading the whole piece, but nevertheless…

'If this be true, it will destroy all government and all our ministry and religion?'
I answer, it is very true;
   …
You oppressing powers of the world, who think that God hath blessed you because you sit down in the chair of government out of which former tyrants are gone: do you remember this? Your overturing, overturning, overturning, is come on to you, as well as your fellow break-promises that are gone before. You that pretend to be saviours of the people, and to seek the peace of the whole nation; and yet serve yourselves upon the people's ruins, not regarding the cry of the poor: surely you must have your overturnings too.
   …
'This man will have no government', some will say.
I answer, you run too fast. True government is that I long for to see…
   …
Love your enemies, and do as you would be done by, in actions and not in words only.
   …
… so that covetousness does not reign, imagination doth not frighten you, with 'What shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and wherewith shall be clothed hereafter?'
   …
… you are that power that hedges some into the earth and hedges others out; and takes to yourselves, by the power of the killing sword, a liberty to rule over the labours and persons of your fellow-creatures, who are flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone. And you do the very same things, in a higher degree and nature, for which you hang other men for, punishing others for such actions as you call sin; and yet you live in the daily action yourselves, taking the earth from the weaker brother, and so killing him by poverty or prison all day long.
   …
And here I shall end with this question, What are the greatest sins in the world? I answer, these two: first for a man to lock up the treasuries of the earth in chests and houses, and to suffer it to rust or moulder while others starve for want to whom it belongs – and it belongs to all. …
The second sin is like to this, and is the same in nature with the other; and this is for any man or men first to take the earth by power of the murdering sword from others, and then by the laws of their own making do hang or put to death any who takes the fruits of the earth to supply his necessaries, from places or persons where there is more than can be made use of by that particular family where it is hoarded up.

Break-promises. Nice turn of phrase, and as true now as it was then.

I finally wrote a new perl script, filter_conv_new.pl, to convert Sylpheed's newer, (>= 0.9.99), type of filter rules to Sylpheed-Claws filtering rules. This complements the previous script that converted the old format Sylpheed rules.

Download: http://www.claws-mail.org/tools/sylpheed-filter_conv_new.tar.gz

Usage: perl filter_conv_new.pl

Requirement: XML::SimpleObject

The script looks for filter.xml, the file that holds Sylpheed's filter rules, first in '~/.sylpheed-2.0', the config directory of Sylpheed >= 2.0.0, failing that, it looks in the old config directory, '~/.sylpheed', and converts all enabled rules, writing its output to '~/[CLAWS CONFIG DIR]/matcherrc' , (the script determines the location of Claws' config directory). Only those rules that are enabled in Sylpheed are converted, as, in Sylpheed-Claws, all rules are enabled at all times. I thought about adding an option to enable the conversion of disabled rules, but decided to leave it out, at least for now.

It passed all my tests, and seems to manage with any filter rule that Sylpheed can throw at it, so that's that: finis!

UPDATE
Since Claws Mail (formerly Sylpheed-Claws) allowed disabling of filter rules this script was updated to support enabled/disabled rule conversion. The same URL above will get you the updated script.

Since yesterday, (in SVN), the KIPI plugin SendImages has support for Sylpheed-Claws. This means that DigiKam, KimDaba, ShowImg, and GwenView can now all send images via Sylpheed-Claws. Sweet!

Thanks goes to Tom Albers for modifying and committing my patch.

I was glancing over the Planet Gentoo RSS feed, (using Ticho's RSSyl plugin for Sylpheed-Claws), and noticed a link in a post to an entry entitled "MP3 for free" in J5's blog. It turns out that this mp3 for free is a product by a company called Fluendo, the product being an mp3 decoding plug-in for the GStreamer framework. The J5's blog entry puts forward some, in my opinion, dubious views and arguments, and points to a further entry on another blog with another misnomer, Perfect Present, which has more weak arguments.

To cut to the chase, this thing pretty much sums up the diluting of Free Software that I alluded to in a previous post. The elementary error is in confusing the meaning of Free in Free Software. This free that is talked of is as in free beer and not as in freedom, the point stressed is that the enduser can download it for free. The plugin is released under the MIT licence, but, due to the mp3 patents, and the licensing agreement Fluendo has with Thomson and Frauhenofer, "the no-cost license from Fluendo only covers desktop use, all other uses of the binaries need a separate license". According to Perfect Present, developers can download the source code and work on improving it in their free time then submit their patches to Fluendo who will then improve their product and, one would presume, gain more market value. …hmm, I'm beginning to understand their definition of free.

This gift to the community is more like a poison apple. Maybe if we bend over backwards far enough we'll be able to fit our head in our ass.

On January 1st 1650 Gerrard Winstanley's A New-year's Gift for the Parliament and Army¹ was published. The English Civil War was over, the Parliamentarians, with the help of the Common People, had overthrown the Royalists and beheaded the King, Winstanley had been arrested again for digging on the Common Land at George's Hill, and the fact that the Common People had been duped into assisting the overthrow, only to have one set of tyrants replaced by another, was all too apparent. Yet Winstanley still appealed to Reason and Rationality to reverse the shocking hyprocrisy of the new state.

England is a prison; the variety of subtleties in the laws preserved by the sword are bolts, bars and doors of the prison; the lawyers are jailors, and poor men are the prisoners; for let a man fall into the hands of any from the bailiff to the judge, and he is either undone or weary of his life.

We are still living out this history, and what has changed?

1 A New-year's Gift for the Parliament and Army: Shewing what the Kingly Power is; And that the Cause of those They call DIGGERS is the life and marrow of the Cause the Parliament hath Declared for, and the Army Fought for; The perfecting of which Work, will prove England to be the first of Nations, or the tenth part of the city of Babylon, that falls off from the Beast first, and that sets the Crown upon Christ's head, to govern the World in Righteousness: By Gerrard Winstanley a lover of England's freedom and Peace.

"The whole world's insane" Re: Null & Void, 'Still…it must go on', 7" single, Not So Brave Records, 1984