Links: More PyPy, Academia, Censorship we Love, and Monads

My shared links for March 1st through March 5th:

Boom!

Links: Structure editing, Unix History, OSS Legal Issues Primer

My shared links for February 27th through March 1st:

Links: Cheap wardrobe, App Stores, Javascript & Parsing.

My shared links for February 23rd:

def expression(rbp=0): global token t = token token = next() left = t.nud() while rbp < token.lbp: t = token token = next() left = t.led(left) return left

Skim Knockoff(s) on the Mac App Store

Sometime in January, a Skim user asked the developers if we'd submitted it to the Mac App Store. We hadn't.

The app listed for sale for $29 on the store as "PDF Reader" is actually our free and open source Skim app, although no mention of the Skim Sourceforge project is made in the description, and the support link just goes to a livejournal post where the Skim web page ad copy has been pasted. There is also a $19 app called "PDF Expert" that appears to be another copy. That one even went ahead and used Adobe's Acrobat trademark in their icon!

Anyone who buys these apps is paying for a program that has no support from and no coordination with the actual developers and an unknown update or bug fix schedule. They won't know about the tips and support available on the Skim wiki or the users mailing list. They could get a better product for free.

Naturally, I'd like to see these unofficial copies removed from the store.

Because the project uses the permissive BSD license, it's officially OK to take the code, change nothing, and sell it. However, there is an acknowledgement clause, so if a copy doesn't mention the actual authors anywhere, it's in violation of the license.

At one point in mid-January, "PDF Reader" was offered for free, so the main developer, Christiaan Hofman, downloaded it to check. He found no mention of the original authors. So now we have something we can actually complain about.

Now, I wrote an initial prototype and started the sourceforge project, but Christiaan deserves most of the credit for the great app that it became. However, mostly because of my role at the beginning, I am the copyright holder of the overall product and many of the source files. So I took the lead, and over the past few weeks I've been trying to figure out who to talk to in Apple to even find out what my options are.

I emailed Mac App Store support, who pointed me to both the Developer Relations contact info and to Apple Legal. Developer Relations said they can't help me because I'm not a member the Apple Developer Program, so they also pointed to Legal. Ok, a bit of runaround, but I thought contacting Legal seemed reasonable.

Funny, I never thought I'd want to send a DMCA takedown notice, but this is a copyright claim. I decided to use their copyright violation reporting form. In Safari and every other browser I tried, this form just doesn't work! It keeps asking for my phone number even when it already has it... So on January 26 I sent a request to copyright@apple.com with the info for the form and asked what to do next.

Since then I've heard nothing, so I thought it might be time to ask the rest of the world - has anyone had to deal with violations like this before, and is there a better way to address it?

Links: screen for X, computer history, Linux

My shared links for February 21st through February 22nd:

Links: Chicken Pasta, Parsing, DEVONsphere and superpages!

My shared links for February 15th through February 20th:

Challenges of superpages: (1) superpage allocation & promotion (2) fragmentation control

Links for February 7th through February 9th

My shared links for February 7th through February 9th:

  • Effective Scala -

  • Video lectures for 6.851, advanced data structures - Prof. Erik Demaine's 6.851 lectures recorded with synchronized lecture notes.

  • tobami/codespeed - GitHub - Python and django performance monitoring tool. Used for speed.pypy.org

  • Experiences with an Icon-like Expression Evaluation System - Interesting and accessible trip through Icon's expression semantics and Converge.

  • amoffat/pbs - GitHub - Clever library to let you start subprograms from python as if they were python functions. Much more usable than the stuff I'm used to in the pystdlib... Almost as concise as backticks and looks more flexible too (ie, handles piping)

  • Laurence Tratt: Fast Enough VMs in Fast Enough Time - "If you can stomach the smell, put yourself briefly in the shoes of a programming language designer. What you want to do is create new programming languages, combining new and old ideas into a fresh whole. It sounds like a fun, intellectually demanding job, and occasionally it is. However, we know from experience that languages that exist solely in the mind or on paper are mostly worthless: it is only when they are implemented and we can try them out that we can evaluate them. As well as a language design, therefore, we need a corresponding language implementation."

  • Introducing Twine: String Management for iOS, Mac OS X, and Android Development - Mobiata Blog - In this post I hope to show you just how bad the standard localization process is for iOS and Mac OS X apps, and how we have found a way to make it much easier for developers to localize their apps and then maintain these localizations and translations over time. In addition, I'll show you how you can easily share your translations across multiple apps and platforms. This will save your company money that would otherwise be spent duplicating your translation efforts, especially if you are developing for both iOS and Android.

  • Conduit - GNOME Live! - Conduit is a synchronization application for GNOME. It allows you to synchronize your files, photos, emails, contacts, notes, calendar data and any other type of personal information and synchronize that data with another computer, an online service, or even another electronic device.

Conduit manages the synchronization and conversion of data into other formats. For example, Conduit allows you to :

Synchronize your Tomboy notes with another computer Synchronize your your PIM data to your mobile phone, iPod, Nokia Internet tablet, or between computers Upload photos to Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, ShutterFly and your iPod Any combination you can imagine, Conduit will take care of the conversion and synchronization.

Links for January 27th through February 3rd

My shared links for January 27th through February 3rd:

Links for January 23rd through January 25th

My shared links for January 23rd through January 25th: