UK government consultation on Open Standards

Back in June, I submitted a response (also as pp.35–39 of a PDF on the Cabinet Office’s site) to the UK’s consultation on open standards in government. Today I received an email notifying me of the conclusions to this process. I have read through the UK government’s ‘Principles’ document, and the following snippets are quite encouraging: ‘Open’ includes ‘royalty-free’ I think the big one is the inclusion of ‘royalty-free’ in the requirements for a standard to be ‘Open’: 2. Open standard – definition … Rights – rights essential to implementation of the standard, and for interfacing with other implementations which have adopted that same standard, are licensed on a royalty free basis that is compatible with both open source and

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An unusual primality test

A few years ago, I came across The Computist Quiz, and one question in particular led to some interesting mathematics: Amphibious Discursion A predicate on positive integers: boolean isToad(int n) { return ( (n == 2) || (n == frog(4, floor((n – 1) / 2), 1, 0) – 1)); } is defined with the aid of the following helper method: int frog(int q, int r, int s, int t) { if (r < t) return 0; else if (r == t) return 1; else if (q == 0) return 0; else return (frog(q, r, s + 1, s + t) + frog(q – 1, r – t, 1, 0)); } Which integers are toads? Describe what the frog method does.

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MazezaM is NP complete

Update 20170129: My claim that Mazezam is NP-complete is not shown by this argument. The argument does show that Mazezam is NP-hard, but it is not clear that Mazezam is itself in NP. See a follow-up post for more details. Many thanks to Aaron Williams for contacting me to point out my error. The post about AutoFickle reminded me of something I did a good while ago (2008) which doesn’t currently have a home. The connection is that this is also a project based on a game written by Malcolm Tyrrell. The game this time is MazezaM, dated 2002–2004; in it you push rows of blocks back and forth, trying to get from the entrance to the exit of a

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Ireland’s copyright consultation

Background Ireland’s Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation are in the process of conducting a review of how copyright operates in Ireland. They published a consultation document and invited submissions. The Irish Free Software Organisation made a submission, which I drafted. There were also several points about the paper which I thought were interesting, but not strictly Free Software issues: Observations on the consultation paper Neutral phrasing 2. The Intersection of Innovation and Copyright in the Submissions […] 2.2 Innovation […] […] the established film, music and news industries have struggled to find successful business models in the face of widespread infringement of the copyright in their content. [p.5] Encouraging that they don’t use words like ‘theft’ or ‘piracy’ here.

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Making of ‘water video’

Zach of course was holding a hosepipe, which I removed using a background shot. Partly by masking off the relatively static length of hose, and the rest using bodged-together chroma-keying of the yellow of the hose. There’s next to no live sound; only Zach saying ‘I need a pee’. The swishing sound for the last shot was some sound of just spraying at a wall, then I created bass-boosted and treble-boosted versions, and mixed back and forth between them according to roughly what direction Zach was pointing the hose. Turned out OK I think. OpenShot seemed reasonable enough from the small amount I used it. It did crash once, and the dialogs for editing properties of clips were slow in

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