To be convicted of a crime, generally two coincided elements must be proved:
Actus reus - the external or physical side of things
Mens rea - the mental aspect
There are different types of mens rea and these can be found in statute (e.g. Crimes Act 1961) with words such as ‘intended and ‘knew’.
Where knowledge is the mental element it can be argued, in specific circumstances, that although a defendant once knew something at the time of the actus reus they were not aware of the particular fact, therefore no mens rea can be proved.
It may be appropriate that the two cases discussed on forgotten knowledge concern the possession of cannabis. One in the UK where the Court of Appeal didn’t wear the argument. The other in New Zealand where in 1974 Mr Rowles had his conviction for unlawful possession quashed on appeal.
“If in fact the appellant had forgotten the presence of the cannabis in the cabinet, then I think he was not knowingly in possession of the cannabis. The extinction of conscious knowledge, whether caused by mistaken belief or fault of memory, would be in my view fatal to the required concept of factual possession accompanied by guilty knowledge.”
Mahon J, Police v Rowles - [1974] 2 NZLR 756
On that day in court the Police were represented by our current Governor-General Anand Satyanand.
Here’s a video from the BBC’s build up for the Cup which captures the Crazy Gang spirit.
It didn’t seem long after this high that things went awry, Hillsborough meant all-seater stadiums and the Dons moved from their home of Plough Lane to sharing with Crystal Palace. I never enjoyed Selhurst Park and my defining memory is of tears, the day we were relegated from the Premiership.
Yesterday I got an email from an engineer at the mothership asking for advice on tweaking a small utility I put together. The utility automates the creation of on-screen menus for TVNZ 6, which are created using Apple’s Final Cut Pro and indirectly use Apple’s Motion.
I did some weekend based research on FCP’s Apple Event (AE) support whilst investigating the best way to do those menus. With the help of HAS’s appscript AE bridge I put together a first cut of some Python code that could get and send XML to FCP via AE. I didn’t use this approach in the actual solution, instead opting just to have the operator manually import a XML file.
I’ve placed that code onto the Python code snippets site Useless Python, hoping that it err may be useful to some. Why is Useless Python developed in PHP?
It’s not available yet, will link directly to it after it’s been reviewed and approved.
I’ve written at least three blog posts on that Act that passed the third reading last week, and I’ve binned them all. I’ve decided that’s too easy to be snarky…
I spent a couple of hours at the Small Business Expo today where my pick of the show would have to be Statistics NZ. There is a huge resource of free market research stats waiting for businesses to tap into. Some is free, some is charged for. The whole focus on business enablement and the savviness I encountered on their stand was impressive. The free stats are in large part due to additional funding they’re received. Good work govt. Let’s have more funding for this department to enable them to free up more of their stats.
IP telephony company Vadacom were also to be seen at the show. They use Python in their products and host the Auckland meetings of the NZ Python Users Group at their K Road base.
Recently viewed a great Erlang video from the Jonathan Rentzsch organised C4 conference. Bob Ippolito, who is well known for his work helping to marry the joys of Mac with the joys of Python, gives the talk in which he provides an overview of Erlang and discusses the use of Erlang in powering his companies ad server and traffic monitoring products.
The ad server is MochiAds which focuses on the Flash causal games market, embedding preroll and inter level ads into Flash content. If you’ve been to the Auckland Web Meetup in the last year then you may be familiar with it via Shaun Lee’s presentation on his Flash games portal shaunsflights.com or the presentation from Stephen Harris on Ninja Kiwi which inspired Shaun to become a Flash game developer.
"In the space of an hour announcement, Apple has destroyed most of the big mobile players, Nokia, Microsoft, and RIM. I'd expect Google to abandon Android development at this point, it's now just irrelevant (if it weren't already)" - Polar Bear Farm
Two weeks ago I resigned from TVNZ. I start full time study for a LLB in a fortnight. It’s an exciting prospect and I can’t wait to get stuck in. I will not be around for the launch of TVNZ7, though I will sure to set up the PVR to check out Russell’s show.
The last two weeks at TVNZ will be focused on helping define first draft of business/technical architecture for the content aspects of the enterprise. The next two days, however, I’m going to be in Wellington at Webstock.
“We are disturbed not by events, but by the views which we take of them” - Epictetus
I’m not sure what the source was… it was definitely a recommendation that got me to pick up Deep Survival. Subtitled “who lives, who dies, and why, true stories of miraculous endurance and sudden death”, the cover and associated cover bumpf would otherwise not have tempted me to check it out from the library.
However Laurence Gonzales’ book is a cracker. It is a book about the mind, and it mixes Stoic philosophy, Chaos theory and Zen Buddhism together to try explain the crucial differences between who survive and those that die. The stories are all big outdoors adventures but as Gonzales explains the learnings can be applied to personal and business lives. Highly recommended.
Updated:
Based on reading Deep Survival I rented the DVD 'Touching the Void'. It's the story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates' remarkable experience climbing Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. Somewhat delirious, towards the end of his ordeal Simpson, who did not like Boney M, got the song 'Brown Girl in Ring' looping in this head for a couple of hours.
“...and I remember thinking 'bloody hell I'm going to die [listening] to Boney M'” - Simpson
With this in mind, when I was asked this weekend for some advice from a friend looking to put together a web play together I stressed the need for them to get the combo of a decent architecture, an ops machine in place before going crazy with feature development. Once this is in place they can get a minimal release up, then push out new functionality quickly and reliably - well at least from the web ops side of the equation. The less effort they have to focus on deployment and admin the more they can spend on developing the functionality that matters for their users.
So after dispensing this advice I thought that I should walk the talk myself and implement some of my own advice for this blog’s system. This blog was the typical ‘my first django project’. It was rapidly constructed around Christmas last year, porting existing content from the Rails based Typo system I had previously used.
I don’t make many changes to the code, arguably I don’t make that many changes/additions to the content either. However I’ve now placed the code under Subversion control and have installed Capistrano to automate admin tasks, specifically the deployment of new code onto my production server. Version control is mandatory for projects with more than one person working on them and highly desirable even if there is just one. For more information/explanation - should it be required - check out this visual guide to version control.
Simply put, Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks on one or more remote servers. It executes commands in parallel on all targeted machines, and provides a mechanism for rolling back changes across multiple machines. It is ideal for anyone doing any kind of system administration, either professionally or incidentally.
Capistrano is a Rails related tool. It’s primarily used for deployment but can be used to automate any set of tasks. And whilst it has come out of the Rails community and is written in Ruby it can be used in association with any language/web framework. Tasks to be automated are described in its own domain specific language (DSL) so there’s no requirement to learn Ruby. Capistrano is now at 2.1 and whilst there is a chapter on version 1.0 in the online Rails book there is little on 2.0, though improved 2.0 documentation can be expected. So here’s the sources I used to grok it for for deploying a non-Rails web application.
Prerequisites:
ssh and client certificates setup to provide password-less access to your production server from your workstation
knowledge of how your production environment works
a version control system, such as subversion setup and accessible from your production server
Unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise I would go with the flow and use Capistrano’s method for organising releases. This approach lets you get the most from what Capistrano provides for free, with you only having to refine the tasks specific to your environment.
update:
Django added auto escaping of HTML in the version that I installed when putting Capistrano in place. I missed addressing that in the feed's templates. Fixed now.
Aucklander Peter Calveley describes his motivation for having a go at Amazon’s one-click patent as basically being bored. Amazon didn’t deliver on a book order, which seems to have got his goat up - and provided him with a line of work to keep him busy. The work of proving that there was substantial prior art concerning one-click transactions on the web. Thanks to Calveley Amazon have proposed changes to the patent which will reduce its scope to one-click transactions involving a shopping cart, after the US Patent Office & Trademark Office had rejected the majority of Amazon’s claims (21 of 26).
Calveley used the technique of having the patent re-examined to be able to use prior art. Ironically he used information provided by Amazon’s Alexa via the Archive.org’s Wayback Machine as the source of information providing him with evidence that one-click transactions were in use on the web prior to Amazon and its patent.
I have recently become an expert on starting and not completing posts. So I’ll bang out this mix of memes double quick.
Auckland Does Community
Firstly there is a BarCamp happening in Auckland, well Botany Downs, on December 15. Get involved.
Some of those attending can be seen at the Auckland Web Meetup - which is a fantastic forum, much kudos to John and Karl for orchestrating such positive, productive, fun evenings. Next one is Feb.
Creative Commons
I got myself down to the launch of Kiwi Creative Commons licence(s) a few weeks ago. It was interesting, the speaker talks are available online for viewing. The workshop I attended was great - meet a bunch of people doing intriguing things and we had some robust discussion around how CC would affect our collecting institutions. In some small gesture I have licensed the contents of syntho.org as NY-NC (NZ). This means you can do anything you like with the content, unless you’re going to turn a profit off it, and if you do use it - then give me credit for what you do use. As I say it’s a gesture. There hasn’t been much real CC NZ action. I believe Otago Poly are CC licensing some of their course materials. Are there other examples to cite?
The licences are are available on the main CC site at http://creativecommons.org/license/. Select NZ from the ‘Jurisdiction’ menu. I’m not sure why the Creative Commons NZ site appears to contradict the availability of the NZ licences (as of Nov 20 2007).
. Subtitled “who lives, who dies, and why, true stories of miraculous endurance and sudden death”, the cover and associated cover bumpf would otherwise not have tempted me to check it out from the library.
