The Butt Ugly Weblog

You may have noticed the black popup covering this site today, calling you to sign a petition to make some sense to Finnish copyright legislation. Well, for those who don't know about this, Finland has a law which says that "if 50,000 people sign a petition, the government must take it seriously". Unfortunately, what it actually really means is still up for debate, but to get 50k people to sign something in a country of less than 5M eligible voters is quite significant (especially if you're an MP who cares about being re-elected).

Anyway. The real reason why my blog and plenty of other sites went all black was that few people realize that the copyright struggle is a three-party thing. There's the content creators (like the artists), the content consumers (like me), and the middlemen (like record companies). For the most part, the middlemen like to play the creator's side, but when it comes down to actual profit - well, there's a saying in Finland: "The artist pays."

You have to think about it this way: who gets the most out of strong copyright? The middlemen do not create or consume anything. Yes, they do facilitate, and as such they are a valuable part of the ecosystem, but strictly speaking - they're not necessary. However, since individual content creators often lack the resources to enforce their copyrights - and the content consumers don't care - there is a spot in the ecosystem for companies which have the money and the interest to police copyright - and there we find the middlemen.

This is why we're in this fight. Not because copyright is a bad thing (it isn't! It's a great thing!), but because it's no longer in the hands of people. New copyright legislation is dedicated to removing rights from both consumers and creators and concentrating it in the hands of middle-men corporations, because they have the money to write the laws, and lobby them incessantly until they get what they want.

This is why this site is black. To support a copyright law that does not make corporations force the police to seize laptops from 9-year olds. To support a copyright law that allows artists to have a say on whom to sue. To support a copyright law that says that people must be listened to.

Please do support the petition.

I've recently been plagued with OSX performance issues - tasks using a lot of CPU, and inexplicable beach balls popping up, machine getting stuck and making life miserable in general. So here's what I have learned:

SystemUIServer eating all your CPU

TL;DR: Kill it, it's safe. Run "killall SystemUIServer" in your Terminal whenever that happens. It will restart itself.

Longer story: sometimes an application which is occupying your menu bar can get stuck doing network traffic, and this may appear as SystemUIServer getting stuck in a loop. You can either get rid of the offending menubar app, or just kill the SystemUIServer process, which will be respawned by OSX, but in an unstuck state this time. It will get stuck again sooner or later if you don't get rid of the app, but it doesn't happen that often. More information.

System slow, disk activity even if I have plenty of memory, apps show spinning beach balls often

TL;DR: Disable swap memory with

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

Longer story: As stated in this article OSX virtual memory handling, Spotlight and problems in HFS compound sometimes to the state that the system spends way too much time swapping perfectly good bits from disk to memory and vice versa. So, you can go ahead and kill the swap with the above command. This has made my Mac a lot faster, but the downside is of course that you need enough memory (8G or more) so that your system does not die suddenly. This isn't without its risks, but so far I'm very happy that I did this.