Tag: Technology

Creative Commons – not just for hippies

MediaShift . Digging Deeper::Creative Commons + Flickr = 22 Million Sharable Photos | PBS Link via John Batelle

“I think Creative Commons is a huge thing and I attribute a lot of my success to it,” Krug said. “Since the beginning I’ve given all my photos away on the Internet and they’ve been used by other bloggers and people all along the way and it’s gotten my name out there.

Article is about a photographer who has shared his high quality photos under a Creative Commons license, and how it’s gotten his name out there.  Are you listening, music industry?

I have about 1500 photos shared on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.  That means anyone can use the photo for whatever they want as long as theygive me credit, don’t make money from it, and keep the license the same.  I’ve never had anyone I don’t know use a photo (To my knowledge), but I know at least one friend has used a few as desktop backgrounds, which is cool.  And I’m not a professional photographer or anything, but I have an expensive DSLR and I more or less know how to use it.

Anyway, good to hear Creative Commons success stories.

Its interesting to live near D.C.

Wild Blue Wonder – washingtonpost.com

The wife and I were driving from her office in the city to Arlington to take my grandmother on some errands when we passed this new monument, and what looked like a circus or something or other happening at the Pentagon. I didn’t know anything about it, but apparently she had heard something about a new monument. So we surmised that this was the dedication ceremony. I have to say that, from 395, the monument is kind of dumb. I mean, it’s big and shiny and sharp, and I guess it probably strikes fear in the hearts of terrorists or something. But it’s sort of ugly.

But, whatever. Art is subjective, and I’m picky about my art. I’m happy to honor the Air Force, as they’ve done a great deal to protect my way of life.

Anyway, my real point was that part of the ceremony is an air show. As I was turning off of Spout Run Parkway, we heard a loud plane overhead that turned out to be one of these.USAF B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber Plainly visible, right overhead through my open sunroof on this sunny and brisk day, a friggin’ stealth bomber. I’m not usually one to get all worked up over something like this, but these things cost $2.2 BILLION each. And, it’s a stealth bomber. That’s pretty awesome. We saw a few other planes (And heard even more), some that I recognize from video games and whatnot. But the stealth was the highlight.

Anyway, I hope that hotlinking to airforce-technology.com isn’t going to cause any problems. At least they aren’t likely to goatse (Link to worksafe explanation, for those who don’t know) me.

Edit: Didn’t realize that the image was too big for IE, since I avoid using IE as much as possible. So I made it smaller.

Space Invaders is awesome

Teenager moves video icons just by imagination Via Futurismic

The teenager, a patient at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, had a grid atop his brain to record brain surface signals, a brain-machine interface technique that uses electrocorticographic (ECoG) activity – data taken invasively right from the brain surface. It is an alternative to a frequently used technique to study humans called electroencephalographic activity (EEG) – data taken non-invasively by electrodes outside the brain on the scalp. Engineers programmed the Atari software to interface with the brain-machine interface system.

So this kid is not only helping us learn how we might deal with epilepsy, but can also play Space Invaders without a controller.  That’s just one step closer to the end of computer input devices as we know them.  Wouldn’t it be cool if your interaction with the computer wasn’t limited by the speed at which you can communicate with it?

Norton Antivirus kills my processor

I hate my laptop.  It’s a Dell, and I have a Dell desktop that I’ve had since 1998 that I love.  Once it got too old to do much with, I installed Ubuntu Linux on it, and that’s been pretty cool.  But this laptop has been a piece of crap ever since I bought it.  And now I’ve found that maybe I’ve put too much blame on Dell, and not nearly enough on Norton.  My antivirus that came with the computer expired long ago, and I refuse to pay for virus protection.  I’ve never had a virus in my life.  Never.  And I don’t trust Norton to work, anyway.

So, the computer has been running slowly for a while.  Finally I decided to uninstall all the extra junk I’ve gathered along the way.  Soon enough, I got to Norton.  I can’t believe how much faster the computer is running now that Norton is gone.  It’s not just Norton, but that was the only thing I uninstalled where I saw an immediate change in how the computer was running.

I would suggest to all of you that you get rid of Norton, but I don’t know what you should replace it with.  So I won’t recommend that you do that just yet.  It’s one thing for me to go without virus protection, but I’m not going to recommend that you do it.

But I have to say that I’m thrilled with my uninstalling exploits.  I’ll keep you all posted on how it works from here on out.

I love RSS

I’m curious, and I don’t have enough readers to do a poll, but I’d really like to know how many people don’t return to a website that doesn’t have an RSS feed.  Sometimes I’ll come across something interesting at a site and think, “Hey, I’d like to read this site regularly.”  But then I look in the address bar, and there’s no little Firefox Live Bookmark icon.  And that’s usually the last time I visit that site.  It’s just too much trouble to actually have to bookmark the site, then remember to check back and see if anything’s new.

With my RSS reader, Firefox plugin Sage, I don’t have to remember.  When I have a free moment, or need a quick break from work, I just click the Sage button on my toolbar, hit refresh, and suddenly I have new things to read from websites I like.

I don’t really read a newspaper (Too hard to recycle).  But I have RSS feeds for the Washington Post, CNN, the BBC . . . Certainly I don’t get every bit of news that happens, but I get the highlights.

Don’t really know where I was going with all this.  But I don’t know what I would do without RSS.  I look forward to the day when my little PDA/cellphone/camera/etc uses the ubiquitous free WiFi to keep my RSS feed updated wherever I am.

Can I forgive Sony in order to buy this?

Sony Reader: Gizmodo’s Hands All Over, $350 in October (Really!) – Gizmodo

So, Sony sucks.  After their insistence on their stupid proprietary flash memory, their rootkit fiasco and subsequent refusal to take responsibility, and a general “Our customers are criminals who must be stopped” mentality, I wrote off the company.  But, damn, this is a sexy gadget.  Have you ever wished you could take your whole book collection with you?  Tired of paper cuts?  Want a real step forward in the whole book-reading experience?  This thing is it.  I really want one, and I don’t know if I can buy one.  I’m really, really hoping that someone, soon, puts out a similar device that runs on Linux or something.  I don’t think it will happen, though.  Book publishers will almost certainly reject anything that doesn’t help implement their DRM, and a Linux device isn’t likely to satisfy them.

What should happen, at the very least, is the electronic ink technology their using should become more common.  The cool thing about electronic ink is that it only uses power when the screen changes.  Excellent applications include the preview on the outside of your cell phone, or advertising billboards.

So, we’ll see if the cool factor outweighs the Sony sucks factor.  And if it does, the next hurdle is wife-approval.  But I think I can handle that.

Time magazine is on notice

TIME.com: Do Newspapers Have a Future? — Oct. 2, 2006 — Page 2

But there is room between the New York Times and myleftarmpit.com for new forms that liberate journalism from its encrusted conceits while preserving its standards, like accuracy.

I was just about ready to remove Time magazine from my Google homepage because they were disappointing me with thin articles, but this one is a little better. It whines a little about the blogosphere and how the bad bloggers are getting treated like journalists without having to pay their dues as whatever journalists are before they get a job with a big paper. But then it goes on to talk about the need for old school media to find the spot between bloggers and where they are now where people want to read them, and they still make money.

I do have to take issue with this quote:

The Brits have never bought into the American separation of reporting and opinion. They assume that an intelligent person, paid to learn about some subject, will naturally develop views about it. And they consider it more truthful to express those views than to suppress them in the name of objectivity.

American papers objective? I don’t know what American paper he’s reading, but if it’s really objective, I’d love a subscription. I have yet to find a news source in between “OMG Bush is a jerk” and “Fight terrorism at all costs!”.

I’d like to see old media compete. I think that established newspapers have a place alongside blogs, and it’s an important place. They just need to figure out what that place is, and how to monetize it.

Stupid computer

So, I’m at work right now, and I was about to actually do some work, and apparently my server died overnight, which isn’t that unusual.  It’s just a local server running on my machine so I can test our Java web app.  It dies a lot, it’s not a big deal.  Except that this morning, it wouldn’t come back up.  So I tried rebuilding it, and got this error: “creation was not successful for an unknown reason”.  Now, we use Eclipse as our IDE, and for the most part I love it.  It works well, it has a lot of nice conveniences built in, and an active developer community writing plugins.  But when I get error messages that say, “Like, um, something’s wrong, but, um, we don’t know what it is, or how you might fix it”, then I start to get a little annoyed.

Now, I know it’s tough to write good error messages.  Believe me, I’ve written some bad ones myself.  But, damn it, I’m actually trying to get some stuff done here, and Eclipse is not cooperating.  Stupid Eclipse.  If I hadn’t already gone to get coffee, I’d do that now.  That’s how mad I am.  Instead, I’ll probably waste some time until some coworkers get here, and then waste some more time, and then maybe try to fix my server.  Maybe.

It begins . . .

For 1st Woman With Bionic Arm, a New Life Is Within Reach – washingtonpost.com

Today, the first woman gets a bionic arm to replace one she lost.  Sooner than you think, a plastic surgeon is going to amputate the arms of a rich bored kid to replace them with metal arms as a fashion statement or a “body upgrade”.

I think it’s great that people without limbs have this available – a partially thought-controlled replacement arm.  I know how difficult it can be to do normal tasks when I’ve just jammed a wrist or something – I can’t even imagine losing a limb.  And while this technology isn’t perfect, I imagine an imperfect arm is better than no arm.

But it’s a new world out there, and it’s only a matter of time before this is cosmetic surgery.  It remains to be seen whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.