Author: Brian Burger

Started this site way, way back in November 1998, when the web was young. It's still here, and so am I.

ubuntu

Appreciating Ubuntu Even More

Post author By Brian Burger
Post date January 18, 2011
3 Comments on Appreciating Ubuntu Even More

Want to learn to appreciate the power of a modern desktop Linux install? Spend a week at your folk’s place, swearing at your stepmother’s WinXP box. Shockingly crippled… how do Windows users victims put up with this crap? No integrated FTP or SSH in the file manager, text editor that doesn’t recognize and support HTML or PHP, no support for SVG, OGG, PNG or a host of other useful file formats… blergh.

I love visiting the folks, I’m actually glad it’s snowing so we can hopefully get a good cross-country ski in tomorrow, but getting back to a proper, fully-functional computer will be kind of nice!

Tags family, holidays, rant, snow, travel, ubuntu

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A Gap in the Creative Commons Licences

Post author By Brian Burger
Post date January 10, 2011
4 Comments on A Gap in the Creative Commons Licences

The “Non-Commercial (NC)” aspect of the Creative Commons Licences has been discussed a great deal, and there’s always been a lot of confusion over how to apply it (is simply having Google Adwords on a personal blog enough to trigger the NC clause?); there was even an extensive survey a year or two ago from Creative Commons on the NC clause & usage thereof.

There’s another, closely related gap in the CC schemes that I’ve just run into: there’s no way to specify “this product may itself be used in commercial products, but may not be sold by itself”.

The use case I have is a PDF package of gradient backdrops for photography which I’ve created; it’s a basic PDF of Inkscape-created coloured backdrops, mostly aimed at photography of wargaming miniatures. I’d be happy to have these used by a wargaming company for webstore/catalog pictures (or by anyone else, of course), but I don’t want the PDF (or printed backdrops from it) sold on it’s own… and there’s no way to make that distinction clear with existing CC Licences.

Anyone else got any other interesting licencing edge cases they’ve run into, or suggestions for cases like this?

Tags creative commons, design

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Twas The Night Before Christmas…

Post author By Brian Burger
Post date December 24, 2010
No Comments on Twas The Night Before Christmas…

Traditionally read on Christmas Eve, naturally, at least in our family. I can still recite large stretches of this from memory, purely from childhood repetition! This is the complete text of Clement Clark Moore’s famous poem, on one sheet. This is a project that’s been knocking around in the back of my head for number of years, and this holiday season I finally did something about it.

Also available on PDF, if you wish to print it for reading by the fire with care. (UPDATED 5th December 2012; I rearranged part of the website a while back and forgot to fix this link. Sorry. It works now!)

CC-BY License, although it doesn’t currently say so on the page. Done in Inkscape, naturally.

Happy Mid-Winter Holidays, everyone, however you celebrate them.