Category Archives: Uncategorized

More Reasons to Like My Webspace Provider

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This blog, and my various other web projects, are all hosted on Koumbit.org, a Montreal-based nonprofit technology co-op. They cost about the same as similar hosting packages elsewhere, but they’re technologically savvy, incredibly Open Source/Free Software friendly, help with Drupal, LGM and other FLOSS projects, and do a whole bunch of hosting for socially-relevant groups not just from Canada but overseas.

Case in point – what’s down at the bottom of the OpenMedia.ca site? “Hosted by Koumbit”. Awesome.

(and on a closely-related note to the OpenMedia link: on May 2nd, my fellow Canucks, remember your ABCs when you head to the polls…)

The Future: Sometimes It’s Fucking Awesome

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A female astronaut living aboard ISS and a semi-retired British folk-rockstar (travelling in Russia at the time) perform a flute duet in honour of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight. NASA then posts a video of the event on YouTube.

Link to YouTube link, for after Planet Ubuntu gets done killing the video embed. Seriously, go watch this, it’s only two minutes long. Two minutes of awesome.

A Gap in the Creative Commons Licences

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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?

Twas The Night Before Christmas…

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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.

'Twas The Night Before Christmas

Also available on PDF, if you wish to print it for reading by the fire with care.

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.

“… rhetoric from reality…”

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“Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit in order to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases.” — Julian Assange

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” — John Gilmore

“How many of you have broken no laws this month?” — John Gilmore

“So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” — John 8:7, King James Bible

Tim Minchin Can So Do Mellow…

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A surprisingly nice Christmas song from Australian genius Tim Minchin:

He does get a few classic Minchin digs in (“the lyrics are dodgy” is a personal favourite) but it’s mostly a very nice song about family, holidays and such. The real meaning of the upcoming Solstice holiday, in whatever version most of us celebrate it, in other words.

Quite a change from my first introduction to Minchin, which was the F-bomb-laced, glorious and awesome “Pope Song”…

Anyone offended by the Pope Song hasn’t actually listened to the lyrics.