Category: design-and-ideas

Due to the magic of creative commons…

Meat Katie - CD cover by James Cridland.

I can't sing the praises of Creative commons and licensing generally loud enough. I remember reading in Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig ages ago his solution to the problem of works which may still want to be copyrighted going into the public domain. Make the author pay 1 dollar to keep the copyright of that works a live for another 14 years. It seemed very reasonable, because generally if that piece of work is earning you money its maybe earning you much more that 1 dollar. Of the major entertainment business's rejected this as it was too costly and burnesome on them. I say whatever! and of course its not to burnensome to track down users using sometimes highly questionable or even illegal methods and sue them out of their hard earned money.

But what I found interesting was Lawrence ultimately had a plan to deal with the problem of not knowing who the author was, through this proposal.

Once you know who the author/editor/copyright owner is and you can contact them without going through crazy methods things like this happen. From James Cridland.

Until a few months ago, when the Ministry of Sound contacted me about the photo. Could they use it for the cover of a new album? Sure. We agreed terms, I waited a few months… and there it is, in the niftily-produced photo montage above.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been published. Photographs I’ve taken have been used (at least, cleared for use) in the Russian edition of Time magazine; in a few books, some of which haven’t come out yet; in some postcards in Switzerland (oddly); in a video montage used by a comany to flog stuff; and apparently this one has also been used for a San Miguel promotion (the agency promised to send me lots of beer as payment, but I guess they never used it in the end).

What’s interesting is how excited I am about my photograph being produced in a way that the public will see it. And then I reflected that my photographs are everywhere, thanks to the magic of Creative Commons.

Its not just James either, my friend Sheila got her creative commons licenced photos of nigera falls turned into a paperweight which is sold on site. Even I've had my photos used in many places for a price or gift. Recently I was asked if a couple of my videos on blip.tv could be used for a DVD documentary on the ARG the lost ring. So I pointed out that the liceince I had applied already let them to commercially reporoduce the content but they must attribute me for the works.

Its great stuff and actually works as it should do. Imagine a world where stuff was actually licenced (even all rights reserved) and you could contact the copyright owner to ask questions about reuse and copying. Its not impossible, we can make it happen.

Don't use services which don't allow you to apply a licence and always embed a licence into media. Its that simple really.

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Excellent StackOverFlow podcast

I'm slowly catching up with some of the podcasts I was able to download at the frustrating speed I've recently had. I wanted to give a special mention to a excellent Stack Over Flow show which is a podcast by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.

Late in the podcast both of them just run through books which should be read or even owned. And there are some classics in the list.

Don't have time to listen to all that jibba-jabba? Here is Joel's short list:

If you don't like the rambling podcast style, there's also a public transcript with more books that you can shake a tree at.

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A blast from the past: Persistence of Vision Raytracer

Povray rendering glasses

I was listening to FLOSS weekly with the guy who actually created POV Ray (persistence of vision raytracer). It was amazing to listen to because, I along time ago use to run it on my old Atari ST. At the time I never had access to anything else, and frankly everything else was simply crap in when compared to PovRay's efforts. I believe there were all of about 4 3D rendering programs on the Atari 16bit platform and to be honest the ability to write images and animations using a simple notepad application was insane but ever so useful at the time. After a long while I built my first PC which was a 233mhz beasty and PovRay was one of those benchmark software which I used to prove to myself the investment. I could only dream how fast it would be to render scenes on my current workstation and laptop.

The author of POV Ray in the podcast talks about how he made the software freeware and wrote a basic license saying your welcome to modify it but if you do make a change please send it back to the author. This was before the word open source was around and even before the web had taken hold, so POV Ray was distributed on floppy discs, CDs and BBS. It was written before licenses like BSD, GPL and Apache were common, although PovRay 4 is going to be rewritten under the GPL 3 license.

PovRay isn't dead actually there starting to add some well needed features like native mutliprocessor support. In the past you would specify a part of the final image to do on one machine/cpu and the other bit on the other machine/cpu. This may sound very bizarre for a heavy duty raytracing engine but when you had a room full of computers like we sometimes had at college, it meant we could run renders of sizes like 1600×1200 and split the picture up into 4 pieces of 800×600, which were then run over 4x Pentium P133 machines.

The other thing I loved about PovRay was its realism, for year and years I argued that 3Dstudiomax, Lightwave, etc's results were poor compared to PovRay. The main reason was that this applications use to render results not raytrace them. This was why PovRay took so long to render scenes, like the one above. But for the hardcore, PovRay also had true Radiosity support

Actual writing PovRay scenes involves picturing in your mind 3D space and then mapping things based on that space. We use to graph things out on a graph paper and then translate it into C like syntax. It sounds more difficult that it actually is and before long your up and going. I just wish I could find some of my old scenes. Oh the language is a turing-complete language that supports macros and loops. So you can most of the time program effects using maths and logic that by hand.

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Trustedplaces secures its future

Sokratis Papafloratos and Walid Al Saqqaf

Now their after a million users…

It's a busy space, that social/local field. Sokratis Papafloratos and co-founder Walid Al Saqqaf said that ploughing their time and energy into TrustedPlaces.com cost the co-founders their girlfriends. But all the struggles and the late nights were vindicated when the start-up scored half a million in funding from the new investors Howzat – a fund launched by the team behind Cheapflights.com.

My hints for a million users. A decent API not just feeds, APML import and export and of course written agreement for data portability for all those million users they will soon have. Go on guys you know you want to…

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