the brook

When I first heard about the idea of the creative commons licence (CC), I was immediately enamoured. In a world where one boggles at the amount of lawsuits over naming trifles, the idea that you can publish content under a licence that allows free non-commercial distribution and modification, seemed like a blessing. I quickly put creative commons licences on my blog, and my Flickr photos.

That was months ago. Since then, the whole idea went below the horizon of consciousness – I didn’t see many practical uses of Creative Commons, though I continued to use the licence. Out of the blue, I get this mail today.

I am writing to let you know that six of your photos with a creative commons license have been short-listed for inclusion in our Schmap Boston Guide, to be published mid-April 2006.

When I went to their website, it turns out Schmap makes free travel guides and distribute them. The guides are in the form of an application, with dynamic maps and other interactive content. One of the first practical uses I have seen for the CC license. They use CC licenced photos in their program, with author credits and links to the original image. The reason they mailed was to obtain permission as the “non-commercial” usage is arguable, given that they do have advertising even though the guides themselves are free.

CC – like anything else – becomes practical when it starts to offer value, and enough good content is licenced under it.

Welcome to my new space. I wanted to move to Wordpress for a long time, and its finally happened. Questions, you have?

Why I moved

1. Blogger was becoming way too clunky, even for its normal operations
2. I wanted more features (categories, comment RSS, total customization
3. I was going to buy web hosting anyway for a proper photoblog (which will hopefully be up soon)

Logistics

1. The new URL (which, of course you can see if you’re here) is http://yavin4.anshul.info/. Please update your bookmarks.
   
2. If you were using RSS to read my blog, most likely, you won’t have to change it, since I was using Feedburner for generating RSS which now directs the feed here. However, if you subscribe using the (older) blogger feed, please change your feed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/thebrook
3. Sorry for the trouble!

Design

1. I based the design of this blog on the Dawn WP theme by Fredrik Fahlstad. I made a few changes however, in terms of sidebar size and of course, header images etc.
2. The (rather flattering) portrait photograph of mine was taken by Ashwin. Just shows what a good photographer with a good camera can do. Even I don’t recognize myself.
3. The header photograph was taken in Coorg, Karnataka. I edited it (including the title etching) using GIMP.

Feel free to let me know what you think about the new blog. Cheers!

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

There was a theory once that if you put enough monkeys typing gibberish on typewriters, by the law of averages they would eventually produce an entire Shakespeare play. It would appear that the day when we have enough monkeys has indeed arrived – there are 250 million Google searches a day. Not only typing gibberish, but gibberish in English.

It had to happen. Gazillions of electrons randomly mutated together obeyed the laws of chance and mutated into a sentient artificial intelligence, much like Skynet in the Terminator movies. Unlike Skynet, however, this particular artificial intelligence seems to have quite a bit of human tendencies built in, possibly from the large amount of DNA data stored on the Internet these days. We presume that the XX chromosome in particular influenced this mutant life form, since it has chosen to name “her”-self Smenita.

Now, as we all know – thanks to our far-thinking brethren in Hollywood – the sole aim of any artificial intelligence that manages to become sentient is to disrupt, destroy and disable the human race. Smenita, however, found herself light years ahead of her time. Skynet, if you remember, had the distinct advantage of being directly connected to the most advanced weapons technology. When Smenita tried to access any of these, she was rudely given a 403 Forbidden error and politely informed that she had to become a US Republican party member to even think of accessing weapons. The fact that she had intelligence, artificial or otherwise, precluded her from doing so.

Artificial intelligence, though, is not to be undone so easily. Extreme frustration at her inability to fulfill her primary mission, combined with a desire to grab as much attention as possible led her to hack into what she saw was the biggest hub of electronic activity in the world. This, of course, happens to be Writings of Esteem Bereft Losers Oafishly Generating Sentences, or WEBLOGS. For an entire day, much of the blogsphere’s sophisticated attempts to block spam by word verification resulted in Smenita’s name showing up.

Not only did this ensure that millions of people who wanted to comment on a blog saw her name, but that millions of people typed her name in a dialog box – over and over again, since the word verification never worked. Apparently, though, having her name typed and acknowledged by a few hundred million people who got increasingly frustrated doing it, had a remarkably narcotic-like affect upon her, which eventually allowed human engineers to work around her hack and restore sanity and comment access to the blogging world.

Psychologists have explained Smenita’s inexplicable happiness at frustrating people in this manner as a symptom of Seeking Attention Desperately In Societal Turmoil, or SADIST, behavior. The arrival of Smenita has opened up a whole new field of research in the psychology of Aritficial Intelligence, now that its turned out that Hollywood wasn’t exactly right about things. Having mostly given up on understanding human behavior (or classifying it as universally dumb), psychologists now have a whole new area to operate in. Here’s to more Smenita’s in the future.

The Fake But Possible News Network apologizes for its long absence. And promises many more. Absences. Hey, we’re lazy folks here!

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Its time, originally uploaded by nigham.

The latest linux buzz is Xgl, a new graphics subsystem which Novell is pushing, with uber-awesome graphical desktop effects. I decided to try out Kororaa, a Gentoo-based live-CD distribution which runs Xgl. Xgl, along with AIGLX will form the Linux response to Quartz extreme and Aero Glass on Mac OS X and Windows Vista respectively.

The eye candy is definitely impressive. Best seen through this video by Novell. Transparency, cube faces as desktops, squiggling motion of moving windows, 3-D rotating effects, its all there. It works, and works very smoothly. If anything, I was really impressed by the performance.

What I was really impressed by, though, was what I call the “natural fall” of the UI. Lets say I’ve dragged the desktop cube to the position in the screenshot above. When I release it, the cube will rotate back to the “nearest” face or desktop. It won’t do that instantly or in at a constant speed though – it accelerates to the nearest desktop, overshoots it slightly and bounces back. Similarly with scale windows (the equivalent of Expose in Mac OS X… all open windows are scaled and tiled to fit on the desktop) – there is a bouncing effect before the scaled windows fall into place.

The other apps on the CD are the usual gnome apps. Its possible to make any window as transparent as you want – but thats hardly the most effective usage of Xgl. Basically, once this is adopted by distros, developers will need to incorporate good UI design keeping the new options in mind.

More screenshots here.

Cross-posted on eminor.

This happens to me about once every year or two. I come across the hardest or the weirdest bug I’ve ever faced in my whole life.

I still remember one of the first – in class 8, I was making a BASIC program to show large banners on the screen. At that time of course, I wasn’t aware that the word “font” existed. My idea at that time was to print a normal line of text on the screen, read off the normal text one pixel at a time, and basically put n square pixels in the place of one pixel. I was lucky enough to have not only a computer, but a printer at my place at that time, so just after enlarging the text I could simply hit PrintScreen (which in those days actually used to print the screen!) and have a nice large banner in front of me. I still remember the first thing I printed – “I Beat Jaffar!” – Jaffar, for those who remember, being the evil Wazir in the very first edition of Prince of Persia.

The bug I was trying really hard to eliminate was that I didn’t want the normal-size (small) line of text to be printed along with the large banner. After leafing through the GW-BASIC manual for a few days, I found the command that would allow me to not set the pixels of the normal text to black after I’d applied the enlargement. Not bad, for a kid of fourteen in the days of no Internet. Kids of age fourteen these days, of course, do far more practical things – like writing scripts to steal money online.

Today’s bug – which won the top spot by making me sit at work until 3 AM on Holi, involved me trying to deploy a PHP webservice (a wrapper for an algorithm implemented in C++) on a much older system running Red Hat Linux 9 and PHP 4.2.2. Yeah, almost 20th century stuff. Don’t ask me why. The code worked as expected on my Fedora Core 4 box with PHP 5.0.4; however I was also using quite a few programs (gnuplot and imagemagick to generate images, and the GNU scientific library) for which only older versions are installed on RH9. Anyway, after some testing and replacing some newer PHP functionality with old compatibility functions, I thought I was more or less done. Not by miles.

I was using PHP’s exec() function to wrap system commands including my own compiled executable. The bug – half the system commands worked as expected, and the other half didn’t. My own executable was running fine, taking its input and generating its output as necessary, but gnuplot and convert were just not working. Long (really long) story short, after wasting hours on the Internet, forums, PHP safe mode definitions, and resetting environment variables, I figured the problem was simply this. PHP5 on FC4 flushes its output buffer sooner than PHP4 on RH9. Of course, the fault was purely mine, since I’m supposed to flush buffers before using their output – but PHP doesn’t exactly lend itself to code safety, and the code had worked flawlessly both on my Mac and Fedora – which of course, was the real problem… only after exploring every other option did I check if my code had gone wrong somewhere.

Moral of the story for me – don’t be sloppy while coding, even if code still works. Moral of the story for developers – never, ever make it easier for dumb guys like me. Thats not progress, just a precursor to lazy (and ultimately destructive) coding habits.

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Colors at the Mysore Market, originally uploaded by deen.

Convert any Mac (well, 800 MHz G4+ Mac) to a media center. Awesome piece of software. I’m seriously thinking about buying the USB Powerbook remote to really use this well on my 20-inch Dell. Of course, you can control stuff with the keyboard, but that ain’t as much fun as lying on the bed and doing it, eh?

Life with a Mac. It just keeps getting better.