Wolf Head of Self-Repair

Here’s another blog post that I didn’t post in due time. And somehow, the situation had changed while it sat on my hard drive.

It’s nice to see that these days, YouTube’s ContentID system is actually telling me what pieces of music it actually found in the video. Here’s an example:

Matched artist and song title. No complaints there.

I don’t have a permission to use the music, so I can acknowledge that the song was actually used in the video. If the video still remains available, I don’t really mind if the credit is given. If they choose to be annoying about this, I’ll see what the hell I can do about it.

But this wasn’t always so. And I don’t think the situation has improved a great deal either — we took a step to the right direction, sure, but I’m not even sure where this is leading.

Some time ago, I posted a fun little video about The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. …okay, it was neither fun nor little.

I wanted to do something unusual in the video and actually narrate the video. So, in this interesting video, you not only hear the awesome sound effects, great voice acting, and the beautiful music of this great game, but also my less than underwhelming and very very awkward narration. (Can’t believe I did this video three times and this was the best I could do. Shit. I’m terrible at narrations.)

And something odd happened to it.

It’s rare for me to agree with something Facebook does, but this one is a complete no-brainer: they don’t think sharing your passwords is a good thing.

This has been going on for a while in various forms, and not just in Facebook. There’s been lawsuits that demand Twitter account information - not just what was posted by who, but the account passwords too. Most notable of these happened during the Wikileaks investigation.

If password disclosure happens during official investigation, that’s pretty much overboard and condemnable. But at least it’s something that just warrants a stern warning - we can at least trust the officials to employ some care in handling that private information. It’s evidence in an investigation, and it shouldn’t fall into wrong hands. There’s lots of laws in place to ensure that these officials do the right thing, right? If they screw up somehow, heads will roll.

So, of course, what’s more worrying is that similar stuff is actually happening in private sector.

(Forgot to post this earlier this year. Here it is.)

Years and years ago, I heard about a book William Gibson had written. A strange book that would destroy itself as it was read.

I could barely remember what the book was called: Agrippa.

I heard of this book when I was a kid. There was just something inexcusable about information that will destroy itself. I think that somehow, retaining digital information — and all information in general — is just hard-wired in me. Deleting stuff is kind of sad. I think that as a writer, the best thing that has ever happened to me are the version control systems: I can delete stuff without permanently getting rid of anything. And, of course, as a part of learning to create, you need to realise that sometimes creation is also about destruction of things that don’t work. But I don’t want to utterly destroy the failures - they’re there, lurking in version history.

I have memories of things. And that’s what Agrippa was about: memories. Memories that get buried in mind. Memories that get buried in encryption.

I’ve been making these fascinating stained glass window drawings in Inkscape and GIMP for a while, and I had another go at it. It’s been a while, though, and I didn’t entirely remember the process this time around — but it was fun to rediscover the process, and document it.

Hence, a tutorial.

Note that this isn’t a complete step-by-step tutorial because every drawing done using this process needs a little bit of manual futzing. I’d love to turn this into a GIMP script if the process was anything close to straightforward, but it isn’t. So toward the end, I recommend you go crazy and experiment a little bit. Run filters. Tweak sliders. Put layers on top of one another.

…or, My First Ever Bullshit Manifesto.

I am a writer. An author one day, I hope. A creator of arts. I seem to be a verb, and all that.

I have always had the need to write and create something. Over the last decade or so, it has just become painfully apparent to me that I just can’t live without writing. It is something that defines me as a person and that defines my modes of social interaction.

I’m good at writing, and I’m not so good at other forms of communication — yeah, I can attempt those, but I’m just not as good at them as I’m with writing. I prefer to write. It’s just how I get things done with less hassle.

It’s just that it doesn’t end there. I’ve started to realise that I have to start explaining other people that all of my problems probably stem from the fact that I’m a writer. Conversely, I probably have to tell people that that’s also the reason I’m succeeding.

So apologies if I have to write again — it just happens to be the best way to clear my head.

Last year, I was discussing with a slightly combative administrator of another website, who had cooked up a rather draconian Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for his own site. I’m still kind of reeling from seeing that stuff and haven’t actually commented on that on this blog.

Still, that reminded me that there was no Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for beastwithin.org. I decided to write such policy. You’ll naturally notice that this policy is about guaranteeing your access to the site (heck, it says nothing about who can access the site) and not collecting any more information from you than is necessary. (I won’t go slamming the other TOS/PP in detail here yet, but here’s a short summary: “If I don’t like you, go to hell. Your right to privacy is overridden by my right to your identifying information.” …compare and contrast, folks.)

And this week, I was talking with another friend who was having some issues with some other troublesome people. It kind of reminded me that I don’t have another bit of policy down.

Time to talk about moderation on this site, then.

It’s fighting time again, it seems, and everyone’s affected.

I didn’t know if I was going to write a blog post about SOPA and PIPA. I’m not a citizen of the United States, so obviously I cannot make much difference on their laws personally. I can just stay here, be grumpy and whine about whatever craziness they cook up next, and give voiceless support to the sane people who are fighting the good fight.

And it’s obviously a good thing that there are sane people who are fighting the good fight. That’s what democracy is about.

But these recent actions have made me question just what democracy is, and how it should manifest itself.

Might as well post a mini-rant.

You’ve seen this application, right?

Charmap from Windows 7 Starter. Undoubtedly it looks the same on other versions of Windows 7.

I’m a Linux and OS X guy. I haven’t used Windows for a long time. The last Windows version I used full-day was Windows 98SE, and I later got a used Windows XP laptop that sort of refused to start up again. Now I have a netbook with Windows 7 Starter. Yay!

It was kind of disappointing to see that charmap.exe still looks the same as it did in Windows 98SE.

Dammit, as far as my foggy brain can tell, it still looks the same as it did in Windows 3.1 when it was first introduced. Or something.

I’ve grown used to the gucharmap utility in Linux, and OS X’s character picker. Both of those allow me to search characters by Unicode name.

I know what the English speakers are thinking. “DUH. Windows Character Map has progressed beyond Windows 3.1 era, dammit! You can search for stuff. You just click on the ‘Advanced view’ checkbox in the bottom.”

And whadda ya know…

…it’s a search box.

Do you want to know what kept me from clicking the checkbox?

The checkbox didn’t say “advanced view”. Had it said that, I might have figured this out on my own.

It says “Näytä lisätiedot”, which translates back as “Show additional details”.

Usability geeks might have said that a checkbox that says “advanced view” is an affordance. Over the years, I’ve been conditioned to think that “advanced” modes might have some stuff that the basic modes don’t.

But the Windows translators, in their infinite wisdom, chose another affordance. When I see a checkbox that says “Show additional details”, I interpret that as “clicking that thing will show additional Unicode details, like related characters or stuff - that’s not what I’m looking for, usually, because I’m not that much of a Unicode geek”.

So why is search functionality hidden in “additional details” page?

gucharmap, the equivalent character map utility in GNOME, chose another path. It has menus. With a search function right where you expect it to be.

(Dunno why I’m ranting this much about this detail. It’s just kind of infuriating that a sloppy translation work can totally hinder use…)

In November, I got a new digital camera.

The sad thing is, I don’t know how to use it yet.

I need to throw away most of my knowledge and think differently. I’m only 32 years old - not old enough to get completely jaded (because everyone needs a little bit of jadedness every now and then, but no more), and certainly not old enough to be too hidebound how to learn how to work these newfangled thingies (because, hey, I’ve seen old people learn new stuff).

So I decided to learn. Photography is not that hard.

I think it’s a good idea to just ramble a bit on how I got here, because this is also a good opportunity to dig through a pile of photos.

So: Cameras! Photo management! Other epic stuff!

(Should blog more often. Ahem.)

I believe a screenshot is in order. I was just trying to take a look at Gentium, which is an awesome font.

SIL makes awesome contributions to open source and open fonts. I’m not denying that.

I am, however, somewhat wary of a group of linguists who put frigging Google Translate on their home page. This goes right in the category of “should know better than that, dammit”.

Especially when the way Google Translate is deployed pretty much instantly discredits itself.