My Creative Commons-licensed photo appears in a Science article

Bill Clinton reaches for something to sign Here’s a nice demonstration of the power of releasing your photos under a Creative Commons license… a photograph of Bill Clinton that I once took is now featured in this month’s Science magazine!

The fellow who wrote the paper was nice enough to let me know about my picture appearing in Science, writing me to say “Hello – I am writing because you kindly granted permission for your photography to be used in a paper submitted to the journal Science.” Yesss! He understood that permission had already been granted 🙂 Too frequently people e-mail me asking permission to use my photographs and such, when the whole point of the CC license was so they could use it without wasting my time, so long as they follow my license terms. Of course in this case he probably didn’t need to use Creative Commons-licensed photos, I’d say he has a pretty good case for fair use here, publishing part of a picture in an academic journal. But hey, whatever.

Check out this nice summary of the article and see how we can teach a computer to recognize Bill Clinton’s face!

P.S. Thanks to Elsa for mentioning the article to me too… it’s always good to know that even if the author had neglected to inform me, my friends would have kept me up to date 🙂

Saturday in Philadelphia – SPARC forum on students and open access

If any of you will be in the Philadelphia area this weekend, I’m speaking at a librarian conference in Philadelphia on Saturday Jan 12: Working with the Facebook Generation: Engaging Student Views on Access to Scholarship. It will take place at the Philadelphia Convention Center (map) 4-6pm, which is really close to the Market East station if you take Septa into Philly. It would be lovely to see some Swatties there!

At any rate, I’ll be in Philadelphia Friday night the 11th through Sunday evening the 13th, so ping me if you want to hang out ^_^

How hacking Linux is like building sandcastles

OK, I don’t mind hacking stuff to make it work, but once I hack it, it should *stay hacked*!

I have installed Ubuntu 7.04 “Fiesty Fawn” on my Macbook Pro… I am currently dual booting OS X and Ubuntu, and I intend to triple boot Win XP as well eventually.

This weekend, I spent about 2 hours making my NVIDIA video card and my sound card work, and it worked and I was happy and pleased with myself. Today I boot back into Ubuntu and, surprise, neither video nor sound is working! What changed? I used these instructions from this thread to make my NVIDIA card work again… I got pretty clear error messages from X11 when starting up, so it was easy to search teh interwebs for a solution. However, I have no idea what is wrong with my ALSA drivers and I don’t have time to go find someone in IRC to help me right now. It’s hard to fix a problem when you don’t know what the problem is!

Dropping to the command line to fix things is OK, having to fix the same things repeatedly is not. Hopefully the next version of Ubuntu which is due out next month will make everything better…. it is a little unfair to expect Ubuntu to support the hardware on my 3rd generation Macbook Pro out of the box since the version of Ubuntu I’m using was released before my laptop was released.

New cellphone

Since I couldn’t make up my mind about cellphone plans, my parents just renewed with AT&T (yes, kinda evil, oops).  The upside is that they sent me a new phone to replace my old broken phone, so I am now once again able to receive phone calls after a couple weeks of phonelessness. (Sorry if I missed your call!)

My new cellphone is a Nokia 6126, which is a pretty decent phone… it’s a clamshell design with bluetooth and speakerphone, and it was cheap, and that’s all I really wanted. Annoyingly, the Nokia 6126 is not officially supported by iSync on Mac OS X! There isn’t even an iSync plugin that you can download from Nokia, although there are plugins for plenty of other Nokia phones on the Nokia website. Ultimately I had to go and hack iSync’s config files by hand, pasting in some gibberish from these directions for making the Nokia 6126 work with iSync.  I’m sorry, Apple, but that’s really lame.  I’m using a Mac because I want it to just work… if I have to go copying and pasting gibberish from blogs / bulletin boards into my config files in order to get things done on my computer, then I might as well be using Linux.  (Incidentally, I’ve had some success with dual-booting Ubuntu on my new Macbook Pro, but I screwed it up by attempting to update to the latest alpha release.  Oops, time to wipe and re-install.)

My next phone will probably be the OpenMoko Neo 1973, which is kind of like the iPhone except it runs on Linux / open source software, and is designed to be friendly to hardware/software hackers who want to play around with its insides. The consumer model is due out in October, so I’ll be saving up for that… it’ll have wifi and GPS built-in, which makes up for the initial version not having 3G (same problem the iPhone currently has).

An Open Letter to Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer, why do you make all of my webpages look like ass? I designed all of my sites in Firefox, and validated my XHTML and CSS, and my sites look mostly fine in Opera and Safari/KHTML without any work at all. But Internet Explorer, you just don’t see things the same way other browsers do… you have a very warped view of the World Wide Web.

Internet Explorer, I now must find friends who understand your confusing ways, who can help me build things that look beautiful in your eyes, even though you are a disgusting hack job who makes every intelligent web designer want to puke. I don’t understand why you see things the way you do, and I’m not sure I want to, but couldn’t you try seeing things my way for once?

yet another busted IE page

Internet Explorer, there is no reason why you should be pushing all my content down the page to reside below my sidebar. Is it beneath you to render my blog posts in a reasonable fashion? Why can’t you be like the other browsers and put my text where it’s supposed to go? Isn’t it obvious that I don’t want there to be a page full of whitespace before people can get to reading my material? Seriously, think about it… use common sense, Internet Explorer.

P.S. I hate you.

Moving to DC

Tomorrow afternoon I am moving into my apartment in Arlington, VA, right next to George Mason Law where I am going to law school. I’ve lost track of where everyone is this time of year, but if you will be near DC, I could really use some help moving in! I have to get everything into my apartment between noon and 4pm on Friday, because that’s when I have to stop using the elevator for moving furniture etc.

(Incidentally, if you know someone who would like a nice apartment 0.3 miles from GMU Law and right next to a metro station, hook us up! I need a roommate.)

Playing trailer tetris
The Uhaul trailer after we’ve finished with it

My dad collapses
My dad requests that in the future I build robots or engineer superchimps to do the moving for us

I’m speaking at Reed College in Portland

Early this morning I am flying to Portland, Oregon, where I will be staying at Reed College for a few days, as a guest of Reed Free Culture. If you are in or around Portland for some reason, we should hang out!

I will be speaking at Reed Monday, April 9, 7:30 p.m., in Psychology 105. (You can also see me mentioned on their Public Policy Series webpage if you scroll down a bit.) I’ll also probably be at a Reed chapter meeting on Sunday, doing a little workshop to help them get their chapter rolling. My friend Kevin from high school (who now works for Microsoft, to my derision) is visiting me on Saturday, and we’ll go sightseeing around Portland… I’m planning on dropping by Free Geek at some point 🙂

On Tuesday I’ll be flying back to LAX to speak at USC for USC Free Culture, on a panel of several people. Hm… I can’t find the details on that, I’ll have to post about it later. Sleepytime!

UPDATE: You can get the audio from the panel that I was on at USC here: Free[ing] Culture in Los Angeles: Beyond the Ivory Tower [download mp3]

New foods that I didn’t like

If you know me well, you know that I’m a pretty picky eater… my allergies (mild soy allergy, violent peanut allergy), my vegetarianism, and my dislike of spicy foods all limit my diet. I also generally dislike unhealthy foods… most of my peers seem to enjoy junk food, highly processed foods, and foods which provide no nutrition except for empty calories, but I find almost all junk foods to be unappetizing. Perhaps this is psychological, but I know plenty of people who enjoy junk food despite knowing full well that it is bad for them, so if it is a psychological distaste it is at least consistent 🙂

Upon arriving in California, I vowed to be more adventurous… I wanted to try new and nutritious foods to expand my diet and improve my health. I think I’ve been mildly successful so far, although there is plenty of room for future growth. However, there have been some failed experiments, and I’d like to share those with you before I get to the good stuff (hopefully in the next few days).

My negative food reviews