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Stung Eye

The eye of the bee holder.

pieces of relationship - mixed media on wood, 10 x 12”

via

The maps of the Geotaggers’ World Atlas have been enhanced to show tourists in red, locals in blue. (Yellow could be either.)

via

Object-Oriented Modeling, when discussed separate from computer-programming, becomes very philosophical.

Objects as Platonic forms.

Canadian Copyright - Bill C32

On Thursday the Canadian government introduced the Copyright Modernization Act (or Bill C-32).

The CBC does a good job of outlining the proposed changes to Canadian copyright law.

The bill is an attempt to strike a fair balance between:

  1. Our ability to monetize creativity. -vs- Our ability to re-purpose culture.
  2. A creator’s right to control their works. -vs- A consumer’s rights to experience purchased media flexibly and in perpetuity.

There are things to like in this bill. The format-shifting, time-shifting and backup provisions are long-overdue, as is the expansion of fair-dealings1. The non-commercial “mash-up/youtube” provisions are indeed progressive.

However, any and all use-rights provided by the bill are revoked if the work in questions is protected by a digital lock. This immediately makes backing up DVDs illegal. It also makes viewing DVDs using the Linux operating-system illegal2. Copying a quote from a DRM-locked e-book for a book report or a news story would be illegal too.

The supremacy of digital-locks promoted by this bill must not be allowed to pass into law. If you value free-speech, your ability to re-purpose culture, and your right to use your purchased media as you see fit, I ask that you write your Member of Parliament to express your displeasure over the DRM provisions in Bill C32. (If anything, a bill that includes DRM provisions should mandate explicit labeling of all digitally-locked media.)

You can find your MP by searching for your postal code on openparliament.ca.

I recommend following these tips on discussing bill C32 with your MP. For the most impact, voice your displeasure using hand-written snail-mail.

Footnotes

  1. Fair dealing for the purpose of research, private study, education, parody or satire would not infringe copyright. Parody and satire were not previously considered fair dealings in Canada.

  2. In order to view legally purchased DVDs using the Linux OS one must break the digital locks on the DVDs. The reason for this is that the DVD industry has not provided any other way to view DVDs when using open-source software. Since I use Linux for all my DVD viewing, C32 would make watching movies a criminal activity for me.

The Secret Powers of Time by Philip Zimbardo.

It’s worth your time to watch this video. :)

Related: The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory a TED talk by Daniel Kahneman

P.S. Zimbardo was the led researcher behind the famous Standford Prison Experiment.

Lessons from fashion’s free culture a TED talk by Johanna Blakely of Ready to Share.

These are interesting ideas to ponder considering that our Canadian government is about to propose a major (and perhaps heavy-handed) restructuring of our copyright laws.

Related: Terms & Conditions - A short video on Digital Rights Management.

A dark solar filament seen across the surface of the sun.

Related: Video of Large Eruptive Solar Prominence.

Web 3.0 - A short documentary on the semantic web.

Glutton LastFM

Two days ago I released my first Ruby gem. In coding parlance gems are software libraries created to enhance the Ruby programming language.

My gem is call glutton_lastfm. It’s a wrapper library for version 2.0 of the last.fm API. The source code and documentation is available on my github account.

This gem allows you to query last.fm for:

  • artist information by name
  • top albums by artist
  • top tracks by artist
  • top user-submitted tags by artist
  • upcoming events by artist
  • album information by name

For example, here’s a program that searches for tags and images related to Buck 65: artist_tags_and_images.rb

I wrote this library to:

  • Learn the gem creation process. (Facilitated by the jeweler gem.)
  • Better understand the mechanics of web-based APIs. (Facilitated by the httparty gem.)
  • Brush up on my unit-testing skills. (Facilitated by the fakeweb gem.)
  • Distance myself from years of return-code function creation in favour of exceptions.

I also wrote it as part of a larger data-mining project I’m working on. (Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to write a post on datasets and the soon to explode dataset market.)

The glutton_lastfm source-code is released unlicensed into the public domain.

Hitler can’t get a Folk Fest campground pass.

Update: (2010-05-01) The above video was part of a video remixing meme based on the movie Der Untergang. Was it taken down by the film’s production company? Was it a fair use parody?