Month: September 2005

Let’s take the commons metaphor for a moment (I’m not entirely happy with it). The Diggers seem to have been about reclaiming common land, and allotments were a shim for the lack of it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levellers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diggers_%28True_Levellers%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartists

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_%28gardening%29

Let’s ignore the commons metaphor for a moment and look at organisational metaphors for Free Software and culture. These historical models are ironised in Free Software, becoming inclusive rather than exclusive:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative

And ignoring both let’s look at social or political metaphors. The focus of Free Software is programmers, not programs. The name Free Software is like the name Free Society, don’t confuse the structure with the content. Meanwhile, Mackenzie Wark treats the GPL as cultural security, like social security:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_society

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_security

But I think metaphors and precedents can be misleading.

Free Culture

Free Culture Roundup

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2005-09-09

The BBC has released content under the Creative Archive License, and are holding a remix competition:

Superstar VJ Competition

You can now book a place at the Open Congress event at the Tate:

Open Congress

ORG, the UK equivalent of the EFF, is ramping up:

Open Rights Group

Lawrence Lessig will be talking in the UK at the end of the month:

Lessig Talk (pdf)

Projects

Minara Pan & Zoom

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2005-09-09

Pan and zoom are working a little. The concept works, which is a relief. Once I’ve majorly tidied up the code and written an API for getting the cursor position on the page rather than in the window they’ll be done.

Then I can rewrite the toy pen tool to work with that API and you’ll be able to see what you’re drawing when you’ve zoomed in. 🙂

I also need to put another buffer under the translate buffer to handle the window resizing. OpenGL and Minara measure positions from the bottom left-hand corner, which chanegs when you resize the window. So when you resize the window the whole image moves, which isn’t right.

Howto

Having A Job And A Creative Life

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2005-09-07

Via 43 Folders:

11 Tips to surviving a day job with your creativity intact

I’d ignore number 11, and not everyone agrees that music helps, but the rest are cool. In particular getting up early. I did most of the design for Minara’s pan and zoom tools, and sketches for a new unnamed series of images after getting up early to leave the Novotel in Bristol after FAVE.

Projects

Minara Undo

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2005-09-04

Undo works. But not redo. Pressing z makes drawn objects disappear. Pressing Z does nothing.

I think the undo/redo architecture needs reworking. At the moment “marks” go before series of undo events. I think they need to go between, so one at the bottom and top of the stack, with marks on boundaries. Redoing has too much special logic at the moment. It should only have as much special logic as undoing, which will be the case with a mark at the end of the undo list as well as at the beginning.

Update: undo/redo now works as described. OpenGL transformation matrices and the pan/zoom tools are next.