Category: Howto

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Free Culture Howto

Art Loves Wikipedia

Furtherfield have published an essay by me on how digital artists can work to help improve Wikipedia’s representation of digital art by becoming editors and participating in Wikipedia. There’s been some good discussion of the article on mailing lists, and hopefully the article has demystified Wikipedia’s editing process a bit for artists and encouraged people to get involved. Click here to read it –

An Artists’ Guide For Editing Wikipedia

Wikipedians will notice a curious omission from the article – I don’t mention NPOV. I did this deliberately as I didn’t want to distract from discussion of the ideas that I have seen people on mailing lists having practical problems with. Which is why the article focusses on notability, sources and deletion. Hopefully it explains some of the rationale behind them and how to work with them to make better articles for Wikipedia, for society and for digital art.

Categories
Free Culture Howto links

Wikimedia Hates Art

http://identi.ca/tag/wikimediahatesart

I have a lot of respect for the Wikimedia Foundation, everyone I’ve met from it have been great people and I use their software and projects daily. I was proud to take part in the Wikipedia Loves Art event earlier this year. But as an artist I am disappointed and offended by Wikimedia’s treatment of a contemporary art project.

Whatever lawyers who charge for each letter they send out on your behalf may tell you, and whatever your opinion of contemporary art, there are strong precedents in the US supporting free speech under the first amendment for artists who use trademarks. To demand that artists transfer resources to a trademark holder or face legal action is therefore not just a chilling effect on free speech but legally shaky.

The EFF, to their credit, point this out here –

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/wikipedia-threatens-

And details on an artwork and lawsuit that provide an important precedent can be found here –

http://www.barbieinablender.org/

Wikimedia’s response has been to disparage the concerns of the artists and the EFF –

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-April/051505.html

Other web sites have picked up on this, and are supporting the artists –

http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2009/04/wikipedia-threatens-artists-for-fair-use.html

http://freeculturenews.com/2009/04/23/wikipedia-accuses-web-site-of-trademark-violation/

The problem with Wikimedia’s over-reaching application of their trademark to the material detrement of artists is a chilling effect on freedom of speech. Wikimedia owe the artists and the EFF an apology. This behaviour really is beneath such an excellent organization.

Categories
Free Culture Howto links

Script to Convert rms-essays to Plucker Format

#!/bin/bash

# Copyright 2009 Rob Myers 
# Licenced under the GPL 3 or, at your option, any later version.

# Produce a Plucker version of Free Software, Free Society
# Some texinfo errors not fixed

# Convert eps images to GIFs

convert images/clib.eps images/clib.gif
convert images/code.eps images/code.gif
convert images/flex.eps images/flex.gif
convert images/free_software_song.eps images/free_software_song.gif
convert images/headMain.eps images/headMain.gif
convert images/party.eps images/party.gif
convert images/richard.eps images/richard.gif
convert images/philosophical-gnu.eps images/philosophical-gnu.gif

# Fix texinfo problems

perl -pe 's/@heading\{(.*)\}/@heading $1/' -i fs_for_freedom.texi 

perl -pe 's/^\\input texinfo_times.tex//' \
    -i rms-essays.texi

echo "\
@ifnottex
@alias unnumberedfootnote = footnote
@end ifnottex

@ifnottex
@macro sp1
@sp 1
@end macro
@end ifnottex

@include rms-essays.texi
" > rms-essays-html.texi

# Convert to plucker

makeinfo --html --no-headers --no-split --force -o rms-essays.html \
    rms-essays-html.texi

perl -pe 's/^(
Categories
Free Culture Howto

A UK Blogger’s Guide

UK blogs, boards, Web 2.0 sites: how to not get sued – A Consuming Experience.

Improbulus’s notes on a talk about UK blogging law from  Robert ands of Finers Stephen Innocent, and his slides.

Close to a UK equivalent of the EFF Blogger’s guide, which is more US-specific.

[Update] MJ Ray in the comments points out that the blog and notes are NC and the slides are all rights reserved. Sorry about that. I’ve suggested a freely licenced version to ORG, and Francis Davey seems interested. Email them and let them know it’s a good idea…

Categories
Art Computing Free Culture Howto links

FLOSS Manuals To Plucker


#!/bin/bash
# Copyright 2009 Rob Myers 
# Licenced under the GPL version 3 or, at your option, any later version.

if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
   echo "Please enter name of manual directory on server (e.g. FlossManuals)."
   echo "You can find this by going to the printable version of the manual."
   exit 1;
fi

plucker-build --zlib-compression --stayonhost --bpp=8 -p . \
  -f $1 --staybelow=http://en.flossmanuals.net/floss/pub/$1/ \
  http://en.flossmanuals.net/$1/print
Categories
Art Computing Free Culture Howto

Gutenberg CD To Plucker Perl Script

#!/usr/bin/perl# Copyright (c) 2009 Rob Myers # Licenced under the GPL version 3 or, at your option, any later version.# Install gut (gutenberg to html converter) into your PATH.# Download the project Gutenberg CD image, decompress it,# add this file to the directory contaning the etext directories and run it.use strict;use warnings;use File::Basename;use Cwd;sub html_name{my $filename = shift @_;$filename =~ s/(.*).txt/$1.html/;$filename;}sub absolute_path{my $file = shift @_;”file://” . Cwd::cwd() . “/” . $file;}sub html_to_pdb{my $file = shift @_;my $absolute_file = absolute_path ($file);my $file_root = basename ($file);system (“plucker-build  –zlib-compression –stayonhost –bpp=8 -p./plucker -f $file_root $absolute_file”);}sub txt_to_html{my $filename = shift @_;my $htmlname = html_name ($filename);`cat $filename | gut > $htmlname`;}sub process_files{my @txt_files = `ls ./etext*/*.txt`;foreach my $file (@txt_files){chomp ($file);# Don’t convert files that have an html versionmy $htmlfile = $file;$htmlfile =~ s/(.*).txt/$1h.htm\*/;if (! -f $htmlfile){txt_to_html ($file);}}my @html_files = `ls etext*/*.html etext*/*.htm`;foreach my $file (@html_files){chomp ($file);html_to_pdb ($file);}}mkdir (“./plucker”);process_files ();

Categories
Howto

20 Minutes

Over at Locus, Cory has a good article on how to write a novel a year despite the joys of the internet and looking after a baby.

The point of my (abandoned) “agile art” series was to apply geek productivity techniques to some aspects of art production. And several of my recent projects have been structured to be produced as many small, quickly produced works. You can’t do every project that way, and the projects I couldn’t structure in that way have tended not to get finished.

Cory’s observation that you can write a page in 20 minutes and you can always find 20 minutes a day has some bearing on drawing and blogging. So I’m going to make sure I find 20 minutes a day for them…

Categories
Art Computing Howto

Wacom xorg.conf For Lenny Laptop

# This may be useful to someone else

Section “InputDevice”
    Identifier    “Generic Keyboard”
    Driver        “kbd”
    Option        “XkbRules”    “xorg”
    Option        “XkbModel”    “pc105”
    Option        “XkbLayout”    “gb”
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
    Identifier    “Configured Mouse”
    Driver        “mouse”
EndSection

Section “Device”
    Identifier    “Configured Video Device”
EndSection

Section “Monitor”
    Identifier    “Configured Monitor”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
    Identifier    “Default Screen”
    Monitor        “Configured Monitor”
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “stylus”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “stylus”
Option “USB” “on”
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “eraser”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “eraser”
Option “USB” “on”
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “cursor”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “cursor”
Option “USB” “on”
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Driver “wacom”
Identifier “pad”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/wacom”
Option “Type” “pad”
Option “USB” “on”
EndSection
Section “ServerLayout”
        Identifier     “Default Layout”
        Screen 0 “Default Screen”   0 0
        InputDevice    “Configured Mouse”    “CorePointer”
        InputDevice    “Generic Keyboard” “CoreKeyboard”
        InputDevice    “stylus”    “SendCoreEvents”
        InputDevice    “eraser”    “SendCoreEvents”
        InputDevice    “cursor”    “SendCoreEvents”    # For non-LCD tablets only
#    InputDevice    “touch”     “SendCoreEvents”    # Only a few TabletPCs support this type
        InputDevice    “pad”   # For Intuos3/CintiqV5/Graphire4/Bamboo tablets
EndSection

Categories
Aesthetics Howto

The Agile Artist 3 – Getting Real

“Getting Real” is 37 Signals’ book of advice for developing internet software more quickly, more easily, and more successfully. As with “Getting Things Done”, this may not at first sound particularly relevant for making art. But Getting Real’s approach to projects is a very dynamic and creative one, and even if not all of its details are appropriate for art making (or for every artist), there’s lots of good ideas if you take the time to map them onto art practice.

To pick a few section headings…

I always try to solve my own problems in art, I can never get enthusiastic about art for an external agenda. I usually pick a fight when
making art, many of my series of works are ironizations of worldviews I
disagree with or of artists whose work I dislike. I try to get at least one piece in a series finished as soon as possible to keep up my morale. I give samples away for free
with images of work available on the website and as postcards and other
physical items available from me in person. And I always try to give
series of works memorable names.

Just read “art” for “software” and “studio” for “organization” and much of it makes sense, or is at least thought provoking. The chapters on “Staffing”, “Code”, “Interface Design” and “Words” won’t be relevant. Do surprise me in the comments, though… 😉 .

Categories
Howto

Setting the SVG MIME Type in Subversion

If you have directories containing SVG files that you wish to add to a Subversion repository and you wish them to display as images rather than XML when someone broswes the repository in a web broswer, run the following in the local parent directory then commit it:

svn propset svn:mime-type image/svg+xml */*.svg