These sad berries were not long for this world...

As I sat at the dining table shelling peas while I listened to Tool (and other rockin’ tunes) I got to wondering if the peas were worth all the effort ( and also how many people have shelled peas to Tool…). I mean, they’re good and all, but are they that good? After I blanched them but before I stuck them in the freezer I grabbed a handful. Oh man. And then another handful. Oh yeah, it’s worth it. Once they’ve been blanched to bring out their sweetness a little, they are that good. Like, approaching corn-on-the-cob good. Coming from me, that’s high praise.

I also took some arty photos of the harvest, in keeping with one of my four-week challenges I’ve laid out for myself. Thus I give you the official beginning of the Still Life With Harvest series:

Still Life With Harvest 2

Still Life With Harvest 1

Bees Gone Wild from Quentin Hartman on Vimeo.

Any backyard beekeepers out there seen anything like this?

I mortised the legs for the cross members so I could make the stance of the stand as wide as possible and add a little strength. The horizontal piece that runs down the center of the top is there to support our varroa board, or whatever other tray we may need to slide under the hive. The holes in the long sides were something of a last-minute idea. Liz is at a Waldorf conference in Atlanta this week, and she is attending some bee keeping classes there. They demoed some tools, one of which was a contraption that allows you to more easily move hives by temporarily clamping handles onto them. I was thinking about that and decided to add the holes for running a 1″ dowel (or pipe, or broomhandle, or whatever) through, providing handles on each side of the hive when you need to move it. Not sure how well it works, but it was easy enough to add now, and doing something like that later would be tough. We’re likely to need to move the hive in the near future, even if only temporarily so I can install a window in the shed. We’ll see how my idea works then.

And here it is with the hive installed:

Looks pretty good if I do say so myself! If there is any interest, I will draw up some plans and post them. I think the next revision will integrate the bottom board into the stand itself, hopefully providing even more stability and a more polished look.

First off, I’m a supporter of Lessig, the Creative Commons and the general “copyleft” movement, and I’d like to point a few items that you seem to be overlooking. I hope you will give the points I raise some real consideration.

First, I want to point out that in all of my reading and listening to Lessig, he has advocated reforming copyright, not eliminating it. Until that reform happens, the CC licenses are a way to enable people who believe that their work should be Free will be Free in the current climate of effectively infinite copyright extension. While Bob’s Photography may theoretically benefit from copyright extensions, it’s doubtful that they do in practice. I would love to see some examples to the contrary, but with the rare exception of the work of truly noteworthy artists (Ansel Adams comes to mind) the commercial value of a photograph beyond 14 years after it was taken (the original period laid out in American copyright law) is going to be vanishingly small. As a result of this, I don’t see this “it helps small business” argument as a sound support for a law which also has the effect of locking up truly significant works of culture indefinitely so that they may only be built upon by the corporate entities which control them. This greatly decreases the value of those works to the society as a whole. An additional side effect of this is that any works for which the copyright status is unknown are, in the current climate, likely to stagnate and be forgotten to history if the authors or their heirs are unreachable to gain license from them. Would you rather that the brilliant work of some unknown artist be lost in the sands of time because the law frightened someone enough that they chose to leave it out of their project which would have preserved it? Or that the TV series you loved in your childhood is never released on DVD because licensing for the music it featured cannot be obtained?

Add to this the new abundance that Brandon mentions above, and you have the fact that each individual creative piece is worth less than it used to be. This is simply a fact that creators need to come to terms with. Ideally, they will not only come to terms with it, but learn how to exploit this new abundance, this new ease of distribution, to drive new revenue streams. You can see a number of articles about how this can be done at http://www.techdirt.com .

In this new sea of creative output, attention is worth more than any one individual work. Your name as a good artist has more value than any single image you can create. This is why I support the concept of CC-attribution licenses. When I create something I want as many eyes on it as possible so that my name will become recognized. I can then take that reputation and use it to leverage revenue from things that are actually scarce, like my time and talent, rather than try to force artificial scarcity on something that by nature is abundant. Obscurity is a bigger threat to you individual prosperity than the CC ever could be. Zach Arias is a great example of a photographer who has leveraged his reputation to create new revenue streams that have nothing to do with selling his photos. I have no idea what his opinions on IP law are. He has though, intentionally or not, learned how to leverage the value of “free” to create what seems to be a respectable income.

IP law is, and always has been, about creating an incentive to create and enrich society. In the past, creating was expensive proposition, with tremendous up front costs. The best way to encourage people to create despite these costs was to grant an artificial monopoly on the commercial exploitation of those creations. However, we’ve now begun to realize some (arguably) unintended consequences of those monopolies within the new context provided by modern technology. The biggest of these is that the system has been abused and modified over the years by monied non-natural legal entities who have the sole goal of extracting value from the creations they control indefinitely. As a result, these laws are no longer serving to enrich our culture, they serve primarily to enrich those entities instead. Unfortunately, this attitude of feeling like one is entitled to profit many times over for a single piece of work has become the norm in many industries. The music industry is the most absurd example, whose party line seems to be that they deserve to get paid for each and every play a of a song, regardless of the circumstance.

In the end, there are only two groups who truly benefit from IP law as it stands. The first are the corporations. There are examples all over chronicling how they have locked up cultural artifacts to the detriment of new creators. The second group are the lawyers, who are able to play both sides against each other and profit, while adding no value whatsoever.

I’ll leave the response to the anti-corruption bit for another post….

The EFF on Facebook’s privacy changes in December. I had always been a little skeptical of Facebook, but had previously decided it offered enough value for the potential reduction of privacy required to use it. This set of changes got me really wondering just how trustworthy they were. I’ve been slowly mulling that over since then.

Then Zuckerberg (Facebook’s head honcho) came out with this little gem. This made it clear that his (and by extension, Facebook’s) view of privacy is a far cry from my own. More fuel to the “can I trust them?” fire.

Finally this week, I found this Wired article and this really interesting visualization. The trends here are clear, and I agree with the Wired author Ryan Singel that there must be a better way to do the things that I use Facebook for, and that I’d rather be part of that movement than add to the inertia of the 1800-lb gorilla.

Anyway, that’s why I’m considering it. I probably won’t do it any time soon, but I expect it will happen.

To fix it, enter the following into a command prompt:

gconftool-2 –set ‘/apps/metacity/general/button_layout’ –type string “menu:minimize,maximize,close”

(Note you may have to fix some of the quotes, since the typographical quotes don’t work like “real” quotes in the shell)

An viola, sane titlebar button placement for your user account. I’m planning on building a little app in Quickly to do this push-button style. If / when I finish that I’ll put it in a PPA and post about it here. It will be of limited utility, but a good way to play with Quickly and setting up  a PPA. Anyway…

The improved boot speed is FANTASTIC. I haven’t actually timed it, but on this laptop it feels as fast or faster than resuming from a suspend, which I think is pretty impressive.

The visual tweaks are good (modulo titlebar idocy…) and I love the “Ambiance” GTK theme. I tend to like darker themes, and this is probably one of the best ones I’ve used.

Of course the version bumps in major apps is nice, and being able to run the latest firefox w/o repo jiggery pokery is convenient. My webcam is also working out of the box, a first on this hardware, and is even working in Flash. Chatroulette here I come! On the downside, I am getting playback hiccup in full-screened videos from Hulu, which I never got before. Hulu has apparently made some changes recently that makes it not work at all w/ 64-bit Linux, so maybe it’s related to that.

So, long story short-ish,I think this will be a solid release. I have my doubts as to whether or not it will meet expectations as an LTS release given the fairly large amount of very visisble tinkering that has apparently gone on, but overall I’m looking forward to it.