So I just finished reading Michael Toliver Lives By Armistead Maupin.

I think the words I’m looking for are “fucking amazing”.

I stretched the first half of the book over many weeks, and possibly a few months, but the second half I’ve read in the past couple of days, mostly today. And it’s good, and very heart wrenching, and good. As much as I’d like to see what happens next, I don’t know if my soul can handle seeing any (more) of these characters that I care so much about die, and I fear that the longer that the story goes on, the more likely that is to happen.

In other news, I upgraded to MarsEdit 2.0, and it’s brilliant. I’ve never been really satisfied with the way that the Text-Mate handles blog posting. Not enough polish, to much room for operator error, and so forth, so I’ve kept using MarsEdit (and I think the version I was running was a slightly out of date version.) It connected well with TextMate, and I’ve been happy.

While I like the redress job, I have to say that there’s only so many things that an XML-RPC weblog client can do, period (because there are only so many things that XML-RPC can do), and the version 1.x did all of them, and delightfully so does 2.0. And the redress is great (and it exposes a few features that were a little buried,) but…

Here’s hoping tomorrow is a bit more productive than today.

While I enjoy being a morning person most of the time, I think that there are definite advantages to being able to sleep in more effectively. If I had gotten more sleep, I would probably be able to think of a few of them.

I also thought that I had a paper for school due on Wednesday, which I have since learned is due on Friday. I am no longer worried about it, since I have finished reading the relevant book last night, in expectation of a need to write the paper today. I can be leisurely about it now.

I’ll have to see what the undergrad classes are next semester, but I’m thinking of starting to take classes in what promises to be an even more mind dulling but applied masters program, because if I’m going to be sitting around, learning things I already basically know, I think the telos of a degree that I don’t already have would be nice.

I should write a TealArt entry commenting on Station Keeping, or put together an SK pdf file, but I think that’ll have to wait for later. Maybe, we’ll see. I’m already caught up on the RSS feeds, which is kind of crazy, just saying….

Cheers, sam

A while ago, Brenda Dayne of the Cast-On Podcast, got off on a “free culture” and “wiki” kick and there was as a result a bunch of buzz in the knitting world about building an encyclopedic collection of knitting information.

I have say that encyclopedias, even new Wikipedia-esque projects are probably always doomed from the beginning. The balance between specificity and generality is really hard to play correctly, and possibly the larger problem is that encyclopedias are predicated on some sort of existent universal objective positionally, which frankly doesn’t exist. All knowledge is culturally and historically constrained, and encyclopedias need to minimize this for the sake of their projects. But this is a criticism of encyclopedias in general, not specifically of wikipedia or wiki-style encyclopedic project. And I think I should be quick to reiterate a point that I’ve made before that the wiki format should not really be defined by the encyclopedic structure despite the success of wikipedia.

Back to knitting and “free” distributions: Some knitters took issue with the GFDL, which is a permissive licensee that Wikipedia uses and was designed for the documentation that accompanies Linux and other free software. The issue with the GFDL is that not only does it allows anyone to edit it and distribute it, but it also allows anyone to take any GFDL (or GPL, the software counterpart) content and sell it and make profit on the content, provided that their work is also licensed under the GPL or GFDL. What this means for “linux companies,” like Red Hat, or Novel can sell you linux, but they have to provide the source code, and if you want to start a version of Linux (or company that uses Red Hat code,) you can, without consequence. Provided that if you distribute that version of Linux to anyone else, you have to also give your code away.

For instance, it’s pretty clear that Google has an internal Google-Linux version, that’s different from anything else on the block and you can’t buy it or get a copy of the code, but since they don’t distribute it at all, it stays in the company and they don’t have to give away copies of the code. The way most Linux companies make money is they say “here, buy this linux software, and we’ll give you technical support for a given period of time,” or “we’ll install the software and configure your machine,” and so forth. In a very real sense, the money that you pay “for” linux or other free software is really for auxiliary services, not for the software.

Some knitters had a problem with the fact that other people/companies could take their work/writing from a GFDL source and sell it without any of that profit going to the original author. There was a move toward a Creative Commons licenses, amongst knitters, so that a “non-commercial use,” could be negotiated. While I like this idea, and I think Creative Commons licenses are a great thing, in this case it means that (since a wiki project) is community project, it’s quite likely that no one can exercise a commercial use of CC content.

For instance, it’s my understanding that while I have a creative commons license on TealArt that allows anyone to redistribute or create derivative works provided that they “share alike”, you can basically do what ever you want with TA content so long as you don’t try to make money off of it; I (or the other authors) can take TealArt content and use it commercially. In such a community situation, this wouldn’t be possible, and I suspect that such a license in a community situation means that no one can make money (even the “original” creators) off of the content. But I’m not a lawyer.

This isn’t to draw attention or notice away from Sarah Bradburry’s KnitWik, which I think is a great project, but I think there are some serious reasons to consider a more GPL/GFDL like approach. This fits in line with my earlier discussion about monitizing creativity, and also I think it would be worthwhile to reconsider the analogy between open source software and knitting, because it seems to me that if open source is such good idea for software (and I think it is in the long run) then it very well may be a good idea for knitting if we get the analogy right.

I think I’m probably done for the moment, but I wanted to create a small list of ideas and question that I’d like to address in the future, related to this idea:

• Is there a layer of information that goes into knitting design and documentation that isn’t typically exposed in “closed”/conventional publications? (that would be equivalent in role to source code)?

• The role of editors and communities and the sometimes very

  “conventional” development models that “open” projects use.

• The way GPL/GFDL knitting projects can be used commercially.

• Technological methods of attending to such a project.

If you have an opinion, please chime in.

Cheers, tycho

I’m sitting in one of the local cafe shops waiting for a friend as I write this (but not, as you will soon learn as you read this) because this fine establishment charges what I think of as “through the nose” for internet access. What’s through the nose? 10 cents a minute, per hour, or ten dollars for a day. The issue is that this would mean that the provider (which isn’t the cafe) is making a hefty profit from all this, even though we’ve already basically paid our dues for the privilege to sit here.

When will they learn?

I reman, yours in the struggle, tycho

ps. I would like to say that I conned this place into making what amounts to a mango lhasi (like you get in indian restaurant.) Despite the sucky internet, I’m quite happy.

pps. This is what happens when I don’t get access to twitter http://www.twitter.com/tychoish/; aparently there is freqireless, but someone else, that has a stronger signal, has pay wireless. All is well and right with the world.

So, I might have contributed to an order for yet more Harrisville Shetland, in the Charcoal and Pearl colors, enough for another sweater, I think it’s going to look rather fetching, but I don’t know what pattern to use yet. I’m contemplating another Henry VIII, and I’m thinking I might make it into a cardigan. I might still do the cardigan even if I use a different pattern.

In other knitting news. I’m in ravelry now, and I’m really enjoying the fourms more than anything. I don’t have a meaningful stash, despite the recent yarn purchase, and perhaps more importantly I don’t use enough patterns to make those aspects of the site really enthralling, but I’m enjoying it.

I’ve also been knitting a bunch on a sleeve, which I know is kind of out of character. I’m only 4 inches into it, so it’ll be a while. I need to do a little pseudo gauge swatching before I can start in earnest (on take two) of another sweater. This is the punishment I think for buying shetland jumper weight wool that isn’t HD: the gauge is way way tighter. Weirdness.

That’s pretty much where I am, not much more to announce. I’ve been writing most of the day, it’s going well, but not spectacularly. A few weeks ago, I had a great weekend where I just cranked out tons of content, and I felt productive, and now I’m making headway, and I’m not getting stuck, but it’s a bit slower going, so I need to be ok with this without being too hard on myself that I’m not going fast enough.

So Let the world Chug-along as it pleases, I’ll be free and easy still….

I usually find myself writing these entries in the morning whilst sipping a fresh cup of tea and listening to music on my headphones. I’ve long held the opinion that the piece of the puzzle that Virginia Woolf was missing in “A Room of One’s Own” was noise canceling headphones. I spent the weekend out of town and as a result had a very very hard time finding the headphones this morning, and I have to admit that I felt kind of lost. If anyone out there is looking to become a writer, headphones rank right up there on my list of necessities: a good tea cup, a good go-everywhere notebook and pen, a computer with good quality editing software, and a supportive desk chair. In case you were wondering.

Last Friday’s post was a bit angst. I’ll admit it, I need to find co-editors to make TealArt more viable in the long term. In the shorter term I think I’m in pretty good shape. I spent some time thinking about the kinds of features that I could work on that might make writing easier. Over the summer I’d sort of let my focus of discrete projects/series spin out, and so rather than having a set framework of ongoing posts that I could approach not as “I need to write 5 posts for this week,” but rather, “I need to write one of these posts this week,” I think was much easier on the brain.

This isn’t to say that I’ve fixed the problem, if anyone wants to be a blog editor, or do some blog merging, or whatever, I am totally still up for that. So contact me.

As for what’s happening this week? This is my first week of unemployment, which means job searching, something I am so not looking forward to, but alas it has to be done. In any case, for at least a little while this means that I’ll get plenty of extra time to work on some writing projects, and some website/internet projects. This is a good thing.

My novella is progressing nicely. I’m a bit less than half way done with chapter three, and it’s going really well. I did a bit less than 75% of my goal for the weekend, but it’s a long weekend so I’m going to stretch that out into today. I have a good action sequence to work on today, and I’m kind of happy about doing that. That’s pretty much how I feel about this project: it’s just working, and I’m having a great deal of fun with it.

A few weeks ago, I started writing a short story that’s sort of derived similarly from that novel that I wrote several years ago. I got a bunch of notes and about 300 words written, before I realized that it wasn’t going to work out; so, I put it in the back burner. Then as I was driving this weekend I came upon a good way to make it work, so scribbled something down as we were filling up the car, and so I’m going to put some time into that this week.

But you’re probably at least a little interested in what’s happening on TealArt this week, and not so much what I’m working on behind the scenes. I’m going to post the first couple of essays that I wrote last weekend about open-source software, knitting collaboration, and how I thought the two were connected. In retrospect, it’s also related to the posts that I put up last week about making money from art. So I’m quite excited about that, Also, while I haven’t, unfortunately, been paying much attention to Station Keeping, there’s going to be some SK goodness this week, not a new story, but defiantly some reflection.

Stay tuned, and again if you’re interested in doing some editoral-type work around here, be sure to be in touch (tycho@tealart.com). I’ll see you again throughout the week, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Cheers, tycho

Google Earth flight simulator:

Many BoingBoing readers have sent in word of a “hidden” flight simulation feature in Google Earth that’s making the blog-rounds. TechCrunch has a post on how to use it here. (thanks Chris and others)

(from Boing Boing.)

How flippin' cool is that?

So as I was driving back from a visit with the family, (we arrived safely, and the trip was without incident) I was listening to old Boing Boing Boing pod casts, because I’m a dork.

Anyway, I listened to an old one from right before Google bought YouTube, when everyone was like “no, no, no, that couldn’t ever happen, what’s in it for google?”

Despite my sometimes love for YouTube, I think that question remains a useful one. Though we’ve accepted the buyout as fact, I for one still don’t see much in it for google. But then I’m just enjoying people making videos of their cat, and don’t really care that much about google, so whatever.

Sigh.

I think it will soon be time for me to go to bed. I have tomorrow off, it being a holiday (I realized that for the past three years I haven’t gotten bank holidays off, because I went to a private school that didn’t cancel classes on bank holidays.) So I get another day of writing and other good things. Not that I have a job, so its kind of moot anyway, but still…

Cheers!