stephan.com
scattered thoughts

I already had a scan of my driver’s license for emergencies, so I decided to keep it on my iPhone. The aspect ratio is almost exactly the same, and it looks really slick when you whip it out in line at a club… though the bouncer usually needs to see the real thing, it’s good for a laugh.

I hope someday something like this becomes commonplace. That would be _so_ twentyfirst.

Check out my new web application for the iPhone - it’s called “iFifteen,” and it implements the classic “fifteen puzzle“. As near as I can tell, this is the first version of the sliding block puzzle for iPhone

iFifteen has 12 different theme pictures, both the basic numbered version as well as a bunch of pictures. It’s a bit crude, and as of this writing loading is a bit wonky (working on it), but I’m quite pleased with the result - I think it points out the strengths and weaknesses of Safari on the iPhone. It also works great with Safari on the desktop, OK on Firefox, and probably not at all on Explorer (please, please, if you’re using IE 6.0 or earlier, do us web designers a favor and UPGRADE!!!)

I made this mostly to try out building a page via Javascript, and the results are some interesting code. If you read Javascript, check it out. I have to editorialize for a minute about that… Javascript is a funny thing, inasmuch as it has been forced on web developers by virtue of being included in pretty much every browser. Given that fact, it could have been horrible - but it isn’t! You can do some really elegant things in it, particularly when you use the Prototype.js library.

If you have an iPhone, please check out iFifteen

The iPhone is the coolest thing ever. It is perfect; a piece of alien technology that fell out of a timewarp from the future. Truly revolutionary.

get this lolcat and more sent to your cell phone free, courtesy of cellfo.com

Last night, in a fit of nostalgia over my formative years programming the TI-99, I got a hankering for a t-shirt with some hexadecimal digits. See, we used to program sprites in hex, and that was my introduction to computer graphics, and I can pretty much do hex math in my head. It takes me back to my teen years, my first girlfriend, high school, all sorts of things. So, I used interactive Ruby to generate some:

stephan.com:~/Desktop/Mystery Number stephan$ irb
irb(main):001:0> hex = ("0".."9").to_a + ("A".."F").to_a
=> ["0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F"]
irb(main):002:0> 16.times do |i|
irb(main):003:1* print "-" unless i==0
irb(main):004:1> 2.times do
irb(main):005:2* print hex[rand(16)]
irb(main):006:2> end
irb(main):007:1> end
C0-88-56-63-C5-56-41-D8-5B-E3-74-9D-02-11-F9-09=> 16

Perfect! I copied that string into Illustrator, but the pairs got reversed from how I dragged the layers around, and it came out like this:

A great design for a t-shirt. I uploaded it to CafePress, and got several products all set up. When I was done, I thought I might share my design with other hexadecimaphiles at Digg, but when I got there, the site was down. There was some sort of hoo-ha going on about a number - coincidentally, almost the same number that came from my random number generator! What are the odds of that? (umm, 2¹²⁸:1, right?)

Well, I decided that all the hubbub about this other number would totally make people misconstrue the point of my number, and didn’t end up posting about the t-shirt, and it just sat in my CafePress account. Things died down. I figured no one would notice it. (Kudos to Alex, Kevin and all for handling this perfectly)

Oddly enough, CafePress did notice, and sent me the following notification:

Dear Shopkeeper,

Thank you for using CafePress.com!

As you may know, CafePress.com provides a service to a rich and vibrant community of international users. From time to time, we review the content in our shopkeepers accounts to confirm that the content being used in connection with the sale of products are in compliance with our policies, including our Content Usage Policy (CUP).

We recently learned that your CafePress.com account contains material which may not be in compliance with our policies. Specifically, designing, manufacturing, marketing and/or selling products that may infringe the rights of a third party, including, copyrights (e.g., an image of a television cartoon character), trademarks (e.g., the logo of a company), “rights in gross” (e.g., the exclusive right of the U.S. Olympic Committee to use the “Olympic Rings”), and rights of privacy and publicity (e.g., a photo of a celebrity) are prohibited.

Accordingly, we have set the content that we believe to be questionable to “pending status” which disables said content from being displayed in your shop or purchased by the public.

You may review the content set to pending status by logging into your CafePress.com account and clicking on the “Media Basket” link. The content set to pending status will be highlighted red.

Please visit our Content Usage Policy (CUP) for additional information regarding your use of the CafePress.com service. Once there, you may access our Copyright, Trademark & Intellectual Property Guidelines and FAQ’s for more detailed information regarding Intellectual Property Rights.

We apologize for any inconvenience that the removal of your content may have caused you. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

Sincerely,

Content Usage Associate
CafePress.com
CUP@cafepress.com

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been known to have things to say about intellectual property law, and have been around IP for a while… So I responded thusly:

To Whom it May Concern

Thank you for your polite and amazingly prompt notification.

Interestingly, the content in question does not clearly fall into any of those categories. It is not covered by a copyright, nor a trademark, nor a “right in gross”. It is allegedly proprietary information related to violation of the DMCA, though that law presently stands on shaky ground. Intellectual property law has certain notable exceptions of unprotectable content, including the visual appearance of fonts (though their digital embodiment is covered) and recipes (though a specific written description of the recipe is covered, and innovative methods might be patentable). Were this to come to a court case, I think it would be difficult to prove that a particular string of hexadecimal digits should be afforded any intellectual property right whatsoever.

Perhaps there might be some sort of sui generis protection similar to the database rights allowed in the EU since 1996, though in the US this was covered in Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co (1991), which decided (if I might quote Wikipedia) “exclusive rights cannot cover the factual elements of any copyrighted work”.

Had I succeeded in designing my t-shirts and taking orders during yesterday’s firestorm, rather than completing the design when things were just about over, your decision might have resulted in some actual damages in the form of lost business - particularly if you had opted not to fulfill orders already placed. However, I was a bit late, decided last night not to pursue the t-shirt angle, and hence have no interest in seeking any potential damages from you. In your shoes, I would likely make the same decision.

I will however, post your email to my blog, as well as my response and any further responses from you, in the interest of furthering the debate about intellectual property and free speech.

yours,

- stephan

Well, gosh, I’d still like some sort of design. Back in the TI-99 days, we used to specify an 8×8 sprite with 8 hex pairs, so I guess this would be two sprites. Like this:

Thus, I present the world with my Mystery Number Product Sprite line of clothes. Operators are standing by to take your order.

In response to a thread on Facebook about privacy stemming from this interesting presentation that I can’t be arsed to watch the whole way through, I wrote this:

There is no big brother, and never will be. Thanks to openness and the internet, our culture has dodged that bullet. All we have are a thousand little brothers who don’t care what you believe or how you live your life, but just want to sell you things.

So I’m not worried about facebook privacy; in practice, they’ll probably only share info in cases we’d probably approve of (like those evil witches/drug dealers/child molesters/this week’s demon), because there’s just not enough interest in rounding up hippies and commies and jews.

Of course, you might get targeted ads… personal stalkers… that sort of thing. But I’m not worried about the CIA/FBI/KGB/etc. They wouldn’t need Facebook’s permission anyway. I honestly don’t think that sort of thing can happen again - breathless proclamations about the alleged evils of guantanamo bay aside, because I think if any (many) of those people were actually “good guys” in any real sense, no one would waste their time and money locking up those folks.

I live my life in the open, or relatively so, and I’ve watched the last few years as youth culture seems to embrace that. I see Jennicam as the harbinger of it (remember her?), and I think the underlying feeling is one of replacing the illusion of “privacy” with a public life. Not “I’m safe because I’m hidden” but “I’m safe because everyone can watch me”. The panopticon is replaced with omniopticon.

If you don’t have a lock on your bike, do you park it in a dark alley? Or right in front of the store?

someone else responded:

I’m very concerned actually. The information that is asked for isn’t by accident nor is it merely for one’s convenience. I often pass on all the check marks on how I am connected to people. I just don’t like to reveal my network. That album of the day thing was rather enlightening in the end and did nothing more but confirm my suspicions. As for big brother, it is already here - just ask the folks in London. It may not be as we imagined it to be at the moment but it is a hidden hand nonetheless and surveillance is growing. I see it as a matter of conditioning where the state continues to encroach more and more upon society and an individual’s right to privacy. One recent example is London Drugs demand of ID regardless of age for those purchasing cigarettes. Reports of this state that clerks are taking consumer ID’s and entering in the data. Now this may sound harmless to some but if one thinks of it as conditioning and as pawn movements on a chessboard, the picture of the future starts to change. That’s my two cents…

and I added:

The issue comes down to ‘who watches the watchers’ and all that. I just honestly don’t believe that real secrets can be kept today. Information wants to be free, and has too many ways to get that way.

Like the people who claim that 9/11 was faked by the government. It’s just silly. How could you keep that many people quiet? Not a single one would spill the beans on the biggest story in human history? Sure 9/11 smells of a conspiracy, it WAS a conspiracy - of a couple of dozen fucked-up religious nuts. No need to hunt for any fancy explanations, slice that sucker right up with Occam’s razor. There’s NO WAY you could keep the hundreds or thousands of people who would have to be in on it quiet.

Similarly, let’s say “they” decided to come after, say, marijuana smokers. Who’s going to enforce that? Who is going to secretly take over and lock all those people up in secret prisons? It’s much easier to just do it in public, in the open, the way it’s done now.

What do you think “they” can do with that conditioning information? I mean, you can get away with locking a few dissidents in secret prisons - but only the crappy ones, if they were good writers or had anything that interesting to say, someone would notice

No, the only “fear” I can see is that once “they” have the database of who buys what brand of cigarettes where, you’ll get more targeted ads to get you to switch brands.

I just don’t see how it would be possible to recruit thousands of secret police to oppress the citizens of a country with free journalists and unfettered public access to the press - e.g. blogs.

You could do it fifty years ago. 25 years even. The Powers That Be COULD have taken over the media then and prevented the Internet from connecting us all so innocently. We couldn’t have had this conversation.

But we can.

You just can’t keep more than a dozen people quiet any more - if someone was to come out and say “I can prove that the government is doing horrible thing XYZ”… (e.g. flew radio controlled planes at the twin towers, or secretly locked up and tortured sincerely innocent people) Well, at that point they could be assassinated, publicly, and hey, that worked for JFK and MLK, but it would look pretty funny to everyone.

They’d probably have enough money from the TV appearances and book right to afford bodyguards to protect them from anything normal. I mean, look at that spy that got poisoned a few months ago. Every once in a while there’s a suspicious death, presumably executed by some cold-war leftovers who still think they can get away with it - and the media jumps on it and digs into every nook and cranny, because there’s always one more journalist that cares more about a pulitzer prize than his own personal safety.

It’s fine to want to keep that information private, but the only people you’re fooling are, really, individuals that might have a personal vendetta against you. No one else CARES!

I shot this last year - a view a few hundred feet from my door.

I spent a couple of hours last night cleaning up this amazing picture.

Dave Makela (left), Bobby Newman (center), Danny Kissinger (right) and Dick Drew (rear, on drums) play “Roll on, Big Jimmie” in Duc Pho, Vietnam LZ Bronco, 1968

The band was unnamed, but since Dave is the only known surviving member, it has been retroactively called “The Dave Makela Quartet”

Last night’s performance and premiere were a smashing success, with an overflow crowd spilling into the screening room. Thanks to those of you that made it, and those that didn’t, no big deal, there weren’t enough seats anyway.

The video has now escaped into the wild - If you enjoy it, please post it to your blogs, recommend it to your friends, etc - spread it far and wide.

With Leslie Hall, we celebrate the journey of Willow, a small farmer/apprentice magician and together they journey through a war-torn land of magic and monsters, to save a baby princess from death at the hands of an evil queen. Directed by Filmed entirely on location at of Telefantasy Studios.

http://www.willowdontcry.com/

direct youtube link