So, the other day, I'm in a lengthy discussion with an acquaintance, and as usual the conversation gravitates towards technology. I made my usual elevator spiel about Linux and BSD and FOSS, why I use it, blah blah. No, I say, it's not because "Microsoft is evil" that I use Open Source, but because Open Source is good.

Then the conversation veers - "Let me ask you a question about evil.", he says. Sigh, I go, here it comes. So he left-fields me with a question along the lines of "Do you think the government should be restricting access to encryption technology for the masses?" Theoretical question. His point is that it shouldn't.

I always get these. Questions phrased as if they had a yes-or-no answer. No, I said, that isn't the point, it's a question of logistics. Because of open source, I can make up any encryption scheme I want to and give it away and there isn't a damn thing anybody can logically do about it, because code is protected by free speech, so the whole point is 'mu'.

That's your word for the day. Mu. You're welcome to go browse the Wiki for the pedantically correct definition, but it in a nutshell it means that you have just asked a black-and-white question with no black-and-white answer. It means you're barking up the wrong tree, looking in the wrong place, and the point just sent you a telegram from the other side of the planet.

People tend to lose patience when they look for a black-and-white answer where there isn't one. Our brains crave binary, XOR decisions.

Let's take a common technology debate: Out of Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft, who is evil and who is good? The answer as I see it lies on a sliding scale. Now, this article, while basically being a little plea for how Microsoft should be seen as a good company now because it makes Silverlight. Case study.

Point one: Silverlight is intended as a Flash/AIR-killer, which is anti-competitive, so bad.

Point two: Silverlight drove Adobe to suddenly be happy, happy friends with Linux. They released Flash 10 concurrently for Linux and other platforms. Suddenly, all those impossible barriers to porting Flash to Linux melted away as soon as some competition happens. It helped break an Adobe/Microsoft Flash monopoly, so good.

Point three: Silverlight, as noted in its Wikipedia page, is also intended as an SVG-killer. This isn't just bad news; it's a tragedy. All modern web browsers except Microsoft Internet Explorer support and render SVG markup directly. If SVG was supported cross-platform, you'd see a new, beautiful web begin to form, where AJAX combines with SVG to create a Flash replacement. You'd see as much of a leap in web design with SVG as we saw with AJAX. Score: 2 bad, 1 good.

Point four: As the Adobe dictatorship benevolently tolerates FOSS development tools like SWFTools, Microsoft is temporarily tolerating the development of Moonlight, the FOSS equivalent of Silverlight. Tied score.

Point five: Of course, they're doing this because they possessed the soul of SUSE Linux, so they're still reselling Novell SUSE Linux licenses and whaddaya know, Novell sponsors Mono from which Moonlight is derived. This shows a huge breech of the Open Source fortress by Microsoft. One more step upstream, and they'll hop from SUSE to my own Slackware and I'll have the Microsoft Sound playing when my Slackware starts up and every man page will point me to a weblink to a useless MSN.net documentation page that's been moved five times since the distribution released. Then they'll just sneak into my house at night and graffiti a Windows logo on my wall or something. I dunno. Point 3-2 evil/good.

Everything is black and white when you zoom it in far enough. Nothing is when you pull back and look at the big picture.

Google is a "good company", but they patent graphics methods and don't release everything as OS and don't port everything to Linux and go along with Chinese censorship. Yahoo is a "good company", but charge to be included in their directory and some of their works reek of adware and they go along with Chinese censorship, too, and I've personally had Yahoo pages that refused to load until I told Firefox to change its user-agent string to mimic Internet Explorer. Microsoft is a "bad company", but they have not, to my knowledge, actually stormed down the street murdering random people, yet, which is the best damn thing I can think of to say about them at this point.

But all three are businesses with the purpose of making money. Hey, when you get down to it, as a freelancer, I'm a business with the purpose of making money.

Is making money, itself, evil? Even a little, tiny bit? If giving food away to anyone who's hungry is better than charging people money for food and turning them away when they're broke, then every grocery store in existence is just that tiny, little, itty bit of evil. Why do we have to be this way? Why can't we all work together for the common good?

Humans haven't evolved that far yet, and maybe never will. Whether we can even get our civilization to go that far is an unanswered question because humans haven't evolved to be that smart, yet.

Well, discuss it amongst yourselves. I am a bear of very little brain today, and big questions bother me.

Update: Or as Google exec Marissa Mayer puts it, "It’s possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. I think what’s delightful about ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ is that it reminds you there are real people here."

See, there it is. Lots of us want to be rich, but if you lose your humanity in the process, you aren't really rich, then, are you?

Re-Update I swear this is the truth: today (11/18/08) I just discovered that Linus Torvalds blogged similar thoughts to this post of mine and mentioned the same hopeful expectation for Obama that I had in my last post. He even used the phrase "black and white" in the title.

Freaky... was there a subconscious ohrwurm drifting through the net last week and we all caught a touch of it?

Anyway, yes, he wrote his on 11/2 and I wrote mine on 11/8. No, I didn't read his first, even though I link to him in my sidebar blogroll. It's shocking how seldom I get the luxury to read some of my own favorites out there!

I still can't quite let myself believe that Barack Obama won. Isn't this the part where they pull some recount monkey business out of their hat? But McCain conceded! He wouldn't do that if he was planning to steal the race, would he?

Well, my theory is that I'm in a coma and I'm dreaming all this. So, while I'm in this coma, I guess it doesn't hurt too much to offer my own little concession.

By the way, thank you, black Americans! You saved our cracker asses. We didn't deserve that.

My concession is that I have been too cynical before. I had given up on my country. I had seen too many former friends in the past eight years turn to enemies because they suddenly came out Red (as in Red State) and I would not be a party to their terror-mongering. I had seen too much civilization rot back to savagery. I had seen too much racism. I had seen too much enlightenment torn down by too much ignorance.

I figured the USA was never going to wise up. And that does happen to countries all the time. Countries rise, spread to an empire, and collapse, fading away. But it wasn't the United States' turn this time. We have at least two good years left in us.

Mind you, this is only the beginning. Do you have any idea how much mopping up we have to do? The Patriot Act, the Iraq War, the housing market crash, the recession, the erosion of personal liberties, the scary-big-number deficit. Somebody's going to have to answer for this, this, and this. All of that has to be undone, just to climb back up to where we were eight years ago.

Liberal rule is very good for Open Source, very good for Free Software, and very good for Technology Freedom. And I'll tell you why: Because all of these things crumble under fascism and thrive under liberty. Because science thrives under liberalism. With it comes education, and from that follows technology. And at the end of that road, there is the possibility of a civilization that looks upon learning with reverence again instead of scorn.

So I'm going to resolve to tone down the cynicism just a bit.

P. Pres. President Ooooooo.... President Oooooo....

No, I can't quite say it yet. Better to just flow with the coma for now.

Oooooooommmmmmmm....

Update: For further view on why Obama and technology are a good mix, see this Wired post.

...and this blog cheers the election of "an openly smart candidate". Which I think is a damn fine choice of words. Yes, smart people can come out of the closet, now! And boy, was it stuffy in there!

...and - I don't know how the heck I missed this! I was watching CNN on election night. I must have taken a fridge break during this crucial moment. So thanks to the blog at OSI for pointing out this clip, where a direct comparison is made between Obama and open source! He even referred to ESR's book, which probably pissed off ESR no end, since he's been kidnapped these past ten years by kinky aliens who replaced him with a right-wing neocon.

It occurred to me that with all my graphics tutorials, I have never done any Blender ones. This is because, like everybody else including half its user base and even possibly a few of its coders, I barely understand Blender myself. However, I've gotten stupidly overconfident enough to think I can pull off at least one tutorial. So this will be about boning. Now, some call this "armatures" and some call it "linking" and "rigging" and other colorful metaphors and euphemisms. I call it "boning". You're taking a model and putting the bones in. OK?

So, here's my human model, imported from MakeHuman. I've managed to give her something that resembles hair if you don't look too hard and even labored mightily to imbue her with a facial expression. She'll be volunteering for today's tutorial. However, since boning a whole body will be too complicated for this tutorial, we'll just need a basic limb. How about a leg?

Thank you, volunteer. Now that we've ripped her leg from the rest of her body, we can just work with the leg. Trust me, once you just get boning a limb down, you'll be able to apply that method to boning a whole body.

NOTE: I'm doing this with Blender 2.46, the one with the Big Buck Bunny splash screen. I must say up front as a disclaimer that if you even think of attempting this tutorial with any other version of Blender, before or since, you will lose your mind. Permanently. This tutorial is only for version 2.46. Since every version changes something and makes every previously-written tutorial useless, we have no choice but to specify each and every version down to the last possible snap-shot instant day, hour, and minute. So. Version 2.46, downloaded and installed on May 18th, 2008, at 2:02 PM, Central Standard Time.

I can't answer any questions about Blender. I'm channeling this tutorial through Tarot cards.

So select the leg.

Click the cursor (the little annoying red-and-white life preserver thingie) to the thigh end of the leg. You might want to view the leg from top and side to ensure the cursor is centered.

Hit the space bar to get the menu. Select Add... armature.

Hit 'tab' to go into edit mode. Hit 'z' to go to wireframe mode. Hit your head to go into migraine mode, but only after we're done. You should have this:

Now hit 'g' for 'grab' mode and drag that end of the bone with the mouse until it's inside the knee.

Now, you know how you hit the 'e' key to extrude a section of mesh? It works the same way with bones. So when we're at the knee, just hit 'e' and keep on draggin' until you're in the ankle. Click to set it.

Now one problem: When we hit 'z' to turn off wire-frame mode and see how it looks, we can't see the bone (well, not all of it) because it's inside the leg. So in the little bottom panel labeled 'armature', click 'x-ray' and 'auto 1k' while you're at it. 'x-ray' will allow the bone to be visible in edit mode, and 'auto ik' will make it behave more leg-bone-like when we move it. Also hit 'names' so it will show the bone's names.

So then hit 'z' and behold:

Now hit 'tab' to go back to object mode. And right-click on the leg - not the bone - to select the leg - not the bone. Then hit 'tab' for edit mode and hit 'a' to select all of the mesh.

Here is what we have to do next: Tell Blender that this leg has to be attached to the bones. To do that, we have to identify the leg and the bones, and explicitly tell each one how it relates to the other. Because computers are stupid.

So under the bottom section called 'link and materials', under 'vertex groups', hit 'new'. A little box pops up; your group of vertexes is named 'group'. Let's keep it at least this real by clicking in the word 'group' and deleting it, typing in the word 'leg' instead and hitting 'enter'. Then click 'assign'. Now all of the vertexes belong to the 'leg' group.

Hit 'tab' to go back to object mode. Now look down at the little boxes at the bottom again, and a new box appeared named 'Modifiers'. Click the 'add modifier' button and select 'armature' from the menu, and you have a new little box. Under 'Ob:', type 'Armature' (yes, of course, it's case sensitive!) since that's the name Blender automatically assigned it this time, and under 'VGroup', type 'leg' for what we named the hunk of meat we're trying to control.

Now, you're in 'object' mode, the leg is selected, and you're this far. Now hold the shift key and right-click the bones. Now the leg 'n' bones are selected. Now hit Ctrl-P (the 'parent' operation), select 'armature', and in the second menu select 'name groups'.

Ah! Whoo! You're done! You've finally gotten a bone inside a body part and taught it to move together! To review the fruit of your labors, use the little mode selector menu...

And then right-click on a bone to select it and hit 'g' to grab it and move that sucker around. Wow!

OK, can anybody see where something went wrong? Most of the leg's moving, but the toes are stuck in space and the rest of the vertices stay attached but stretchy like we stepped in some chewing gum. Oh, God! We didn't add a foot bone! We should have done that. Then the whole thing would move with us. So I did this to illustrate a 'gotcha': be sure that the meat all has sufficient bones in it. In real modeling, you would have not only extended a foot bone, but probably bones for each individual toe, right?

Here's a knight I did a while back for a project which didn't pan out. Just to show that, yes, it can be done right.

Note the bone structure I've high-lighted inside the foot. The way bones behave, the smaller they are, the less skin area they possess with this method. Since an armored knight is a walking tin can and isn't animated down to individual toes anyway, it doesn't matter that we aren't replicating the whole bone structure here. Just enough to make the whole foot come along with the bones.

Hope you got something out of this. For that matter, I hope I can follow it the next time I have to bone something. For further knowledge, I recommend the education and help section of the Blender site, and I also recommend you buy a copy of the Blender Book.

There's no way I'm qualified to do this tutorial, but I searched all over the web and found nothing for this. So now one exists. It will be out of date in five minutes when they release the next version of Blender and play Twister with the interface again, after which time I will be punished for all eternity by angry readers trying to follow this tutorial with version 2.47++ and screaming "I tried to follow this and it's wrong! You suck!"

C'est la vie. (corrected per Perlejade's comment)

At first, you might mistake me for a "Linux advocate". I'm running a site about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), of which Linux is counted as an example. I certainly bring up Linux and the programs that run on it a lot.

Yet my purpose here is actually not advocacy for a particular system. In the first place, I do cover BSD, Solaris, and other FOSS systems also. Many of what will run on one runs on the other. In the second place, to tie my "loyalty" to Linux would be just as bad as to tie it to a proprietary system. No matter how well Linux does now, there's no saying that it couldn't be corrupted to something worse later. I examine Linux (and all FOSS) with the same critical eye I would proprietary software. I have used Linux for ten years and have it installed on four machines and have sampled dozens of distros; and even then, it's still on probation. To do otherwise would be to stop treating technology like technology and treat it like a religion.

My purpose here is only to empower my readers. Here, I say, you can do nifty things with your computer, too. Let me show you how. No, don't listen to the trolls telling you that you're too stupid, that it's too difficult, that it's not user-friendly enough. I'm showing you how. I serve up a side of commentary on geek culture and FOSS community, but that's just side commentary. My main message is that I got this far in life just by reading and figuring things out on my own, and you can too.

Because we need more people who can do that.

Have you noticed how much technology writing there is out there that revolves around insulting the blazes out of you, the readers? Every day it's "we need to dumb this or that down". Every day it's somebody shoving a new ideology down your throat. Or insulting your intelligence with another "think tank" study that "proves" some point that favors some commercial company who just happened to fund the study. I grind against that.

So, what's wrong with "advocates"?

When I think of "advocate", I think of 60's flower children singing protest songs on the sidewalk. To do such a thing for Linux, to me, is like funding a presidential campaign with lemonade stands and bake sales. It insults its cause by trivializing it. And that's the biggest insult of all.

Am I exaggerating about flower children? Not a whit. The subject of my last post was a loud protest at the Ken Starks cult and their endless mudslinging sermons about how they're the only true friends of Linux and everybody but them is an enemy. Well, just how bad is that delusion that they have? Here's a thread on LXer for comments appended to that original story. Give it a scan, if you can stand to.

The thread holds much flaming against the companies that actually build Linux, sell it installed on their computers, and run Linux-based businesses. IBM, HP, Dell, and so on. The rest of us are pretty jazzed to have them "on our side" (whoops, sides are for activists), I mean to have them putting Linux out there for the rest of the business world to benefit from. But in the Starks' cult, all companies are bad companies, except, of course, for Starks' own company, HeliOS Solutions. It's a company, it's a charity, it's a floor topping and a dessert wax!

Oh, the wrath poured onto any Linux business but HeliOS by the "Linux advocates"! Red Hat, Novell, even Slashdot, again, is savaged at the tip of Starks' pen, as collateral damage, I guess.

Hmmm, we've all seen those accusations against Linux users. Like this one at DaniWeb:

"The one thing I wish Linux didn't have is this rancid, religious, overzealous fanboys who give Linux a bad name. If you look at the Linux thought leaders, developers, and community leaders, they don't possess the same acrid attitudes that the congregation-at-large does. Linux is an Operating System. It is not a religion. Mac people used to act like that and it's not only unbecoming but embarrassing as well."

That we're zealots, that we're commies, that we're anti-business and unrealistic. From whence could such beliefs have been fed? From bearded hippies who stand up at the Linux Summit and interrupt business with their zany little protest, perhaps? Listen carefully when they do this: They do not identify themselves as HeliOS Solutions or the Ken Starks cult, but as "the Linux community".

Well, let me be the first to say: "Hey, assholes! I'm the Linux community too! And I think you need to take a long walk off a short pier!" If for no other reason than because you need a bath, yah grass-smoking, tambourine-banging hippies!

Here, take a long, hard look at what "Linux advocates" do:

• In that same LXer thread, user 'jdixon' expresses how difficult it is to fund both of (Helios) Ken Starks' projects, and asks which is the least important. He is told that "they're tied at the hip". It sounds expensive to be in the church of "Linux advocacy".
• In the Mandriva forums, Lindependence was being pumped up by the Helios cult, and, well, read the reaction. A forum moderator merely state that they're rubbed the wrong way by Helios' constant projects, another moderator mentions how Helios spams. Whoops, red alert! Here comes tracy_anne, registered cult member, to flame and harass and cuss and fuss. Thank you, tracy_anne. If we had any doubts about how "Linux advocates" are to behave, you've set the platinum standard!
• Ugh, devnet again! I hate to stir devnet up, because I don't like picking on the handicapped, but there was some "random" Linux observations, which brought me up. I posted a couple of passes there, kinda playful and not much purpose, saying (a) my, I seem to be on your mind a lot, and (b) after devnet sneered back (I think his face is frozen that way) that I was a “fake advocate versus real advocate”, I explained that I'm not a "Linux advocate".

That last example takes some explanation for why it's an example of the problems with "Linux advocacy". The devnet rhapsodizes:

"As for your impact, your dropped my name last July trying to lace me in again with Ken’s latest initiative…so I guess I owned you one with a name drop and association."

Hmmmm, last July? Ken Starks was doing Lindependence2008... I saw it going on but was busy keeping my mouth shut about it to see what happened... I go back over my July posts... nothing. When did I say that?

And then I remember those emails I was getting last summer (I mentioned them in my last post), from readers asking me why I wasn't covering the further doings of Helios and company like I did Tux500. Groan! OK, but sure enough, a few of them came in in July. Sure enough, I did respond to one of them mentioning devnet along with "the usual suspects" in the reply, where I explained that babysitting them wasn't my job, even if I volunteer for a season.

Um, could that be it? Either devnet or somebody else poses as a reader trying to feel me out on what I'm going to do about Lindependence before they turn on the spam machine shaking people down for money?

Well, don't be friggin' paranoid, Pete! Jeez, if you have to regard every correspondent with suspicion... and then I remember 'Anonymous' posting over at Linux Lock about "going undercover"... which I certainly never asked anyone to do. Well, since he's posting there saying he's turned coat, maybe he's now "undercover" for "the other side"? Because I don't see where I mentioned devnet and Lindependence in the same page in July 2008 except in private replies to emails from people who gave no indication that they were tied in with devnet or Ken Starks.

You see how stupid this "Linux advocacy" business is?

What, are we in a spy novel? Undercover! Yeah, I'm infiltrating the enemy camp! It's us against them! You're either a "fake advocate" or a "real advocate"! You're either a friend of Ken Starks (and one who donates some cash), or you're not a true friend of Linux!

Or maybe, if you're a "True Linux Advocate(TM)", you're actually a retarded money leech with no life.

That, finally and at last, is why I'm not a "Linux advocate".

Neither is Red Hat, Novell, IBM, HP, Dell, Google, or any other company. We're into Linux for the money, bub. Plain and simple! Even my own site ties into my own business, and I'm very frank about it.

Oh, by the way, make up your own minds who your friends are. You readers are big people who tie your own shoes; I'm sure you can figure it out on your own.

Now, I'll try to handle the comments on this one. We'll see some more flames from the cult of Ken Starks spewing their usual hisses and boos - I'm still deleting "TK" from my server, who night and day has sought to find his way around every IP block I put up, ever since last post when after three comments to have his say, I was done with him. Since devnet gets hearts in his pupils whenever I bring him up, I'm sure he'll be by. I wonder if Thomas Holbrook The Third (and 33 1/3rd) will pop by? Maybe we'll even hear from some of the macho men of Austin who gave Helios a dollar, who like to threaten me with aluminum bats and mangled English. Who knows? It's all great fun with the radical Islamic extremists of Linux!

I haven't paid enough attention to Carla Schroder lately. It is such a tragedy, because she's normally a smart, geeky writer who has published some real get-your-hands-dirty Linux-tinkering articles. I find myself admiring her when she posts a pithy HOWTO or examines a dark corner of the Linux internals not commonly explored. We need more of that.

And then just when I'm about to link to her, she publishes another pro-Ken-Starks article that's worthy of Big Brother's "Ministry of Truth". The message, which Ken Starks and his little cult of personality has been drumming for years now, is that Ken Starks is Your Only Friend.

Ken Starks of course "humbly" concurs. It doesn't matter who writes Linux, who provides tech support for Linux, who builds a computer with Linux built-in and sells it on the market, who donates non-programming support to Linux in the form of documentation, artwork, and server space, or who teaches the public how to actually use it. Ken Starks roars that he and he alone is the Alpha, Omega, Messiah, and Holy Ghost of Linux, and everybody who doesn't worship him is damned to hell.

Hey, did you catch the name of that blog of his? "Linux Lock". He's literally telling you he wants Linux locked up... for him only!

So Starks, who resembles the old televangelist Dr. Gene Scott in both appearance and motives, gets up at the Linux Summit and rants at the panel, in a video he posts as if it were something to be proud about. The panel rightly dismisses him with nervous giggles towards the lunatic who has invaded their business.

If Linux has bad P.R., thank Ken Starks. He says he speaks for you.

And otherwise intelligent people somehow seem to fall for him. In literature, we call this "Refuge in Audacity". You just show up, demand money, and keep screaming. Insist that you, and you alone, must be the public face of Linux and everybody owes you money for that. No matter how many times security picks you up and throws you out, occasionally some poor misguided outcast will hang onto you, and year by year, outrage by outrage you build a solid little band of disciples around you, each of whom become so deeply invested in you that they dare not disown you, no matter how much of a batshit fruitcake you turn out to be.

How do you tell a real friend? Real friends empower you. Ken Starks and his cult members take your power away.

• You're not free to make up your own mind with them. They tell you what to think.
• You're not free to act on your own with them. You have to submit your money to them and let them spend it for you.
• You're not free to learn with them. They'll tell you everything is too hard for you to understand, and that they have to dumb everything down and give you the special-needs version.
• You're not free to educate others. That gets you the hate-title of "elitist".

After the great Tux500 fiasco, if you Google it, you'll find that I'm the only one left on the web to tell the story of it, since the scammers buried their scam and moved on to the next scam. (But tux500.com is still viewable at the Internet Archive! Happy joy!)

I have since kept my promise about keeping my peace, leaving it to others to ferret out the scandals. Through Starks' subsequent Komputers4Kids and Lindependence2008 ventures, which have their own scandals attached, I have kept the mum word, even when emails came in asking why I was letting him get away with it.

Well, he's going to get away with it no matter what I blog, alright folks? These things happen in the world. Religious cults, belief in paranormal and occult practices, quack cures in medicine, bogus lotteries, political parties from Cloud Cuckoo-land - these have been with mankind since it all started, and it's going to keep going long after this generation passes away.

The only thing I can do, is point out occasionally that smart people know a crazy cultist when they see one. People like the corporate business people who build Linux and run the Linux Foundation. They know better. Do you?

I do. I run a business based on Linux. And when customers come to me saying:

"Are you tied up in that Lindependence2008 thing? Because somebody at this LinuxLock site brings you up as a possible supporter. We had to ban those guys from our site for violating our forum's terms of service. Is this what this Linux you use is about?" - actual quote from a client

... and then go to their site to see, yes indeed, that I was mentioned by name as somebody who would support their activities, then I know that I have been generous to a fault, merciful beyond all reason, and allowed the Cult Of Ken Starks to run on far too long a leash for far too long a time.

*Ahem* I'll take it back in now, if you don't mind.

"Alrighty then".

Anybody who owns a mobile device has had the experience, at least once, of accidentally dropping their smartphone or PDA in the can. It happens - it slips off your belt clip and falls out of a pocket, and 'bloop!', there goes another one.

That's why I was jolted upon watching this clip over at Wonkette. See, they're having a benefit to raise money for breast cancer on the Ellen Degeneres show - normal so far - so their idea was to put Julia Louis-Dreyfuss into a giant pink cage and have her dunked by Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden throwing softballs.

But it wasn't until the gal was dumped into the soup that I noticed the Windows Mobile ad. Because Microsoft, having failed to win hearts and minds with the drug-induced Seinfeld episodes (they were way too long to be mere commercials), figured that the next best thing was to buy ad space on the rim of something that reminds you of a potty. Stay classy, Microsoft!

Some afterthoughts:

(1) Too bad the Seinfeld deal went south, because I was *so* primed to write a parody ad titled "Look! Look! I can write inane nonsense too!" which would have had Jerry ironing Bill's boxers on the back of a live kiwi while Bill, next to him, smears playful mayonaise/ mustard/ pickle relish finger-paintings on the kitchen windows and they converse about how you can't find any good $85 dollar teaspoons at San Francisco raves any more, and then the Flying Fatman from the Dune movie erupts through the floor to ask if they have any azalea ink to cure his hemorrhoids.

But then my David Lynch poster on my wall scowled with disapproval, so I had to stop.

(2) Joe Biden. What a surprise, Joe! It took what, six shots to hit that button with a softball? We promise not to suggest any metaphors for your political skills from it. As it is, after your flunked solo bid for the Casa de Blanco, I was expecting you to provide the comic relief by revealing that you were John Bunnell, and then go back to hosting "World's Wildest Police Videos". So anything beyond that is a bonus buck.

Dear Santa/Fairy Godmother...

There's a number of new graphics applications that I've been searching all over for. They may or may not have been invented yet. So I'm posting this little list, to the purpose of either...

• discovering through some reader's comment that such a creation exists, with link and recommendation,
• inspiring some development team out there to pick up the idea for their next project,
• or finding out that if I'm ever to see such a program, it's up to widdle old me to create it.

#1 - An Isometric Image Editor

We're close already. Gimp has an isometric grid and snap-to-grid feature in the GFig plug-in, and it's also possible to render isometric perspective with POVRay and Blender. But what I'm actually after is a drag-n-drop block editor. The closest thing to what I have in mind is a Windows program named "AnkerCAD", uncovered over at Rea Maor's. I tried it out, but it behaves funky.

#2 - A combined POVRay/Flash Editor

As anybody who's followed my Flash explorations knows, I've frequently used pre-rendered ray-traced graphics in building Flash animations. My favorite POVRay front-end is KPOVModeler, which sadly looks like it's going to be abandoned in favor of the new K3D. But anyway, if we had something like KPOVModeler with a plug-in to automatically integrate a build-script for swfc, defining frames of movie-clips... I don't even know exactly how this would work, but with better integration between POVRay and SwfTools, it could save the step where you have to write your own custom-hacked Bash script to run the two together every time.

#3 - A MakeHuman Fork For Animals And Cartoons

MakeHuman, previously raved about here, here, and here, continues to be a source of delight for me. Now, if only we had it so easy to make animals, and make lower-polygon human models that could easily be converted into manga/anime Ω style models.

#4 - A Sims Clone

The whole family has gotten back into Maxis' "The Sims" games (on the only Windows box), except, as before, we don't care a whit about the actual game play. The fun of the game comes from subverting it, making and using custom-hacked objects, and letting your imagination run wild in making up whatever kind of game you want. A whole subculture of object modding has grown up around the Sims franchise. Now, really, it's time we had a whole open-source system which also - duh! - ran on Linux. One that breaks out of the narrow, confining game play of the Maxis game and just lets you have a complete open sandbox. True, we have Second Life, but it's too tied in with online play, and also it's commercialized to the hilt. Maybe a fork off of OpenSim for a small, casual desktop toy.

#5 - An ANSI-to-Unicode Converter and Unicode Graphics Editor

I'm talking, of course, of ANSI-character graphics like you used to see on Bulletin Board Systems. I've almost got a system worked out myself for converting ANSI graphics to Unicode - once you have a handle on DOS code page 437 and Unicode box-drawing and block elements, it would be simple to translate between them. Now get the colors right - ah! You'd have to come up with the closest match between how they displayed in a terminal and HTML hex color codes today. The main stumbling point is that I have no idea how to protect against server-scripting attacks if I put up a PHP program to do this with uploaded ANSI graphic files.

And that's what's going on in my dream-world!

Ω I've gotten quite into manga myself. I never used to be, but my gateway drug finally came along: Deathnote! God, I loved every issue, and devoured the series in a week-long marathon. What an idea, what characters, what story! And then since then I've been searching for another manga with the same flavor, and so far haven't found anything close. My manga tastes run to the exact opposite of Shonen, so DragonBall-Z and Bleach are out. Fullmetal Alchemist so far looks interesting.

What if manga swam back across the pond and culturally combined with independent underground comix?

I hear you inquire, "Wherefore, prithee proud blogger, doth thou make such claim?" Well, see Klein bottles are these mathematical objects that are really hard to grasp and explain. They make sense but don't seem like they do. Kind of like a Möbius strip, which is cool to write because it has a Heavy-Metal umlaut in it.

The economy is on my mind this week, for some screwy reason. The fact that Wall Street this week is melting away like Belloq's face after Indy told him not to look in the Ark is just a passing coincidence. It is also entirely incidental that house values in the USA are currently so low that burglars will break into your house just to leave you their house. And it's a mere whiff of a happenstance that the dollar is getting so weak that it doesn't even make a good snot-rag anymore. No, I go around randomly thinking about the economy all the time.

And thinking about the economy, I chanced upon the assertion that Linux is, in fact, developed by corporations. This time it's being said by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who has been a really nice guy lately so I'll link him the credit. So to which corporations do we owe our gratitude for Linux development? McDonalds and WalMart. No, no, wait, I misread that. To Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Intel, the Linux Foundation (which is a group comprised of a charter involving many companies, itself), Consultant, SGI, MIPS Technologies, Oracle, MontaVista, Google, and Linutronix, to name every corporation with more than a 1% share of the code.

In fact, just a little under 75% of Linux kernel development is corporate-sponsored. Somebody actually makes a paycheck off of it. In what appears to be complete defiance of the laws of capitalist economics, because then they turn around and just give the crazy thing away for free.

Most companies who pay to develop the Linux kernel don't even bother to reap the secondary rewards of good publicity. You don't see the Google homepage advertising this fact, every Intel commercial I've seen doesn't even mention Linux, and every HP ad I've seen shows Windows in the screenshot.

It's almost as if they were participating in a community project to benefit the world at large. At this point, somebody usually interjects, "That's communism! From each according to their ability to each according to their need.", and then does a little Marxist salute and smirks because they're so damn clever.

Yeah, it'd be tempting to say that. After all, communist models which falter in the real world tend to do very well in the virtual electronic world where a good may be reproduced indefinitely without ever running out. Electronic goods tend to be infinitely abundant. The Internet itself is kind of a warping of the ideas of economics, too. Where's the law of supply and demand when it comes to blog posts?

But still, why should these corporations to the grunt work? Because they get something from it. Their motives are, in fact, ruthlessly capitalistic. They reap a benefit that makes the investment a good return. Of course, Red Hat, Novell, and Oracle sell Linux distros and support themselves, so that's obvious from there. IBM sells Linux support, and so do several other companies on the list.

Then you get to Google. They actually run their services on Linux. So in a way, they're reaping direct rewards as well. Several of the other companies which develop Linux also depend on Linux either for their own systems, or as a platform upon which to market products and services. As IBM's senior vice president said, they're recouped their investment in software and system sales. The returns on investment take dozens of other, even more arcane, forms. For instance, one way to be sure your driver works on Linux is to write the dang module yourself.

What else, in classic economic teaching, could express such a model? Um... water utility? Your local water department operates as an allowed monopoly, by consensus of the fact that having seven sets of pipes coming out of each house would really ruin the curb appeal. But that's not a good model. Your neighborhood watch program is a volunteer effort to make your neighborhood safer, but that actually amounts to citizens forming their own anarchic system for self-protection in the face of perceived lack of police coverage. How about public libraries? Taxpayers are perhaps willing to pay for libraries because a better-educated public benefits us all?

That's the closest thing I've thought of to the free software model, but the truth really is that there is no perfect economic model for this. Most of what you'd read in an economics textbook was written before the Information Age. The closest model before that was writing and speech. Talk is cheap.

Code is cheap. But even in writing and speech, there is definitely a producer and a consumer. Those are the two sides of every known business model.

But Klein bottles and Motörhe - ah - Möbius strips only have one side. And that's what Linux, and other Free and Open Source Software products, are. We, the consumers are we, the producers. And we all own it, and we all make it, and we all use it, whether we know it or not.

Yep, more 1600x1200 wallpapers. Get 'em here.

I miss the days when I could just mindlessly slap something together. These days, every project I do has to be this boundary-pushing exploration into new territory, whether it's blogging, graphics, or Flash. It's the kind of period where I'm just determined that it's better to do nothing at all than to do something I've done before.

So this batch of wallpapers shows lots of experimentation. There's cellular automata...

Typography...

And this sketch-looking one...

This last (full-size here) was rendered with POVRay making 3D objects with black-and-white striped textures and some reflection, then running Gimp filters on it of the sort you would use to turn a photo into a sketch, including some warping so the lines aren't so straight. I don't know what kind of wallpaper it makes, but it is definitely my most successful attempt at creating 3D art with the effect of a hand-drawn sketch.

As always, CC-licensed, share 'em, trade 'em, collect the set. Scott Carpenter, fellow geek blogger, has recently had a little career boost when the phone company used one of his CC-licensed images on the cover of the new phone book. Maybe there will be hope for me yet, if and when I develop my own work further.