I had a good time last night, working in the Bridewell Theatre off Fleet Street. I was called in as a last minute Lighting Operator (well, called on Monday for a Wednesday performance is pretty last minute, but not as short notice as Upbeat music was a few weeks ago!). The role of LX Operator also included being the Sound Operator. Oh, and Stage Manager too. And if I’d been more girly, I’d have been doing the actress’ hair during the interval too, but thankfully I was spared that.

The play for which I was one-man-teching was Brimstone and Treacle, put on by 1066 Productions. It’s the first time that I’ve worked for a professional theatre company, and I’m glad to say that none of them twigged that I was an amateur techie until I enlightened them in the bar afterwards! Obviously I’m a well trained DramSoc techie ;-). It’s a great play, but if you go and see it, it’ll both lighten your wallet (hey, this isn’t a DramSoc production) and leave you feeling slightly disturbed.

Most importantly, I managed to be a “parachute techie”, and I didn’t screw it up. Nice.

I spent quite a few years feeling a bit uneasy about music and computers, aware (yet not really caring) that my huge music collection was, ummm, yeah. But I was so irritated by the music industry with their bogus “copy protected” CDs and their insane drivel about how much piracy was costing them (as if I would ever have been able to afford a 4000-song music collection by paying 15 quid for a CD when I’m only wanting one track from it) and all that kind of nonsense, so I was on the lookout for another option. Slightly over a year ago, I discovered an unusual music website, called Magnatune. It’s got a few great features, which are great for a variety of reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Too good to hide in the “elsewhere” list, here some important advice from the government. In addition to a pamplet being sent to every house in the country, it’s very important that you read the “Preparing for Emergencies” website. Solid advice for all, wouldn’t you agree CITIZEN?

Heh.

I only occaisionally read articles about computer viruses (and trojans and so on), since in my experience avoiding viruses is a solved problem. Yet it’s nice to see general awarness about viruses increasing - especially in mainstream news.

Once again, another virus (it doesn’t really matter which) has used security flaws in Microsoft Programs and Operating Systems to do some damage. Whilst the BBC has always taken care to mention the word “Microsoft” when describing which systems are affected, today is the first time that I have seen them mentioning the alternatives -

The worms affect Windows systems but not Linux or Apple Mac computers.

- albeit as the last paragraph of their article. It’s a start, but when such a disclaimer comes as the second or third sentence (preferably with “As usual”, “Once again”, or “We’re not surprised to note that” in front, I’ll be happy.

Folks, computers aren’t vulnerable to computer viruses. Email programs aren’t vulnerable to Email viruses. However, Microsoft Windows (of all varieties) is vulnerable to Windows viruses, Microsoft Internet Explorer is vulnerable to Internet Explorer exploits, and Microsoft Outlook is vulnerable to Outlook viruses (propagated via email). Linux, Mozilla and any email client you can name (that’s not Outlook) are not vulnerable to any of the above viruses.

Sure, other alternatives might be vulnerable to viruses written specifically to target them. But until that starts happening on a large scales, that possibility is only used to try and divert attention from Microsoft’s failings.

Following on from the last post, what is this Creative Commons malarky? At its heart, CC is a collection of well-presented licenses. These allow the copyright owners to decide whether to allow derivatives of the creative work, whether to let people use it commercially, and whether to require attribution when things get reused. (Well, nobody ever used the no-attribution licenses, so they were removed recently).

If you want to find out more about the licenses, you can have a look at the CC cartoons and animations, or even just fiddle with the license chooser.

The main thing that has made Creative Commons work where other attempts have quite made it are the “Human Readable” pages that copyright holders can link to - like this one. All legal documents are pretty turgid (lawyers have a vested interest in making sure nobody else can understand them), so these potted summary pages have inspired lots of people to use them. And I reckon that these, more than anything else, have made the whole thing work. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Anyway, too much focus on the licenses, and I’ll miss out on talking about the best bits - what people have been using the licenses for. I’ve been meaning to talk about these things for a while, but felt that I needed a bit of introduction to the topic first. And a new catagory, that I’m calling, for want of a better phrase, “Open Culture”. Until tomorrow (or maybe the next day), then…

Well, I’ve harped on about open standards and free software for years now, but I’ve realised that I don’t write very much about something just as important to me. I guess it’s because I’m so used to it, that I forget that some people won’t have even heard of it, never mind know its full worth.

First, an introduction. Boringly, it revolves around copyright.

Read the rest of this entry »