ig·no·rance
(n.) The condition of being uneducated, unaware, or uninformed.

planet.gnome.org (or Pogo as I will be referring to it as in an attempt to make it stick (teehee) and its a much cuter and easier to pronounce name than pgo or p.g.o or whathaveyou) has other interesting problems. I personally don’t care about who gets added to the planet at all, people say I should be there but I don’t want to be.

*I ALSO DON’T WANT TO BE ON Planet FIDO (my cute name for freedesktop.org come on people keep up here) IF YOU’RE READING THIS DANIEL!*

Anyway, man of the moment, Mr Rodney “Dobey” Dawes complained that his copyright was being infringed by his blog being aggregated there: “Since the planet software intentionally violates my copyright and freedom of speech by filtering content.” We’ll ignore the freedom of speech issue giving Rodney the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t really mean that.

He also created a wiki page to track issues with Pogo so that “we can catalogue  requests and track them more easily,(sic) rather than relying on Jeff’s personal mail, (sic) which he obviousy has problems replying to.”

Now, violation of copyright is a serious issue and so it was duly added to the wiki page so that we could track the issue along with other important issues like changing some icon to a different one, yaknow the important earth shattering maintainship stuff. But, it seems that although Rodney is happy to complain and rant about this issue, claiming, like Chicken Licken that the sky is falling on the idea “a sane web”, he doesn’t want to track this issue, reverting all attempts to add it and ignores all attempts to discuss it (I’ll not go into the threats of physical violence made because I don’t believe they were serious and I’m not too worried about Rodney trying to kick me in the groin but he can always join the queue if he wants behind the KDE guy who’s “stalking” me and the GPSD guys who’re pissed off with me too (and they may have guns)) Personally I think that allegations of copyright violation is far more serious than some French guy not having his blog added to Pogo.

There is a point to this though so bare with me. As I said above I don’t care who is on Pogo. I don’t care if Rodney’s blog is there or not. If it is then I’ll read it if I think its interesting or I’ll ignore it if I think that he’s talking shite. But you have to wonder about someone’s motivations if on one hand they’re screaming blue murder about copyright and free speech violations, but on the other they don’t want to do anything to stop these violations. People need to look carefully when choosing spokesmen for their cause…

Incidently, and this may shock some, I agree with Rodney on the copyright violations and think that the Planet concept has the potential to be a legal minefield. How do you get around having no-deriv licensed blogs on a Planet, which is clearly creating a derivative? And how do you have a share-alike blog aggregated with a more restrictive licensed blog? And in the case of Rodney’s blog there is no license which would mean that doing anything with his blog feed is in violation of his copyright.

Anyway enough of this frivolity can OSNews and ITWire write an article on me now please? I want my cheque of internet money!

I’d like to formally and public announce before anyone else does that Iain Holmes is a poisonous person. In his 30 miserable godforsaken years  on this planet he has failed to live up to many of his promises and claims. In fact, most of them. Nearly all of them. He clearly cannot be trusted at all and you should not rely on him to do anything. At all. Just look at how often he tells people demanding features on metacity’s compositor. Fucking poisonous asshole. If we all shun him then maybe he’ll stop. Its the only way people learn.

““Motorists are being treated like they’ve committed murder every time they get in their car. It’s disgusting.” – Hugh Bladen (The Association of British Drivers) on parking meter charges like £3 for 5 hours in today’s Express. He truely knows what its like to be a convicted murderer.

Meanwhile celebrity chef Brian Turner says, “I believe if we stop celebrating St George’s Day and all that is great about our country, we will lose our distinctive identity in Europe.” Brian’s just annoyed we get St Paddy’s day of for a big pissup.

I *AM* Luis Villa

And you can be too in 5 easy steps

1. print out image from http://tieguy.org/blog/2008/04/16/new-headshot/
2. Buy webcam
3. Install Cheese
4. Think lawyery thoughts
5. Click Take Photobutton!

After last night’s rant I thought I should say something positive about the music industry.

But I can’t, so I’ll just link to my band’s website and let people download our demo. Its free.

http://www.29sfellshadow.com

Radiohead have released a new single: Nude.

They’ve split it up into “stems” and are asking people to remix it.

That sounds nice. Oh, but you have to pay for each stem (there’s 5: Bass, guitar, vocals, strings/FX and drums).

And “Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway will be registered and credited as the sole writers”?

Seriously, this is wrong on so many levels. Trent Reznor releases a 38track album under Creative Commons and encourages people to remix it. Radiohead release a 10 track collection of what feels like unfinished stuff they’ve had kicking around the studio for a few years (Nude for example has been doing the rounds on bootlegs for over a decade now), allow people to download it for as much as they want as a gimic to up their hand in contract negotiations before removing it for download and releasing it on CD…and now they have the gall to make us pay to give them content?

FUCK YOU RADIOHEAD! Seriously, this is the final straw. I endured a couple of mediocre albums, concert prices jumping for no apparent reason (the show is essentially the same as it was when I saw them in 1997 (twice), 2000, 2001 and 2006 but the ticket prices have gone up to over 4 times the price), but no more. Radiohead have got their last penny from me (and I’ve spent a lot on them over the years)

As a parting gift, I made them a remix: http://www.radioheadremix.com/remix/?id=165. It won’t be there very long, it violates section 7 of the terms and conditions, but it made me feel better. Maybe you can go and vote on it if you’re pissed off like me.

(Edit: Yup, its gone…Well, it had 53 votes before it was removed.)

Due to popular demand I’ve released version 0.6 of Gypsy, my GPS multiplexing daemon.

This is also the first release that is hosted at freedesktop.org, so my blog finally has a reason to be on planet-fido other than Daniel Stone added it one night while drunk.

The important info:

•  Website: http://gypsy.freedesktop.org
• Releases: http://gypsy.freedesktop.org/gypsy-releases
• Source repo: git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/gypsy
• Source browser: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gypsy/

And because some people complained after the last release that I was being “sneaky and under-handed” by not mentioning why I think Gypsy is better than its competitor, I’ve written a page listing the design flaws that I’ve come across and how Gypsy solves them: http://gypsy.freedesktop.org/why-not-gpsd.html.

I like comicstrips. I grew up on Garfield (when it was still funny and fresh) and Charlie Brown, Bill Watterson is a personal hero of mine and I wish I had the guts to stand up for what I believe in like he does. Comic strips are a very maligned artform, capable of being incredibly meaningful while at the same time making us smile and sometimes even roll on the floor in laughter. Unfortunatly there are a lot of bad comic strips out there as well – The Comicstrip doctor dealt with many of the classics before flames and apathy set in, the Comics Curmudgeon has taken over brilliantly.

Recently OSNews has started up its own comic strip, cos y’know its a modern day newspaper or something, and really I felt I had to say something about it because it is so utterly terrible that it is hurting a medium that I enjoy so much. This strip is called Focus Shift, or as I’m now going to call it “Fuck it’s shit”. So what are my problems with it? Its not just that its terribly drawn (I’m hardly the next Michelangelo myself really). Its not even that its just completely unfunny. No, my biggest problem is that it is so unfeeling and so clinically sterile that its mere existance has started to offend me.

What am I talking about? Well, if OSNews had a boardroom and editorial meetings to decide content, I think the meeting where Fuck It’s Shit was sanctioned would have gone something like this:

- You know, I’ve noticed that a lot of geeks like this XKCD comic
- Yeah…
- Can we find someone to copy it for us?
- OK, it should be easy, it is only stick figures after all, but sometimes its a bit…rude
- Right, so we’ll take out that swearing and the sex references. Leave in the love stuff, that’s quite cute
- Oh yes, that is always nice, but sometimes I find the jokes are a bit too … intellectual? If we can make it simpler, we’ll get a larger target audience. Leave out the quantum physics references.
- Oh, and its a bit weird too sometimes, we’ll fix that.

However I highly doubt OSNews is that professional, so I imagine the concept was more that Thom Holwerda was reading XKCD and decided that it would fit that awkward hole in OSNews’ front page, and it’d be easy to recreate, after all, its just a single joke with simple drawings, it can’t be that hard, can it?

Fuck It’s Shit has terrible artwork, its terrible artwork that’s trying to be acceptable, but it fails. On the other hand, XKCD’s are is simple because that is all it requires. Randal (I think thats his name, I’m really sorry if it isn’t, but for the purposes of this rant it is now, so there…) Munroe has shown in some of the earlier XKCD strips how good his artwork can be if he wants it to be (And to be honest, I long for more of his landscape images).

XKCD’s humour is high brow with low brow twists. I don’t find them all funny, I don’t even get some of them, but I always appreciate the thought that went into creating it. Fuck It’s Shit is tired old cliches and non-jokes (cf. Handwriting from 17th Feb).

When you read XKCD you get the feeling that Randal draws it because he loves to draw, because he wants to draw, because he needs to draw it. That passion is conveyed in the artwork and the detail and the jokes. There is a sense that he took time and effort over each strip, time to get everything right. Looking at Fuck It’s Shit the only sense is that it was done as quickly and as effortlessly as possible (cf. http://osnews.com/thread?301270 where Thom explains why he’s switched to a computer font for the text…)

When XKCD does a comic on love, it feels heartfelt, natural and quite sweet. When FIS does if (e.g. Insecurity – 11th March) it feels tacky, forced and slightly embarassing.

Finally, FIS (sorry, I can’t be bothered typing it all out anymore) feels sterile. Like a fast food chain selling “home made apple pie”, it kinda looks like the apple pie your grandmother would make, but you know that it wasn’t made out of a love of making apple pie, it was made because there is a perceived market for apple pie or the boy band who decide to do a rocksong, cos thats what the kids are buying these days…FIS feels like cynical attempt to attract some sort of cult following to their news site but like the boyband trying some rock numbers, its a sanitised, clean version, a safe version, a boring bland version…would FIS dare to do something like the fantastic http://xkcd.com/137/ ? I’d doubt it…but once you start thinking about what is acceptable to your audience your work ceases to be art, and is merely nothing more than a product. XKCD is art, FIS is a product. And it is a bad one that needs to be discontinued.

(This image was meant to have an XKCD style tooltip reading ‘And yes, I’m aware that this ‘joke’ has the same conceptual problems as the original on which it is based’ but it appears that Wordpress strips it from the img tag. Boo hiss!)

(And for what its worth, I’m not a massive fan of XKCD, I read it maybe once every couple of months, I’m only using it to compare Fuck It’s Shit with because of how hard Fuck It’s Shit is trying to be XKCD)

What he said