Monthly Archives: June 2004

More Public Domain Images and a Correction

Frog, colorizedJust another example of an image that I scanned from the Dover book and colorized. I kind of like it!

Now, the correction: in reviewing Fishman’s book on the Public Domain, I am reminded that the term “copyright free” is not synonymous with “public domain”. From Fishman, page 3/27,

The words “copyright free” are often used to describe works (particularly photos and clip-art) that are under copyright, copies of which are sold to the public for a set fee rather than under a royalty arrangement.

So it remains to be seen whether these images are in fact in the public domain. These old style woodcuts appear to be of a style which suggests they predate possible copyright protections, but I suppose it’s vaguely possible that they are not public domain.

Till then, enjoy the images under the appropriate use of their “license”. I’ll investigate more, and probably end up writing them to find out what they think their position is.

Addendum: I found this site on Copyright for Collage Artists, which contains good information which seems sound.

Public Domain Images

butterflyI was looking for some clip art that I could use on my website, so last time I was at the bookstore I acquired a copy of Dover’s Old Fashioned Animal Cuts, a book of copyright-free images ready to be scanned. It’s a fairly nice collection of hundreds of black and white images which are copyright free.

They could have just said “public domain”. After all, if a work is not protected by copyright or trademark, it is in the public domain. Curiously, Dover includes the following “license” in the front of this book.

This book belongs to the Dover Clip Art Series. You may use the designs and illustrations for graphics and crafts applications, free and without special permission, provided that you include no more than ten in the same publication or project. (For permission for additional use, please write to Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Streen, Mineola, N.Y. 11501.)

However, republication or reproductin of any illustration by any other graphic service whether it be in a book or in any other design resource is strictly prohibited.

FishWhat’s wrong with this? The fact that it is a complete fabrication. If the images themselves do not carry copyrights, they cannot place any restrictions on their use. That’s what public domain means. They can copyright the collection as a whole, keeping you from basically Xeroxing their collection (which is a creative work, requiring the acquisition of images and their arrangement in a catalog format), but they can’t keep you from, say, scanning them all and producing your own derivative work in the form of a catalog of your own.

I’m not trying to bust their chops. They produce a nice $6.95 book which is convenient and good to have, and frankly worth the pittance they charge. But for them to place restrictions on the use of their public domain collections is well beyond any rights they hold to the collection.

Caveat emptor: I’m not a lawyer, and cannot advise you on these, but you can go ahead and read up on the subject. I suggest Steven Fishman’s The Public Domain: How to Find Copyright-Free Writings, Music, Art and More.

Weekly Weigh In

Today’s weigh in saw me give back last week’s loss. Not too surprising given the fact that I have been eating a bit more. A company picnic full of yummy barbecue food probably didn’t help much, but there were plenty of other times when excessive snacking happened. Oh well, I shall try to do better next week.

Weight Loss Graph

An aside: Carmen and I got out of a movie late last night and felt like we needed some kind of dessert. Normally this means either air popped popcorn, watermelon or Skinny Cows, but we were out of all three. I stopped in at Albertson’s to restock.

I decided to give the CarbSmart Ice Cream Sandwiches a try, since they were on sale. Their numbers are 80 calories, 40 from fat, and 1g of dietary fiber. If you compare this to a mint Skinny Cow, you’ll find that the Skinny Cow has 120 calories, but only 20 due to fat and 2g of fiber. Both work out to around two points (the Carbsmart sandwhich has higher fat and lower fiber, which counts against it). So arguably, both are about the same, at least for those of us on the Weight Watchers diet. No reason to prefer one over the other, right?

Wrong. The thing is, the Carbsmart bar is a 2oz sandwhich which amounts to barely more than a mouthful (at least for someone with a big mouth like me). The Skinny Cow is a 4oz sandwhich, literally twice as big.

There you have it: Skinny Cows, just better.

Holy Crap! My scanner works!

coinsI have a Canon LIDE 20 scanner, a super cheap LED flatbed scanner. I figured there was no way that it would possibly be supported under Linux. After all, none of my other scanners ever was, largely because I am so cheap I never buy SCSI scanners. But remarkably, it does work, and right out of the box with Fedora Core 2. I typed scanimage -L and land of mercy, it found my scanner. Then a simple scanimage --resolution 300 --mode Gray | cjpeg > foo.jpg, and voila! It works! A bit of GIMP work, and you can get the image on the right.

I also scanned an image of an ordinary quarter as a test. At 600dpi, considerable detail, some of it nearly microscopic is clearly evident.

The Chronicles of Riddick

Ah, this time, a Saturday evening saw my wife and I attending a late showing of The Chronicles of Riddick, a sequel to Pitch Black, starring Vin Diesel as Riddick, an escaped convict with an uncanny ability to see in the dark and to kill.

I must admit, I wasn’t a huge fan of Pitch Black. It had some good points, and had a look which I found compelling, but ultimately I found it to be a bit predictable. You knew that the action would center around the escape, and that ultimately just about everyone would die. That’s what happens in this genre.

The Chronicles of Riddick suffers a bit from this basic flaw, but it is all-in-all a more well rounded story. It is a story with villains and heros, with battles and treachery, and lots and lots of really nice special effects. Riddick is being hunted by mercenaries, and traces the money back to Helios Prime, a planet which is about to be overrun by the Necromongers, a fierce race of conquerers who go from planet to planet, assimilating all those who will join them and then destroying the planet and all that remain. Aereon, a mysterious Elemental has summoned Riddick to battle against the Lord Marshal of the Necromongers, as prophecies have fortold.

So the story begins.

Overall, I found it beautfully rendered, exciting and well paced. It’s a classic summer action movie, perhaps a bit darker than some, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The look has some of what you might have expected from Dune, but delivers it with greater impact and panache. I don’t really think of Vin Diesel as a good actor, but he does have a certain rugged style and his delivery is dead on. Dame Judy Dench turns in a good appearance, but it’s over quickly and actually has very little to do with the plot. Alexa Davalos plays the grown up Jack from Pitch Black, people who watch the same programs as I do will recognize her as the electrical temptress Gwen Raiden on TV’s Angel. I immediately wondered if she was actually the same actress in Pitch Black (I might not have recognized her with a shaved head) but she was played by Rhiana Griffith.

I rate the movie as a good solid 8 out of 10. If you like action packed science fiction movies, or just good special effects and costuming, you’ll probably enjoy it too.

A TCP/IP Stack and Webserver in PHP

Sweet Zombie Turing! Adam Dunkels has written phpstack – A TCP/IP Stack and Webserver in PHP. Some people really do have too much free time on their hands.

Adam is also the author of the more useful lwip and uip, which are compact implementations of TCP/IP that you might actually want to use.

Writing software in odd languages isn’t exactly a new idea. Nanoweb is an http server in PHP. HTTPi is a webserver written in perl. PS-HTTPD is a webserver writen in PostScript.

CPU Evolution…

Over on linuxdevices.com, there’s interview with Glenn Henry, founder of Centaur Technology, the bright guys behind the C3 CPUs which are marketed by VIA. I’ve got a 1ghz Nehemiah running the webserver that you’re looking at this very moment. I saw this mentioned on Slashdot and on Dan Lyke’s flutterby!, and I thought that I’d comment.

Glenn Henry had an amazingly simple idea: that he could compete in the PC chip market not by making faster chips, but by making cheaper, cooler chips. It’s a good notion. After all, my webserver ran for years on an old 133Mhz P5. Given the relatively low volume, it was more than adequate. I’m typing this message from an 800mhz Celeron, which runs Fedora Core 2 very nicely. It’s far from clear that having a 3.2ghz P4 would significantly enhance my weblog-authoring experience, or the experience of my readers.

What does enhance my weblog-authoring experience is quiet. My webserver runs with fairly aggressive power management. If people don’t access my site for some small number of minutes, disks spin down and the machine goes into an idle mode. Right now, the server is loafing along at a load of 0.02. It’s quiet and cool and energy efficient. I can leave it on all day, something I really wouldn’t want to do with todays power hungry CPUs and GPUs.

The other cool thing is that VIA is making a wide variety of small boards (Mini-ITX and soon Nano-ITX) that are full PC computers, but which run much cooler. Their 1ghz machines loaf along at under 5 watts. They can be passively cooled, which eliminates fans. That makes them desireable for home theater applications, for thin clients and just for machines that run quieter than your average PC. I’m almost more interested in this region of the CPU world than I am in additional speed enhancements (although some hardware enhancements for MPEG-4 encoding/decoding might be useful).

Centaur Technology also recognized an interesting economy of scale: that making a chip which runs 80% as fast as Intel or AMD didn’t cost 80% of what Intel and AMD spent to make their chips. The last tweaks of performance come at a great deal of design cost and die space. By accepting lower performance, they are able to design chips more quickly and with vastly smaller dies and correspondingly smaller costs. This is the kind of “work smarter, not harder” mentality that I wish were more prevalent in business.

The race doesn’t always go to the fastest. Intel and AMD can continue to try to put out muscle cars, but the market is going toward cheaper, more energy efficient technologies. VIA has placed themselves admirably to put x86 chips in all sorts of places that Intel and AMD have overlooked. I think they will do just fine.

Trilobite Fun

TrilobiteI have this old trilobite fossil that I bought from the Discovery Store. I find it kind of neat to have a specimen from 530 million years ago sitting on my desk. I made this picture by plopping the fossil onto the flatbed scanner at work and just scanning it at 300dpi. The original scan was a 2.8megabyte TIFF file, which I processed a bit with GIMP to form the image on the right. Using scanners to make pictures of shallow objects is an idea I’ve talked about before, but this was a nice application.

At home I have a Canon LIDE 20 scanner, which uses an LED light source, but it really doesn’t make very nice pictures (they get fuzzy quickly as the depth falls away from the bed of the scanner), but it was super cheap. It’s okay for doing coins, but pictures of things with deeper focus is not really satisfactory. Try scanning objects on your own scanners and see how they turn out.

Baseball Yesterday

After the Athletics previous road trip, I felt I had plenty to be worried about. The A’s hitting (especially their ability to hit with men in scoring position) was so anemic that I felt that even if Hudson, Mulder and Zito turned in good performances, the A’s could still pull out a defeat by simply failing to score those who got on base.

Ah, what a difference a couple of weeks can make in this crazy game called baseball.

Last night, I witnessed what can only be described as a meltdown. I’d been hearing alot about the Reds and their unexpected position atop the NL Central leader board. Griffey came into town with 498 homeruns, and since I had tickets for game 3, I felt like there was a remote possibility that I could see some small bit of baseball history. What I got was meltdown of incredible proportion.

In the three game series, Oakland outscored the Reds 40 to 16. The Reds starting pitching for the three games had a combined ERA of 18.9. Last nights game was a phenomenal ass-whooping, where Acevedo seemed literally to be defenseless on the mound as a veritable cavalcade of A’s reached base again and again. Brief worried gasps where heard when Cincinatti scored 5 times in the sixth and three more times in the 7th against Harden and Ducsherer respectively, but the A’s bats weren’t finished, and they scored another six runs in the 7th to put the game beyond any reasonable doubt.

I’m not sure what got Cincinatti to the top of their division, but they better order a refill.

Best part of the game: Damian Miller’s grand slam to make it 8-0, and Eric Byrnes pinch running appearance, where he immediately steals second (a perfect 9 for 9 on the year) and then scores on a base hit. Here’s the game recap.

The Fun of Radio

Mighty MiteI admit it, I have a ham radio license. I’m KF6KYI, a lowly Tech licensee. I went through a brief phase where I learned alot about radio, but then it kind of fell off for me as I realized that few people were interested in doing the kinds of work with radio that I was. But I did become interested in the world of QRP, or low power operation. What’s cool about low power operation is that many people build their own rigs, and often very inexpensively. The idea of building a $10 transceiver and using it to talk to someone in the neighboring states is interesting to me, and no page that I’ve ever read was more in touch with this notion than HOMEBREW QRP IS GUD 4 UHOMEBEW QRP IS GUD 4 U, now maintained by WB5UDE. Despite the atrocious use of abbreviations, the author shows just how simple it is to assemble a working ham radio station from scratch. Applause!

The schematic on the right is a 500mw transmitter. It’s called the Michigan Mighty Mite, and has a single transistor which you can probably buy for a buck at Radio Shack. It’s amazing what you can do with very little equipment/money/know how.

Somewhere in my workshop I’ve got a kit for the PSK-80 Warbler, which is another super cheap kit ($45), but in line with my technical interests. It uses the super-nifty-keen PSK31 modulation technique, which is a highly noise resistant digital mode. You plug this little transciever onto your laptop and you can type interactively to other PSK31 users. I’ll have to struggle through the Morse exam sometime so I can give this a try.

I was also trying to find my notes of Lowfer or Low Frequency Part 15 broadcasting. Perhaps I’ll give that a try sometime soon.

Ars Technica: Small Form Factor Guide — June 2004

Small Form FactorsI’m tired of machines taking up several cubic feet of my under desk space, so the recent trend towards smaller machines suits me fine. I made an Spacewalker SV24 system a couple of years ago, but it is fairly long in the tooth, so I was glad to see Ars Technica: Small Form Factor Guide, a guide to building small form factor systems. Their Budget Box would make a respectable web server and could even play a few games.

Interesting FPGA Board…

Dan Lyke was musing about learning about FPGA technology on flutterby, which is a topic which has long been in the back of my mind for future projects. I rescanned the list of links I created on FPGAs a while ago, and found that Digilent has a new Pegasus FPGA board which looks promising. It uses their 50K gate Spartan 2, and includes both video and PS-2 ports and sells for a trivial $89, quantity one.

You can also look at FPGA CPU News (infrequently updated), Jan Gray’s page, or opencores.org.

Time keeps on slippin…

Tom Van Baak has a fascinating obsession with timekeeping. His website, www.leapsecond.com, has a great deal of information regarding timekeeping and his vast collection of odd and accurate timekeeping devices. He even wrote a nice paper which details the state of the art in amateur timekeeping. The short of it: amateurs can achieve ridiculous accuracy for fairly cheap amounts of money.

Oh, and he took some photos of the Venus transit too.