The World of Stuff .com

The SVG problem

I’ve been going out with my friends so much lately that any interesting things I might have had to say are now so commonplace that I can express them in pithy statements: Played baseball. Went to Outback Steakhouse. Went bowling. That was yesterday. Tonight, though, we hope to go to Miami for wild times. It’ll be a night to remember… or to forget. I wonder which one!

The other day, I woke up with a song in my head. It was very clear, as if I’d just heard it, but I couldn’t remember where I had or who it was by. I tried Googling the lyrics, but I got very few results. Then I remembered that it was a song I had recently downloaded on Jamendo. Lately, I’ve been browsing Jamendo, a community where musicians provide their Creative Commons licensed music for free download, and I’ve found some cool stuff. Here are some of my latest Jamendo picks:

• The Wavers EP by The Wavers. Four surf rock tracks that are clean, snappy, and well produced. I don’t know how you couldn’t like this stuff.
• The Great Pharaos by The Pharaos. Some more surf rock. This one’s in mono, so it’s more authentic? Worth it just for “Hava Nagilah.” Insert surfing reference and Yiddish word here!
• Here Comes Plasma Raygun! by Plasma Raygun. They’re a bunch of kids making loud sounds in a garage. Punk rock in its purest form. “I Love Her So” is my favorite track.
• Your Reality by STEEP. Is it pop? Rock? Probably both. It’s indie, but not obnoxiously so. I thought I’ve heard some punk or metal leanings in there too. “Fly with Me” is the song I had in my head when I woke up. “Like This” is also really catchy.

Here are all of my favorite albums on Jamendo.

Here’s a musing and observation for you: there are a lot of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) images on Wikipedia. Unlike traditional images, which are defined pixel by pixel, vector images are defined in terms of the lines and shapes that make them up. As such, you can scale them to enormous sizes without a loss of quality; no matter how big, a line still points in this direction and continues for that percentage of the image’s length. This is great for images of flags, little graphics of checks and X’s, and other things.

But it’s slightly worrying that people are vectorizing company logos that are supposed to be displayed only at low resolution for copyright and trademark reasons. Here’s just one example. How can an SVG be a low resolution image when you can make it infinitely high resolution? Picking a random company, I see that Exxon’s logo is an SVG that is nominally 200 x 120 pixels, yet in the article, the logo is crystal clear at 250 x 150 pixels. If these logos are only supposed to be rendered at low resolution, why don’t we just make them regular images again?

Yet another reason to use free software: Apple’s iPhone apparently has a “kill switch” that might disable the use of applications that Apple has not authorized. Nobody really knows except Apple, but the company does tell you what software you can and can’t run on your iPhone. Free software, on the other hand, is about being in full control of your computer.

Oops. The US Postal Service has issued a stamp showing the American flag with too many stripes.

This is actually a featured article on Wikipedia: “The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.”