Category - Stuff

It's important to back up your data. It's also important to make sure that your backup works. Otherwise, there's no point to having it. Case in point: I got an external hard drive last year, and I used it to back up my data every week until about a month ago, when it stopped working. Since you I can't take it apart without voiding the warranty, I have decided to have the hard drive replaced. This entails mailing it back to the manufacturing company, who will send me a new one and pay me back for the shipping.

In a way, this wasn't a big loss for me. I don't keep anything extra special on that drive... if by "extra special" you mean "things I don't already have on my computer." The downside here is that the opposite is true. Copies of the things I do already have on my computer are on there: my e-mails, snapshots, demo recordings, chat logs, Internet bookmarks, home movies, books, legally downloaded music, programming projects... everything. Luckily, it's all safe and sound right here on the laptop. But the point is, somebody somewhere is going to potentially have a copy of it. And that's not cool.

I foresaw the possibility of losing the data on the drive, but I didn't think I'd have warranty service, which would expose my valuable data to theft, copying, or mockery by employees of the company. I wouldn't even know the thing had a warranty if I hadn't seen the words "One Year Warranty" printed in eensy letters on one side of the box. I'll have to encrypt the contents of the drive next time, perhaps with something like TrueCrypt, maybe. (Then, if I ever had to send it back to the manufacturer again, they'd be all, "No wonder this thing didn't work... the contents of the drive are indistinguishable from random data!" Encryption pwns.)

Last night, as I was trying to go to sleep, I was thinking about things. I was thinking about how I've been home from college for over a month now. I haven't gotten a job. I haven't gotten behind the wheel of a car. And I haven't really talked to anybody. Uh, I haven't really talked to anybody. I mean... well, hold on.

I was thinking about those things. They sound pretty worrying. But they had only just arrived in my mind. And I wasn't terribly bothered by them. I was happy. I was happy not having to worry about anything. I've had a stressful eight months, and it's been nice to have a peaceful month to break things up. I look forward to a few more.

Here at home, I don't have to worry about exams or getting to class on time or scheduling visits to the chiropractor. I don't have to worry about where I should spend my money on food or how long it would to take to walk to the grocery store. What's more, I am not worrying about girls. I bombed spectacularly this year. I probably shouldn't wallow in my past failures as much as I do, but I just have to lay these out for consideration: one two three four five non-dates. FIVE.

The conclusion is clear. Dating: I'm doing it wrong. With each failed attempt, I learn a little more about what I did wrong and what I should do the next time. But seriously. Counting high school, this makes seven dates I haven't been on, and seven girlfriends I could have had. WTF? It seems that the only way to get out of this mess (and believe me, it's not a self-esteem booster) is to undergo some drastic change... like, for example, literally becoming someone else. Can they do that with today's technology?

Oh yeah, uh, anyway, it is really great that I am here by myself.

Four years ago, I took the Yankee or Dixie Quiz to see whether my speaking style was more Northern or Southern. Though I didn't specify my exact score, I recall that it was between 47 and 49%, barely on the Yankee side of things. I just took the quiz again the other day, and my score is now 63%, firmly in the Southern camp, which I find rather odd because there's not a lot of Southern cultural influence here in South Florida. Recently, I've started to pronounce aunt as "ahnt" rather than "ant" and route as "raut" rather than "root." The quiz says that my new pronunciations are favored in the North. I don't know why I changed, but I think it was a subconscious move to avoid using confusing homophones. Apparently I'm a closet homophonophobe.

This is pretty cool: it's an interactive panorama from a hot-air balloon. It's like those crazy QuickTime ones that were popular a few years back, but this one is in Flash, so it will probably work for most people.

Another one from CollegeHumor: If you have trouble talking about Lost, maybe Losticil is right for you. (This is probably funnier for those of you who watch the show.)

You wouldn't write sensitive personal information on a postcard, so why would you do it in an e-mail? When you send an e-mail, it travels through various servers before reaching its destination. Anyone who has access to the e-mail servers can read the e-mail that you send. It could be an employee of the company operating the server, someone who has broken into the server, or a law enforcement agency. You probably don't want people reading your e-mail in the same way that you wouldn't want them listening to your phone calls, opening your letters, or watching you go about your business in your home.

So, if you value your right to privacy, what can you do about your e-mail? The safest thing to do (short of not e-mailing at all) is encrypting your e-mail. This makes it virtually impossible for anyone but the intended recipient to read it. In the same way that you wouldn't submit your credit card information to a web site without a secure HTTP connection, you shouldn't be content to send private e-mails through the open air, so to speak. Now, if you're like me, maybe you've considered using e-mail encryption but have written it off as too much of a hassle for a security method that no one uses. But plenty of people do use it, and it's pretty simple. So I'm going to explain it for you.

First, some terms. By far, the most common encryption standard for e-mail is OpenPGP, which I'll just refer to as PGP since I'm lazy. The PGP standard utilizes public-key cryptography. With public-key cryptography, you have two sequences of alphanumeric characters that are called "keys": a private key and a public key. As the names imply, the public key should be made public so that anyone can encrypt a message to you. The private key should always be kept a secret because it allows you to decrypt messages that are sent to you.

So, when I want to send an encrypted e-mail to my friend Luke, I look for his public key. I might find it on an Internet key server that has a searchable database of people's public keys, or he might have it posted on his own web site, or I might receive it from him in person. Maybe he'll just e-mail it to me. Once I have his key, I use it to encrypt a message to him. If some baddies intercept it along the way, it'll be unintelligible; they'll just see garbled mess of characters where the body of the message should be. When Luke gets it, he'll be able to decrypt the message with his private key. Then, when he sends me a message, he'll encrypt it with my public key, and I'll decrypt it with my private key. Now that we have each other's public keys saved, so we can send each other encrypted e-mails in a flash. (In each case, our e-mail programs handle the actual mathematics of encryption and decryption. We don't literally have to do it ourselves!)

PGP can also be used to sign e-mails. In real life, when you write your signature on something, it implies your authorship or approval of whatever you're signing. But that's not always true. Someone could ask you to sign a blank sheet of paper and then type an angry letter on it and mail it to your grandmother. When you sign an e-mail with your secret PGP key, it ensures that you wrote the message. And unlike an ink signature, your digital PGP signature reflects what you actually wrote. If you sign an e-mail saying "Hello, Luke!", the signature will indicate that you (and not anyone else) wrote the words "Hello, Luke!" (and nothing else). But if a bad guy intercepts the e-mail and changes it to say "Hello, Puke!" before passing it on, he won't be able to update the signature because only you have the secret key that can be used to properly sign the message. So, when Luke gets an e-mail from you calling him Puke, his e-mail program will show that the signature is bad and that your message was probably tampered with. (Caveat: the bad guy could just remove the signature entirely if the message isn't encrypted. But if you make a habit of at least signing your e-mails, this should come across to your recipient as unusual.)

Incidentally, although PGP is mainly used for e-mail, it can be used to encrypt or sign any file. This could be handy, for example, if you have to store private files on a remote server or an external hard drive. You can encrypt files the with your own public key and decrypt them with your private key later.

The encryption methods that PGP uses are considered secure. Basically, all encryption is breakable, but "secure" encryption requires infeasible amounts of time or computing power to crack. There is no known way to crack PGP's encryption methods other than to use "brute force," which means trying every possible key, a process which could take massive amounts of computing power. For example, my encryption key is 4,096 bits long, which means it's one of 2⁴⁰⁹⁶ possible keys. How many is that? Let's just say I am surprised that my computer's calculator could handle it. It's more than 10¹²³³, or 1 with 1,233 zeroes, a number that defies comprehension. There probably isn't that many of any physical thing in the universe. If a computer could try 1,000,000 keys per second, it could take as long as 3.31 × 10¹²¹⁹ years to find the right key. If you had 500,000 such computers and you found the right key after trying only 0.00001% of all possible keys, it would still take them 6.62 × 10¹²⁰⁶ years. The universe, by comparison, is 13.7 × 10⁹ years old. I'm not even sure if my math is right, but the point is that your key would have to be guessed, and that's an extremely difficult operation.

Still, though, I have my PGP key set to expire; that means that people should not use it to encrypt e-mails to me after a certain date. (I've chosen for my key to be valid for five years.) I believe this is important because the encryption algorithms that my key uses may eventually be cracked so that the right key can be found relatively quickly without resorting to brute force. I certainly wouldn't want the security of all of my e-mail to be compromised if that happens. And while I've chosen the greatest key length that my PGP software currently supports, it may allow for larger keys in the future.

That's all I have to say about PGP itself. Now it's time to make some recommendations. The best PGP software is probably GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) because it's free as in price and free as in freedom. It's available for Mac OS X and Windows. If you're using Linux, you probably already have it. You'll also need a tool to integrate GnuPG with your e-mail client or web browser. If you use Mozilla Thunderbird for your e-mail, I recommend the Enigmail extension, which is what I use. If you use web-based e-mail with the Mozilla Firefox browser, try FireGPG; it integrates especially well with Gmail, but you can use it to encrypt or decrypt the contents of any text box.

Whether I've converted you just now or you're a longtime PGP user, I encourage you to send me a signed and encrypted e-mail. I have a copy of my public key on this site and on keyservers such as this one. The version on this site is what I got when I exported the key from Enigmail, and the version on the keyservers is what Enigmail sent to them. For reasons I can't understand, they appear to be slightly different, but they are actually the same key. I think that's normal. You can verify that both copies of the key work, and that the key applies to both my personal and school e-mail addresses. You can also verify that the key's ID is 0xD90D8E6A, that its fingerprint is 1639 9F9E 404D 26D3 EC1C 5768 A3DC A43B D90D 8E6A, and that it expires on June 1, 2013. So shoot me an e-mail (or two) and let's get encryptin'!

And now, the word of the day: bioluminescence.

In Russia, cashiers rip your receipt before they give it to you. Why? It's just an old habit.

Here's a clever way to present a poem: One Day Poem Pavilion (Flash video).

Last weekend, when I was at my grandmother's house, she gave me a coin that she'd found. It's from Hanover, and it's dated 1841, before the German unification. It says "ERNST AUGUST V.G. G. KOENIG VON HANNOVER" on the front (along with a portrait of someone who is probably Ernst), and on the back is the coat of arms of the House of Hanover, which will be familiar to anyone who is familiar with the British royal family's coat of arms (they're closely related, you know). The back says "EIN THALER" and "XIV EINE F.M.," and it's dated 1841. Around the edge of the coin is inscribed "NEC ASPERA TERRENT," which is apparently Latin for "We're not afraid of bad stuff" (roughly speaking).

I'd post pictures, but I can't get very good ones. I have basically described it for you anyway, so a picture would be overkill. So, other than that, the only question that remains is how much the coin might be worth. The condition has a lot to do with it. My experience with collecting coins tells me that this one would be graded as "Good," which, of course, is the worst possible grade. As such, it's probably not collectible except for the precious metal content. (I think it's silver.) I happened to find on the Intertubes that the coin auction house Bowers and Merena is auctioning an identical coin in uncirculated (MS-64) condition. They're valuing it between US$400 and $600. The only difference besides the condition is that that coin has an "A" mint mark, whereas mine doesn't (unless it has worn away).

On Tuesday, I went back to Pompano to say hi to teachers and friends. I was there with my sister and my friend Justin. It was my third trip back since graduating last year. Since the Class of '08 had already graduated, they weren't there, but I had some '09 friends to catch up with. My friend Andrew happened to be visiting at the same time; he had just gotten back from his first year at Cornell. Plus, I got to greet some teachers I didn't get to check up on the first two times I went back.

While we were talking to Mr. Chandler, the freshman English teacher, my sister brought up The World of Stuff, and Mr. Chandler tried to go to it. The school's filtering software had blocked it. Reason: porn? Well, whatever. My guess is that after many of the teachers and administrators found out about it last year, they realized that maybe people were spending a little too much time reading it? Or something? Oh well. It's flattering that they'd care enough to block it. I'm just glad they didn't do it while I was still a student there; otherwise, I'd never be able to blog from school like I did several times.

On Wednesday, I went to the Rapids Water Park in West Palm Beach with Mark, TJ (not that TJ), Joe, Matt, and Mark's girlfriend whose name I am going to spell Wai. I think Mark wanted to go because (a) it's the summer and (b) he was going to have his tonsils taken out the next day. So off to the Rapids we went. Basically, it was a day filled with water slides. I don't see how that can't be awesome. Actually, it's not awesome if you fail to put sunscreen on your arms because you barely have time to put it on your face. I also kept a shirt on so I wouldn't have to slop down my whole torso. It worked, but I'd rather not contribute to my farmer's tan next time.

But yeah, it was a blast. We went on all of the rides. I can close my eyes and imagine going down Big Thunder (or Black Thunder, which is the same but in the dark). They're new since the last time I went. And this time, I still failed at the feats of balance, though it was fun to try. And at least I didn't plunk down any extra money on food.

Rolling Stone reports on China's increasingly prevalent citizen-spying technologies that are coming from American business: "China's All-Seeing Eye." (Related: PC Magazine's "Behind China's Great Firewall.")

Here's a pretty big table of Copyright Term and Public Domain in the United States. It shows exactly how complicated today's copyright laws are.

Some have tried to prove the English royal family's descent from Muhammad, but it's not generally accepted. However, Queen Elizabeth can more likely trace her lineage back to the Romans, or at least to St. Arnulf of Metz (582-640). Arnulf is said to be a descendant of Flavius Afranius Syagrius (born c. 345), which makes Syagrius "the earliest known ancestor of any of the royal houses of Europe. His descendants almost certainly number in the millions and include most of the past and future kings and nobles of Europe." Imagine being that guy.

From CollegeHumor, it's humor about college: Honest College Ad (NSFW dialogue).

Yesterday I went to my friend Kim's graduation party. Actually it's more like my friend Mark's sister Kim's graduation party. I hadn't seen Mark in a while, so it was good to see him. He's grown out his hair and lost weight, so everyone's saying that he looks like me. I do like to think that I served as the inspiration for his hairstyle since it does look exactly like mine. He's growing sideburns as well. Maybe I'm starting a trend!

Ever since I'd upgraded Ubuntu to version 8.04, I've encountered a problem with a certain font in Firefox. When the default sans-serif font (DejaVu Sans) is in a justified paragraph, the lowercase letter "f" overlaps with the letters around it, making words like "office" annoying to read. It's only for justified paragraphs, and only with that font. I should have realized sooner that the solution is to change Firefox's default sans-serif font. Bitstream Vera Sans is practically identical, except that it doesn't suffer that problem. Just thought I'd throw that out there for anyone else who may be experiencing the problem.

News out of Eugene, Oregon: On Friday, a peaceful demonstration against pesticides turned ugly when a protester was subdued and tasered. It started when a University of Oregon student wearing an exterminator suit was spraying water at his surroundings and asking people if they'd like to be sprayed with poison. A plainclothes police officer who was driving by told him to stay off the street, so walked out of the street to sit down. As he was sitting, police officers allegedly dragged him away by his hair. They tasered him at least twice. Two others were arrested for trying to stop the police officers' actions. The young man and one of the others have concussions. The reasons for his arrest are ambiguous.

Now, Crazy People for Wild Places, a student group at the university, is trying to get the protesters' charges dropped. My friend Luke is friends with some of the protesters who were present. He calls the actions "politically motivated" and "uncalled for," and he's helping to get the word out by starting a web site for the CPWP.

In my opinion, this all really boils down to one issue: Is saying that you're spraying poison the same as yelling fire in a crowded theater, or should the context matter? After all, my parents always said, "It's not what you say, it's how you say it." This young man was dressed as an exterminator at an anti-pesticide rally. It would seem to me that poison would be the last thing he'd want to be spraying on a city street, and my gut reaction is that the police took their ever-expanding authority too far. Power corrupts, my friends. This I have learned. Even if they police are legally right, I believe they're morally wrong.

Once again, here's the link for Crazy People for Wild Places, and if you're in the greater Eugene area, check out the list of their upcoming events and media appearances.

[Update Tue Jun 3, 2008 19:50 UTC -5: Here's a video that features eyewitness testimonies and footage of the incidents.]

Okay, now this is pretty ridiculous. You all know Digg, right? It's a social bookmarking site. You bookmark a site with Digg, and other Digg users can comment on the page and vote it up and so on and so on. Okay, so Wikileaks posted a copy of Kappa Sigma Fraternity's secret book of secret rituals, and one person Dugg it. But it was enough for Kappa Sigma's lawyers to send Digg a takedown notice because they were linking to a page that was linking to the copyrighted material.

Incidentally, I know a guy who joined that fraternity. He wanted to show me what they did to his dorm room right after he was initiated. They completely trashed it -- mattress on the floor, flour in the dresser drawers, papers everywhere, posters torn down, tiny objects on the floor that you'd have to pick up individually because they'd break the vacuum, etc. -- and left him to clean it up himself. They also marked the place with "ΚΣ" and the initials of the secret motto. It was about 3 in the morning when he showed me, and he was drunk and still working on cleaning everything up then.

On to lighter topics: How about Office Space recut as a thriller? Watch the fake trailer. There are a lot of crappy recut trailers, but this one's pretty good. I promise.

And finally, some Intricate and Realistic Lego Creations. My favorite is the Lego portrait of The Beatles from the Sgt. Pepper album. It's very well done. I wonder where they got the idea...

I can't go to the grocery store without getting nostalgic. I was there today. When I saw the Cheetos, I thought of my suitemate Evan, who always used to eat them. Then I saw the RC Cola, which I remember having a conversation about with my roommate, Adam. And don't even get me started about the Dr Pepper. Adam always had some around. He's a pepper, and he's got the t-shirt to prove it.

On Thursday I realized that it had been a year since I'd graduated from high school. It was May 29 of last year. So that night, I went through my high school graduation box (not to be confused with my eigth grade graduation box) in which I'd kept all of the memorabilia: cards, awards, my prom ticket, my mortar board (with tassel), and of course, my diploma.

The class of 2008 graduated today. I wish I could have gone to see them because some of them went to my graduation last year. I wonder who the valedictorian was. It's probably the person who's been #1 in the class throughout this year. He always bothered me. As in, he actually took the time to personally annoy me with his constant presence. I heard he got accepted to Harvard. Almost makes me wish I'd applied to Yale. But at least he won't bother me at Florida.

You know, that makes me remember something I don't think I ever mentioned here. I've always been pretty healthy, and I got perfect attendance twice in my first school: once in second grade, and next in, I want to say, seventh. I got it again in ninth grade in high school, and I thought that was cool. And when I attended school every day for the second year in a row, I thought I could have something going here. Sure enough, in eleventh grade, I didn't miss a day. And twelfth grade rounded it out, temptations notwithstanding. As salutatorian, they needed some facts about me to introduce my graduation speech. I supplied the impressive fact that I'd never missed a day of high school. When they mentioned it introducing me at graduation, the whole audience gasped. It was priceless. (My friend Luke told me he thinks he never missed a day either.)

The other day, I was thinking about floppy disks. I had some in junior high. There was a list of school supplies you needed to buy, and floppy disks were on the list. I bought a pack of 10 of them in various colors. Then when we had computer class, we asked the teacher what we needed all these floppy disks for. She said we didn't need them. She didn't even know they were on the list.

I last used a floppy disk in 2003, in my freshman year of high school. It was one of the red ones from the aforementioned pack, and I had a Microsoft Word document on it that I had to write for my art class. I think I still have it around here somewhere because I checked it out while I was going through old stuff last year. The file was still there and everything.

Re-take the photos of your youth and submit the old and new versions: Youngme / Nowme.

In some times and places, dying has been illegal.

This is pretty sad. It almost makes me afraid of elevators. It's a video of a guy who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. They didn't find him sooner, presumably, because he got stuck on a Friday night.

Summer is in full swing. Yesterday, my friends Nick and TJ were at a Memorial Day barbecue with Nick's relatives. They paddled down the canal and made their way close to my house. When I found out that they were in a boat in the canal across the street, I went over to say hi. I soon found myself taking a ride with them and trying to keep far enough from the shore not to get hit by the things Mike was throwing but close enough for him to try. Later we played a game of pool at the Pompano Bowl, and then went to Hooters at Beach Place in Fort Lauderdale. Good times.

That's summer to me: having fun with your buds and not having to worry about school. But you know what else I've been doing? Historical research.

It all started a few months ago, when I heard that presidential hopeful John McCain might pick Florida Governor Charlie Crist to be his running mate. If Charlie Crist became Vice President, the Lieutenant Governor would take his place as governor. But I wondered: who was the Lieutenant Governor, anyway? I wouldn't recognize him if I bumped into him on the street, yet he's a heartbeat away from running the state. Okay, so it turns out it's this guy named Jeff Kottkamp. But that wasn't enough for me. Wanting to know more about the office of Lieutenant Governor of Florida, I delved deeper.

To make a long story short, I've been tending to some Wikipedia articles for various lt. govs. of the past. Luckily for me, there haven't been that many. (The office was created in 1865, abolished in 1885, and reintroduced in 1968.) But still, I've got lieutenant governor fever. I checked out a book about Florida history from the library so I'd be able to contribute some precious morsels of information like... dates and things. Seriously, the records for 19th century Florida lieutenant governors are spotty at best. They weren't such a big deal.

But a little Googling goes a long way. I've got to admit it's thrilling to start with little more than a name and end up with somebody's whole life story (including a picture). That's what happened when I created the article for E. C. Weeks (Lieutenant Governor from January 24 to December 27, 1870... apparently). I've now submitted it to be featured in the "Did You Know?" section of Wikipedia's main page. Will it make the cut? It seems to meet all the criteria. (Did you know that the Florida state comptroller refused to pay Lieutenant Governor E. C. Weeks his salary because he was not elected? I don't see how that couldn't make it. That's the kind of stuff they eat up.)

In researching this stuff, I've found a few resources particularly useful:

• Google Scholar allows you to search the text of digitized books. For public domain works, you can see the whole text.
• The New York Times: All the articles they've ever published are searchable, and the oldest ones (19th century) are available for free.
• Florida Photographic Collection: From the State Archives of Florida. They have two photos of E. C. Weeks. Very impressive.
• Find a Grave was the only place where I could find Weeks's date of death (and a picture of his tombstone to prove it).

Okay, that's enough.

This is the best thing ever. No, really. I Will Derive!

Here's a map of baseball team allegiances throughout the country. I didn't know the Marlins were so popular over such a large area. I didn't even know they were popular.

National Geographic reports that the oldest living tree has been found in Sweden. Well, sort of: its roots are 9,550 years old, but its trunk is a youthful 600. And I'd say it doesn't look a day over 550.

Summer is upon us, so check out the 11 Most Awful Museums to Visit This Summer.

Continued from last time...

Sometimes, people violate your copyright. Maybe they think they can get away with it or that it doesn't matter, or maybe they just don't care. I take violations of my Creative Commons licensed work seriously; I could (and should) be getting credit for the use of my work, and I'm out to make sure that it happens. The Creative Commons licenses aren't out to undermine copyright; copyright is what makes them work. Otherwise, I'd have no power to say, "You must attribute this work and any derivative works to me in the manner that I specify and release any derivative works under the same license." Without copyright, the most I could do would be to say, "Uh, like, I know you don't have to, but could you please try to put my name in there somewhere or something?" And we all know what happens when people don't have to follow the rules.

Fortunately, I haven't found too many cases of people copying my work and passing it off as their own. But it has happened. A few months ago, with the help of Copyscape (yet another site I could have sworn I linked to once -- ah, there we go), I discovered that a keyboard company lifted several paragraphs from The Dvorak Keyboard and You for a sort of press kit they were distributing online. The document acknowledges that it contains information taken from some other web sites, and even makes an attempt to credit some of them, but there was no credit toward mine. I sent a somewhat harsh-sounding e-mail:

After waiting a week for a reply, I looked up their web site's IP address and e-mailed the ISP in charge of it about this copyright violation. No reply there either. Rather than go up one level further, I just decided to do nothing.

I had another whack at it just the other day, when I went to Copyscape again and found that a non-profit was also using several paragraphs from The Dvorak Keyboard and You in violation of the license. I wondered what I could say that might be taken a little more seriously. I poked around to see if anyone had written form letters for responding to Creative Commons license violations, but I could find no such thing. But I did find some GFDL violation form letters on Wikipedia, so I ran with one of them. (Incidentally, my Creative Commons BY-SA license is pretty similar to the GFDL, so there wasn't much, conceptually, to change.) I liked the approach that some of those letters took. Instead of being threateningly pseudo-legal-sounding, they were warm and fuzzy: "Yes, it's okay to copy my work! Just please give me credit and let other people adapt your new work!"

So, I sent this to both the non-profit and the aforementioned company:

I decided to make it easy for them to comply by telling them exactly what they should say. It was hard to figure that out, though, because that meant I had to go past the summary of the license and actually read the legalese myself. I think the manner I suggested should comply with the license or be darn close: you have to cite the original title (if any), include the URL of the original (if any), credit the author (if one is given) in a manner that they specify, preserve the original copyright notice (if any), and make clear that your work is a derivative work of the original. I asked someone at Creative Commons about proper attribution, and while he was helpful, he tried to use the standard disclaimer that his answer wasn't legal advice and "should [sic] be taken as such." Maybe if something goes wrong I can sue him. (Turns out I could have read the FAQ. Bad me.)

Anyway, in suggesting a proper copyright notice, I had to take a whack in the dark (there's two metaphors that don't go well together) because I scoured the web up and down looking in vain for someone who attributed someone else's CC-licensed work in such a formal (read: license-abiding) way. In the few cases where I could find someone using someone else's CC-licensed work, they would just include a link to the author and a link to the license. Even Creative Commons themselves have done this. (Although it's possible that in those cases, the works are untitled, have short copyright notices, and aren't being modified enough to be considered derivative works. Then I guess it would be okay. If I were a lawyer and worked with this stuff for a living, my head would asplode.)

And what of the replies to this friendly letter? Three hours after e-mailing the company -- the one that had ignored my previous letter -- I got a friendly response from them thanking me for letting them use my work. They also said they'd get their webmaster to add the proper copyright notice. Though I've gotten no word from the non-profit yet, maybe it is true that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

One final word on this: I hereby dedicate the above quoted letters to the public domain with the hope that other Creative Commons licensors will find them useful. But I am not a lawyer, and they should not be interpreted as legal advice, etc., etc.

The Wall Street Journal has a graph of Presidential approval ratings from 1945 to 2006. During that time, the only president who had a higher approval rating upon leaving office than upon entering was Bill Clinton. Also, Truman was a man of extremes. His highest approval rating was higher than George W. Bush's after 9/11, and his lowest was lower than Nixon's upon the latter's resignation. If the graph is right, that is. It's pretty close in both cases.

From the BBC: a British perspective on baseball. It's a captivating account written by a complete outsider to the sport. I mean, this guy knows even less than I do. Here's what I found especially interesting: With many linguistic examples, the author notes, "So pervasive is American culture that we Brits have a complete arsenal of phrases for more or less every aspect of human activity, all drawn from a sport that none of us play and few of us understand."

Here are the Top 10 Awesome Nostalgic Foods We [meaning whoever made this list] Want Back. I remember some of them. Actually, just one of them.

My old high school's prom was this past weekend. The photos have started to come in on MySpace and Facebook. It looked like everybody had a good time. And of course, it got me thinking about my own prom, which was last year. I could go on for a while about how great it was. I could mention more details that I didn't add to the original post. For example, one of the songs I remember dancing to was "Hey Ya!" Everyone went crazy immediately upon hearing the count-in. I could also mention how the only regret is that I didn't get the nerve to talk to Jannike sooner. But I won't. I just hope the Class of '08 had as good of a time at their prom as I did at mine.

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about today was copyleft. What's that, you ask? Before we answer that question, we have to ask: What is copyright? Mr. Webster says:

For example, the above quotation is from the 1913 edition of Webster's dictionary, which is no longer protected by copyright. As such, I can quote as much of it as I want in this blog post, and everyone in general can do anything with it that they please. If it had been copyrighted, I wouldn't have been able to quote very much without first requesting permission from the copyright holder and likely paying a large fee.

Over the years, copyright protection has become much more widespread in several ways. First, it is much easier for works to be copyrighted. Instead of having to file a form with the U.S. Copyright Office and include a copyright notice in your work, anything you create in a tangible form is instantly copyrighted whether you include a notice or not. Second, the control that copyright holders have over their work has been extended to include not only copying but also adapting, performing, translating... basically everything but quoting brief passages. Third, copyright terms have been extended drastically, from 56 years in 1975 to 120 years or more in many cases today. The effect of all this is that it's getting harder for people today to follow in the footsteps of generations of innovators in science, business, and entertainment, who advanced our culture by building upon material that had little or no copyright protection.

Enter copyleft. First devised for computer software in the 1970s, "copyleft" refers to any form of copyright licensing in which the copyright holder revokes some of his exclusive rights to the work and requires anyone who modifies the work to do the same. So you can be sure than any work that is covered by copyleft will always be free for other people to use, no matter how it is changed. (Until the copyright expires, at least.)

Maybe you've heard of the GPL, a copyleft software license. It's the license under which Linux-based operating systems are distributed. The GPL and similar licenses allow a group of people to collaborate on software, and that's part of what has made Linux so popular. Software development under the GPL advances rapidly because it allows people to adapt and extend other GPL-licensed programs. And there are many thousands of them. It's exciting stuff. What's more exciting (if you can believe it) is the recently released version 3 of the GPL, which closes a lot of loopholes that companies have discovered in the previous version in recent years.

Recently, it's become easy for people to apply copyleft to other works. This is largely due to Creative Commons, an organization that provides licenses for people to "easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry." These licenses can apply to most anything you create, whether it's a web site, a book, a painting, a song, or something else entirely. Say you took a photo and posted it on the Internet, and you'll let anyone use it for any purpose as long as they give you credit. Just say it's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Then, if somebody uses your photo without attributing you, they've violated the legalese of the license, and you can sue them. Other licenses prohibit making derivative works and/or using the work commercially. There are fun mix-and-match combinations to suit just about every need.

You may notice that these requirements themselves do not constitute copyleft; that is, someone who modifies someone else's work and just gives credit or uses it non-commercially can declare "All rights reserved" in their new version. But several Creative Commons licenses require users of the work to "share alike." I used to have this site licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, meaning that anybody could use my work for noncommercial purposes if they gave me credit and released their new version under the same license. Then, I got some requests to use some of my images for commercial purposes. I had to give them permission explicitly because the license forbids it in general. But I thought about it, and I realized that I wouldn't really mind if my works were used for commercial purposes. As long as they remain under copyleft ("ShareAlike"), it doesn't harm me or the general public. So recently, I re-licensed the content of this site under an Attribution-ShareAlike license. (Check out the sidebar and the footer to see those links you've never noticed!)

But I have to admit, folks: I haven't always been this attentive to copyright issues. I wrote The Dvorak Keyboard and You almost 6 years ago, when I was 13. When I needed an image of the Dvorak keyboard layout to illustrate the article, I searched the web and found high-resolution scan that someone had made from an MS-DOS manual. I prettified it, and other people copied it when they linked to me. That's no way to respect someone's copyright, even if it is Microsoft's. Yesterday, I finally decided to correct this indiscretion. I searched Flickr for a diagram of a keyboard that I would be able to use under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike license. I found one with an Attribution license, modified it for my own needs, gave the author credit according to the license, and relicensed the new work under the Attribution-ShareAlike license. (This is allowed because the original author is still being attributed and has not restricted the right of others to require sharing alike down the line. At least, that's what this table says.) Now, if someone comes along wanting to use my modified image, they'll have to give me and the original author credit and allow others the freedom to modify it for their own purposes. That's copyleft.

Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, has some interesting things to say about copyright in his book Free Culture, which I'm currently reading. It's pretty cool stuff, but I'll hold off on it until I've finished reading it. Besides, this has been enough for one post. And now, the links.

Here's an Animated History of the NYC Subway. It's an animated map that shows each line in the order it was built.

Math humor: 36 Methods of Mathematical Proof. This reminded me so much of my differential equations professor (what with his ingenious math tricks and all) that I sent him the link. I'm not sure whether he liked it or not.

Firefox Logo Spied in Deep Space? Okay, the image is a little modified from the original, but there's still a resemblance if you look at it the right way. At least it doesn't look like a woman wearing long robes or a guy with a beard.

It's getting pretty hot these days, so I've been trying to keep my room as cool as possible. I'm running the fan on full blast and keeping the door open to the rest of the house; for some reason, my room doesn't get very well ventilated. I also tend to keep the blinds shut so it's darker. My parents have their own strategies for the house, including the selective use of air conditioning. Sometimes it's windy, so it doesn't feel hot enough to warrant putting the A/C on. Instead, we have all the windows in the house open for a few days until it gets hotter.

It was windy on Friday. The windows in my room were open, but the blinds weren't, so they were banging and clanging around. It was also hot. So yesterday, my mom turned on the air conditioning, and I closed my windows. The blinds were still closed. Without the heat and wind, it was a more peaceful day.

When I woke up this morning, it was still a nice, air-conditioned, indoor day, even though it was a little hot in my room. As I lay on my bed after Sunday brunch, I heard a buzzing sound at the window next to me. I opened the blinds for the first time in who knows how long and saw what looked like a bee. I looked closer. There were two of them, and they were between the screen and the window. I wasn't worried, because unless they could rip through the screen, there was no way they could get to me. They must have been trapped when I closed the window yesterday. Unless I hadn't closed it all the way.

I thought I had closed the window all the way, but now that I had the blinds open, I could see that I hadn't. And why not? There was something caught in the window.

A snake.

I took about as brief of a look at it as I could bear. It had snake skin. It had a little snake head. Its mouth was open. It was dangling, caught between two window panels. Its head was between the window and the screen. Some huge flies that I had mistaken for bees found a good spot in its side to lay their eggs. Disgusting? Yes. But it was also pretty funny. How long could I have gone without noticing it?

My dad had a look, and then he went around the other side to get rid of it. I couldn't have gone much longer, apparently. It smelled pretty bad, but mostly the smell was outside. It does, however, explain why my room smelled slightly funny this morning. After I was able to close my window fully again, I sprayed down my room with an air freshener.

In keeping with the popular dictum, "Pics or it didn't happen," I have one photo here that I managed to snap before the snake was delivered to its final resting place. The picture's rather large because you need a long shot to appreciate how close this thing was to my pillow. Have a look. It's not graphic, but if you look closely, you can see the large, dark spot on the body where the flies were. Also, notice the festive pattern of my bedsheets.

So, what did you do last night? I slept next to a maggot-infested snake!

And now... the links:

Yesterland is a site that's all about stuff that used to be at Disneyland but isn't any more.

If you ever model for stock photography, be careful. You might end up everywhere, like the Everywhere Girl.

Here's a video of a real-life Rube Goldberg machine, apparently for some sort of contest.

It's summertime in The World of Colleges. All of my friends are either taking summer classes, traveling Europe, pursuing research opportunities at national laboratories, getting married, or working. Yes, working. I'm home for three months, so I figure I'd try to get a job that's close enough to walk to and that I could work at, say, most days of the week. I could always use the money.

I searched the Internet for extremely local job listings and found a place close by that was looking for someone to do easy but tedious work on their web site. As it happens, I love doing easy but tedious things, and I have experience with web sites. I got the resume ready (thanks Kirsten), wrote a cover letter, and shot them an e-mail. Response: "I have found someone for that position. Thank you." I told her to take the ad off the freaking web site so other people wouldn't make my unfortunate mistake of wasting time trying to apply. I did not use the words "freaking" or "wasting," but that's how I felt.

So I went around to some local businesses to see which were hiring. Then I went home and called them to see what positions were available. The pizza place wanted a chef, and the Thai restaurant wanted a delivery boy. Nope and nope. I haven't tried calling the others because I can't decide which one I would want to work at the least.

Ah, getting a job. It's totally worthwhile, even necessary. It can bring you security and happiness. But finding one is tough. You will get burned a lot, especially if you have little to no experience. And the longer you wait, the harder it gets. Good thing nothing else in life is just like that.

I need to come up with a clever idea to make money. One that doesn't involve writing a cover letter. Something really stupid yet clever that no one has thought of yet. Maybe I could just play the guitar on a street corner. Maybe I can start a business and Be My Own Boss™. I also need an outlet for my near-constant frustration. I mean, besides this blog. Something that doesn't involve complaining. I wish I could make art. Angry art. Sad art. Luckily, anything can pass for art these days, so I guess I could throw paint on a wall and call it art. But art isn't really my thing. I want to smash things or blow stuff up in a field. And I want to not clean up after it.

Maybe I can make a business out of smashing things. Send me $50 or the iPhone gets it.

On a completely random note, no one has ever bought anything from the World of Stuff Store.

By the way: Justin is in Rome for one of his classes, Adam is going to pursue a research opportunity at a national laboratory, and Jennipher is apparently engaged. I don't know her that well, but we're friends on Facebook.

This is cool if you're an independent artist: TuneCore distributes your music and videos to Internet music stores. You keep the rights to your songs and and all the money they make.

Big-time Jeopardy! winner Ken Jennings has interviewed a former Jeopardy! writer. Carlo Panno reveals all the secrets about how the show was made, as well as some amusing anecdotes. Here's the interview: parts 1, 2, and 3.

Because you've always wondered: The Stories Behind 10 Famous Product Placements.