another weblog

On Thursday I attended a Northwestern University “new employee” orientation. (Despite the fact that I’ve now been working for Northwestern for over a year, I never got around to finishing the orientation; I decided to do so when I received a couple of ambiguously threatening emails a couple months back.)

The orientation consisted of pretty standard stuff: performance review system, ethics survey, introduction to identifying and dealing with racial/sexual discrimination/harassment, etc. There was one of the ethics survey that really irked me.

The ethics survey consisted of a series of hypothetical situations as the motivation to discuss ethical behavior on a case-by-case basis. One of these situations can be summarized as follows:

A friend asks me for a copy of a program I’m running on my computer. Is it okay to give him one?

The immediate answer — almost unanimous — was “No”. I loudly objected, but I’m frankly stunned that people could still believe “no” to be the right answer in these times. (Though perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised: this sort of thinking is precisely what proprietary software alliances have been pushing for for decades, and it looks like they won that battle over ideas. The website for Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones’ font foundry makes a similarly astonishing gaffe.)

So let’s be clear: “No” is the wrong answer. It’s been wrong for over twenty-five years; actually, even longer than that, but it’s only in the past twenty-five years that the question was seriously raised. The correct answer to the question is “it depends on the copyright terms attached to the software”. This applies to any copyrighted object.

I know I’m asking for more complexity in your life, but please, if you ever end up with a question related to copying copyrighted material, help your questioner out a bit and ask them to find out the copyright terms attached to the copyrighted object. Over-generalization doesn’t help anyone except those distasteful organizations that actually want “all rights reserved” to be the only mode of copyright: the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and so forth. If you don’t like those people — and you probably don’t — don’t help them out by furthering their cause.

Thanks.

ACen 2010’s site is live.

This year, we’re using Drupal; my idea of using a static site generator plus git didn’t pan out the way I wanted it to.

Much love to the CSS tools Compass and Blueprint. If you do anything Web-related, check them out.

Not the logician, the food. First time I’ve been able to get pictures, though.

Tonight I winged (wunged?) it and threw something simple together: beef curry with lotus root, enoki mushrooms, onions, and carrots on brown rice.

(black and white always works to suggest precursors, obviously)

My lighting job makes the curry look uncomfortably like some sort of cheese sauce; not sure why but I think it has to do with the color of the light, or perhaps the specular highlights. Stuff to remember.

So I was at a friend’s wedding this weekend (seems like I’m doing a lot of these; it’s a sign I’m getting old, I guess) and they had one of the finest examples of wedding cake badassery there. Observe:

(click any of these images for larger versions)

The bride and groom are both dance game fanatics. What better way to celebrate than with a DDR cake?

Let’s zoom in.

Fans of the Bemani series of games probably already know what song is selected on the wheel…

Fun times.

Best viewed on a dark background.