Made a quick overnight trip up to San Jose for GDC. Southwest works great here; if you buy in advance, it’s only $39 each way (!) — also, if you get there early, they’ll switch you to an earlier flight w/o hassle on the spot.

More GDC pics on my IM bloog.

While I was up there, I hung out at Yahoo for a little bit and had dinner at Google w/ friends. Ernie posted a little summary.

• High Dynamic Range Image Encodings
• A Standard Default Color Space for the Internet – sRGB
• PNG (Portable Network Graphics) Specification, Version 1.2: 13. Appendix: Gamma Tutorial
• The Logarithmic Pixel Response FAQ
• Raw Digital Photo Decoding in Linux – Dave Coffin’s better than vendor RAW conversion tools

SydShamino comments insightfully on the Kahle v Ashcroft /. discussion:

So does the author have the right to say “I don’t want my work released, ever, so any old copies out there can degrade until they are unuseable but no one can make any new copies.”????

Answer honestly. Do you believe that this is true, that an original content creator has perpetual rights to control the use of his work?

If so, congratulations, you believe in the European model of copyright, where it is an inherent right of a person.

In the US, however, copyright is not an inherent right. Instead, public domain is the inherent right, and the constitution grants a limited monopoly on creative works ONLY so that the public domain is improved. Thus, in the US, once an author/creator/etc. chooses to write down and release a work, he or she has given up perpetual control of that work. The constitution demands that, after a limited monopoly, the public domain shall inherit the work.

Frankly, I agree with the constitution. Some things belong to humanity, not to the greed or whims of those in control. The sum body of human creativity is one of them.

Transcript of 60 Minutes Richard Clarke interview

Brad wrote a Secure Copy Droplet applescript that looks extremely useful.

related: wsanchez has a little hack called DropScript that does turns UNIX executables into droplets (cool).

Years later, Brainjar’s DOM Viewer is still indispensible when dealing w/ IE Events.

I flip-flop back and forth when writing event listeners. Right now I use a modified version (extra boolean to control capture) of scottandrew’s old addEvent function and ad-hoc the rest of it (damn IE and their useless event handling referencing; since it’s always reference via the window object, this becomes useless), however, sometime I’ll have to give dithered’s DOM2 Events a spin.

• Vim Tip #83: how to indent (useful for source code)
• PHP: serialize() – OK, I wrote my own before I decided to look around, but this is much better (I did get to use variable variables for that though, which is always fun)

Took a little while off from work to do some fun programming. Got my little Netflix queue working again (inspired by this article [hey, bugmenot has a bookmarklet!]). The tag parsing is much more robust now, so it should survive a fair amount of redesigning. I shouldn’t have to touch it until 2005, when my session expires (I tried writing an autologin component, but it was failing for some reason)

Renamed realsched.exe and realevent.exe to .crap extensions (in C:Program FilesCommon FilesRealUpdate_OB). This gets rid of stupid popups when running RealOne.

• Task List Programs: R
• OK/Cancel: The Real Deal

(I’ve mostly been using Real Alternative w/ Media Player Classic, but sometimes I still need to run the Real player. This makes it slightly less annoying)

While I’m slacking off… who knew there’d be such a bruhaha over TypeKey? (summary at idly.org) I think the actual implementation might not have been thoroughly thought out (specifically re:idtheft), but who hasn’t been expecting something like this coming from… well, just about everyone? (personally, I have a fondness for a PGP-based solution, althought the idtheft issue can just as easily be solved by requiring a TypeKey signature on the referenced webserver which the TypeKey service can check)