Printing straight from LyX

10 Apr 2006

I love it when things just work. Printing directly from LyX rocks. Adobe’s Acrobat gets no opportunity to butcher things by ‘scaling to fit’ (despite the page being designed with generous margins, etc.).

Adobe Bridge rocks

10 Apr 2006

It’s just great organising software. I doubt I’d pay for it on its own, but seeing as it comes with CS there’s nothing much wrong with it. At a pinch, it can also be used for slide shows (for weird corporates like AMP that ship Adobe CS but have held back their MS Office to ’97! Hence, there’s no PowerPoint “insert photos” wizard, and on Win 2k there’s no picture and fax viewer that does slideshows.)

I am procrastinating

09 Apr 2006

I am procrastinating so hard right now. All I’ve gotta do is write a measly 500 words for an essay plan and it’s just so not happening. So I’m cropping and rotating photos. Have some cool sky.

And a pyramid rope thingy that looks like it’s on fire.

And a freaking huge piece of Jaeger Schnitzel.

We all ate way too much that night… the Schnitzel developed its own identity (or became a certain someone’s baby…) and much strangeness was had by all.

Slowly playing catch-up with content, here! Heh. I haven’t got time for Flickr I’ve decided… it needs to fill in descriptions for you as well! What is this Web 2.0 crap? I want omniscient AI already: it knows everything about my photos so I don’t have to. I’d pay for that…

Da Vinci Copyright: sense prevails

08 Apr 2006

“It would be quite wrong if fictional writers were to have their writings pored over in the way DVC ( ‘Da Vinci Code’) has been pored over in this case by authors of pretend historical books to make an allegation of infringement of copyright,” Judge Peter Smith said in his 71-page ruling.

“Cases like this hopefully will clarify what copyright is all about,” said Allan Adler, vice president for legal and government affairs at the Association of American Publishers.

“Copyright doesn’t protect ideas and copyright doesn’t protect facts. That’s why we have genres, fiction and nonfiction, and a number of people can write novels based on the same idea and still have freedom of expression.”

– Associated Press

There is no ownership of ideas. Common sense calls for attribution (which DVC gave anyway!), but an idea is ephemeral in the mind of one person alone: growth beyond that is required for it to survive. If ideas are of value (one presumes that they are), any notion of exclusivity is ludicrous and devaluing.

I am not, therefore, an irrational communist in this regard. I acknowledge value, but simply reject that same value is decreased by propagation/increase in supply/availability. Hence, I am an irrational capitalist.

3-monthly paper attachments

07 Apr 2006

According to AS3760 – 2003, if you hire equipment out it needs to be re-tagged every three months (In addition to the obvious testing of everything before each hire). Still uncertain as to whether this is just dry hire or not.

*laughs at folly of world*

Or something.