dougv.com | The Web home of Doug Vanderweide

I’ve decided that it’s time to pay more attention to the open-source projects I have created and will create. I’m also considering joining some other software projects.

As a result, I need to revisit my licensing.

Previously, my software was licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution / Share-Alike 3.0 license. That license is really intended for authors, musicians and teachers, but I found its strong requirements for attribution and sharing of derivative works met my needs.

However, most open-source projects use a GNU license, most notably the GNU General Public License. As such, I believe it’s best to change my software licensing over to the GNU GPL.

I do this reluctantly. I am an ardent supporter of open-source software. I believe it’s my duty to give back to the developer community. But I believe I am due credit as a work’s author, and that my right to ultimately retain the benefits of copyright should be clear.

The GNU GPL technically defends my authorship and allows me to retain ultimate copyright, but it does so in a far weaker way than the Creative Commons Attribution / Share-Alike license.

I am in the process of changing all posts to reflect my new licensing.

For additional information about my licensing terms, visit the Copyright / Attribution page.

No Tony Kornheiser on Monday Night Football, thanks to hernia surgery. Just Ron Jaworski and Mike Tirico, talking about the game itself, focusing on pertinent matters, providing actual insight and calling what, so far, has been a pretty good football game.

If only there was such a thing as season-ending hernia surgery for TV commentators.

Probably the best we can hope for is a nationwide outpouring of people, shouting with joy from the rooftops, that Tony Kornheiser = good football broadcast.

But if ESPN won’t respond to overwhelming criticism of Kornheiser, will it respond to overwhelming support of his booth partners when they are freed of his inanities?

I doubt it. But we can always hope.

I crawl around on YouTube two or three times a month, generally watching music videos of songs I’m thinking about buying on iTunes.

Thanks to the “related videos” section on YouTube, I tend to wander off my intended path. Tonight, for example, I started at Jeff Buckley’s Sin-e performance and wound up, about two hours later, at Junior Senior.

As I checked out the video for “Move Your Feet,” I couldn’t help but notice this related video:

Which leads not to a discussion about teen-aged girls posting ill-advised YouTube videos without their parents’ knowledge — that ship has long since sailed, regardless of all the TV news stories during every sweeps week about “protecting your kids online” — but rather to a different question altogether:

What in the world would compel this girl, or anyone for that matter, to post a video of herself spazzing out to what has to be one of the gayest disco tunes ever recorded?

It is this phenomenon — the varying types of YouTube attention whore* — that I wish to examine.

Continue reading ‘A Non-Scientific Examination Of The YouTube Attention Whore Spectrum’ »

Excerpts from tonight’s Cincinnatti Bengals / Green Bay Packers pre-season, pre-game comments by Tony Kornheiser, the worst color commentator working an NFL broadcast booth (and that includes the patently awful Randy Cross):

(Aaron) Rodgers is under more scrutiny and more pressure than any player in the NFL bar none, maybe ever.

Um … does Pacman Jones ring a bell? Or Michael Vick? Or, going back to a time perhaps more familiar to Kornheiser’s aging brain, Paul Hornung?

Kornheiser’s bluster is especially amusing because not 10 minutes before this dumb shit was said, Steve Young said the same year he was named league MVP (1994), San Fransisco 49ers fans were telling him he didn’t measure up to Joe Montana.

Not three years ago, many people were calling for Favre to quit, following the disastrous 4-12 2005 season. Had not 2006 ended up at .500, thanks to a season-ending, four-win streak that saw the Packers defeat their awful division opponents and the as-awful 49ers, we wouldn’t be having this discussion; Favre wouldn’t have been given an option to return.

Of course, since Kornheiser has exactly two years’ experience broadcasting NFL games, and apparently was paying attention during only one, I wouldn’t expect him to have much of a sense of history. Which makes his hyperbole especially sophomoric.

Unless he wins the Super Bowl, almost nothing (Rodgers) does will be good enough.

Packers fan is loyal. Packers fan loves No. 4. But Packers fan has no delusions about winning Super Bowls, with or without Favre.

Continue reading ‘Tony Kornheiser Is Still A Total Imbecile’ »

A significant number of potentially helpful n00bs come to Yahoo! Answers every day, and most are gone within a few weeks, if not a few days.

Almost universally, they wage the same complaints as they leave, which are generally valid:

• The questions are stupid / can be easily answered with a search engine query
• Many answerers have no idea what they are talking about
• A significant amount of point gaming / cheating takes place
• Reporting Community Guidelines violations, even clear violations, often backfires, especially if you are a new user
• Answers staff is largely absentee, and on the rare occasions when they do show up, they are far more interested in protecting feelings than promoting worthwhile content

There are a number of reasons for these shortcomings, but the executive summary is this: When a fox raids your henhouse, you shouldn’t blame the fox for eating the chickens or the chickens for being eaten. You should blame yourself.

The fox and chickens did what they naturally do. But you chose the dog that failed to watch over the henhouse. You failed to build a henhouse that kept the fox out. You put the hens in harm’s way and provided the fox with the means to do harm.

If you want to avoid the same trouble again, you fix your mistakes. You get a better dog. You build a better henhouse. And if successful fox raids persist after all your best efforts to stop them, you get out of chicken farming, because you clearly cannot do it properly.

That’s the basic problem with Yahoo! Answers: It’s built wrong, the wrong people are watching over it, Yahoo! is taking advice on how to fix those problems from idiots, and given the realities of what it’s trying to accomplish and the realities of human nature, Yahoo! should probably quit Answers altogether.

Continue reading ‘What’s Wrong With Yahoo! Answers, Part 1: Boards Will Be Boards’ »