obfuscated.org

While I too agree with Critical Mass’ mission, I really can’t get behind its methods. Dave Moulton’s reasoning behind why annoyance doesn’t sell is right on the money.

All this started me to thinking about the Critical Mass movement and what they are doing. Their cause is indeed noble and one I would support; to bring awareness to bicycles and the cyclist’s right to be on the road. It is the method of delivering the message that I question.

Like the windshield flier, it is a poor way to get a message across. The flier under my windshield wiper might also be for a noble cause, a charity event for example, but I will never know because it made me mad and I never even looked at the message.

A demonstration, a civil protest is a form of advertising; selling an ideology rather than a product. Promoting a cause and trying to get people to come around to a different way of thinking. Blocking traffic in the middle of rush hour will get attention in the same way as the flier under a wiper blade; it does so because it makes people mad.

The first project I ever worked on was in the news recently. The Synthetic Aperture RADAR run by the European Space Agency is being used to detect massive rogue waves. I worked on the Information Management System/Data Analysis and Distribution System (IMS/DADS) for the ESA satellite and a similar one run by UA Fairbanks, writing testing code for a huge Motif application used by scientists to get particular images for their research. The software that I worked on is likely long since decommissioned — does anybody use huge, Solaris-only Motif applications any more? Really? — but it’s fun to see what the project’s data is being used for.

I don’t care if it’s fake — and it has to be fake. There’s nothing this good in the entire universe. I checked — it’s amazing. I know who I’m voting for in the Republican primaries. (For all those times I’ll be voting in the Republican primaries.)

You know, I had no idea that there was a “stoned religious conservative” demographic to go after. Live and learn.

From The Future of Reading:

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

– Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

VectorMagic is perhaps the coolest web tool I’ve seen in quite some time. It takes raster (bitmap) images and converts them to vector images. (Allowing you to save as either SGV, EPS or PNG.) There are several command line and desktop tools you can use to do this. Illustrator, for example, does a tremendous job of this, but then you have to pay for Illustrator. If all you want is to vectorize one image, VectorMagic is amazing.

Here’s an example:

Original:

Vectorized: (and then re-rasterized, but you get the point.)

The vector version certainly loses detail, but it scales infinitely, whereas you start to see pixels pretty quickly when you make the raster version bigger. Also, I just sort of think that vector images like this look neat.