Elias Torres on Operator, RDFa, Open Data

Mike Linksvayer, May 17th, 2007

Elias Torres is one of the best people to watch for news about technologies relevant to what we’re doing at Creative Commons.  He’s been working with CC tech advisor Ben Adida on RDFa.

Start with Elias’ XTech 2007 post and presentation.

XMP Toolkit 4.1.1 Officially Released under BSD License

rejon, May 14th, 2007

That’s right, Gunar from Adobe, blogged it today and sent me an email! This is super great news that I want to blockquote:

The 4.1.1 XMP Toolkit (SDK) has been finalized and moved to the Adobe’s Developers Center. The 4.1 Toolkit is now available under the BSD license for open source developers.

Although the previous Adobe open source license is quite open, we decided that is was best to use a standard open source license that is respected in the open source community. Opensource.org was invaluable in reviewing the many different open source licenses that are available.

The 4.1.1 XMP release is significant because it include the source code for developers to read, write and update XMP in popular image, document and video file formats including JPEG, PSD, TIFF, AVI, WAV, MPEG, MP3, MOV, INDD, PS, EPS and PNG.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, XMP

Also, please help digg this so more can find out about it!

More XMP Toolkit Plugs

rejon, May 13th, 2007

In a follow-up to Mike’s post about XMP, I (through CC) have been working with Adobe XMP’s product manager, Gunar Penikis, on how CC and Adobe can work together on XMP. Also, in the same line, I’m friends with and working with Cyrille Berger and Hubert Figuiere, who have each noted how positive of a step releasing XMP SDK/Toolkit under a BSD license is for the larger community.

I’m having some other discussions with all the above mentioned folks with regards to how this is going to pan out, but all I can say is that it is going to encouage XMP to flourish, and return help smooth out metadata and embedding across the board.

This really frees up the space for more developments

Libre Graphics Meeting

Mike Linksvayer, May 13th, 2007

CC staff Jon Phillips and Alex Roberts attended the Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal last weekend. Jon posted his slides (PDF). Alex posted a heartening update titled Libre on his personal blog, which I’ll repost here:

The title is a bit of a misnomer, since my laptop runs OSX and I use Adobe software at work. At least right now, various parts of my workflow (and I sure do dislike that term) will be changing soon. Here’s why.

Last weekend I attended the second, annual, Libre Graphics Meeting, in Montreal. A time of firsts for me: my first time visiting Canada; my first LGM; and the first time I’d met, in person, many of the hackers and artists in the F/OSS community. Some of whom inspired me to become a designer, and give me the lofty goal of working in free culture. So that was incredible.

LGM featured a lot of talks going over new developments in the community, it was great to see the directions all the art tools are going — Scribus, Krita, Inkscape, etc. But what really got me hyped, and excited about the future, were the demos. I’ll admit I’ve been out of the OSS art loop for a while, having little time to check out the latest trunk builds of everything, but seeing them all in use really inspired me that yes, these tools work, and yes, they can in fact be used in place of the commercial giants. Scribus has, by far, come the farthest since I first saw it. I believe it’s fairly safe to assume that I could use it, instead of InDesign, for much of the print work I do. I’ll be sure to report on my progress in that regard.

That being said, while you can use the open source tools for production, you do need an open mind and ability to learn what they can do — both similarly and differently. For instance, Inkscape has some incredible features that you won’t find in Illustrator — gradients on strokes; advanced object linking, allowing you to create complex effects that remain completely editable; full access to the underlying XML, so you can directly edit any content. But unlike Illustrator, Inkscape doesn’t yet handle CMYK or spot colours, and has no support for any kind of blending modes (coming soon). So I doubt I’d be able to move 100% away from non-free tools, for the foreseeable future, but it really isn’t too often I find myself tasked with print work. So a minor inconvenience at worst.

The whole experience makes me extremely excited over these improved possibilities, of using the tools in the real world, and the joy of contributing back where I can. This includes Serif and FontView — my font manager, and viewer apps respectively. A good amount of hacking on FontView went on over the weekend, solving a number of large bugs, which also made me happy.

Adobe XMP Toolkit 4.1.1 — under BSD

Mike Linksvayer, May 13th, 2007

Adobe’s XMP Toolkit is now available under the BSD license!

VMware Workstation 6 released

Nathan Yergler, May 10th, 2007

I’ve been a fan of “VMware”:http://vmware.com for years. Both at my previous job and this one, their Workstation product has made cross-platform development sane. So I just noticed they released a new version of “VMware Workstation”:http://www.vmware.com/products/ws/, 6.0. The new version includes lots of new features, but two things caught my eye.

First, they have “Eclipse”:http://eclipse.org integration for debugging and testing. I don’t think I can do the feature justice — “this blog post”:http://quikchange.livejournal.com/170570.html goes into some detail. Basically it allows you to take a Java application you’re developing in Eclipse, select a particular VM, and then build, deploy, launch and connect remote debugging. And when you’re done (optionally) revert the VM to the original state. I don’t do much Java work, but this is seems like a great idea.

Second, the look and feel of VMware under Linux has been improved and (more importantly) the icons (most of them, anyway), have been licensed under “CC Attribute-ShareAlike”:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/. More details available “here”:http://www.chipx86.com/blog/?p=206.

CcWiki:Todo

Mike Linksvayer, May 10th, 2007

Today’s release of MediaWiki 1.10 reminds me that the CC Wiki is badly in need of an upgrade (from 1.6). Here’s the todo list:

• Upgrade to MediaWiki 1.10
• Add more spam prevention, remove barriers
  • possibly no image upload on new accounts?
  • add capcha?
  • remove need for email confirmation?
• Install OpenId extension
• Install Semantic MediaWiki extension
  • Migrate lists of stuff to articles with queryable assertions, e.g., content curators, books

That’s in addition to migrating and adding lots more content there and doing a theme refresh.

The release also reminds me to look at an old patch to AJAX-ify Creative Commons license selection option in installer, makie it work in 1.10, and try to get it into the mainline.

Palimpsest

Mike Linksvayer, May 4th, 2007

Terry Hancock, a frequent poster on the law-oriented cc-licenses list, is working on an interesting metadata library called Palimpsest:

[W]hich has a mnemonic association with what the program does, and does have a clever backronym for those who want one:
Python
Attribution &
Licensing
Information
Metadata
Processor, with
Systematic
Extensibility for
Sundry
Types

Terry’s goals for the project:

• Read/write support of Adobe XMP embedded metadata
• Read/write support of native “named field” data
• Read/write support of comments
• Read/write support of visible text labelling for formats that need it
• General adaptation to the 15 Dublin Core named fields for all data
• Discovery of attribution and licensing data in comments and annotations, if not available elsewhere
• License-aware processing (expansion of common abbreviations of terms, etc)
• Open-ended pluggable support for virtually any multimedia datatype
• Highly portable, so that it can be used on clients or servers on any operating system
• Dead-simple, so people will actually want to use it

I’m glad to see Terry tackling this project. It’ll be hard to get the abstractions right, but valuable if it works.

I love the project logo:

Not because it is a particularly great logo, but because it’s the first logo I’ve seen that could be mistaken for a captcha. Intentional or not, bound to be independently invented many times, and perhaps copied by me at least once.

Atom License Extension

Mike Linksvayer, May 4th, 2007

Thanks to the work of James Snell the Atom License Extension has been approved for publishing as an Experimental RFC.

Read about CC license support in RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 1.0 on our wiki page about syndication.

StuffIt 10 Considered Harmful

Nathan Yergler, May 1st, 2007

Mac OS X users of “ccPublisher”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcPublisher have long been plagued by the following error:

No module named os. Check console.log for complete error report.

The source of this has been a mystery. For a while the pattern suggested it was only older, non-supported versions of Mac OS X. Then my suspicion was Intel-based Macs. But neither of those really held up under scrutiny. Last month a “thread”:http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pythonmac-sig/2007-April/018882.html on the Python Mac SIG(Special Interest Group) mailing list revealed the culprit: Stuffit 10.

StuffIt has an option to “continue expanding” archives, so if you have a gzipped tar file, it will do both passes: un-gzip, un-tar at once. However, Python applications packaged for Mac OS X using the “py2app”:http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/py2app/ utility contain an additional zip file, hidden in the application. This zip file contains the Python runtime library. Apparently StuffIt 10 traverses into application bundles and continues the unzip process if you’ve chosen to “continue expanding”.

From my brief testing this morning, it appears that StuffIt 11 is smarter in this respect — even with “continue expanding” checked it doesn’t traverse into application bundles. So if you’ve run into this problem, either unzip from the command line or upgrade StuffIt. Future releases of CC software for OS X will use DMG(disk image) files to avoid this problem in the future.