Vichy France, the FCC, and the Internet

I just wrote a message to the FCC regarding Net Neutrality, at the urging of the Save the Internet coalition. You can do the same at: http://www.savetheinternet.com/fcc-comments

I've included my message below, if anyone wants to use it as a model of articulate civic engagement.

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Dear FCC,

Look, we all know that the Internet should be a plain, old common carrier just like the telephone system. That will work best for consumers, for content innovators and providers, and it will actually work out pretty damned handsomely for the wireline companies just as it has up until now. Making certain that the Internet remains a common carrier would be the highest achievement you could reach as public officials and citizens.

We all know this. So don't, don't, don't, give in to the lobbyist pressure and compromise Net Neutrality. You have the legal authority to reimpose Title II, and once you do that then the wirelines will have that much higher of a barrier to get over in terms of removing Net Neutrality and exploiting the public. Sure, they may buy the next election and then proceed to buy Congress, but that isn't your worry. Your job is to do the right thing, right now, while you have the power to do it. We'll fight tomorrow's battle tomorrow, and we might lose tomorrow, but we lose for sure if you surrender today. Do you really want to go down in history as the FCC that created an Internet version of Vichy France? We all know know what the right action is here. Just do it.

Cutting out hair in GIMP

Here is another great Gimp tutorial from the GIMPtricks series on YouTube. I had been assuming that bad hair selection was just something you had to live with in Gimp. I was wrong.

Freemind

The farther we get into the Millenium, the harder it gets to keep all of the information organized. One strategy for coping would be to follow Thoreau's advice and simplify my life in order to reduce the information flow to a manageable level. But what's the fun of that?

The other strategy is to fight fire with fire, using technology to fight the info-flood that technology has brought us. And that's where Freemind comes in. It was created as a mind-mapping tool, useful for organizing a stream of ideas and seeing how to fit the ideas together. But as the following video by JerryTonneman on YouTube shows, Freemind can be used to sort all kinds of information, including your daily schedule.

Firefox Spellchecking

I owe a thank you to Rick Broida at PC World for publishing his tip about adding words to Firefox's spell checker. I use TiddlyWiki for taking notes about economics, and Firefox's dictionary doesn't include many terms from economics, so as I make my notes I'm sometimes swimming in red squiggles. But Rick pointed out that simply right-clicking the terms will bring up an option to add them to my personal Firefox dictionary file.

Again, thanks Rick!

Youtube Fixed

I noticed awhile ago that my video player controls in Youtube weren't  working. The videos will start playing, but I cannot then pause them, adjust the volume, or anything else involving the mouse.

So, having a moment this morning, I finally went up to the Ubuntu Forums and the forums came through for me once again. More specifically, poster lovinglinux came through for me with a Firefox flash troubleshooting guide that included my problem, and the simple, command line solution.

One thing troubled me. The solution that lovinglinux provides involves adding the line "GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1" to a configuration file, and I have a knee-jerk suspicious reaction whenever I see WINDOWS. Happily, Dax at Dax's Blog (http://blogs.gurulabs.com/dax/2009/10/what-gdk-native.html) came through with a post titled "What GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 means". Thanks Dax, my mind is set at ease.

And, now, for your viewing pleasure, is a screen capture of Oren Lavie's Her Morning Elegance, taken while the video was conveniently paused.

Inkscape Graphs with Backgrounds

A simple step forward: putting a bitmap illustration behind a graph in Inkscape. I started with a graph that I had already built. Then I opened the Layers menu and added a new layer, which I then placed at the bottom of my layer stack. With that layer active, I imported my jackelope png file that I had taken with my webcam yesterday, and set the opacity to around 45% to gray the picture out. Then came a brief period of resizing the jackelope bitmap using Inkscape's Transform -> Scale widget. And that was it, an illustrated graph.

That Was Easy: Webcam Edition

Was also pleased to find that Ubuntu accessed the webcam on my Dell Studio 1557 without a problem. I downloaded Cheese and was instantly able to take the following self-portrait, which saved itself politely into a folder named "Webcam" within my Pictures folder. Video was painless as well.

Net Neutrality Graph

Following on the graph of Metcalfe's Law from last week, here is a take on network externalities, a graph that I've adapted from the article by Stan Leibowitz and Stephen Margolis in the Handbook of Telecommunications Economics (vol. 1, copyright 2002).

The interesting difference between this graph and Metcalfe's graph is that, for Metcalfe, the value of the network is rising exponentially while the marginal cost of adding another user rises linearly, but in the Leibowitz and Margolis version of the story, marginal benefit rises linearly while marginal cost rises exponentially.

Today's graph is basically a standard externalities graph, labeled to make it apply to a situation where network effects have become externalities that lead to the network being too small. This issue of network size is important; since the value of the network derives from the other users of the network, you want to keep adding as many people to the network as you can, until the cost of reaching the people still outside is greater than the extra value they would bring. If the network is too small, then we all lose out.

But as important as the question of network size is, it isn't really my biggest concern about goods with strong network effects. For me it's a matter of how all that network value gets shared between network owners and network users. Call me biased (I don't own a network of any commercial significance), but I want the lion's share of the network value to go to the users. But more on that later.

So far as Inkscape is concerned, I found a nice video on Youtube showing how to do superscripts and subscripts (along with text kerning) in Inkscape. The process isn't as automagic as you would find in most commercial Windows programs that deal with text, such as Illustrator, Indesign, or Word, but it's also not hard to do, and Inkscape will do everything I need it to, and more.

No Google Sketchup for Linux?!

I'm a little surprised that Google has not made Sketchup available for Linux. I thought part of the idea behind web services like Google Docs was to make computing a little less OS dependent, so as to weaken the grip of Microsoft on computing.

I'm not complaining though. Google has done plenty to advance the FLOSS cause, and I can't recall ever giving them a dime for any of it. Still, I need to find out where to write just to make them aware of the fact that I would like to see Sketcher for Linux.

The Bicycle, the Fawn, and the Stylus

I felt the need to document a close encounter I had with a fawn while on my bicycle today. Normally I would just take a picture with my cellphone, but I felt that stopping to pull out my phone would have needlessly alarmed the little thing, which was standing there, two feet away from me. So, if photography is ruled out, the fallback has to be sketching with the Gimp!

The first step was a quick stop at Google images to find a picture of a fawn, and what fawn better than Bambi? I'd show you the picture, but I'm terrified of Disney's lawyers (may Michael Eisner and Roy Disney rot in hell). Hold it, I could show the picture to you if I used it for purposes of parody. Hmmm, may be a post idea there for later.

In any case, I opened my downloaded jpg in the Gimp and opened a second, transparent layer on top of it and began tracing. Of course, tracing an image on a laptop touchpad with your finger is so awkward that it's almost just not worth the effort. But I was saved by instructions I found on the web about how to build a homemade touchpad stylus.

There are a variety of instructions out there for your DIY touchpad stylus, ranging from the unexpected (superfine steel wool for the nib) to the strange (a bit of sponge for a nib, that you dip into water, as if you were going to watercolor on your touchpad). But the common element that all of these instructions have is the use of aluminum foil running along the length of your stylus to conduct electricity from your fingers to the touchpad (who knew?). When I later found how (here) that I could cover the aluminum foil on the tip with Scotch tape to protect the touchpad, then I was in business.

It took about ten minutes to take an unsharpened pencil and cut a little angle off the end with a kitchen knife, then wrap some foil over the angled end and cover the foil with tape. Voila! It's not pretty, but it did the job.

Armed with my new weapon of mass creation, it was simple to trace over Disney's Bambi. Well... simple, but not good. But I patiently followed the absolutely disastrous first round of tracing with a few minutes of correction, moving back and forth between Gimp's paintbrush and eraser tools, bit by bit, until I had something that I believe is recognizable as a small deer. And so, without further ado, I give you ...

First Inkscape Graph: Metcalfe's Law

Hello World. Here is my first stab at a graph made in Inkscape. It's a duplication of the famous* slide by Bob Metcalfe where he originally presented his contention that the value of networks increases exponentially with the increase in the number of users. His statement is now called Metcalfe's Law, and is the foundation of the theory of network effects in economics. Here is a fun and spirited defense of the law against critics, by Metcalfe himself.

As the foundation of the theory of network effects, Metcalfe's law is very important to my own economics. So I've played with Inkscape here re-creating Metcalfe's original 35 mm slide. This is all just freehand, as befits a graph that is illustrating a concept rather than showing an actual, measurable quantitative relationship. As Metcalfe himself points out, it is very hard to specifically define, let alone measure, something like network "value."

Manning book downloads

One thing I love about Manning Publications is that they offer their books for download as pdfs at a good discount. I didn't want to pay $36 for a print copy of their Gnuplot in Action, but $23 for a pdf hits my sweet spot. O'Reilly offers pdf versions of their books, but the discount I just saw on one of their graphics books was $4.00. Sorry, no sale.

Grabbing a Still Photo from a Movie

I really had no idea how easy this is in Linux.

I assumed that I needed an actual video editing program in order to grab a still image from a movie, but I was so wrong. To my surprise, that capability is built right into the VLC movie player that I use to watch iso files ripped from DVDs. You just pause the movie, and then use the Snapshot command under the Video menu. Voila! There's your still.

For myself, I want to use these stills as models to draw over within Gimp or Inkscape, but for a description of other legitimate purposes see the Stanford University guide to fair use.