Guaka! - creative_commons

numpy documentation

Guaka — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 00:08:39 +0000

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With trustlet, I'm finally getting to a point where we can do cool stuff, evaluating prediction graphs of trust metrics. Now I need to refresh my Python array stuff. Since last time I was using that stuff, in 2004, they have refactored it (once more) and called it numpy. That's fine. But, in order to read an important part of the documentation you need to pay 39.99 US$. Now, that's less and less by the day, but still, it's very inconvenient, and probably holding back wider acceptation of Python in the scientific community. Like software, documentation should be free. I might even pay if the author would have chosen to use the Creative Commons ShareAlike NonCommercial Attribution license - but then I would be able to pass on the information to my friends (even they are all over the internet). I think it would have been a wiser choice to find a job at some institute or company to further the development of numpy and scipy, and its documentation in a freer way. That shouldn't be too hard these days.

Creative Commons books

Guaka — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 01:10:58 +0000

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Last week I found a list of books available under Creative Commons licenses on the Creative Commons wiki. You can find some great titles, such as Wall Street, Capitalism 3.0 and Asterisk: The Future of Telephony. Some of my favorites were already on the list (Free Culture and Down and Out of the Magic Kingdom and We the Media) but I had to add Everyone in Silico and Producing Open Source Software. I was also pleased to find out that the Semantic MediaWiki plugin is successfully used on the wiki. And that they use OpenID. Of course I couldn't refrain myself from doing some structural improvements on the CC wiki. And yesterday I was promptly made sysop. Zoek u informatie over auteursrechten in het Nederlands?

Wikivoyage

Guaka — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:55:11 +0000

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I have been a contributor on Wikitravel for a long time now. I was not too worried when Wikitravel was bought by Internet Brands (which has already shown interest in buying CouchSurfing). But I have been annoyed by the lack of database dumps at Wikitravel for a long time now. So I was very happy to stumble upon an alternative: Wikivoyage. The project was set up by disgruntled admins of the German version of Wikitravel. I haven't gone into the gory details, but it could be more than the lack of database dumps. My wild guess is that there was a cultural misunderstanding between Wikitravel, that was founded with an SF Bay Area Burning Man culture, and the Europeans dealing with policies created by them. It's funny to see some more parallels here with CouchSurfing but ortunately Wikitravel was already a lot more open (using Creative Commons and mostly open means of communication) than CS so forking was quite easy. Now let's see if a little bit more pressure will induce Internet Brands to make the dumps available.