Month: June 2012

Background Ireland’s Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation are in the process of conducting a review of how copyright operates in Ireland. They published a consultation document and invited submissions. The Irish Free Software Organisation made a submission, which I drafted. There were also several points about the paper which I thought were interesting, but not strictly Free Software issues: Observations on the consultation paper Neutral phrasing 2. The Intersection of Innovation and Copyright in the Submissions […] 2.2 Innovation […] […] the established film, music and news industries have struggled to find successful business models in the face of widespread infringement of the copyright in their content. [p.5] Encouraging that they don’t use words like ‘theft’ or ‘piracy’ here.

Some stop-motion animations that the older three kids did with my dad a while ago: Meg’s: Jude’s: Zach’s:

Zach of course was holding a hosepipe, which I removed using a background shot. Partly by masking off the relatively static length of hose, and the rest using bodged-together chroma-keying of the yellow of the hose. There’s next to no live sound; only Zach saying ‘I need a pee’. The swishing sound for the last shot was some sound of just spraying at a wall, then I created bass-boosted and treble-boosted versions, and mixed back and forth between them according to roughly what direction Zach was pointing the hose. Turned out OK I think. OpenShot seemed reasonable enough from the small amount I used it. It did crash once, and the dialogs for editing properties of clips were slow in

Did a bit of video editing recently, using OpenShot. The kids and I took a good bit of footage, and separate sound, then I added special effects and put this very sophisticated comedy together:

This puzzle was in my daughter’s Dandy: and I thought it would give me an opportunity to experiment with Prolog, which I’d been meaning to do for a while. I used SWI-Prolog. Structure of the puzzle We’ll represent a block of nine boxes as a list. A box is the expression X/Y/C, meaning that creature type C occupies location X/Y, where the top-left box is 1/1. We’ll have a fragment similar to Bs = [1/1/_, 1/2/_, 1/3/_, 2/1/_, 2/2/_, 2/3/_, 3/1/_, 3/2/_, 3/3/_] Our goal is to find which creature can go in each box. The different types of creature Every box must have a creature in it. box_has_creature(_/_/p). box_has_creature(_/_/h). box_has_creature(_/_/b). We’ll use the variable name ‘Bs’ throughout to mean