The Windkey and the Lamplighter

I wasn’t certain, when I saw this, which way was up…

I used to take lots of pictures, and my dad works in the photography
industry and used to get sample cameras at a discount, so sometime in
high school I was given an older SLR—a Ricoh XR-X 3PF. I used it a
lot then, but I hadn’t really used it in a couple years.

Lately, though, I’ve been ogling digital SLRs, and missing playing
with digital photography. Before dropping $1000 or more on a Nikon
D80 or D50 or something, though, I wanted to make sure I really
wanted one. So I bought some ISO 200 film (my first mistake—the ISO
800 wasn’t that much more expensive, and I’d have gotten better
pictures) and took my camera out to play. Here are some of the
results from my low-light, outdoor, no tripod adventure.

I’ve made ice cream before. In high school, my church youth group
used old-fashioned wooden buckets to make vanilla ice cream for the
social where the little kids did their end-of-summer musical. But I’ve
never been in charge of the recipe, and most of what I remember from
that experience is lots and lots of cranking, finding more ice and
salt, and then more cranking.

The Kitchenaid Ice-cream maker attachment to my mixer takes away all
the ice, salt, and cranking, since you get a nice cold bowl by
freezing a double-walled bowl with some sort of liquid between the
walls. It does take 15 hours or more in the freezer to chill the
bowl, plus time for the ice cream to "ripen" in the freezer after it’s
made. If I’d planned all this out well, and had nothing to keep me
from being home to make ice cream, I could have had real, tasty, hard
ice cream in less than 24 hours. However, since I didn’t plan quite
that well, it took a bit longer.

We put the bowl in the freezer before we’d even gone shopping for
cream. After going shopping, we discovered that the "beginner recipe"
(a vanilla custard) called for 2.5 c of light cream and 2.5 c of
half-and-half. We, not having actually read this particular recipe
before going to the store, had bought a pint of heavy cream. So we
halved the recipe, and used our heavy cream with 1% milk, instead.
The recipe was pretty simple:
Half of the cream got heated, then mixed with four egg yolks (another good reason to make a
half-batch, since I only had five eggs), and half a cup of sugar.
Then the whole thing got poured back into the bowl and heated again
(carefully, but not carefully enough, since we got some chunks that I
think were cooked egg not mixed in well enough)
Then we poured in the rest of the milk/cream, some vanilla (I put in 4
oz instead of the 2 that a halved recipe would call for) and a very little salt.

Sounds super easy, right? Absolutely. And it does taste very good.
However, that good is not (only) vanilla—there’s a much stronger
taste that dominates (and, admittedly, complements) the vanilla.

Whiskey.

Those of you who know me know I pretty-much don’t drink. But a few
years ago I was convinced that home-made vanilla is overwhelmingly
superior to the store-bought kind, so now I keep one or two bottles of
Jack Daniels with vanilla beans soaking inside. Six months is enough
to have very good vanilla that I can use in cookies, cakes, etc.
Even though I tend not to measure vanilla when I put it in a recipe, I
don’t usually notice the whiskey flavor at all.

This is an exception to that rule.

I even measured it, but the ice cream is definately
whiskey-flavored. It’s whiskey-vanilla, but the whiskey is undeniable.
I’m not sure if this would have been more or less true if I’d quickly
heated the vanilla before adding it to the custard base, but I did not
think of that. Eight hours in the fridge to chill the custard plus a
day or so in the freezer after being mixed as ice cream seem to have
reduced the flavor somewhat, but I also may have just gotten used to
it, or something. Maybe next time I’ll make chocolate…

There seem to have been a few changes along the way:

src="http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51W3XJ1QASL._SS500_.jpg"
alt="old optimus prime" scale="75%">

I am a paid-up member of the Free Software Foundation. I’m proud of
the work they’ve done, and glad to have them as a major participant in
the world of software. I use GNU Emacs, Make, the GNU userland, GNU
Ghostscript, and GNU compliers every day in my work. I license most
of my software under the GNU GPLv2. I’ve always been hesitant to use
the "version two or any later version" language recommended by the
FSF. Now they’ve demonstrated why.

The final version of the GPLv3 says this:

1. Use with the GNU Affero General Public License.

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have
permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed
under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single
combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this
License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work,
but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License,
section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the
combination as such.

That is, if I release a program under the GPLv3, anybody else can do
their own work under the GNU Affero GPL and combine the two. What’s
the GNU Affero GPL? It’s just like the GPL, but it says you have to
make the source available over a network. This is designed to allow
authors to claim that they’re distributing Free Software while
prohibiting its use by Application Service Providers:

1. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the
Program, your modified version must give all users interacting with it
remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such
interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of
your version by providing access to copy the Corresponding Source from
a network server at no charge.

It’s based on a fundamentally flawed understanding of what a network
is. A network is not just a large computer. The USPS is a network.
This says that if the USPS is using routing or OCR software licensed
to them under the Affero GPL, they’ve got to offer that software to
anyone who uses it—especially if the customer has a computer
printing out the labels. There’s no clear dividing line between
"interaction remotely through a computer network" and provision of a
service with assistance from a computer. When I reach a computerized
phone tree, perhaps using GNU Bayonne on their end, are they now
obliged to offer me the source to their phone tree? To their
copyrighted speech files? To the uncopyrightable database behind
them?

The right to run the software for any purpose is the most crucial
component of Free Software. In his zeal to punish large corporate
freeloading users of Free Software, RMS and the FSF have compromised
that freedom. If I can’t run a business using Free Software, what’s
the point?

The whole thing’s a disaster. It’s not evident and clear to me that
the GPLv3 is safe for me to use: that I can take back contributions
from others and incorporate them into my software without incurring
significant costs. I can’t be sure that the GPLv3 is a license for
Free software. It looks like, as with the GNU FDL, some works under
this license are free and some are not.

I hope to find clarification of this issue; one FSF blog referred to
authors "blacklisting the Affero GPL" when using GPLv3. Until that
day, I won’t risk using the GPLv3 for anything I write. I’m happy to
stick with the GPLv2.

Further realization: Shoot, this may cause me to switch to XEmacs,
when GNU Emacs goes GPLv3 and I’m not interested in publishing my Gnus
modifications just because I have autoreply code in there.

We’re in Los Angelas. Decoration here is strange. This is up a skylight.

The Marmalade cafe feels like what the Cheescake Factory is meant to imitate—without the compromises necessary for a chain.

Phone Picture