Rant about copying

Sep 09, 2006 20:34

I got a bit irritated a few weeks ago when I realised that codenazi had stolen my LJ icon. I assume that codenazi saw it when I posted a comment on jwz's journal. I know he must have stolen it from me since I wrote the computer program that actually draws the picture. By "stolen" I mean copied without permission. I asked him where he got it. He just said that he "found it". He was of course looking at the icon accompanying my post when typing that. He thought the icon was cool enough to use for himself, but obviously it wasn't quite good enough to make him ask first (or even retrospectively thank me when he realised that I had noticed).
I resolved to tweak the program around a bit to rotate the head instead of the pentagram, when I had some time. Well, I spent some time on that today, and in the process discovered a bug in the 1997 version of the program. Unfortunately the result just doesn't work as an LJ icon; the lines making up the head are too narrow to stand out well enough while being rotated, and making them thicker would remove some of the detail. So I'm not going to change my LJ icon. The result does look OK at larger sizes, but I've no use for it at the larger size, really:-


While I'm ranting about copying stuff, I should say that I got the idea for writing the program from jwz in the first place. He made a really great set of screen savers called XScreenSaver. One of them was called blitspin. It takes an image and rotates it by performing repeated logical operations on increasingly small segments. The image seems to dissolve itself into static and reconstitute itself with a 90 degree rotation. I liked the screen saver, but thought it could do with being able to work with any screen resolution. I sent the program to jwz but he decided not to use it (these days, blitspin usually just grabs a screen image and rotates that). So the original idea here is from jwz (the image of course is from the Sisters of Mercy logo).

software, music

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