User:Rofthorax
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents |
[edit] Bio
It's dispersed throughout the net, Kiernan Holland been on the net since 1993, so his rants extend enough to fill a volume set of encyclopedias (a sign of his proficiency with typing which developed from hunt and peck on a Commodore_64, and has been known to generate content at about 40-100 words a minute depending on how excited he is. His favorite text editor is VIM, a side-effect of earning a degree in Computer Science. He also took a minor in art when pursuing his interest in computer animation. These days he works as a web developer, sometimes coding object-based systems from scratch in PHP, the same scripting language that wikipedia is written in. Earning less than most high school teachers, he's happy enough just to share with others his tips on spending wisely and content he's found on the Internet, and effectively torturing major corporations and celebrities with conspiracy theory, truth and advice (he's only kidding :) ).
[edit] Rhapsody
Kiernan began using Rhapsody in 2004, after using it he found out he could save playlists to files. He then added a portion to his site called "Musical Archeology" page, a title that adequately describes the amazement of onveiling a new relic from the past and puting it up for display. After having his eyes burned out from watching too much MTV and listening to way too much Rock music, he's only happy to share with people his love of music and "Thick bouncy disco beats with Funky Bass", ala Daft_Punk.
There is a current debate underway whether Wikipedia should contain links to playlists on Kiernan's site, a debate largely upheld by Kiernan and some admins, but whatevah happens, happens.
[edit] YouTube
After playing with Rhapsody much, Kiernan developed a script that would take rhapsody playlists and convert them into search queries on youtube, so as to resurrect music videos placed on youtube. He hasn't been able to rip himself from YouTube to make playlists on rhapsody.
[edit] Wikipedia Synthesized
Since Wikipedia is in GPL, essentially, Kiernan now manages four podcasts based on articles from wikipedia, synthesized with a voice synthesizer called "Text Aloud", it has the capability to do regular expression matches, and Kiernan has programmed it to strip a wikipedia page of junk and read it from head to toe without much alteration. An average one hour podcast takes him 3 hours to encode. He usually publishes on Monday or Tuesday. Do a search on iTunes for "Wikipedia".
[edit] Breakthrough
More recently Kiernan did work for a scientist at Los Alamos Laboratory, making tutorials and making interface suggestions for the program "Breakthrough": such as the color encoding of the items, how information should be presented, who was the primary audience (lay people or industrial hygenists). Breakthrough is a program used by industrial hygenists to predict the service lives of air purifying respirators. The package and its creator (Gerry Woods) won the Edward J. Baier Technical Achievment Award from the American Industrial Hygiene Assocation, the proceeds were shared with his colleagues including a two hundred dollar check for Kiernan.
[edit] Blender
Kiernan Holland, one of the first few users of the popular open source 3D application called Blender. In the early days, before there was a manual for blender, Kiernan and others such as Bart_Veldhuzen gathered understanding from Ton_Roosendaal via email and served as free help for many newcomers to blender. In April of 2000, Ton invited and paid the expenses for forty common users of blender, including Kiernan, to come to Amsterdam and witness the unvieling of Game_Blender with the proposition that these users could make videogames with Game_Blender, though this idea never quite caught on, following the release of the sources to blender, Ton released the sources to Game Blender as well..
One of the features of game blender is the creation of stand-alone embedded web content using a plugin version of Game-Blender for web browsers like Firefox. Kiernan believes that the continued development of Game Blender could result in an adoption of complex and intricate web content, unmatched by VRML clients previous to Game Blender.
The same year Kiernan purchased the URL www.blender3d.com, the plan was to make it into a website about blender, when Ton Roosendaal wanted the site, Kiernan wasn't quite sure how to shift ownership of the URL to Ton. It wasn't until NaN's bankruptcy and eventual resurrection as the blender foundation, that Kiernan transferred ownership to Ton. After that Kiernan purchased the url www.bl3nDer.com , which BTW is not mispelled, it has an embedded "3D" in the name, which becomes more obvious once you visit the site.
[edit] Rise Of The Thorax
Previous to using blender, Kiernan won a two thousand dollar scholarship from Alias/Wavefront (one of three being offered at SIGGRAPH in 1996) for an animation called "Rise of The Thorax"(mpeg) that he had made with Wavefront's flagship product "The Advanced Visualizer" (precursor to Maya by about two years). "Thorax" was hand delivered to Pixar by Kiernan's instructor Thomas Keller in 1995.. This initial relationship led to a series of talks at Riogrande SIGGRAPH (the New Mexico chapter) by animators of Pixar such as Ash_Brannon, Elliot_Smyrl and Mark_Henne (Mark graduated from UNM).
Disgusted by his inability to obtain a commercial license of "Visualizer" from Alias/Wavefront, upon graduation, to continue creating quality work (an option he counted on) Kiernan said "that's it, I'm finished with commercial 3D applications" and switched to blender. Upon graduation from UNM, he took the two-thousand dollar scholarship from Alias/Wavefront and purchase a Pentium 166 with a Nvidia-TNT2, a Iomega Buzz-board (capable of playing back MJPEG compressed video to a VCR without using flying-erase-heads), and a Jazz Drive, and made the animation "The Early Worm"(mpeg) entirely with blender.
[edit] Evil License Server Daleks
Kiernan believes that software-based license servers are EVIL, and believe they are used to leverage special annual payment relationships between software vendors and users who would rather own an application. Alias/Wavefront, for instance, will sell one a copy of Maya but will not allow consumers to transfer this relationship to a third party by way of a sale. This practice has been adopted by many commercial software developers, using piracy as a scapegoat, and "getting away with it" due to the ignorance and lack of resistance from consumers. The purpose for this behaviour is to have a granular control over the rights of the consumers with regards to the use of commercial applications. The MPAA is trying to pass such controls in congress to control the reception and viewing of videos collected from cable TV (look on google for "Broadcast Flag"). Another example is the use of Digital_Rights_Management on the sale of distributed digital music, Apple is using the firmware on iPod's to limit iPod owners from purchasing or using the DRM files from other music sales services such as Rhapsody and Napster.
Kiernan encourages the development of open source applications, primarily object oriented applications because they just make sense. And it was this programatic rape of the senses that led him to value open source development and the use of open source applications.
[edit] Open Source
Recently, Kiernan has been pushing a proposal for a concept called a object oriented file formats, that he believes would encourage a convergence of media formats like movie formats and audio formats, allowing for flexibility in the file format without stimulating a change in the applications that use the files..
He believes why such an idea is not popular has nothing to do with feasibility nor logic, he staunchly believes its the politics of commercial software development that is clouding developers logic from the real issues.
Normally when one uses a Word Processor document, the document is in a proprietary data structure that is patented to prevent third party applications from using the document. If the document could be wrapped in a object interface leading to a standard protocol between a word processor and a document, then it would be possible to design word processors apart from the internal design of the document. Also it would be possible to protect files from obsoletion, allowing users to exchange word processor documents regardless of their prefered word processor and operating environmnet (MAC, PC, Linux, etc.). He believes that such an idea would be discouraged among commercial developers because it makes them vulnerable to competition, and would make the environment "too easy for the consumers".
There is a saying "that anything good for consumers tends to be bad for business". Kiernan says Object Oriented Open Source development of standards in a openly used and object oriented language would be very bad for business, but it's necessary to solidify peoples understandings of computers and to encourage the widespread use of computers (not to allow large software vendors to become complacent and re-develop applications to stimulate a repurchase, never to reach a stasus (for it makes no commercial sense to arrive at a design that doesn't require any further development).. However, the logic that governs commercial software development is completely orthogonal to the development of open source applications, why confuse the approaches of the two, and why even be constrained by the politics of commercial software? He believes that solutions that were realized in open source WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN DEVELOPED in commercial software development. He thinks those conservatives who see open source and unfair to commercial development of software are not aware of the real problems with commercial software which is the perpetual re-development of software that has for decades already been perfected.. Its like that joke: "how do you keep and idiot in suspense, answer continued on the other side.", though here it is "how do you keep a consumer satisfied, solution in next product release."
A prequisite to the development of object file standards is the implementation of an object sandbox(pdf), to execute and interface with these and other kinds of objects, the sandbox implementation is not unlike a Java JVM or the Smalltalk environment, and could conceivable be developed on such Virtual Machines, but the instructions used must be limited to functions that can't be manipulated to perform malicious actions like addressing/erasing un-owned memory, making direct system calls, using buffer overflow to gain administrator execution access, and so on.
[edit] Object Standards
Kiernan believes that with the adoption of object standards would lead to the convergence of most common applications like video editors, music mixers, word processors, database packages.. Making software users into professionals that shouldn't have to keep relearning packages they already know how to use..
[edit] External Links
More of his ideas and media can be found on his website at www.bl3nDer.com.
[edit] Frustrations
[edit] My contributions ripped from Wikipedia by Clumsy Brushes
CryptoDerk (aka Derek Williams) has reverted all my additions to wikipedia, links to playlists for each musician (Bryan_Ferry, Brian_Eno, Talking_Heads, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Talking_Heads, etc.. ), I've determined that Wikipedia is moderated by scripts, not people, that MAY do things like clump edits made within hours (via Clustering_Algorithm not unlike the ones used in grading people on a curve) related by a single reference (person or ip-address) and blindly mark these changes as VANDALISM.
Well this grudge may not last very long, but I have to admit Wikipedia serves as a reference for information but it's not perfect. See Derek, and other wikipedians that use his applications, paint with big clumsy brushes, and I and others who add content paint with hairline brushes.. Derek's scripts can only destroy, they can't create nor can they make up for lost time spent on wikipedia by those wishing to inform.. Making wikipedia a toilsome waste of time for those who really care about it. Just keep this in mind the next time you plan on contributing to wikipedia.
I would request that wikipedia open the vote for content removal/reverting to one out of three random, unique selected non-wikipedians to avoid the potential of bias
Note, in a relational database its quite simple to check for the existence of an IP address, just do "select $IP from table users", if that comes up with zero results, the IP address is of a unique-non-wikipedian, wikipedians who are not logged in count as non-wikipedians even though the paradox, you can't guard against this. If the selection is random, over a reasonable sampling (ie 3,10 or 100 selected over the last hour, based on the hit counts for the content), its sufficient for non-bias given that wikipedians are a minority of the general population. The number of necessary votes for non-wikipedian contributors could be 2 or 3, but for wikipedian contributors it could be increased to ten to be fair to those that choose to be accountable.
BTW, if you are interested in seeing some of the rhapsody playlists I am oferring: here you can find a list of such playlists here (I provided links to the content because I know of no way of loading them onto wikipedia, i had hoped something like this would be adopted as a approach of adding audio content to musician's pages legally), I know its not a dependable reference to the musicians content, but if people want to access the content directly and are willing to pay for it, this is the best method I know of.. You will see on my page that I always provide the cheapest of obtaining Musicians content legally, and if the content is illegal, it will be found out, but I try not to store content that is illegal. Referencing content that is illegally stored is not the same thing as distributing illegal content, the user has the choice of accessing it or not. I'm merely providing references.
--Rofthorax 23:22, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
[edit] License
All my contributions to Wikipedia, in any form, are licensed as follows:
 |
Multi-licensed with any Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License | |
| I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license draft version 1.0 and version 2.0 and the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides. | ||
 |
|
