Following xkcd #918, I have joined google+. What's google+? To paraphrase that brilliant webcomic, "it's like facebook, but it's not facebook".

That's an important distinction if you have any privacy, moral, or pragmatic concerns. Facebook is a bad company. Their "walled garden" approach -- in terms of users' private data, as well as applications and casual browsing -- does actual harm to the idea of a global internet. Even if you have no romantic or philosophical notions of the "flow of information", such walled gardens are simply harmful on a practical level. When (not if) something unquestionably better than facebook comes around, you'll lose a lot of data if you use facebook.

(why am I certain that something better than facebook will arrive? That's simply the history of computing. Every software project is supplanted eventually; thinking that software XYZ is the pinnacle of human-computer interaction is the sheerest folly. Something better than facebook, something better than google+, something better than mutt or vim or python, is always bound to happen. Maybe not in 5 years or 10 or 20 years, but it will happen)

Anyway, you can "plus me" (if that's the verb we're going to use) here. Invitations available for people I know who want to join.

There were 44 commits between the release-1.4 and release-1.6 tags, with lots more info in the git changelog.

Hopefully this will be the last Artifastring release before Vivi 1.0 (within the next week). After that, expect not much in July. August will hopefully see Artifastring being expanded to cover cello, viola, and maybe even multiple violins. This relies on a Masters project at the University of Glasgow, so it's not under my control.

I found a nice set of Creative Commons logos for LaTeX, but they were used with \input{cc_beamer}. Following advice in a comment at that blog, I've turned them into a LaTeX package. Following the spirit of open source -- not to mention the CC-SA license itself -- here's the source code:

ccbeamer-0.2.zip

Note that although the hartwork blog has a general "CC-no derivative works, unless otherwise expressly stated", the actual zip file states that it is under CC-SA 3.0.