AquarionicsI was trying to find an article in it’s section, and realised that it was impossible. So I rewrote the articles indexing function to do so by category. Oh, and writings. Oh, and coded half the user system, so passwords arn’t hard-coded any more (Bad Aquarion, No biscuit) and I can log in properly. Next up, account creation. Possibly. If I don’t do something else entirely.
Pingback is back in action. It went down because I’m a moron, and didn’t check Pingback when I integrated Trackback. Fool.
As forwarded by AFP’s Gary Nicholass, A message to clueless website authors
by someone called “Night Owl”, which is sorta like the Wasp manifesto only with more swearing.
I hate HTML4
So, the way I’m supposed to do inline objects is the <object> tag is it? Well, to quote someone famous, Duck that. Of the roughly sixteen million possible attributes it has, six million are just rephrasings of the opposing six million, and the last four million are obscure and pointless. Why is the HREF called DATA or CLASSID anyway? It’s not an id, it’s a URL FFS. Grr. Anyway, so my attempts to do an attachment system were foiled by HTML4 being crap, coupled with the fact that of the mirriad of possible combinations of DATA, CLASSID and whatever, only one works in both IE and Mozilla.
So I went to the other idea, which was to feed the file after sending the right content type. This was easy to program, and as all things that are easy, it didn’t work. IE accused me of being an unrealiable source, and Moz just crashed. Both worked fine with image/jpeg, but borked on application/ogg, which was the problem in the first place.
So attachments are partly broken. Bah.
So, I was surfing this evening, when up popped a window with this in it (mirrored in the attachment below)
Nice to see that good taste in naming runs true…
22 years ago today, the being currently known as Nicholas “Aquarion” Avenell entered this level of reality.
Happy Birthday To Me.
So I got bored and redesigned. For some reason, Moz <1.3 is ignoring the margin-top: on the content block, so you can’t see this text. If anyone has any idea why, answers on a postcard please. Moz 1.3a and IE seem to handle it fine. Bloody browsers…
Today has been a level day.
This morning, I got up at 8am to a doorbell that hadn’t rung, because my brain was now used to the idea of a doorbell waking me up at 8am.
Boo Morning.
At 9:30, the bits for fixing my computer came, I installed with no problems and (thanks to the fact I’ve now replaced every central componant) it works.
Yay Technology.
I installed Windows 2k, and Syndirella (which rocks) and then we went to meet friends for lunch at The Dojo, and had noodles.
Yay Food.
Then I discovered I’m being clusterfucked by my bank in a way that is both totally my fault and someone elses, but can’t stop the ever-spiraling fuck right now.
Boo Money.
Then I got a phone call from someone to talk about a possible short contract.
Yay Work.
Then I found out that the reason the washing up was piling up was because it was my turn and nobody thought to tell me.
Boo Washing Up.
(I hate washing up with a passion unholy, especially when it’s washing up someone else should have done. I only do it for short periods of time, because otherwise I find the idea of smashing plates so I don’t have to clean them a better one. No Cool Toy makes it worth while.
Watched a small marathon of Buffy DVDs, and wished for Season Six to arrive on DVD soon.
Things are looking up. Expect more witty ramblings on life in general and mine in particular to come soon.
SteveD:
Gary Nicholass
Google have archived pages that, for various reasons valid to myself and
others, I have removed from websites. That is my decision, taken according
to my morality, the opinions of others, or due to changing circumstances.
More to the point I own the domain names and all the content therein. What
right have Google to cache and serve pages which I have deleted?I accept that anything I say on a ng will be recorded, and act accordingly.
I absolutely do not agree with Google cacheing and providing from their db
something that I have written and subsequently deleted, for whatever reason,
from the sites that I maintain.Can’t see the issue.
I can.
My posts on usenet, and my entries and articles on
Aquarionics.com come under an implied (but soon – in the case of the
website – explicit) licence to be quoted or reproduced wholesale,
provided both context and attribution are provided and no commercial
worth is given to the post in particular. I retain copyright on the
items, yet grant the world at large permission to quote and use my
works, on those provisos. This is the implied statement you give
whenever you post anything to usenet, (the stuff about “Commercial
Worth” allows people to sell NNTP services without ownership getting
in the way, without someone being able to collect all my posts – for
example – and sell them as a book whilst gathering royalties. That I
could get moderatly intense about) (Note: The contents of this post
do not imply a legal statement, it wasn’t designed as such and
shouldn’t be used as such. If you want a watertight legal document,
ask a lawyer).
I don’t really have a problem with Google caching all that,
because people are free to quote it. I’d prefer them to read the original
source, because it will have any corrections or removals I may have
made, but I assume that if they are looking at Google’s cache, this
isn’t possible.
On the other hand, I write short stories (and currently novel,
but that’s another point) which it would be nice to get published some day.
A couple have already been so (Well, Fan/E-Zine published, which doesn’t
pay as well, but is still very nice), but one day it might be legally
necessary for me to take them down from the site, and at that point I
run into problems with the Google Cache, because it’s now costing
someone money, in that people who would buy the thing to read the
stories are instead reading them on Google.
The two sides of this could be thought of as follows:,
Neal Stephenson (of Snow Crash, Zodiac and Cryptonomicon) wrote a novel
called “The Big U” (I belive it was his first, but could be wrong) which
hadn’t been reprinted in years, and showed no signs of ever being so.
This being so, Neal didn’t object too much when copies of this
started appearing on the net. Then the sucess of Cryptonomicon (Which
has a sequel ‘Quicksilver’ out this summer) brought The Big U back into
print, so sites were asked to take it down.
On the other hand, Cory Doctorow published his first novel,
‘Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom’ simultaniously online (via his
website, http://www.craphound.com/down/) and via Tor Books (Get it,
by the way, it’s very good). This he did because first authors don’t
tend to get a lot of publicity, and this way many people would hear of
and read the book (and hopefully enjoy it) because:
SteveD:
You put information into the public domain [1].
On purpose. Someone made
a copy of that information and will show it to people who ask. If you
don’t want the information to go public, don’t put it in the public
domain in the first place. Google is not the only webcrawler in the
world, nor the only archiver. I’d suggest researching the actions of the
Wayback Machine and thinking about how many other people do this kind of
thing as a hobby.
Beware the terminology. “In the public domain” and “readable by the
public” are differant things. You can see Mickey Mouse, watch his films,
but try to use him unless you work for Disney and you’ll find yourself
in la-lawyer land.
SteveD:
If you merely don’t want the reputable archivers to record your
information, I suggest you look into the use of a file called
ROBOTS.TXT.
Personally, I would like Google to have a seperate useragent
string for the archiving as apposed to the crawling, so I can tell it
to index the site for searching, but exclude certian bits from
caching. When I get back online properly, I’ll email them about this.
To sum up my entire post, I make this point: Just because it’s
on a website, doesn’t mean it isn’t copyrighted. If it’s copyrighted, you
should get permission before you use it.
