Remember my issues with Sunbird 0.3 alpha1 and Upcoming.org?
Luckily some of those yahoos at Yahoo! know what they’re doing, and are pretty on the ball.
Now, as soon as they get all the timezone stuff straightened out, we can start to see the calendar files support start and end time for events… I’ll give them a month or two before I complain about it again! ;)
I’m not exactly sure what Renkoo is, but I should probably check out the Renkoo Blog and determine if I should take action to prevent them from using the name renko, which…. wait… they’re spelled differently. Never mind…
I’ve been using Sunbird for a long time. I like it. It’s nice. It’s got bugs, but that’s ok, they get fixed, it works good enough, and it’s open-source.
I’ve been a fan of Upcoming.org for a while now. they got bought by Yahoo! and I hoped it would go well. I still hope it will go well. Still, I’ll spill what the last week has brought.
I installed Sunbird 0.3 alpha1 last week. Unfortunately, all my Upcoming.org calendars broke. Ugh… I dig around, check release notes, try a few things, and… nothing. Am I the only one who uses Upcoming.org and Sunbird together?
Anyway, I don’t give up. I start hacking away at the calendars that are output from Upcoming.org, and I have a few ideas on what is going wrong. I first think it’s a Sunbird thing, since everything worked fine until I upgraded to the latest version. I figure I’ll submit a bug, I mean edit the Bug_Reports wiki page at Upcoming.org (Note: A wiki might not be the best thing for tracking bugs) but get no response. I end up adding to the wiki everytime I learn something. Oh, and it’s a good thing the Sunbird folks do use a real bugtracker, as the bug I submitted to Bugzilla clued me in on the problem.
Of course I figured out a workaround. I mean, I didn’t want to wait for a new release of Sunbird, or wait for the Upcoming.org folks to fix things on their end, so I wrote a cgi on my own server that fetches the Upcoming.org calendar, and re-writes it so it works in Sunbird. Problem (somewhat/temporarily) solved.
I just sent a feedback email to Upcoming.org today. Let’s see what happens next. (I’m also wondering if this blog post will have any effect.)
Ok, it may not be the end of funky, but I’m one of those people who consider the W3C as sort of the stewards of the web and the standards used upon it, so it’s nice to see they’re getting involved with the Feed Validator:
W3C is pleased to launch the W3C Feed Validation Service, a free online tool open to creators of syndication feeds in formats such as RSS and Atom. Based on ‘feedvalidator’, and adding a SOAP Web service interface for interactive programming, the tool is useful for automatic or batch syntax checking. This service joins the existing pool of free, open source tools offered by W3C to the Web development community to help build a better World Wide Web. Learn more in the announcement.
Who knows? Maybe someday that RSS thing will even be a standard?
Many videoblogs use visuals with a musical soundtrack, and while there are already a few known Free Music Sources for Soundtracks, there’s now one more, Magnatune.
See their Podcasts and Video Blogs page, which outlines how you can use their music in your creation. they use the Creative Commons by-nc-sa license but they ask for attribution in a specific way that works for podcasts, but might not for some videoblogs, so I asked for a slight change, and got it. It now says the following under Attribution:
Video blogs can put a credit at the end of their video of the form “The song ’song name’ by ‘artist name’ used by permission from www.magnatune.com”
Awesome! Thanks to John at Magnatune… I’ll be digging through the catalog to see what might fit with some of my videos…
You can get your Flickr photos printed through QOOP, and one of the options is for a poster with all your photos, which is cool. Now, if you test out QOOP, and choose the poster option, you can choose to have them generate a thumbnail of what the poster will look like and email you when it’s ready. So I did…
Neat! Of course you’ll then want to upload the results to Flickr…
Apple cracked the whip and those iPodder Lemon guys changed the name to Juice. (Perhaps they should do a tie-in with those Mattel Juiceboxes.)
Of course I was smart enough to avoid name problems with renko, but if I were the iPodder Lemon, er, I mean Juice guys, I would have changed the name to ipLemon, which works on two levels…
But that’s just me…
Mozilla Sunbird is still pretty alpha, but 0.2a has been solid for me for a really long time. I did manage to break WebDAV on my server for a week and kept wondering what went wrong with Sunbird, but in the end I figured it out, fixed it, and made a note not to break my WebDAV server again…)
Anyway, the Sunbird 0.3 alpha1 Release Notes tell all about the latest version, which I’ll be installing shortly…
I’m loving XAMPP… Out of curiosity though, I thought I’d check on the possibility of Tomcat being part of XAMPP… The result is in German, but I translated below: What(s) about JSP support in XAMPP?
No, anyhow with largest probability not. XAMPP would increase thereby around approximately 42 MB on over 60 MB (38 MB for the Java 2 SDK and 4 MB for Tomcat). For the moment I am convinced of the fact that it is not worth that.
There ya go folks… I’m not really a Tomcat fan anyway, but it would have been nice to have an easy to install, fully configured Tomcat to deploy… Oh well…
With the imminent release of a Firefox that supports SVG, I wonder if we are going to see a lot more warnings… Warning you say? Yes warnings…
In December 2004 I wrote a post that included some SVG graphs. When I checked the RSS feed for validation I got a warning. (Acutally, at the time I think it was an error, but I’m not sure about that, should have blogged it I guess.) You can check this feed using the validator to see the warning, which points you to the foo should not contain object tag page.
So I’m wondering if we’re going to see more people using the object tag with SVG, and if so, what will that mean for RSS feeds, feed validators, feed readers, etc?
I’m a big believer (complainer, pain in the ass) when it comes to using dates… I usually prefer to use the standard YYYY-MM-DD notation, but even when I don’t, I always try to include the year. It’s important stuff. I’ve suffered by looking back at things I’ve done or created and seeing things like “Recorded on May 9th and May 15th” without the year and believe me, 10 years later, you may be hard pressed to remember exactly what year those days in May refer to.
On the internet, you really need to put the year with things… I mean, look at this page:
In an e-mail to top executives, dated Oct. 30 and obtained late Tuesday by The Associated Press…
Oct. 30 what year? You will also notice that under the story title you see: Tue Nov 8,11:38 PM ET. Nov 8 what year?
They go on to use phrases like “last week” and “a decade ago” which doesn’t help the matter…
I like this example because for all we know Gates noticed this “sea of change” towards the internet 4 or 5 years ago, when most of us did… Ok, too much credit, chances are he didn’t realized it until 2005. In fact, I’d guess from the URL which contains /20051109/ and the part that says Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press that is it most likely 2005 they are referring to.
Maybe news organizations are used to the old way, where news was news until it wasn’t, but nowadays things stick around and get archived, and it’s too damn easy to search for something, pull up a page, start reading, and unless you can clearly determine the year by having it shown, it’s just too easy to get it wrong…
Old news folks… You could learn something from them bloggers…
Ha! Tricked ya… I wrote Don?t Panic instead of Don’t Panic…
In my WordPress Dashboard I saw Don?t Panic! WordPress Is Secure instead of seeing Don’t Panic! WordPress Is Secure which is what I see at the site and in the feed. (Unless I look at the source, where I see Don’t Panic! WordPress Is Secure which should also be fine…)
A quick check with curl reveals both the WordPress site and feed are being served as charset=utf-8, and since I truse the WordPress guys are doing the right thing, I really start to panic… Well, not so much panic as get that “here we go again” feeling you get when you realize that somewhere in the chain something is broken and you’re not sure if you should be happy or sad that it’s probably on your end since you have the power to fix it (hopefully) but that also means it’s up to you to fix it, so you can’t just pass the buck, blame someone else, and write a blog post about it… sigh…
Does anyone know what fair use really is? Sure there are definitions which say that it is a “concept” or a “provision” or “guidelines” but what does it really come down to?
To me (and I’m guessing others) it comes down to a simple question. Am I going to get sued? Really. That’s it. I mean, there are corporations with lawyers who spend more on dinner than I spend on groceries in a month, and those are the folks who will try to relieve me of all of my money if I upset them by “fairly using” something. I don’t have lawyers, or deep pockets, or time/money/resources for a trial, even if I was guaranteed to win. It’s a sad but true fact that “Justice for all who can afford it” is the standard of the day in the U.S.
I know there is the EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers which I’ll have to read through a bit more, but still, I tend to weigh things by the “will I get sued” question. Luckily, Creative Commons goes a loooong way towards helping me know what I can use, and how I can use it. But for stuff that isn’t clearly licensed? Well, more than once I’ve asked permissions to use something and I’ve got it. The hard part here is knowing who to ask… Emailing someone who puts photos, videos, or music on their web site isn’t that hard, but contacting a major publishing company, music studio or record label? Forget it…
And we definitely need to spread the word of what a Creative Commons license means. On tinkernet’s about page I have the following:
The videos from this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License unless otherwise noted.
If you’d like to use my work under some other license, feel free to contact me.
I think that’s pretty straightforward eh? I got an email from someone asking if my Zombie Lurch video could be shown at a Halloween event that was not charging for admission. I said “no problem” and pointed to the Creative Commons by-nc-sa license explaining that they probably didn’t even have to ask my permission to show it (since I’d already given it with the license) and if they had wanted to charged admission (which might fall under using my work commercially) I would have the right to license it to them under other terms. That’s the other nice thing, I get to choose how my work is licensed to who, for what. You want to make money off my work? No problem! Just talk to me and make sure I get a cut too… ;)
Now, as for “fair use” I still am not clear on exactly what that is…
The following is an unordered list of things Loosey the Cat has attempted to eat, or has eaten, or has at least chewed on a bit, in the last two years:
Don’t get me wrong, I have not offered all of these things to Loosey, she often decides what to eat, and when to eat it without consulting with me. As for the “Tinkerbell’s vomit” item, for all I know Tinkerbell vomits on a daily basis but I never know it. Kudos to Loosey for cleaning it up so I don’t have to. (That does not lower the “gross” factor though.) She has only chewed up two kitchen sponges, and that happened in the same week, I’ll call it a phase. As for the donuts, she managed to remove one from a plastic bakery bag on Saturday night, but she was caught in the act Sunday night trying to compromise the security device protecting the donuts. The donuts were properly secured after that, and she was punished appropriately.
(Hey, it just ain’t the web without posts about cats…)
Microsoft has something called an ISA Server…
What does ISA stand for? I’m pretty sure it’s Incredibly Shitty Appliance.
I know they think it’s something else:
ISA Server is the advanced stateful packet and application-layer inspection firewall, virtual private network (VPN), and Web cache solution that enables enterprise customers to easily maximize existing information technology (IT) investments by improving network security and performance.
But I’m pretty sure it’s an Incredibly Shitty Appliance. I assume by “improving performance” they mean “breaking the web” or something similar. You know you’re in trouble when even the IT guys think it is the suxors…
(Squid Web Proxy Cache anyone?)
