RasterWeb!

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 trust 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…