04 Nov 2005
A little birdy told me that using WSUS means you don’t need to have activated (i.e. legit) versions of Windows or other Microsoft products. I’ve had instances where, on reinstalling Windows XP (slipstreamed SP2), over-the-net activation wouldn’t work at all and I didn’t get a chance to phone activate for about three weeks. Wasn’t a huge problem because of course IE wasn’t the default browser and I refuse to let people install MSN Messenger (if they’re using Windows, they have to use the no-frills, relatively secure and quick Windows Messenger!), and there was anti-virus stuff installed, but that’s a while to be running unpatched Windows.
In a small bus environment, WSUS means you can avoid potential headaches like that. In a paranoid reluctant-MS-user environment, it means you can (illegally) crack your (legally purchased) operating system, and enjoy updates without having to hand out your details on a platter. Or, alternatively, if you’re a comprehensive Microsoft pirate from the server to the desktop, you can take further advantage of their hospitality by enjoying the fine update services they have to offer. ;-)
Hey, if you’re going to steal software at least do it well!
More generally speaking, WSUS just looks like a cool tool. You download once, apply many, and manage what patches do/don’t get installed from a central location.
Disclaimer: I haven’t tried WSUS, this is just second-hand. We only use appropriately licensed Microsoft products here. I’m publishing this because being subversive is fun, if a little childish, and this could conceivably (legitimately or otherwise) be of use to someone.
04 Nov 2005
I’d been keeping the name “StreetComputing” around because… it fit like an old shoe. I now think it’s kind of ugly, and it’s been hinted I should do away with it a handful of times, but I’d kept putting it off. Brand recognition and all that, at least with the folks at school, many of whom remembered it from Year 10 (when, it must be said, the audience from that part of the world was many times greater than what it has been ever since. Mostly as a result of the proliferation of videos in which stupid things were done, and, I would hazard, the fact that I wrote as though I were completely illiterate). But those days are done. And, further away from the Real World, your site could be called “The Hippopotamus Tsar; or, The Adventures of One Irrelevant Title to a Land Not So Far Away” and do perfectly well by the search engines, assuming you had the content to match it.
Rebranding in a commercial context is risky. But I just made this site look like a whitewashed wall, and have signalled my general lack of interest in complex aesthetics here at this particular point in time. Further away, perhaps, but that’s something entirely separate. I’ve got three designs in the works at the minute, one of which is this site, another of which is less austere but certainly not what would readily be described as “busy”, and another I envisage [having not yet commenced its design outside of my head] will be a fair distance from #fff (white, for those non-geeks in the audience) and hopefully more visually complex than the other two. I say this so everyone is aware I’m not a lost cause to this whole sparse design thing. I just wanted change, but change is isolated site-by-site.
So whilst I’m ripping down the establishment in that sense, I may as well do the same thing with the name! I struggle to define a purpose for this site, which is an overwhelmingly good thing (I think) at this particular point in time. It means I am not confined by the tyranny of Purpose and its twin, Rationale. Nepotism runs rife.
And, seeing as I have this domain here, it does make quite a lot of sense to make the blog name match the domain name, for as long as the blog remains the key component of the domain. StreetComputing would have been a convenient identifier had my blog related to computers and been of approximately equal or slightly less than equal (either way) importance within this domain space, but it doesn’t relate to computers for the most part, and I’m not keen on splitting up blogs into separate nerdery (language), geekery (pure IT), tech-ery (unsure about the appropriateness of that suffix there, but pertaining to A/V) and web-ery (CSS/markup/occasional server-side) blogs.
Though I am tempted. I could call one of them “Cascading Style Street” ;-)
Anyway. This is now called Joahua.com. And that was a really lengthy explanation.
My concern now is chiefly for Georgia’s capital J, on which the lower serif (there’s probably a more precise typographical term) seems disproportionally large:
That aside, this whole change thing is fun. Can you tell it’s [nearly] the end of my HSC? ;-)
04 Nov 2005
Okay. I’m writing a real post about the comment policy (in response to this comment from Dale) just so it’s a little more visible/obvious/open. I thought about his remark and wondered if he read the Copyright page, or just the line “Submitted comments become copyright-ish to Joshua Street/this site.” (That wasn’t an attack… just a question, and a potential source of confusion. For the record, Michael, this isn’t directed at you… you just brought up the question first :-))
If there’s concern about me “owning” them, the wording suggests you mightn’t have read the Copyright page itself. It’s pretty open-ended, partially because I reject the idea of idea-ownership to some extent (certainly text ownership), and also as recognition of the practicality of copyright protection on the Internet. That is, it’s impossible to keep something in the one place even if you want to, so embrace it.
I’ve ditched my old CC license because:
- It was too over the top and complicated for a personal site. I don’t need that jargon. If you don’t respect plain English imperatives to copy or not copy in a certain way, you’re scum, and there’s little long-winded legal crap will do to change that.
- I don’t think there’s any reason, aside from vanity, for me to require attribution. It’s nice, but hardly something that I should bind ideas or even just text to.
- Nothing I write here is of significant commercial value. The exception to that is potential reproduction of some pieces that may be of use in commercial publications (web or print) as standalone articles. And, in that case, attribution would be really nice… I just can’t be bothered trying to enforce that, or even having to think about it. In saying this I accept some market value for my work, but I don’t think it’s significant enough for me to care. And micro-payments are as much effort as normal payments to set up, and, to be perfectly honest, I doubt anyone’s that interested in my content.
This change simplifies my sitewide copyright policy… and it only made sense to include comments in that. Because this is a blog, and not a ‘zine or whatever the heck we called these things back when they were static and non-interactive, comments are an intrinsic part of it most of the time. They value-add (hah, yes, again assigning value!) the original article by augmenting its content, illuminating its foibles, and elucidating alternate points of view where opinion/conjecture comes into play. Thus, to separate them can, potentially, be damaging to the content.
I don’t want to break that.
So far as I could see, applying a uniform policy was the only way to ensure it didn’t have to be broken. And I know I haven’t said this in the past, but I figure if people are prepared to contribute their ideas to a public forum hosted by someone else with relation to an agenda set by someone else, they’re probably not too worried about who reads them/where they go.
This isn’t a legal thing, mostly. It’s more about etiquette. I’m saying it’s okay to take what you want from here, and use it for what you will. I’m — tentatively — including comments in that. Now would be a great time to read over my “Copyright. Ish.” page and decide what you think for yourself — and if you’ve commented here in the past and want to tie your content down, let me know. (Somehow… I’ll get the contact form going again soon, until then there’s always the mobile number listed on that page, or that page’s own comment form) I’ll respect that, either by deleting the comment — if it contributes insignificantly to the discussion — or appending a notice to it stating it’s not for the taking. I really think that is over the top, though.
If you have any comments on this, I’d invite you to use the comment facility on the Copyright page. (Comments are disabled on this post to encourage you to use that instead. This is because it’s static, and more permanent.)
p.s. Note that some content on this site is non-free, or only available in a limited form online. The photos, for example, are available in whatever resolution is there… but I have better quality source archived, which I’ll generally only publish on a whim or for profit ;-)
04 Nov 2005
Okay, if this isn’t already all over the web it should be, and I’m posting about it anyway because Sony/the agency that did it deserve all the viral marketing they get over this ad.
No CG (well, probably in the transition at the end, but that doesn’t count). Lots of bouncy balls. The making-of featurette (on the “Behind the Scenes” page) is worth a look, too… the camera operators are wearing head gear, and there are people with those plexiglass riot shield things. All the cars were props, but in the making of you can still hear alarms going off… I imagine that could be a byproduct of the small earth tremor released by 250,000 balls pelting down a hill.
I’m not in the market for an LCD TV, but… damn. I don’t know quite how these things can be technically significantly better than anything else on the market, but I’m now interested to find out. And have a pro-Sony bias, at least for this product (definitely not for their audio equipment or their record label or digital cameras or… the list goes on).
The video is in H.264 format but even the broadband version isn’t massive. I dig the music, though.
03 Nov 2005
They’re everywhere. Particularly ants and small spiders, here. If you’re ever thinking about coming to Sydney towards summer, now would be the time to avoid.