Record companies suck

In today’s news, iTMS Australia launches without Sony, presumably because they’re greedy, uncompromising bastards. I’d like to be sued for defamation on that comment (because, you know, they’d get awarded such massive damages for a blog this size), because then at least the real reason would come out, either way. I’m inclined to think they’re far more evil than Apple, but perhaps that’s just PR spin. Having said that, here’s evidence to the contrary from an AppleTalk Australia interview with CD Baby founder, Derek Sivers:

Keep in mind : Apple is not screwing musicians. Labels are screwing musicians. Apple pays 70 cents per 99-cent download. If the artist has signed their music over to a label, they don’t own their music anymore. The label does. So Apple pays the label 70 cents per song, and the label pays the artist… what… a penny? Two? Nothing at all? But when an artist is NOT signed to a label, when they’re going through CD Baby for example, we only keep a 9% cut and pay 91% of all income directly to the artists every week. Our accounting is wide open so they can see every dollar every day, and it all goes to the artist every week, without fail, for over 7 years now.

Also, I’ve just discovered that iTunes users, even on Windows, can rip CDs with supposed “Copy Control” technology without even having to resort to the typical Shift key “hack” (heh, and, in the US, pressing Shift at that point in time is entirely illegal. Remove those copyright circumvention devices from your keyboards, America!!) to prevent the loading of supposed restricting technologies. I guess this means iTunes is now illegal under the DMCA, too?

For the record, the CD in question was Placebo’s 2003 “Sleeping with Ghosts” album, published by Virgin. At least they didn’t have the audacity to use the standard CD logo on it (because these copy-control things are outside of Red Book spec).

Dynamically rejected

<xxemailprotectedxx@optusnet.com.au>: host mail.optusnet.com.au[211.29.132.250] said: 554<br /> 5.7.1 Rejected 60.225.72.235 is a dynamic IP (in reply to RCPT TO command)

I need a static IP =(

WWW SQL Designer

WWW SQL Designer

Far out. This thing is incredible. Database design with AJAX… there’s a demo on the site, and you can download the app. Must play with. Incredible. Reduced to incomplete sentences by its awesomeness.

The attribute myth

I’ve been talking with Ben this evening about… markup, amongst other things, and discovered a conviction that using single quotes with an attribute is evil.

Clearing this up right now: it’s not, either in HTML 4 or XHTML (which retains much of the semantics of HTML 4, except where explicitly contradicted — “The semantics of the elements and their attributes are defined in the W3C Recommendation for HTML 4. These semantics provide the foundation for future extensibility of XHTML.”). Section 3 of the HTML specification states:

By default, SGML requires that all attribute values be delimited using either double quotation marks (ASCII decimal 34) or single quotation marks (ASCII decimal 39). Single quote marks can be included within the attribute value when the value is delimited by double quote marks, and vice versa. Authors may also use numeric character references to represent double quotes (") and single quotes ('). For double quotes authors can also use the character entity reference ".

Ben didn’t quite get the “Single quote marks can be included within the attribute value when the value is delimited by double quote marks, and vice versa.” bit, so here’s a quick example of both:

<img alt=&#34;If you can see this, the image isn&#39;t working&#34; />
<img alt=&#39;You can probably see this because the &#34;src&#34; attribute is not defined&#39; />

Both are valid and should work fine (with the exception of the lack of src, obviously). Feel free to use single or double quote marks, safe in the knowledge neither is better than the other.

Old-fashioned Nautilus location bar in Ubuntu Breezy

Regretably, the location bar has been disposed of in the latest version of Nautilus, in favour of buttons to navigate to the present directory. This sucks. Especially when trying to access hidden folders quickly and easily. Today, I discovered it’s possible to use Ctrl + L to achieve the same thing, but I really don’t see why a series of buttons should be used to do what I could do before. In my case the buttons take more time, because I’m a keyboard person and mousing is, except for when very tired, a secondary action.

So I changed the default back to what it should have stayed as, following these instructions I found online. I say “should have stayed as” because the change introduces insurmountable barriers (e.g. navigating to hidden files/folders) to the user experience, in favour of a very dubious UI enhancement. Dictated not only by convention, but also practicality.

Furthering my irritation was the difficulty of changing it back. The steps described on the post I found aren’t particularly complex, but this is something that should be accessible via the Edit → Preferences menu within Nautilus itself: it is akin to show/hide hidden files, which is in there where it should be (also via Ctrl + H — but I consider this poorly implemented, too, as it requires a manual refresh of the page to restore initally-screwed up icon positioning).