26 Oct 2005
F-Spot is a photo management/cataloguing thing from the Gnome project that looks cool. Another reason to love Gnome! Note particularly the cool timeline thing in the screenshot on their site. I don’t know if I’ll start using it yet, but it looks cool. Assuming I don’t eventually wind up on iPhoto, this is probably going to become a mainstay of my day-to-day computing life if development on it continues (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t).
Obligatory geek aside: Look, it’s written in C# and uses Mono! (yeah, I realise I’m linking to my own comment. Not just a vanity trip, it is actually relevant!)
25 Oct 2005
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).
25 Oct 2005
<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 =(
24 Oct 2005
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.
24 Oct 2005
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="If you can see this, the image isn't working" />
<img alt='You can probably see this because the "src" attribute is not defined' />
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.