Donncha’s Links – Page 3

Donncha's Wednesday Links

A few days ago I blogged without comment a video by Larry Lessig on the Creative Commons. It’s a great video, but I won’t use it to license my photography. Why? Jim covers most of my reservations about the scheme. This might come as a surprise to some but one of the main reasons I “reserve all rights” on my Flickr stream and photoblog is because I would like some say in how my images are used. I would be horrified if a picture of my son was used in a derogatory way, or if a photo of a stranger on the street appeared in an inappropriate context.
If I was going to use one of their licenses then it would have to be the cc-GPL. I’ve released GPL licensed software for the past 10 years and at least then all materials used in any derivative works would have to be made available. Would that mean a magazine featuring a GPL licensed image would have to make PDF files of their magazine available? I hope so. I also do not want to give up my right to redistribute my image under a different license. As the original copyright holder of the work that is important to me. Anyway, my duck photo shows that many people think photos found online are there to be ripped off and used. I don’t think it matters what license you use.
This image would definitely not make it into the wedding album. Love it!
Digg’s API docs, for something I’m working on now.
Paul Indigo took a great portrait here. I can only imagine how bossy that woman was if he compares her to Hyacinth Bucket. Paul is so right. The number of “That’s great”, or “Lovely image” comments on Flickr and photoblogs is overwhelming. They don’t add much to the photographer’s skills. Critique!
Conor gets nostalgic about the Speccy for Science Week. Damien has more posts about great inventions.

Donncha's Monday Links

Finally got some shots of the Autumn leaves on the trees and the ground last night, a little late of course!

Funny Olympus commercial – full of passion!
Towering ambition – I knew I recognised Chicago’s Navy Pier!
Chemtrail Conspiracy – via a scrawled message on a building site in Cork. Photo to appear tomorrow.
Milking a dead horse – Tubular Bells x y and z. I remember going into HMV and seeing a different Tubular Bells album in the “sales” every few months. They all looked the same and I had no idea if the one Bells album I bought was the one on sale each time.
Bloglines top feeds – I’m subscribed to the top 2. There’s comfort in that.
Vic did the NCT last week. I have to book mine shortly.

Things started to get even worse. When people were called for their results they didnt immediately jump up. They slowly looked up and repeated their name, pointed at themselves and then made the long walk of death to the guy with the NCT results.
WP Super Cache and Lsws rock. 100,000 page views in less than 5 minutes! Pity compressed files don’t work.

And via Jim, How Creativity Is Being Strangled By The Law by Larry Lessig.

Donncha's Friday Links

There is no vulnerability in WP Super Cache. Chris blogged about it after we spent a late night of debugging it until 1.30am. But if:

You are using Windows (props Computer Guru)
You are using a Red Hat or Cent OS system, or just having problems with compressed content (props Dennis)
You want to use the reject uri function
You want to try out the new automatic .htaccess rule generator
You want WordPress searches to work again

then you should head to the download page and try the development version of the plugin. Official release tomorrow probably.

I tell ya, I have learned more about Apache, content types, mod_rewrite, IIS and Red Hat vs Debian differences with this project than I ever could have considered healthy.

Joseph linked to How to Debug PHP with Vim and XDebug on Linux. I started reading but then I realised I had to compile Vim again! I’ll stick with my error_log(). Inertia is a bitch isn’t it?
Haha. Hugh responds to requests for a Facebook cartoon. (via Damien)
Google is abusing nofollow? Credit where credit is due. That’s just mean.
Akismet announces Defensio. So, who’ll hack both their plugins to compare results? Should be easy. Should be interesting! Chris is comparing the two on different blogs. Excellent.
The WordPress MU Codex is going to get another boost when we start populating it with useful nuggets of information from the forum. More documentation, more help, less frustration.
OK, so how many Irish and UK natives sneer, sniff and give out about the Polish people living here and in the UK? This is what happened to Joe who broke his ankle in Poland. Wouldn’t you just love if your hospital was that good?

He arrived in the hospital at 10:15am, He was wheeled into the doctor at 10:30am and then taken for an X-Ray. By 11am it was confirmed that his ankle was broken and it was reset. By 11:15am his ankle had been placed in a cast and by 11:30am he was back in his hotel eating his lunch. 1 hour 15 minutes, done and dusted.
Stephen Fry bemoans the advent of modern cameras and mobile phones. Gone are the days of the simple autograph.
IPhone Day in the UK today! Fanboys started queueing For the iPhone release in the UK, yesterday. Unfortunately for them they have to deal with British weather. Whycantheywaitafewdays…
Googlehacks is a neat front end to Google allowing you to find music, books, videos and other things online. via and Digg so you all probably saw this too 🙂

Reports of an exploit in WP Super Cache are being investigated but details are vague at this stage. There are only 3 reports of this out of hundreds who installed the plugin. Email me at donncha at ocaoimh.ie if you find files from outside your blog in wp-content/cache/supercache/
Tell me the following if you can:

Plugins installed on your blog.
WordPress version.
The output of ps auxw and lsof if it’s installed.
If you notice any strange processes running, check that they are not shell or php scripts.
Anything strange in your log files? Look for the string “=http” for funky stuff. There will always be strange entries, so don’t be too alarmed if you see them, see my perl bot post. They’re fishing for an exploit on your server.

On to the links ..

You can now make your Google Reader tags public and add those sites to your blog as a blogroll. Nice! I still want a “timely dozen” like Photomatt used to have. Must look at Simple Pie ..
I’m shocked. Alkos is writing on his blog. I thought the world ended when he used colour but this? What will happen next? Oh, great photography, as usual!
Robert’s girlfriend has only a few days to go and his nerves are starting to go. Good luck with the birth! He has also posted Super Cache benchmarks. Good results!
Any world leaders reading? If you want to justify an outrageous pay rise, talk to Ireland’s Prime Minister/Taoiseach. His pay rise takes him to the top of the list of top 30 OECD countries. Well done Bertie! Now where’s the health service gone?

Ireland €310,000
The US €276,000
Britain €267,500
Germany €261,500
Switzerland €256,000

Donncha's Wednesday Links

Post digg.

Ireland’s Prime Minister or Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, recently received a nice pay rise of €38,000. He is now one of the highest paid heads of state in Europe. He even earns more than George Bush! Here are 50 ways his party, Fianna Fail, laugh at Irish voters. (via). Twenty Major elaborates on a possible discussion between Bertie and a member of Government. It’d be funny if it wasn’t based on fact. (via)
Damien is lusting after the Eee PC. Toni already bought one and he has the same complaints I had reservatioons about,

* The screen and keyboard are tiny
* I was hoping for a longer battery life (seems like it gets about 3 hours)
I Broke Blogspot.
How to scale WordPress MU is a work in progress. I’ve only skimmed it so far but I’ll dig into it later.
Make Linux look like a Mac is a Gnome theme with instructions and screenshots. Looks pretty.
Haha! Niall discovered that the Golden Spiders voting form only does Javascript validation. Vote as many times as you like! (sort of)
When I get older. What scares you most about the prospect of being old? Failing eyesight, hearing, physical disability? Memory loss or dementia?
The digging yesterday of my Super Cache post wasn’t as heavy as I thought it would be. More on that later.

Donncha's Tuesday Links

HolisticNetworking is now on WordPress MU 1.3 describes some of the issues one admin found when upgrading to the latest WordPress MU. Thomas – you should package that signup key system in a plugin and put it on the WordPress plugin site or WPMU Dev!
More discussion on the WordPress.com theme marketplace and some interesting comments from theme designers too.
Gamma Goblin is looking forward to the ballet at the Opera House methinks. The linked mp3 is hilarious!
The next generation Jpeg compression could be Microsoft’s HD Photo and will be called Jpeg XR. “XR stands for “extended range,” a reference to the format’s ability to show a wider and finer range of tonal gradations and a richer color palette.” (Via Thomas Hawk)

Digg users! Want to help test the Super Cache? You might see this server go down in flames, or it might survive and keep serving files. Who knows? Digg it to find out! 🙂

Donncha's Monday Links

Waterworks – great feel to this image.
Modsecurity and WordPress paper – I haven’t used ModSecurity myself but it seems like something good to know about.
Let’s Dance – I love the long exposure flowing crowd!
WiFi in an SD card? No more wires or plugging your camera’s flash card into a reader! Now, I want a CF version, and one that’s certified outside the US!
Another new WordPress MU user blogs.

And now, having this multi-user version, we can literally host hundreds of blogs using the same WordPress instance. Imagine a company with several brands or locations that wants to have their sites all look and behave similarly but also wants each to manage their own content.
A GIMP plugin rss feed has been created by Garrett. I’m subscribed!
If you thought morning traffic was bad, be glad you don’t need to take a detour like this. (via)
Heroes in Cork – Heroes comes to Cork apparently and the Irish accents are awful!

Donncha's Saturday Links

Catching up on some links.

Cubic Telecom win it@Cork emerging company award. Congrats Pat!
Keith says Airtricity have a simple approach to electricity meter reading. Email and text. Sure you could lie, but they have a good notion of how much electricity you use and I’m sure a meter reader would be out after another month of only 10 units used.
494 comments – I need to paginate the comments on that post.
GIMP plugins I discovered through the GIMP Registry RSS feed: photo effects contains a bunch of pretty effects. Cross processing and cross processing 2.4 make your image all green and contrasty. Sort of like these cross processed pictures.
Figmentation has some great photos. Another Irish photoblog.
My funny video blog now has a pagerank of 2! Not all sites went down I guess. Here’s a great clip of Jeremy Clarkson in his Peel P50 driving around the offices of the BBC in London!

Donncha's Friday Links

Anyone who knows me knows I’m an avid photographer.

Thomas Hawk was in a train station in San Francisco when a body was discovered on the tracks. He snaps literally *everything* and took a photo of the poor guy who died, but then he questioned if he should publish the photo? I admire how he stands up for his rights on the street. Jeremy Brooks who is featured in the previous link did the same, much to the ire of a shop keeper.
In Synthetic technical style in digital photography Doug has quoted a Mike Johnston piece on photographer’s style saying that digital photography lacks a distinctive style, and that it lacks integrity because it can be manipulated so easily. As Mike says in his longer piece, every image can be taken as a separate case, but I disagree that that is a bad thing. I’m not limiting myself to one technical style.
Paul Indigo has had some interesting encounters while photographing people on the street, but he’s got great advice if you want to do it yourself.

This gentleman agreed to pose for me. He wanted to know whether my camera was digital or film. He said he would pose if it was digital but not if it was film. I am not sure exactly what his reasons were.
Avant Window Manager for Linux is like the Mac OS X Dock for our little free OS. I haven’t tried it but it looks pretty. This is a nice screenshot with screenlets too.
Amber Jack describes itself as, “a lightweight Open Source library, enabling webmasters to create cool site tours.” Take the tour. It’s nice!
Barry reveals all, about how WordPress.com serves files and pages that is.
This video of Vista Vs Ubuntu Makes me wish I had gone for the higher end video card for my laptop. There’s not a hope in hell the onboard Intel video will handle all the eye candy in Beryl!
Go Maith are experiencing technical difficulties but still manage a very entertaining dancer and fiddler!
Matt announced the new WordPress.com Theme Marketplace. Some sites unfairly jumped the gun before Matt posted details of the Marketplace on his blog. I love the idea that .org users get the themes for free because they have to be GPLed. That’s great!
If you were adding hooks and a plugin system to WP-Cache, where would you put them? wp_cache_get_cookies_values() definitely, maybe at cache generation too? What about the admin page?

What has Web 2.0 done for you then? (via)

PS. I installed Xcache and the Xcache WordPress plugin I mentioned on Wednesday. I don’t think it’s any faster than the Memcached backend I was using but I have one less service running now, and the admin stats page is nice.

Donncha's Thursday Links

SMPlayer is a nice front end to the mplayer movie player. .deb packages available for Ubuntu! (via)
Gamma Goblin has an innovative solution to the new learner driver laws here in Ireland.
Meanwhile, Grandad introduces his how to drive in Ireland series.
Recommended tags for WordPress – just one of the new plugins springing up to make tagging in WordPress easier. This Blog Herald post lists lots of other similar plugins too.
I really like this picture.
Kae got hit by a truck! No damage done thankfully.

Tomorrow, I’m buying a bike. An upgrade from walking. See, I’m sneaking up on the 21st century, but very slowly.

It’ll be a BMX, so I can use it in that skatepark that opened recently.
Yesterday morning I got another Shelfari invite, but this time from Bernie Goldbach which made me think it was legit as I fished it out of the Junk folder. Not so. As James reports, mass invitation spam is becoming the default because Bernie accidentally spammed his Yahoo address book when he signed up to Shelfari. Bad, bad, bad. I hope Shelfari get kicked for this.

Joseph found this collection of Windows startup screens and sounds. Wow, Windows 3.1. I remember the install disks for that although I can’t remember how many 3.5″ floppy disks it came on now. AFAIR, they ended up being Linux boot disks.

Liking the links?