Saturday, 1st July, 2006

How To Do A Pixel Head

link

Fascinating glimpse into a creative process — and one that reminds me of Becky's Tranny-pops, which I think is my total favourite thing that she's ever done. (via John Gruber )

White Rabbits

code tranniefesto

One of these days, I really must go back to fix to some of the scripts that drive this weblog.

Take the auto-del.icio.us script for example. It's very clever — it parses my del.icio.us feed every half an hour, and squirts anything new that I've posted into the general weblog-stream — all nicely formatted.

There's a lovely bit of the code that works out whether or not to create a new day, or just tack it onto an existing post...

$y = date("Y") ; $m = date("m") ; $d = date("d") ;
$today = "/path/to/source/$y/$m/$d" ;

if(file_exists($today)) {

    $addition = "\n\n" ;

    } else {

    $addition = "" ;

    }

...and then using $handle = fopen($today, 'a') ; takes care of either appending whatever's contained in $addition by the end of the script, or creating a new file for $addition

'Mode a' — Open for writing only; place the file pointer at the end of the file. If the file does not exist, attempt to create it.

(http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php)

This is all well-and-good, and I'm rather chuffed how I can just happily browse my way through Cool Things™ and let Erin pull out the things I like and add them here for me — but there's been a glaring omission in this script (and all the others — like the auto-flickr script).

A while back (not sure when), I was banging stuff left right and centre into del.icio.us, but nothing was showing up here. Nothing I could do — even brute-forcing the script to run — would work.

After a lot of debugging, reposting, deleting caches, it finally dawned on me:

"*Do'h* It's the first of the month. The folder for this month doesn't exist. No wonder Erin's not creating the file for today"

Attribution

rant linkage attribution

Is it "attribution"? Or is it "attributation"?

Whatever

This is not a major rant, just a mild "Let's all play nice in the (urgh) Blogosphere, and be happy, friendly (urgh) Netizens shall we?" It's not something that Gets On My Tits™ per se — it's just something that Minorly Irks Me™ from time to time¹.

Everything I do — except if it's (a) my photographic prints, or (b) something I've done for the university — I do under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Partly because I'm totally into the idea of creative freedom and I think sometimes that people can be a little too protective about the things that they make, but also because it gives me the freedom to not be too polished about the stuff I make.

(As a (bad) example, I don't charge people for email accounts on Erin, because I can't guarantee that I'll be able to maintain them for them, or that Erin will even be up all the time.)

I guess that at heart, I'm just a idealistic/lazy digital socialist

There are two parts to the license — what you can do with things, and what you must do with things...

You are free:

* to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
* to make derivative works

See? Aren't I nice? Go ahead — copy my things (if you want to that is²). Share them around. Distort them and make completely new things based on them. After all, that's the wonderful collaborative joy of the Internets.

However...

Under the following conditions:

* Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
* Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
* Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

(Ah — so it is "attribution")

Maybe I'm going to sound a bit like a bratish primadonna here, but that third condition is really important to me. It's like some form of currency I guess.

We all have our different reasons for doing things. I nearly wrote a large piece a while back on "Self-Constructed Validation Protocols" (until the point slipped my mind and got lost in the ether), that (I think) was about the different ways in which we determine whether or not something we've done is 'good'.

Some of us blog/make stuff for comments, some of us do it for Adsense revenue, some of us do it just to get things out there, some of us do it as an educational experience.

Some of us (like me) do it for a mixture of some-or-all of those things. In terms of Attribution, I get a lovely warm glow inside me when I see someone pick up on something that I've done (or linked to) and repeat/expand on it.

But it bloody narks the hell out of me if there's no attribution.

All it takes is a simple "Via:"

</primadonna>

¹ Tell you what though, something that does Get On My Tits™ is when not only is there no attribution, but they've had the gall to slap their own copyright on something which is obviously a derivative of my work. Just imagine how annoyed I'd be if they charged for it too...

² Yeah, I know — most of the stuff I do is shite. But there are some things I've done in the past that people have picked up on and copied. Not many, just some

Sleepless night?

Not really — I just had some really strange dreams. Like trying to repaint my house but realising I was using gloss white — but deciding that was a good idea because I could then paint over it with matt white, and it would do a better job of hiding the nicotine stains.

And I must confess — in a blindingly duh moment of utter embarassment — that it's only just dawned on me that Craig is the guy behind the Minipops.

'Scuse me while I go bang my head repeatedly against a wall for being a clueless idiot

a tiny religious primate

And I'm now picturing a very small ape wearing a dog collar...

ASCII Frame from The Matrix

link

More ASCII fun — from my little journey to find out something specific

ASCII Boxes

link geek unix compile MacOSX

Draws any kind of box around some given text — That's just what I was looking for Ain't the Internets great?

OK, ultra-geek time...

That boxes thing, it's going to save a whole chunk of time for something I'm planning on doing in the near future. I doubt this will apply to 99% of my readership, but if you're planning on compiling it on OSX then here's what I had to do to make it work:

1. cd into the uncompressed archive.
2. Edit src/regexp/Makefile and chage the line that reads
   CFLAGS = -traditional -O -I. $(CFLAGS_ADDTL)
   to
   CFLAGS = -traditional -D_ANSI_C_SOURCE -O -I. $(CFLAGS_ADDTL)
3. type ranlib src/regexp/libregexp.a and hit return
4. make as normal, and follow the authors installation instructions

I'm going to send him an OSX binary, because I Am Nice™

In the meantime, I'm going to bore yous to tears with ASCII text...

figlet foo | boxes

/*********************/
/*   __              */
/*  / _| ___   ___   */
/* | |_ / _ \ / _ \  */
/* |  _| (_) | (_) | */
/* |_|  \___/ \___/  */
/*                   */
/*********************/

LOL!

Stuff For Free

rss Mac

OK, maybe this will be more of interest¹ I have, as we all know, several Macs in this house. Erin, CuChulainn and Creidhne are the three that actually get used, but even though it's only those three, sometimes the stuff that I have going on on each of them is horribly out of sync.

Take my text editor for example — BBEdit — the version I have on Creidnhe is 8.something which I actually bought (no, really), whereas I'm still on a hacked version of 7 upstairs on CuChulainn.

(I must fix that this afternoon)

My RSS reader — NetNewsWire — is kinda a similar story. I've had it for quite a while now, and although I love it (mostly), one of the things that's really been annoying me of late is how even though I use my .Mac account to sync the feeds, it doesn't seem to sync their read status.

So, when I've been away for a while, but reading stuff on my laptop, I get back to twenty-million unread items on my desktop.

But, on a whim earlier, I was flitting my way around http://www.ranchero.com, and I noticed that version 2.1 had been out for ages. And, seeing as how I'm registered user (yay me!) I figured I'd download it...

...only to discover (because I haven't been paying attention lately) that NewsGator bought out Ranchero a while back, and I get a free Premium Account with them because I paid for NetNewsWire.

And if I use Newsgator to sync my machines, it all works like I wanted to.

...

I have, in the past, wondered about getting a Bloglines account — but the idea of recreating all my feeds and then having another thing to try and sync somehow really put me off. But I've also been really jealous of the ability to catch up with things when I'm away from my Macs.

But now I can — and (IMHO) in a more lovelier interface than Bloglines

¹ Arse. Maybe not. Look, just ignore me — I'm trying to fill in time before tonight's potentially awesome Doctor WHo is on, OK?

Media Link Dump — YouTube

link

Pretty big collection of avant garde and art films — (via Eyebeam reBlog)

Un Chien Andalou

link art

Full length QuickTime downloadable version of Dali and Buñuel's film, which, IMHO contains the most graphic and disturbing film sequence of all time — (Via Eyebeam reBlog again)

I remember seeing it un-prewarned, and it's haunted me ever since. I gather there's still debate about how they actually did it.

Keep It Foolish

doctorwho

Whoah. Well fucking Mexico. I was shaking at the end of that, and Erin's gone into overdrive with people searching for New Cybermen

I don't quite know how I'm going to cope 'til next week...

Now now Beki, no spoilers

I humbly concede.

You and me both hon Now, where did I put those clean pants...?

I meant that I'd shat myself

Is it a Slitheen eye?

No, it's a Dalek's eye stalk

Yeah, no spoilers Beki with an I

Way to totally give the game away Bex. Although, actually, we all saw someone getting exterminated in the trailer last week — so I guess it wasn't such a big surprise eh?

Stephanie, 120 Days of Sodom yes, Salo no — although eye being sliced open in womans face with razor blade beats anything I saw in the former.

that's the whole title

Ah — two D'ohs in one day ... I was thinking of the porn version with that guy with the big willy in it.