See Have Bruce Perens Keynote Your Confference at perens.com

http://perens.com/blog/2013/01/16/1/

The FCC plans to end single-provider cable contracts for apartment buildings. They're doing this to increase competition and lower prices for consumers.

It's a nice gesture, but pretty useless from my point of view. What good does it do to allow competition when the city the apartment is in only has one cable provider? How about ending the practice of cable monopolies for entire cities?

Someone twittered about the version of Firefox with an "orthographic corrector." I wondered why this was so great, and whether this was something I needed. So I went to the page they linked to and still didn't get information about this feature beyond the fact that it existed. So I looked up "orthographic" on Google: Of or pertaining to orthography, or right spelling.

That's right, orthographic corrector = spellcheck.

Our new XServe is up and running. It has many pretty blinkenlights, making it more attractive as well as a zillion times faster than our old stack o' Dells.

Now the only question is, what do we do with the old servers? They're not really fit for reuse, so it's been suggested that we destroy them interestingly and post the video on YouTube.

Normally I think about technology and copyright as it applies to music or movies, not fine art. This article in the Post and Courier describes problems Charleston's local artists are having with their pantings being copied for profit without permission. Technology makes it easy for their images to be copied and placed on mugs, t-shirts, etc. This often happens outside the U.S., making it hard for the artists to follow up and prosecute copyright violations.

Artists and those copying them have different views on the morality of copying the art:

Anthony Pompa owns a Montreal company that makes canvas prints from the images on Carter's posters. "I love Eva Carter's work. I really do," he said. "And this is such a proper way of displaying her work. We're just doing her a favor. We're making her look great."

Carter, who operates a gallery on East Bay Street, views the works as a clear infringement on her copyrights and a threat to her livelihood. But the practice continues just the same.

I had a page where I needed to swap images and image maps using javascript. This caused IE to crash. Apparently, others have also struggled with this issue.

But I managed to persevere! Instead of just changing attribute values, I used replaceChild() to replace the entire image element with a new one. I then set the attributes of the new element to be whatever I need them to be.

It works, IE no longer crashes, and our site is just about ready to go live.

It's been a while since I've posted things I've found in our web site server logs, but this was one search term I just had to comment on.

Can't you just picture some guy saying, "There's too much crime around here! Why aren't the police doing anything about it? They need to round up all the criminals and put them in jail." And he's going to help them do it, by using Google to find the "locations of criminals".

Sorry, but our web site isn't going to be much help in that endeavor.

I just built a 9-page web site from scratch in two days for very demanding clients. That includes graphics, QA, etc. The site went live 5 minutes ago, 15 minutes ahead of deadline.

And now, I am done with work and going to the beach. If I could drink, I would have a margarita. I've been hiding out in academia for the last 5 years and this is the first site for regular business clients I've built in all that time (i.e. not government or university). I had forgotten how stressful Fridays could be.

The alert provides a web form to write to your congress person. Please do that. And please put the alert up elsewhere, so that other people can help too.

I'm in Washington DC working on this today, and your support will help.

Thanks

Bruce

Bruce

What's kind of scary about this cartoon is that I've actually had that conversation about the fish at work, only we were serious. One of the things we've been talking about doing is working with state agencies and commercial fisheries to get better data to monitor the fish populations off the coast of NC and SC. In a meeting where we were talking about this someone brought up the issue that this could cause overfishing.

1. Select the file you want to roll back. Right-click, select "Graph selection" (or hit Ctrl+G)
2. Right-click on revision you want to remove. Select "Admin options > Delete revisions"
3. Click around to get out of graph view. You'll notice the file is still at the wrong version. Right-click on the file, select "Update," check "Get the clean copy," and it will revert back to the correct version.

I tried the command-line options I found via a Google search, but that just generated weird syntax errors in CVS. This way actually worked.

Have you seen the stories about bloggers making piles of money with Google AdSense? Back in March, I decided to see what would happen if I put text ads on my blog, which nobody reads and which is rarely updated. Today I am happy to report that my ad revenue has finally passed the $1 mark! W00t!