The Daves Collective

Fatwa of Unsuitability
2004-05-31 15:30

I hereby pronounce a Fatwa of Unsuitability (F.U.) upon Gallery. Its replacement will be JAlbum and its ExhibitPlus skin. Gallery was found guilty of PHP Abuse (register_globals, uncaught warnings), Recent Security Cockups, Wasting Too Much Of Dave's Time, and Pandering To Copyright Nazis (by adding watermark support).

Another F.U. was recently pronounced on fetchmail, now replaced by Getmail. Fetchmail was found guilty of Being Written By A Right Wing Gobshite and Too Many Security Advisories.

Copyright vs Community
2004-05-29 17:18

Last week, a day out south of the river (ugh) to the one day Copyright vs Community event at Ravensbourne College. This featured talks from Fravia, Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow.

Fravia's talk was great, although having slurped up much of his Searchlores site years ago, there wasn't much I didn't already know. He concentrates on locating and extracting information which is known to be out there. That isn't my current problem; to research those litigious bastards at SCOX, I need to use readily available information to discover connections. Nevertheless the talk was good fun (sadly, perhaps a bit misleading about Moldova) and his ability to hold an audience whilst performing a live demonstration was very impressive.

On this occasion Richard Stallman concentrated (as was appropriate) on copyright. His was the most conservative, nay, boring and measured of the three talks - why is he constantly depicted as some sort of loony? - until the audience egged him on to ever greater condemnation of the music business. That brought his talk to life; clearly it's not just software that RMS cares about.

Cory Doctorow's talk was hugely entertaining (lots of arm waving, agitation and good points bluntly made) but very much to the point. In some ways his was the most, er, (ahem) well-developed critique of modern copyright practice, but very reassuring that he made such a good case for current-day radicalism being just another iteration of the historical orthodoxy of innovation.

The most memorable bit was when Fravia took his radiomike with him for a quick pee before he started, treating the lecture theatre to an impromptu broadcast.

Back with a revamp
2004-05-29 15:18

After a break of four months (for good but unstated reasons), things here are moving again. The site looks very much the same, but it's been refactored to take advantage of Zen's SSI support on their free homepages, enabling common content and presentation throughout the site without lots of duplicated code to maintain and get out of step.

This has also enabled the new content in the right column of most pages. On the front page, this tracks interesting links on a number of topics, with old links automatically expiring as new ones are added. Elsewhere, the right column contains links related to each leaf page's content; the links aggregate automatically at index pages. Each such link is actually an individual story of a parallel Blosxom flavour, generated as static pages and merged into the site using SSI. El Neato or what.

There's also some new content. The new system pages describe various nonbiological entities in the Collective. There are some new files in the Config Bistro, including an XF86Config for the Toshiba Portege 7200 and a Linux 2.4.26 kernel .config for the SGI Indy.

Lastly, the bloody drains blocked again. Fixed now. What a relief.

For further drivel see the Index