I noticed Evan made a side-comment about Ephox licensing which I wanted to clarify and since he doesn’t have comments enabled but does have trackback on I’m posting it here.  Ephox products are available both in limited seat licenses as well as on per-server terms with unlimited users.  The server licenses make it much easier to deploy in big organizations as you don’t have to deal with the overhead of ensuring you have enough user licenses etc (which is what Evan was originally talking about).

Symphonious.net has now moved to it’s own virtual server hosted by eApps.  I think everything is set up right but if you see any problems please let me know.  Sorry for any disturbances caused.

Also, a massive thanks to Iain for letting me use his server up until now (the header image is his too).  The service was excellent – you’ll have to come round for gratitude beer and nachos soon.

Headed down to Tweed Heads with SWHO (she who is happily obeyed) and took some nice photos, here’s my favorite.  Click for a bigger version – give me a yell if for some reason you want the full 2048×1536 version.

Most people have probably already worked this out but if you’re new to rails or new to rails login components, you probably want to use Login Generator and avoid Salted Login Generator like the plague.

Login Generator is extremely quick and easy to get up and running with, is made up of a small amount of clean code, has no dependencies and works with Ruby on Rails 0.13.

Salted Login Generator on the other hand is crap.  Sorry to the author of Salted Login Generator for putting it so harshly but it really is a mess and has caused me a huge number of headaches.  The feature creep seems to be what killed it – the localization is particularly problematic and makes all the code horrendously messy but depending on a firstname and lastname field in the database is bad too (should have just had login and let each application decide how and if to store the user’s real name).  If it were trimmed back so it just focussed on handling authentication it would probably be a lot better for it.

So Sam Ruby is pandering for links in a vain effort to tell Apple that iTunes’s RSS support is horribly non-standards compliant.  Of course this effort will fail horrible because Apple doesn’t do anything unless there’s a Radar issue created and Radar issues created by internal staff carry far less weight and get far less priority than Radar issues created by external parties.

That’s right, you can create Radar issues yourself.  Apple has a bug reporter which is the official and the only official way to tell Apple anything.  Don’t like the fact that Apple only acts on things that have a Radar issue?  Log a Radar issue telling them so!  Don’t like the bug reporter? Log a Radar issue telling them so!  Don’t like the way iTunes works with RSS?  Log a radar issue telling them so!

Compatibility Matters

Funny, funny, funny.

Feedster seem to have improved their indexing times recently – they now find every new entry on this blog immediately when I publish it – the Feedster item (for my vanity search on “Adrian Sutton”) actually appears before the actual entry for this blog (I subscribe to my own feed to make sure it’s working correctly).  Good stuff.  I’ve probably managed to set up WordPress to ping something whenever I post (I seem to recall seeing something in that box) and Feedster has linked into that somehow (that or I’m pinging Feedster directly but I don’t think so).

As an early 24th birthday present (and late 21st birthday present since I never actually got around to taking up their offer for my 21st present – it’s only flaw was requiring a modicum of effort on my part) my parents gave me a new digital camera.  It’s a Pentax Optio MX with 3.2 megapixels and a 10x optical zoom (also a 10x digital zoom but digital zoom is generally pretty worthless).  Having that much zoom is much, much more useful than I had thought it would be.  Instead of importing my photos from the camera and spending hours cropping each photo to get rid of useless stuff around the edges, most of my photos are framed exactly how I want them and I leave them as is.  The down side is that I’m still learning how to hold the camera still enough when zoomed in and have quite a few fuzzy photos because the camera shook.

So David’s relicensing his blog content – good for him.  One thing struck me:

doesn’t allow any derivative works (I don’t really see the relevance of it in this context, but I’m happy to be persuaded).

In the context of Australian law, with our whole not having fair use like the US, what implications does this have for quoting from your blog?  What if I quote the whole entry and comment on each paragraph?  What if I have ads on my blog – does that make it commercial?  How is the average Joe supposed to work out all this?

Dori Smith brought the case of Merkey vs Everyone to my attention and for some reason, despite the fact that I have 4 days worth of reading to catch up on I thought I’d read it.  I don’t see this as a case that should be dismissed entirely without thought as Dori’s quotes from the complaint would make out.  Certainly there’s a lot of rhetoric that should just be dismissed and the complaint is biased in favor of Merkey (isn’t a complaint supposed to be?) but it does point out quite accurately that there is a very distasteful undercurrent within open source communities that does cause harm to people and should be actively discouraged.  Often we’re too caught up in the belief that every forum must allow anyone to say anything they want and don’t focus on building positive communities, encouraging professional behavior and generally behaving like adults.

Ah Scoble, when are you going to learn?  Everytime you mention Mac and anything Microsoft related in the same sentance, a whole bunch of Mac users are going to flame you something savage.  In this case of course their completely right – Windows Media Player for Mac sucks and I don’t bother watching any Channel 9 videos because it sucks so much.  I could probably use VLC which I use for anything else that Quicktime can’t play but it just seems like too much hassle just to listen to a bunch of people prattle on and on instead of just reading a quick text based blog entry.

So iTunes 4.9 is out and the podcasting support is pretty cool.  It does pretty much what you’d expect – podcasts appear in a new “Podcasts” “special playlist” just under the “Library” icon.  It does keep track of whether or not you’ve listen to a particular podcast or not so you can keep track of where you’re up to and has a bunch of configuration options for how to handle incoming feed entries and how long to keep stuff.