Image Thieves

Monday 0812hrs

My images are being stolen. This is beginning to piss me off.
The more hawk-eyed readers will notice that at the bottom of the gallery pages is a Creative Commons licence, which permits someone to use my photos for non-profit, if they simply attribute the original image to me. Not a tall order, to be honest. If I could use a Nikon D3 camera for the price of simply telling people I got it from Nikon, that would rock! And you know what, it would be easy to do, too, because the camera has “NIKON” stamped on the top in big letters. Peice of cake.

Oddly enough , my images have “M Denyer” on them, this lets people know that the person who took the photo is called, who’d have thunk it, M Denyer. (The M is for M, by the way.) You’d like to infer from this that such a person deeming my images fit for use would then have to simply display them, as-is, and the attribution part of the bargain is complete. Actually ZERO effort required. Literally, none. It’s actually harder to copy the image to your own FTP server than it is to hold up the attribution part of the bargain.

This is therefore why I get angry when thieving punks like this git running a website about a Jersey Water polo Club and another individual running some blog (I will not abuse this fellow human just yet, as I only hailled them this morning about the issue, so have yet to see how they respond. If they respond correctly, I will be crediting them with a link. If not, I’m going to get angry on their behinds.) use my images and go through the arduous trouble of attempting to conceal the copyright notice.

If you are a non-profit organisation and you leave my copyright notice intact, the images are FREE FOR USE. Get it? It’s clear these people are either compulsive kleptomaniacs for whom the thrill of the steal is the main event, or they’ve got some kind of learning disorder and simply cannot read. Given the fact that both of them have managed to author websites, even if not of any noteably great standard, I am lead to conclude that they are just plain old thieving bastards. Yeah that’s right, I said it.

Just for the record, the original photograph of the White Faced Saki and the Jersey Cow can be found in my gallery.

—–
Update – After lunch
Looks like the blog owner over at Quedat took my polite yet-ever-so-Britishly-aggressive message to heart and has reversed their copyright chop, to display the full image avec-copyright. One down and one to go! (That I know of…)

Hong Kong Surprise

Saturday 0049hrs

Turns out we had no idea where we were transferring on our way to Oz, and it turns out it was Hong Kong :) Crazy huge airport with mountains and chairlifts and clouds that sit on the mountains like little hats. It’s cool, though because we’re trapped in the airport for a mere 100 minutes we don’t actually get to see Hong Kong proper.

Mucho turbulance over India and the Russian mountains (Urals?) *again*, hate that bit.

More to follow from Australia.

(And Doug, if you’re reading, we’ll wave to everyone in the airport on the offchance you know them… 😉 )

Serious and Organized

Sunday 1205hrs

Once again the window into our beloved Big BrotherState, the BBC, brings us a harrowing peice about two desperate and dangerous criminals, determined to endanger the lives of our beloved parliamentary doo-gooders.
Obadiah Marius was arrested under the “Serious and Organised Crime Act”, another one of those policies dashed through to provide blanket powers to the police under the guise of doing something useful to protect us from, well, Serious and Organised crime. He had in fact just gotten himself a little lost which, I’d always though, was allowable. It seems now however that “Inability to Navigate” has been added to the list of henoius and sinful crimes alongside “Speaking your mind near Whitehall”. Interestingly enough his girlfriend was released, though her name wasn’t. I wonder if Obadiah was “White British”, or perhaps his girlfriend? She was released, afterall, even though it’s well known that women can be at times both very serious and organised.

Don’t get me wrong, I think with the jokes the UK government is pulling off on a global scale they really do need that security, but do they genuinely believe that Obadiah Marius was either serious, or organised? Just make sure you don’t stop to ask a copper for directions in The Smoke any time soon, else you might find yourself sharing a cell with genuinely serious and organised criminals… 😉

Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher.

Because Supermarkets are dirty profit mongering whores.

Soon most butchers will be closed due to low profits, most grocers will have gone and most independant dairies crushed by supermarket demand. Most people nowadays have never eaten good bacon, know what should be in a sausage or even say “Hello” to the person behind the counter who serves them. it’s a joke, a sick tragedy and a loss that will not be recouped further down the line.

Don’t be retards. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher.

Windows XP Memory Problem

Tuesday 1309hrs

I had some out of memory errors recently, which is naturally absurd for a machine with 4gb RAM (Yes I know XP doesn’t support it, but it’s future proofing in case Vista ever works out or Adobe release their products on Linux…(And yes I know Vista can’t boot with 4gb of RAM either properly without hacking yet, but by the time I get around to it I’m lazily hoping they’ll have fixed the issue…)) Anyway, back on track, I came across a post regarding a potential fix to some common out of memory errors over at Kevin Dente’s blog. I’ve implemented it, the world has yet to implode and I haven’t come across an error message yet. Fingers crossed.

Micro Waves, Big Fires

Wednesday 1851hrs

As was kindly pointed out to me it turns out microwaving things to make them clean could be a bad idea. A bad idea, that is, if you’re stupid enough to microwave anything with no water or fat in, for half an hour, unattended.

If you’re foolish enough to set things on fire like that, perhaps you shouldn’t have been left to live on your own in the first place…

I legally indemnify myself from anyone burning down their house etc and take no responsibility for anything at all. Anything.

Typo3 is an amazing creation. It’s a fantastically powerful CMS, based on PHP and available for free. However, it’s so powerful that when things go wrong there are many places to look…

I have no idea if this has been resolved in the latest codebase for Typo3, but in the version I was using for a recent project I was being driven crazy by google claiming it couldn’t see my site due to a 503 server response.

Turns out wGet on Ubuntu couldn’t either.

Turns out, that if you have a dynamic content extension like tt_news set to not cache, and happen to insert that via TypoScript into your page, Typo3 will constantly issue temporary 503 headers as it believes the page isn’t cached and is busily being cached, which of course it isn’t because you told it not to.

This causes some irritation when your main page is issuing invisible 503’s (As hey, your site loads in the browser…) but oddly doesn’t feature on Google because their poor robot brain doesn’t know what’s happening.

The fix? Well I trawled the net and found a few bug reports on the issue but the resolution wasn’t visible in the code I had on-server, so I applied a few of them manually. One worked, and he is as follows:

Look for the file class.tslib\_fe.php in path-to-source/typo3/sysext/cms/tslib/ and open her up. Somewhere around line 2574 (Whoever thought 4000 lines in a PHP class was a good thing was clearly smoking something very interesting…) you should see the following code:

// Storing for cache:
if (!$this->no_cache) {
$this->realPageCacheContent();
} elseif ($this->tempContent) { // If there happens to be temporary content in the cache and the cache was not cleared due to new content put in it... ($this->no_cache=0)
$this->clearPageCacheContent();
}

Simply add a line in the 2nd clause, to make it look like so:

// Storing for cache:
if (!$this->no_cache) {
$this->realPageCacheContent();
} elseif ($this->tempContent) { // If there happens to be temporary content in the cache and the cache was not cleared due to new content put in it... ($this->no_cache=0)
$this->clearPageCacheContent();
$this->tempContent = false;
}

And you’re all set. No more mysterious 503’s on genuinely dynamic content.

Compliment Tool

Tuesday 1639hrs

Quick one today, linking through to a cute cartoon with a pertinent message to anyone who’s ever weilded a camera in anger. What the Duck on Photography.