denyerec.co.uk

Well, even though I installed the blacklister, which has been rather successful, there is still some arsehole using randomly generated spoofed email domains to spam my site.
I don’t give a damn about Texas Holdum and I have no idea which genius spammer thought this site would be a good vehicle to advertise it, but there you go. For the time being, comments have been switched to moderation only. Perhaps I need a wordlist or URL blacklister, as detecting on email address is obviously not robust.

Answers on a (moderated) postcard.

For those of you who tired quickly of Microsoft’s eye-punishing bright blue colourscheme, you may or may not be aware that there are alternatives. The obvious ones are the “Olive” and “Silver” themes available in your display properties dialog, or you could revert back to the Win2K look if you’re feeling retro.

If however you fancy something else, help is at hand. Handily, this isn’t some crazy WindowsBlinds GUI overhaulling thing that will crash your PC and scare your grandparents, what I am on about uses WindowsXP’s native “styling engine”.

Currently I am using the Opus 1.5 theme by a chap called Bose. It comes in 3 colours, one of which being olive green so I’m all set.

To use these funky “MSStyles” you need a modified DLL patcher which you can download from the Neowin Forums. It’s quite safe, but it might violate a EULA somewhere along the line, modifying MS files and whatnot. Ho hum.

Neowin have a bunch of themes in their forums too, for those who don’t like Bose’s.

As “Stink Bomb” (Who the…) pointed out, we do not have a television. How then am I so well informed about series’ such as The Sandbaggers ?
DVD’s and my computer, of course! 😉

That link does go through to my Amazon affiliates thingy, which has successfully earned, well, nothing over the last 9 months. Whoot! Praise be for affiliate systems. Go on, click it, buy it, I’ll get 20p.

Goodness knows I could use it.

Recently we’ve been watching the first series of a 1978 show called The Sandbaggers.
Portraying UK intelligence in a more realistic light than James Bond could ever hope to, this series is heavy on dialog, doesn’t waste any time and doesn’t have any car chases. Well, there are a few, but it’s hard to imagine a Hollywood car chase in some of the things they drive…
Check out The Ops Room for more info and get hold of it, thoroughly recommended.
I’d give you more links, but my clipboard is broken.

If you were thinking of moving to Canada, it looks like now would be a good time to go through with it.

I would say “Unlucky, America.” but something deep down says that they’re not the ones who are going to end up paying.

*sigh*

Software patents bemuse me. Whilst I can see one side of the arguement, in that a software idea or concept should be judge no different to a physical one, it still doesn’t seem quite right. Take for example emoticons. Lets say someone tries to whack a patent on the system by which an ASCII emoticon is replaced in realtime or at parse-time by a small graphic. Given that people are trying to whack patents on scrollbars and text boxes I hardly think this idea is too outlandish, so, to continue… The problem is that these crazy lawyer-fuelled maniacs aren’t just protecting their own source code, they’re trying to protect with a thick wall of cash “intellectual property”, or ideas to you and I. Why is this bad? It’s bad because there are some fundamental ideas, some devices and methods of doing things that are so basic that not only is it difficult to attribute them to a single originator, it just doesn’t make sense to. I don’t pretend to be a legal expert, but given how the US legal system works (Whoever has the money gets the “justice”) there would be nothing to stop a certain software vendor buying up every patent out there and, BAM, all of a sudden if you want to write software to count to 10 you have to pay a fee to them, simply because they have rights to labels, text boxes, OK buttons and the concept of displaying information on a VDU in a box, or “window”, if you will.

Can I patent smiling? Can I put a patent on the reaction between having a humerous thought and conveying it to someone else using a visible physical medium? Didn’t think so, I’d be laughed out of court.

Maybe if I tried again with a few billion US dollars I’d have more luck. Then I could sue the arse off the judge I had to bribe with a billion US dollars for not paying his smiling licence fee.

The people at the Protecting Innovation Website know far more than I do, please check them out.

Following a discourse in good old channel #Webdev, it ocurred to me that although my work is for sale (Yes, it is true…) it’s not nearly well advertised enough. In fact the only mention of it is in my website FAQ which thanks to its lack of advertisement no-one seems to read. (I get a fair number of emails , one could say I received them frequently, asking questions which are answered in the FAQ.)

The willpower to put up a full-blown automated sales system is not within me, not only that but I really don’t want to turn into a bargain-basement stock salesman which, if you sell images above 1024×768 is rapidly what you’ll become, afterall, no-one gives a crap about photographic rights these days anway. On the flipside, I’m not actually selling anything anyway at the moment so you could argue something is better than nothing. Would the images find their way into the public domain? Would someone use them as their own, build them into a website, print them in a brochure or a flier after paying only a small fee to “Use it as a desktop wallpaper” ?

One line of discussion was about music and the way in which an awful lot of people don’t pay to listen to it.
Read the rest of this entry »

Things have gotten very slack around here and I do apologise. The usual story of no new photos, no new posts, no advancement of the site and also no progress on the Gallery project.
Ho hum.

On a better note, I can make rent this month, which is nice.

Despite the lack of updates this page is still receiving around about 450 unique hits a day which makes me wonder what they’re looking out for My top search term is sadly still “Veiled pages” and I think that’s some kind of dodgy porn thing, though I’m not quite sure. If you got to this page by searching for “Veiled pages”, please drop me a line and let me know what you were really looking for.

Once more I shall promise to become more active, though the nagging thoughts of “Why should I try for more traffic?” still plague me and I’ve not quite figured it out yet.

There are oodles of photo’s that need uploading and, really, printing and putting in some kind of print portfolio. If anyone out there has a cure for terminal apathy, get in touch.