...more recent posts
So we're thinking about putting free Wi-Fi at the cafe. Anybody have any experiences to share? I'm under the impression that it is against the terms of service to share a Verizon DSL line (not sure how they'd ever know though.) Unfortunately it is impossible to find the real fine print on their site (well, OK, maybe it's not impossible, but I couldn't do it.)
I've looked at bway.net a bit, as I've always heard good things about them. They seem to be of the "it's your bandwidth, do what you want with it" school of thinking which is obviously what I'm looking for. Any experiences with them? How about speakeasy?
And finally, does it even make sense to sign a one year contract with a little guy like bway? (or speakeasy?) I mean taking into account possible legislation which would remove the onus presently on the big Telco's to share their lines with these guys. I've fallen a bit out of touch and no longer know where that legal stuff stands.
Help appreciated. If not, I'll update below as I find answers myself. Pretty fun project.
Big Apple announcement on Monday (well, maybe it won't be big.) Probably new iPods, and most likely the introduction of an Apple music download service. Those rumors about Apple buying Universal Music Group seem to have died down.
I'm worried about this download service. I'm scared they will price it too high (and put in too much DRM) for it to work. Apple can't take too big a failure at the point in time.
What would you people pay to download music? I mean legally. How much per song? How much per album?
Good legal news for file sharing networks:
In an almost complete reversal of previous victories for the record labels and movie studios, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Streamcast--parent of the Morpheus software--and Grokster were not liable for copyright infringements that took place using their software. The ruling does not directly affect Kazaa, software distributed by Sharman Networks, which has also been targeted by the entertainment industry.
"Defendants distribute and support software, the users of which can and do choose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends," Wilson wrote in his opinion, released Friday. "Grokster and StreamCast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights."
This will only be interesting to people posting here (unless someone wants to tell me how other blogging software deals with this issue.)
[update: sorry had an error in the block quote. Fixed now.]
HTML entites:
Character entity references, or entities for short, provide a method of entering characters that cannot be expressed in the document's character encoding or that cannot easily be entered on a keyboard. Entities are case-sensitive and take the form &name;. Examples of entities include © for the copyright symbol and Α for the Greek capital letter alpha.These are useful. Here's a list of Latin-1 entites. Here's a list for symbols and greek characters. Here's a list for special entites. In those lists you should be looking at the two 'entity' columns (the first is what you put in your post, the second is the character that will result when viewed in a web browser.)
Great. The problem is if you use HTML entites in a post, and then go back to edit the post, when the system puts the entity into the editing text box in your browser, it displays the entity, not the code for the entity. In other words if you make a post with > your post will display the greater than symbol: >. But when you go back to edit, instead of seeing > in the editing box, you'll just see > which isn't what you want (because you'd have to change it by hand back to >)
I wonder if that's clear? Anyway, the work around for this is non standard, but will work on all pages here: insert an underscore after the ampersand. So instead of © to make a copyright symbol, you should use &_copy;
Thanks to Bruno for finding some problems in my first implementation of this.
Esther mentioned Google's purchase of Applied Semantics on her new blog.
From Google's side, interesting too! Last month at PC Forum I was pestering Sergey Brin about whether Google would move beyond mostly abstract algorithms to more explicitly semantic analysis... watch that space!
And today there is a tiny mention in Cory's notes from the "Google, Innovation, and the Web" talk at ETCon by Craig Silverstein, director of technology for Google:
We just acquired Applied Semantics. They do targetted advertising. I can't say more. Semantic tech could be applied somewhere other than ads. If I said more, I'd have to kill you.I'm skeptical about the semantic web, but if anyone can make progress it's probably google...
Aka was slamming. Nice downtown crowd.
Now we're at arlene's grocery for the 3rd annual picture show. It turns out this means quirky indepenent videos shown on a 15 inch low quality TV hanging on the wall.
Ok, correction, now I see. There's another room with a bigger screen. That room is completely packed. It's not that big but still, nice turn out. Seems like a cool thing. Might want to get here a bit earlier.
April 25 - April 28. Arlene's Grocery. Stanton btw ludlow and orchard. Starts at noon tomorrow (saturday.) Goes all day.
This looks pretty cool: martian netdrive. A tiny, completely silent, wireless 120 gb hard drive. Just plug it in, and you have an 802.11b file and print server. Stick it in the closet, under the bed, whatever. Runs a custom version of linux. $479.