Month: July 2004

Categories
Just Shelley

Summer break

In addition to our political views, Mark Morford from the Chronicle and I have something else in common this morning: we’re both suffering from injured wrists. More than that, we’re both taking a break from our writing: Morford because of his wrist; me because damn, but I’m tired.

My writing has been uninspired, my camera busted, and even my code sits there going, “Can you give me one good reason why I should run?” Uppity code is a sure sign that you’re overdue for time away from the keyboard.

I have some writing to do for American Street and then I’m going to see what kind of mischief I can get into that doesn’t involve the computer.

Be good. Be well. Kick butt.

Categories
Burningbird Weblogging

Source updates

I am regenerating the documentation of the PHP for my site and should have replacement pages up tonight. The pages will include my Talkback feature and comment editing. They won’t include the counter post technology, which I’ve removed.

I want to congratulate Jay Allan for winning the Six Apart contest. He deserves recognition for his hard work and I’m glad to see he got it.

This reminded me, though, that those who contribute plugins for other products, such as WordPress, also deserve recognition for the hard work they do. So I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to those who have provided documentation, plug-ins, or even inspiration for my own tweaks, including the WordPress development and documentation team, Chris Davis, Mark from Weblog Tools Collection, Craig, and Carthik.

I gather that August 1st is WP Patch Day where plugin authors pick a bug to fix in the core. Though I’m working on converting the Redland Unix libraries to Windows in order to create a PHP extension (and having a bitch of a time with it–nothing to do with the Redland code; it’s my own rusty Visual Studio/C skills), I’m going to see if there’s a bug left to claim. And then that will be it for me.

Categories
Copyright

Copyright, copyleft

Dave Shea has a set of images at his web site, depicting a photograph being altered in progressive stages. He asks the question:

Assuming the photo I started with was copyrighted by someone else and I wasn’t licensed to use it, at which step does the design process below does the work become ‘legitimate’?

I gather that his doing this was a direct result of one or more CSS designs from CSS Zen Garden being taken by one or more people, used as is, and the other person or people actually claiming credit for the work. However, people could not understand how something that is ‘open source’ so to speak, also be copyrighted; hence his unusual and rather clever experiment.

I was going to write more on this, because as you all know, I’m just so fond of discussions involving Creative Commons and copyright. And the comments at Shea’s were pretty damn interesting. I also have a pictorial essay I’m writing on the state of politics here in Missouri for American Street. However, I am feeling pretty beat tonight.