tonyagudo.net

Today I had finally decided to put the finshing touches on a HUD version of my Parcel Web Browser, with the ability to set the HUD's texture to the current parcel's media texture, so you can see webpages anywhere a media URL is set. That little piece of magic is accomplished with the use of the LSL function llParcelMediaQuery. Guess what the wiki page didn't tell me? It only works on parcels you own or land owned by a group you belong to.

Minutes before I figured out the wiki's big error, I had already put up the HUD for sale at both SLX and OnRez. Luckily no one bought the HUD, so no damage was done. But I'm a bit angry at the fact that the primary reference on LSL omitted a critical caveat on a function's description.

What I could do at least is prevent someone else from getting caught up like I did. I'm going to edit the wiki page for llParcelMediaQuery and note that it has the same caveats as it's sister function llParcelMediaCommandList. But as for the HUD, I guess I'll have to put it on hold until I figure out how to get around the underlying technical limitations.

Recently, The Associated Press(AP for short) has adopted a policy for bloggers who want to quote from their articles. The good news about it? None at least until Monday(more on that later). The bad news? The policy is a not-so-veiled attack on fair use.

Simply put, they want to charge you a fee depending on how many words you quote, starting at $12.50 USD for 5 words.

This all started when the AP filed DMCA notices against the Drudge Retort, claiming violations of fair use for quoting AP content. After initial outcry made them back off on the DMCA notices, they instead came out with a "license fee assesment" policy for quoting AP content.

The big problem with this is that it itself violates fair use principles, as quoting falls under it and there is no licensing requirement for fair use. In other words, they have no legal legs to force their policy on anyone. The most they can really ask is to cite/link back to their content.

On Monday, the AP will release a new set of "guidelines", hopefully grounded in actual copyright and fair use practices. That announcement hasn't stopped many bloggers from boycotting AP and using alternate sources such as Reuters. I believe, however, that the best way to send the right message to AP isn't by boycotting it, but rather do what they don't want: exercise our fair use rights. Quote and cite. If they don't like it, there isn't much they can legally do beyond attempting DMCA takedowns and subsequently get trampled in court.

And AP, remember: If you do somehow get the law to back your "policy", it will absolutely cut both ways. If you get to break fair use, so can everybody else, which makes life miserable for everyone(except lawyers).

Just over a week ago, Nanoblogger version 3.4-rc1 was released. I quickly downloaded it and was eager to check out the "action based" command-line interface. After referencing the User Manual and the included generic upgrade instructions, I attempted to upgrade this blog. The result: A big mess.

The most likely reason for the big mess was the fact that the RC stripped out several nice CSS stylesheets, and by using the upgrade instructions included, data gets lost. I did, however, figure out a simpler and painless upgrade path: Simply make a copy of your blog directory and use the RC with that. That way all data is preserved(including CSS stylesheets).

So Kevin, if you're reading this blog post, I have two suggestions for the next RC: 1. The upgrade instructions need to be changed or implement a "blog upgrade" command to make upgrades easier. 2. Bring back the CSS stylesheets you cut out or at least throw them into the "extras" tarball.

That being said, I will upgrade to the RC when I make my next post, just for that "my mood" plugin

Yesterday, I had a discussion with an acquaintance in Second Life about VirtualBox, a really cool virtualization package for all major platforms. I already had VirtualBox installed on my machine, but I found out that it's no longer the latest version. Sun Microsystems recently acquired Innotek, and with it VirtualBox. So I went to the Downloads page and decided to download the binary package, since didn't feel like compiling the OSE version. One little RPM command later, and I was up and running.

The good things added in this VirtualBox are USB support(OSE doesn't have that) and added built-in support for more OSes. However, it's not without a small annoyance or two. In the previous VirtualBox, once I set up a virtual machine to run in Fullscreen mode, it stayed that way until either I shut the machine down or directly chose to take it out of fullscreen. In this new VirtualBox, it kept going back to windowed mode several times while a machine was booting up. Certainly not a showstopper, but quite annoying. And performance overall seemed pretty much the same, even after I tried enabling some options for Intel virtualization optimizers.

But all in all, not bad for Sun's first release after acquiring it. I give it four stars, and the fifth one will come once they fix that annoying fullscreen-to-window bug.