Symphonious

Compatibility Matters

Funny, funny, funny.

Feedster seem to have improved their indexing times recently - they now find every new entry on this blog immediately when I publish it - the Feedster item (for my vanity search on "Adrian Sutton") actually appears before the actual entry for this blog (I subscribe to my own feed to make sure it's working correctly).  Good stuff.  I've probably managed to set up WordPress to ping something whenever I post (I seem to recall seeing something in that box) and Feedster has linked into that somehow (that or I'm pinging Feedster directly but I don't think so).

Sadly, Feedster is indexing the whole page instead of just the content of the (full text) RSS feed so it screws up and matches every new post to this blog with my "Adrian Sutton" search just because my name is on the sidebar.  We really need an RSS extension that marks an RSS item as full text so that these stupid search engines don't have to try and guess what the content is based on what's on the full page - they always seem to get it wrong and it makes them a big waste of time.

Course, it wouldn't be a probably if everyone just provided full text RSS feeds…

As an early 24th birthday present (and late 21st birthday present since I never actually got around to taking up their offer for my 21st present - it's only flaw was requiring a modicum of effort on my part) my parents gave me a new digital camera.  It's a Pentax Optio MX with 3.2 megapixels and a 10x optical zoom (also a 10x digital zoom but digital zoom is generally pretty worthless).  Having that much zoom is much, much more useful than I had thought it would be.  Instead of importing my photos from the camera and spending hours cropping each photo to get rid of useless stuff around the edges, most of my photos are framed exactly how I want them and I leave them as is.  The down side is that I'm still learning how to hold the camera still enough when zoomed in and have quite a few fuzzy photos because the camera shook.

It has full manual override as well which has already proven useful.  Taking photos of the kids playing is rather difficult when the camera decides to use a slow shutter speed to deal with the lowish light conditions (I didn't let it use the flash as it gets annoying when someone is constantly taking flash photography and I didn't want to distract people from acting normally).  Flicking it into shutter speed priority mode let it pick the optimal aperture and avoids blurring when the target is moving.  Many of those photos I ignored the cameras warning that it couldn't set an aperture to match my desired shutter speed and the photos came out a little dark but that was quickly rectified in iPhoto.

The OptioMX also has a video mode which is quite usable.  It only does 640×480 but does a full 30fps and records pretty good audio with it.  The results appear a little small on a computer screen but would need to be shrunken further for e-mailing or web deployment and is the same quality as NTSC and PAL so displaying it on a TV screen looks as good as your camera work and lighting allows (ie: pretty bad in most cases but it's not the camera's fault).  While you wouldn't buy the camera as a video camera, it was really nice to be able to very quickly shoot some video for action shots like the kids riding their bikes or playing soccer.  I mean quick too - no changing modes or fiddling with settings, just press the start recording button instead of the take photo button and you're filming.  Both are just as easy to access with your thumb without moving your hand.

The flash pops up when you want it so you can easily control whether the flash is used or not by just not popping it up.  It also means that there is very little red eye effect because the flash is further away from the camera lens - I only found one person who came up with red eyes and she has the biggest pupils I've ever seen so it would have been hard to avoid.

Overall I'm very happy with it.  Now I just have to decide what the best way to publish my photos is…

So David's relicensing his blog content - good for him.  One thing struck me:

doesn’t allow any derivative works (I don’t really see the relevance of it in this context, but I’m happy to be persuaded).

In the context of Australian law, with our whole not having fair use like the US, what implications does this have for quoting from your blog?  What if I quote the whole entry and comment on each paragraph?  What if I have ads on my blog - does that make it commercial?  How is the average Joe supposed to work out all this?

Dori Smith brought the case of Merkey vs Everyone to my attention and for some reason, despite the fact that I have 4 days worth of reading to catch up on I thought I'd read it.  I don't see this as a case that should be dismissed entirely without thought as Dori's quotes from the complaint would make out.  Certainly there's a lot of rhetoric that should just be dismissed and the complaint is biased in favor of Merkey (isn't a complaint supposed to be?) but it does point out quite accurately that there is a very distasteful undercurrent within open source communities that does cause harm to people and should be actively discouraged.  Often we're too caught up in the belief that every forum must allow anyone to say anything they want and don't focus on building positive communities, encouraging professional behavior and generally behaving like adults.

Browse slashdot with comment filters set to -1 and look at the huge amount of crap that is posted, usually discrimanatory in a range of ways, encouraging violence and drawing down the tone of the community.  When was the last time you saw slashdot held up as an example of a strong, positive community?  When was the last time you heard someone saying how pathetic the comments on slashdot articles are?  Even though the worst of the comments are hidden from most users, the entire culture of slashdot is pretty immature, negative and unprofessional.  As a result, there are few really engaging conversations that occur on Slashdot and those that do occur struggle to be noticed over the noise.

On the other hand, there are positive, friendly online communities out there where engaging discussions regularly happen because they focus on getting rid of the crap and really encouraging people to be friendly.  See Kathy Sierra's Building a Successful Online Community and Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

The right to swing your fist ends at the other man's nose, and the right to free speech ends at a lot of places, including when you're using other people's resources, when you are being discriminatory and when you are being slanderous/libelous.  It's definitely something to keep in mind when you are planning to build a community.