No, my account is kosher and I only kill Bambi-eyed goats on the Holy Day of our week and no other days of the week, as is our custom here. I am clean.

Didn’t stop me from fountain-spewing my disgust in MSPaint tho.

And wide-eyed hurl #2

“Who do you think you ARE?” -”We have a no questions asked policy at this company.”

I think I’ve managed to stay on-topic throughout this whole blog post, for once.

It’s not so bad yet, but if you’re using the free version of Spotify, expect more of your favorite artists’ labels to ban hits. I wholeheartedly support each and every artist to choose who sells their songs and where, though.

I could have a small problem with songs published decades ago which sold in the millions. Is a song ever successful enough? Profitable enough? Someone needs to let go. Nevertheless, it’s still the artist‘s choice.

The Spotify message says “The artist/label has chosen to make this track unavailable.”, but you can bet it’s extremely likely that it’s the label rather than the artist that has chosen. (It’s a bit curious that some of the blocked songs have no Buy button. Likely, the label had a problem with Spotify making a small profit.)

I foresee that this choosing will increase exponentially until Spotify basically becomes iTunes.

In a new world where the culture is to make music rather than consume music, and “everyone” makes songs but still the same extremely few get published or even heard, there needs to be a shift of attitudes and distribution. Services like Spotify could play a large part in this new world, hopefully reflecting the culture of their time.

Imagine a combined service where anyone could discover and search free and commercial music. People could listen to anything, but have to pay to listen to the promoted, published few.

Boy, isn’t that vision scary. For everyone but the audience.

“The neat thing about Objective C is that instead of fucking up an object, you can send it a message, preferably via a delegate, to go fuck itself, and it will. Fuck itself. More often than you think.”

Well, it’s my first one. Just wait til I’ve practiced some.

One of these is one.com, though it would be improbable that they are the only hosts that frequently upgrade their server software surrupticiously.

This is fine, except that if a large number of devs use CMSes where the point is to not dev all the php yourself, a large number of websites can be made completely inoperable if there is a flaw in the php scripts of the CMS, or if server software upgrades are not backwards compatible.

In the case of Joomla 1.0.x, every single page on my company’s site failed to fetch articles from the Database. That’s right, zero content.

This was the error message from Joomla:

Warning: Parameter 2 to frontpage() expected to be a reference, value given in C:\xampp\htdocs\mambo\includes\Cache\Lite\Function.php on line 100

And this was the solution posted on Joomla forums: (All credit goes to Kjell Hählen.)

I wrote a fix. My version is Joomla 1.0.13 but I suppose it will not be very different for later versions.

You sould replace two files by the ones in the attachment:

/includes/Cache/Lite/Function.php
(this solves the “Reference instead of value”-problem)
/includes/vcard.class.php
(to make the contact form work again)

If you rather add the changes by hand:
The changes to vcard.class.php are minor, look for:
Code:
if(!function_exists(‘quoted_printable_encode’))

In Function.php I added a this line twice:
Code:
$arguments = $this->fixCalls($arguments);

The new function (fixCalls) is added at the end of the file.

Get the mirrored fix file here, http://bitbrain.se/fix_joomla_10x_php_530.zip

It turned out to be a simple fix, just changing a couple lines in two PHP scripts, in my case I used the fix zipfile. I’m blogging about it since files have a tendency to stop being hosted and forum posts get archived.

I can’t guarantee the fix will work for your site. But it saved a tricky upgrade path for me, and so I wanted to make sure the solution doesn’t get lost, folded, spindled or mutilated. (Kjell, if you don’t like this, let me know and I’ll take it down.)

Just made this post to say I’ve given Opera 10 the medal of honor called “Default Browser” back, after liking FF3.5 for a while.

But the shananigans (nonsense; mischief; often a deceiving or treacherous trick (c) Agent Cooper) of FF3.5 (such as starting FF2.x or FF<3.5 exes starts FF 3.5.2 instead), coupled with the fact that no plugins work (the strength it had is -poof- gone), made me go back to Opera – where the plugins are included and always work.

Dunno why they added "Turbo" ((again)) though. These days.

Oh well. I'm good

After installing Firefox 3.5, there is no fucking way of starting Firefox 2 or Firefox 3. All paths lead to Rome. (By which I mean Firefox 3.5, stupid!)

If I manually run D:\util\Firefox2.0.0.6\firefox.exe – hey presto! Firefox 3.5 loads.

If I press the old trusty SHORTCUT to Firefox 2, I get Firefox 3.5.

What the FUCK kind of megalomaniacal global corporation big brother pissy cunt tactics is this!? You think you fucking own me? All fucking Firefox versions REMOVED. Back to Opera it is. I don’t fucking care how optimized Firefox is after a DECADE of lamers trying to catch up with Opera…

I hereby send a coconut up Mozilla’s shaggy rectum. (Look it up.)

Mozilla, fuck you. Strong blog post follows. All this from trying to find out why normal AJAX scripts such as mainstream gallery scripts don’t work with Firefox 3.5. Silly, really.

I think the times have changed. Or put (perhaps) more succinctly by Joe P. Ickuptruck, “What kinda s**t are they letting on the radio nowadays??”

Regardless of mine or anyone’s opinion on biogas, this was on Swedish radio, just now. I love it!

This post by Matthew Nisbet mentions main points of the actual study (which I am too cheap to buy online) and brings up the question, among others, of what will make people engage in discussion and discusses the need of a scientific consensus.

I wrote this to add something to my comment #8 on that article (which is inserted below): The fourth option I see as a way forward is to instead of forcing consensus, to dispense with consensus. Seeing as religions have failed at this (even with a limited set of unproven sources without sources), I think science advances only by fierce NON-consensus of individuals presenting neutral and testable measurements, fact, or conjecture with rationale. To sever that tree of research open to anyone will yield the same consequences as imposing needless legislation on free trade; those who know the rules and use them will quash the competition and make the consumers of same suffer.

Religious believers will not all be swayed by a board of truth of not quite final theories of everything; some will be engaged by heated debate of scientific theories. We do see that today. Probably not enough to stop the habit of going to church or slitting the throats of conscious lambs, perhaps enough to watch a TV program. For myself, I’d rather see a science vs science fight than a science vs religion fight, and so, I think, would a ninth grader not brought up in a too fiercely religious home.

Comment #8 follows. It’s a suggestion of alternatives to decrease the polarization of debate. (Quoting myself, huh? I’d never think I’d sink that low. But anyway.)

I have a hard time addressing the behaviour of groups of individuals, let alone trends among groups of individuals, and further less groups of individuals in opposite camps, and least of all media coverage of the different camps.

Also, there is no will left in me to find middle ground or go down the track Taylor is (probably accurately) describing.

What is left when no more can be left out? To pick a fight, one you believe in. If media is considered the way to reach out to, um, those more numerous than the people who look shit up (note how I avoided the word “masses”!), the positive action is to empower the media reaching out to them for “your camp”.

The other option I see is an opening up of dialog of all camps, which I only see the good guys without agendas doing, and which can be hard to fit inside the programming time of media channels and attention span of (passive) viewers.

A third is establishing a working board of scrutiny of media, without censorship. Right now it’s mostly censorship without scrutiny. If we imagine a society where this would actually happen, that would relieve that society of some of the fascination for entertainment, misrepresentation of fact, and shift of focus purveyors of woo rely on.

Instantly inviting, it has a modern design (webdev by trade, sorry) with media and a clear layout that pretty much makes it impossible for anyone not to stop and maybe click on something, like the luxuriously sized inserted media or next article buttons. Even if visitors are young, old, or know nothing about birds and don’t wanna know.

It’s (presumably) backed by good funding, but despite the site not validating (again, habit), it’s more instantly appealing than thousands of sites coming out of larger purses. The devs might not have been paid for the time to cross the T’s, but the overall impression is nothing short of perfect. It made me stop and write this, and that about sums it up, I think.

I tried to convince him of the existence of truly great software, in the sense that, depending on who sees the greatness of it and who just miss it, some software stands the test of time indefinitely because it cannot be improved or is enough in itself, or is great despite the test of time or how its environment has changed (think processor speed, texture resolution, and pixelshaders), because of some quantity that I tried to confer with him about, and try to find.

Without letting me finish a train of thought, he contradicted each piecemeal statement instantly, and countered each proposition that “this software is great in itself regardless of not topping the best-seller list” or such things as “why don’t use GIMP+Photoshop binds instead of Photoshop?” by explaining how software is made modular these days, with team members contributing their little part. Gee, thanks for the enlightenment.

Contradicting is fine, countering is fine. Nothing is better than a really fierce argument in order to advance ideas and reach conclusions. At least to me. I want people to say that I’m wrong, so that I can find the source of his or my mistake.

I gave him a dozen approaches to the central idea, that it’s not about who made it, but about the result. For an artist, the lines on the paper, the concept and the performance. For a musician, the sound waves, the emotions they evoke, and the idea presented through optional lyrics. For a programmer, the bytes of the complete program, the experience using it, the pixels on the screen. For all those, the resulting whole.

In a certain time period or environment, some people will worship the work of someone. When that environment ceases to exist, the works that approached the truth in some fashion are rediscovered, and everyone finds out what was the spirit of the times and what was timeless. There are numerous examples in the music scene of the nineties, when the sheer starvation for something that was at least decent elevated stars that are now considered, rightly, insignificant in every respect.

By denying entrance to any of my ideas, he never did understand this concept. I could not accept this lock-out, and could not understand how he could deny the concept just by prematurely objecting to, basically each sentence I said because I hadn’t proven logically each sentence before speaking it.

How sick is that? And how unproductive to any kind of intellectual progress, or any useful result of communicating at all? Reduction and logical proof can follow, but only if both parties will “hear all evil”, as made popular by the three monkeys statue.

Rather than conclude that all communication is pointless, I concluded that informal communication is pointless with some, and the best thing there is to get results, with some. Also, that being close friends to start with helps informal communication, since it prevents any misunderstandings. But talking about the same topic for 6-odd hours should at least in theory eliminate any chance of misinterpretation with anyone.

Email is time better spent. It’s an awesome “invention”, actually.

From this experience, a fear arises. Suddenly I see many scholars dissecting individual statements, be they from a superlative intellect or a creationist, and, like the troll that too often went potty on your favorite forum, failing and inanely refusing to see any multiple-paragraph message that is there and makes sense, but hacking it up into convenient chunks of nomatter for easy disposition without counterpoint.

I say, skip that shit. And try to get the whole message, or failing that, to find a fault of fact. This has taught me that I will.

Early, it came to me that intellectual ideas can’t be “transmitted” at all, but only created to an image of some likeness in the mind of the receiver; for some, an exact likeness. If the receiver is disallowing a picture to form, nothing will be transmitted.