File Extensions

As of today you no longer need extensions to navigate my site, I have started an experiment that I will expound upon at a later date.

Now you can simply input robust, or minimal instead of robust.php or minimal.php.

ChrisJDavis.org swag

Yeah that is right the store is now up and in full swing with eight products!

Please for the love of all that is holy, go and buy something, help a brother out! And wear stylish threads at the same time.

Everyone wins.

Beats from the Whiteboys.

Alright I lied, I have two mp3's up right now, look for the links in the list of tracks.

I have decided to release another album, this time it is a compilation of live and studio tracks from the now defunct fiction:504.

Back in 1998 I was an electronica DJ in my spare... very spare, time. I recorded a couple of my live tracks... badly, and then recorded some studio stuff that is only marginaly better.

I have been told that it is good, so I have decided to release a "Best of" disc and see if anyone would like to waste... err spend some money and help a brother out.

I have found that most of what I have recorded is really good for background music. I have used it in flash projects and it really sings, and I have used a track or two in videos I have produced and again it really sings.

I should have some mp3 samples up by the morrow, so you can try before you buy. I am selling the discs for $7.99 a pop to cover shipping costs.

Here are the 10 songs slated for this album:

Ballistade
Daeon
Detroit Beat
Fade
Ghosts of Isolation
Jammin'
Jazz Revisited
Madness
Percussion
Vocoder

So check back tomorrow and I will have two mp3's to Dl and sample; the discs should be ready for primetime in 2 weeks.

Great

As if life wasn't complicated enough for Apple Computer, now SCO is investigating the potential for intellectual copyright infringement, specifically concerning Linux companies, Apple Computer, Microsoft, BSD versions of Unix, and other companies using the various operating systems.

But as noted in the article:

A 1995 lawsuit set up barriers between the version of Unix that stemmed from AT&T and a variant that it spawned at the University of California's Berkeley campus. That Berkeley variant has spread into several operating systems, including BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. And parts of that BSD code have popped up elsewhere, including in the networking software of older versions of Windows and, more recently, as a foundation for Apple's Mac OS X.

The subsystem of MacOS X is and has always been BSD Unix, I am hoping that this suit will be thrown out, or not pursued. One interesting fact to note, in the aforementioned article it states that if you "pull down" OS X, which I can only assume means pull from the CVS tree, "You'll see a lot of copyright postings that point back to Unix Systems Laboratories, which is what we hold."

Now I wonder how many of those are from the BSD code, that still must retain copyright statements from before the 1995 decision that declared that BSD was an autonomous system?

It is my understanding that the 1995 decision pretty much makes it clear that BSD Unix does not infringe on the Intellectual property of the AT & T flavor; so how can anything derived from that variant (BSD) infringe upon said USL rights?

RIAA Gaining Ground

Via WhatDoIKnow by way of the New York Times (registration required), it seems that the evil gluttons at the RIAA have won a decisive battle in their quest to destroy independent labels and artists (under the guise of stemming the flow of unauthorized mp3 sharing).

Basically the RIAA convinced a federal judge to force internet service provider Verizon to hand over the private, confidential information of a subscriber that the RIAA suspected of making freely available hundreds of unauthorized .mp3's.

I cannot tell you, gentle reader how disturbing this is. In effect this decision sets a precedent that will give the RIAA indiscriminate powers to violate your rights as set forth by that old piece of paper... what was that, oh yeah the The Constitution of the United States of America, and it's sidekick The Bill of Rights, the Dynamic DUO of personal liberties and rights!

What's next, the Internet Geheimstatspolizei (Gestapo) headed up by Reichsfuhrer-SS Hilary Rosen?

0wnz0red

WARNING: The story that I link to below is a work of Science-Fiction, and contains some profanity, so gentle reader if you are one whose sensibilities are offended easily, please do not follow it.

I have just read a wonderful short story by Cory Doctorow winner of the John W. Campbell Award for best new science fiction writer at the 2000 Hugos.

In a word the story is brilliant and flows well. I was completely engaged from the moment I began until the moment it ended... much too soon. I am now stoked to read his first published work Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, on sale now from TOR. To find out more information about the story, buy it, or... today is a good day to be alive, Downoad it For Free, click here to go to Cory's site.

But please for the love of all that is holy purchase the man's work, and encourage the free exchange of information. If we don't step up and represent, there will be very few authors willing to use this publishing model.

For more information on the licensing model Cory is using travel over here.

Mmmm... Mary Tyler Moore.

Enjoy this image provided via Mena Trott by way of Scrubbles.net.

Your welcome.

Ahh... features

Well the last piece of techology has been added to the site.

I just finished writing a really light PHP script that sets a cookie based on user input as to which layotu you want to view. I had originally hoped to just use alternate stylesheets to create the two pages, that way the url remains the same, but the layouts could change.

Unfortunately whilst designing I changed the layout dramtically, and the alternate styles became impossible. So I opted for the present solution. The base url is the same, after a fashion. You still link to the index.php page, so offsite linking is not compromised, the index page now performs a cookie check, and if one id found redirects you to the appropriate page; if no cookie exists it sends you to the default page, minimal.php and does not create a cookie.

To create the cookie you must manually switch layouts via the links on each page located in the menu on the left. If you would like to set the cookie now, here are the links:

Enjoy.

New Face... Pt. 2

Well I have made further updates to the new layout and I must say that I am happier.

I decided that I needed to incorporate a little more of the content of the old layout into this one, so the position:fixed on the menu had to go. But I just love position:fixed when used correctly, and I decide to accost my visitors with my tagline.

Look at it! You know it is witty! I write my own dialog! Have at you!

Err... sorry about that. Anyway I think I am happy now, but.. I must resist... the urge to... program new features; must... stop talking like... Bill Shatner.

Safari moving along...

Over @ Surfin' Safari the weblog of moz-head and Apple lover David Hyatt, the news is good (I designed that site... hehe) indeed for fans of Safari.

On todays episode of praise the parser Hyatt and his cohorts have enabled XML in Safari so sites like this one will be parsed as text/xml as opposed to text/html.

Now if they wold only fix the title= attribute, everything would be hunky dory. And what is the deal with Safari reading the acronym tag as italic and not underline? Weird, and pointless since Safari users can't actually see the acronym tag! But oh well, I digress.