Entertainment Industries: innovate or die
You don't need us to tell you that your position on anti-"piracy" laws has been unpopular recently. Last month's historic protests, with millions of Americans registering their opposition, have made that point pretty clear. Instead, we're writing today to tell you that the Internet can be great for creators and their community, but your own leadership refuses to recognize and take advantage of its promise. It seems they'd rather spend your membership dues on lawyers, lobbyists and astroturf than innovation. We suspect many of you are realizing this, especially when you see how successful new business models can be.We humbly suggest that you stand up and tell them to either embrace the age of the Internet or get out of the way so that new, forward-thinking industry leaders can take their place.
There are a lot of different fights regarding censorship on the net at the moment in the name of Piracy. So much of the issues come down to simple availability and price, the money being spent on the fight against piracy should go to making content easy to access at an attractive price, globally. We don't want to wait 6 months for that TV show, album, DVD to be released in our region. Innovate or die ... using the legal system to keep your business model never works, look at the Locomotive Acts in the UK. If anything this practice should somehow be outlawed in itself.
Fusebox has changed hands from TeraTech
The project will remain in the Apache License. The copyright will be removed as most modern project no longer need or have a copyright. The Fusebox.org domain ownership will be transferred initially to John Blayter. The domain ownership shall only be owned by a commiter of at least 3 months. The rights of the domain ownership must be given up if 50% or more of the commiters vote to have it moved to another commiter.
Looks like there is a new set of developers in town for Fusebox with TeraTech letting it change hands in to the community. I still have one old project on FB (and its doing well) so I wish them all the best of luck going forward! It always good to see any project live on rather than go stale.
Is this really an @asda rollback?
This kind of rollback does nothing except help Asda with their stats i.e. "Rolling back 1000's of prices". I know, technically yes its a rollback, but really come'on.
Say NO to #ACTA
ACTA is one more offensive against the sharing of culture on the Internet. ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is an agreement secretly negotiated by a small "club" of like-minded countries (39 countries, including the 27 of the European Union, the United States, Japan, etc). Negotiated instead of being democratically debated, ACTA bypasses parliaments and international organizations to dictate a repressive logic dictated by the entertainment industries.
ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is the worlds #SOPA, though possibly worse in every way. If you live in the UK take 1 minute and make sure you get heard on this non-democratic process at http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/20685.
Don't forget you can also tell your MP how you feel via theyworkforyou.com
If you want to know more about ACTA then check out http://www.laquadrature.net/ACTA
Just before I get off my soap box though what also bugs me is that this can be agreed on in principle by so many countries yet nothing can be done to the banking industry for years and after investigations?
O2 shares users phone numbers with every site they visit
Update: O2 have fixed this already)
Whenever a mobile user accesses a website from their phone they share information about that device with the site. It usually includes the web browser and the model of phone being used to allow the website to display its information in a way that suits your device. However, O2's mobile network in the UK is also apparently including the phone number of some users in the data.
The mobile phone number can be seen in the HTTP header
Malicious websites could use the information to target users with spam texts or scams.
Wow, just saw this on Sky news, seems like a silly mistake for someone to make. They probably had a reason for it but it seems silly!
I wanted to check if this was true and how easy it was with ColdFusion. Check if yours is visible at http://www.andyjarrett.co.uk/o2/, the code is below:
A quick tutorial for WebSQL
I've created a gist which gives you the basics for getting to grips with WebSQL. It's heavily commented and shows you the three core methods used (openDatabase,transaction,executeSql) and how to:
- Create a database
- Create a table
- Insert a record
- Get the data back in to HTML
Don't forget that WebSQL is currently only supported on Chrome, Opera, iPhone, and Android. It's not on Firefox(!) or Internet Explorer (shock).
To see your results right click on the page and Inspect Element to bring up the following window and go to the Resources tab. Under Databases you should find a table called fightclub
BlogCFC and a new future ahead
A few weeks ago I came to realize that I was holding back BlogCFC as a product. I was a barrier to it growing. I thought about Joe Rinehart (a man I greatly admire) and his decision to hand over the reigns of Model-Glue to Dan Wilson, and it occurred to me that maybe it was time to do the same.
I just read the news over at the BlogCFC blog about Ray stepping to the side and can't help but feel this could give the project a needed kick it with new blood taking over the reins.
Thank you Ray for a great project, Scott when we seeing version 6 :p
DateFormat in #nodejs
Adding some DateFormat functions to Node ended up being quite simple
2$ npm install dateformat
3$ subl app.js
For this I installed it locally, you can always add -g to add it locally. The final line opens up a new file called app.js in Sublime Text 2 for me. In there we are going to create a simple web app (cause thats what you do with Node.js apparently) and quickly return the date to a Hello World program.
2// requre the dateFormat
3var dateFormat = require('dateFormat')
4
5// Create a function to return the current Date and Time
6function getDateTime(){
7 var now = new Date();
8 return dateFormat(now, "dddd, mmmm dS, yyyy, h:MM:ss TT");
9}
10
11
12http.createServer(function (req, res) {
13
14 // Add some output to the browser including date and time
15 var textResponse = "Hello world @ " + getDateTime() + '\n\nCheck out more at https://github.com/felixge/node-dateformat';
16
17 // output to the browser
18 res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
19 res.end( textResponse );
20
21}).listen(1337, "127.0.0.1");
22
23// Tell the console when the server was started
24console.log('Server running on http://127.0.0.1:1337/ Started @ ' + getDateTime());
Once you've saved app.js call $ node app.js from the Terminal and go to http://localhost:1337.
This only scratches the service of what it can do, check out more at github.com/felixge/node-dateformat
layout.jade for Twitters Bootstrap
When moving over to a templating system like Jade it is the silly things you get stuck on. This is probably more for my reference than anyone else but its a simple layout.jade to use with Twitters Bootstrap.
2html
3 head
4 title= title
5 link(rel='stylesheet', href='http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/1.4.0/bootstrap.min.css')
6
7 body
8 div.topbar
9 div.fill
10 div.container
11 a(href='#').brand #{title}
12 ul.nav
13 li.active
14 a(href='#') Home
15 li
16 a(href='http://www.andyjarrett.co.uk/blog') Blog
17 li
18 a(href='#') Contact
19
20
21 div.container!= body
22 footer
23 p © Company 2011
Each of your views will then be within the container, you just need to add the div.row in each view file. Below is the current index file at andyjarrett.nodester.com (subject to change of course)
2 h1 Hello Node and Nodester
3 p More content coming soon
4
5div.content
6 div.page-header
7 div.row
8 div.span6
9 h2 Currently using
10 p Jade and Express
11 div.span5
12 h2 Starting with Node.js
13 p <a href="http://www.andyjarrett.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/2011/4/20/Developing-with-NodeJs-starting-links">Links to start you off</a>
14 div.span5
15 h2 The message board
16 p.label.notice Coming soon
If you are looking for more documentation then check this out from the Scala communitya href="http://scalate.fusesource.org/documentation/jade-syntax.html">scalate.fusesource.org/documentation/jade-syntax.html
Getting your Node JS + Express app deployed on Nodester
Nodester Allows you to Deploy your Node.JS applications to Nodester.com for FREE and is a good way to quickly get playing around with Node.js. The site has some quick guides for getting your app created and deployed within 40 seconds, this post is about getting from Hello World to having a Express+Jade site deployed. Before we continue some assumptions have been made: you know Git, you've installed Node, installed expressjs, signed up at nodester.com, and now just want to get your web goodness deployed to show the world.
-
$ nodester app create [app name]
- For this example my app will be called scribble and can be seen at scribble.nodester.com. When you run this call you will get a port number back i.e. 12332 Note this down!
-
$ nodester app init scribble
- At this point your app is running at http://[app name].nodester.com and you should see "Hello World". Basically you Node.js web app is running. Simples. Now we are going to add Express.js which is a node web framework.
- $ cd [app name]
- $ express
- You'll get a message destination is not empty, continue?, type Yes and hit return at which point the folder structure will be setup.
- $ npm install dont forget to install dependencies
- When Express sets up it uses app.js and Nodester uses server.js easiest way to fix this is to run $ mv app.js server.js
- $ vi server.js open server.js and change the port number at the bottom (app.listen( xxxxx );) to the one you noted earlier i.e. 12332
- $ node server.js
- We're running this to check everything is ok. Open your browser at localhost:[port number] and you should get the "Welcome to Express" message. Once you're happy go back to the terminal and ctrl-c
- $ git add .
- $ git commit -m"My first express.js commit"
- $ git push
- Thats it, the Push should of restarted your app, go to your Nodester URL and you should be up and running.