Time to get creative!

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Late last night, I wanted to write a blog post which quoted a portion of someone else’s copyrighted work. After researching fair use legislation (and finding out that the UK equivalent is fair dealing), it seemed that what I was doing constituted criticism, review and news reporting under the terms of fair dealing in the United Kingdom Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) but I was caught up in a haze of legal doubt. I made clear that I was not the originator of this work, credited the artists but even so I felt that I needed to disclaim my use of the work on the blog post and I’m no legal expert – what if I’ve got it all wrong? I’m not making vast sums of money from this blog and what if I get sued?

Whilst my problem related to copyrighted work and fair use/fair dealing is very vague, there is an answer for content publishers who do want to share their work – it’s been around for a while now and is really starting to get some traction – that answer is Creative Commons. I first heard about Creative Commons on an episode of TWiT a year or so back and when I recently redesigned this website, I turned it over to a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License – effectively retaining some rights over the work whilst allowing others to use it in the manner that I see fit.

Basically, if anything is copyrighted (and under many jurisdictions it is automatically copyrighted – whether or not the © symbol is displayed) then permission is required to use it (subject to the vagaries of fair use/fair dealing). Creative Commons licenses are intended to make it easy to skip intermidiaries and to grant others permission to use creative works.

Creative Commons licenses are standard copyright licenses provided free of charge via the Internet. Written for lawyers and courts, they are translated for people, and again for computers. The are used to retain copyright whilst granting permission for certain uses, subject to some conditions (images are from Creative Commons):

AttributionAttribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work – and derivative works based upon it – but only if they give credit the way you request.
Noncommercial Noncommercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work – and derivative works based upon it – but for noncommercial purposes only.
No Derivative Works No Derivative Works. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
Share Alike Share Alike. You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

Any content may be protected with Creative Commons license, e.g. files, photos, drawings, websites, films, sounds, books, or weblogs – there is even a Creative Commons search engine.

To find out more, watch the video clip below:

Get creative!

My computer is better than your computer…

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of weeks back, I posted some clips of spoof Mac vs. PC ads, as well as pointing out that the Apple campaign is a little… how can I put this… untruthful… at times. I couldn’t be bothered to report Bill Gates getting annoyed on US television over the whole Mac vs. PC thing but I can tell this whole episode has gone mainstream when British comedians start poking fun at the Mac vs. PC ads on BBC Radio 4.

I was laughing out loud when I heard last Friday’s The Now Show – so much so that I thought I’d share a short segment of the show here – thereby illustrating that the whole “my operating system is better than your operating system” nonsense is quite ridiculous really:

Jon Holmes: Let’s take two letters at the same time…

Mac: Dear Jon, I’m a Mac.
PC: And I’m a PC.
Mac: I wonder if you could settle, once and for all, the controversial debate that’s been raging as to which one of us is better for the home and which one is better for the office?
PC: Well it really is a tricky one that, isn’t it? Umm.

Jon Holmes: But the Mac or PC argument has of course been a source of techie conflict for years; personally I couldn’t give less of a t*ss either way – they both let you download p*rn don’t they – what’s not to like? But speccy computer enthusiasts on either side treat the Mac and PC divide like open war…

(gunfire/explosions)

Admiral Horatio Nelson: The Battle is won Mr Hardy. Those Mac-loving scum have taken their stupid mouse that has only one clicky button and turned tail and fled. We can claim victory over those who would dare prefer an OS X operating system that utilises GUI and Unix underpinnings.

(explosion)

(Windows exclamation sound)

Arghh!

Admiral Horatio Nelson: Mr Hardy! I’ve been hit by a spam e-mail! I thought this ship’s Windows anti-worm and virus software had been configured to prevent unsolicited e-mails. I am done for.

Captain Thomas Hardy: Sorry Sir, the ship’s firewall was down. IT say there was a .DLL file error in the hold.

Admiral Horatio Nelson: It is over Mr Hardy. My battle is lost. Kiss me Hardy.

Captain Thomas Hardy: No thanks Sir, someone might film it on their phone camera and put it on YouTube and we’d look well gay.

Jon Holmes: PC or Mac, Mac or PC it’s causing a national divide pitching brother against brother, cousin against cousin, spoddy geek against spoddy geek…

Geek: At my signal, unleash Dell.

Jon Holmes: However, Mitchell and Webb aren’t the first double act to advertise computers either. Punt and Dennis did one some years ago, back when they were famous, in which they too had to pitch computer against computer but back then, there was no real contest as to which was the best…

Sinclair ZX-81: Hello, I’m a Sinclair ZX-81.
Space Invaders machine: And I’m a Space Invaders machine in the pub.
Sinclair ZX-81: I’ve got up to 1K of memory, an external cassette recorder (not supplied) and a lead to connect me to the back of the television.

(pause)

Space Invaders machine: Yeah but I’m in the pub.

Jon Holmes: No contest!

Notice
The above work has been copyrighted by the British Broadcasting Corporation and the author believes that the republishing of the script and low-quality recording on this page constitutes criticism, review and news reporting under the terms of fair dealing in the United Kingdom Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). It also represents free publicity for one of the BBC’s excellent programmes!

Should I avoid Western Digital hard disks?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Over the years I’ve had many hard drives and by and large they have been pretty reliable. I did lose data once when the hard disk in a Dell laptop died but then, last week, the disk in one of my external Toshiba PX1223E-1G32 (320GB 7200 RPM external USB 2.0 hard drive with 8MB data buffer) let out a “clunk” before failing – there was still power to the enclosure but the disk was not spinning. To open the enclosure and investigate further would have voided the warranty and thankfully, it was the drive I use for backups (strangely, the one which sees least use) so I hadn’t lost any data – just the previous night’s backup. As it was less than a year old, I had no problems exchanging it for a new one (although it was the last one on the shelf at PC World), but it has dented my confidence in these drives.

Toshiba PX1223E-1G32 320GB External Hard DiskPrior to the failure, the disk inside the Toshiba enclosure was reporting itself within the Mac OS X Disk Utility as a “WDC WD32 00JB-00KFA0” (a Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200JB), as does the one which is still working. My personal preference over the years has been to avoid Western Digital drives and to use drives from Seagate (one reason is that many Seagate drives have a 5 year warranty). Interestingly, the replacement for my failed disk is reporting itself as a “Toshiba USB 2.0 Ext. HDD Media”, which does make me wonder if there have been problems with failure rates on these disks and if Toshiba have switched their drive manufacturer as a result.

I accept that an occasional hard disk failure is inevitable (that’s one reason to take backups) but my understanding is that failures should normally be in early life, or after a few years (the curve is sometimes described as a bathtub); however on the way to work this morning I was listening to Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte discussing Google’s white paper about failure trends in a large disk drive population on episode 81 of the Security Now podcast. Interestingly, Steve Gibson commented that he doesn’t use Western Digital drives – maybe that’s something I should be considering too.

Bye bye Blogger – Hello WordPress!

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Regular visitors to this site may have noticed that over the last 24 hours, the site has developed a totally different look and feel.

I will start posting content that isn’t about the redevelopment of this site again soon but the last couple of weeks have been pretty tough on the self-hosted IT front. First I started to have problems with e-mail delivery to certain hosts, then I accidentally dropped my domain off the Internet and at the same time, I’ve been busy moving this website to a new content management system and hosting provider.

For some time now, I’ve been working on rewriting the site using (semantically correct) XHTML and CSS but my lack of design skills (combined with a lack of spare time) were holding the project back. Ironically, it was my decision to dump Blogger as a content management system (a not insubstantial project in its own right) that has pulled everything together.

WordPress logoI’ve heard a lot of good things about WordPress, which is available as a hosted service or as software to run on a server under your own control, and I’ve chosen the latter option. In fact, over the last couple of weeks, the whole site has been migrated to a WordPress installation on ascomi‘s webspace.

It’s quite strange – most of the technology on which I’ve built my career is from Microsoft – yet I’m writing this post on a Mac and publishing it on a site which uses the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) software stack (actually, the server is running FreeBSD, so it’s really FAMP but that’s just being pedantic).

I had originally planned to run the old and new sites in parallel until all the issues were ironed out, but in practice it’s not been that straightforward as I tried to maintain the URL structure. Late last night I cut everything across to the new site but like so much on the ‘net today, Mark’s (we)Blog 2.0 is in beta!

So, why’s it been so complex? Well, so far, this is what I’ve done:

  1. Order new hosting space and upload the content from old website.
  2. Transfer/register all domain names and direct them to the new hosting provider’s name servers.
  3. Edit .htaccess to rewrite requests from secondary domain names (or without the www. prefix) to http://www.markwilson.co.uk/.
  4. Install and configure WordPress – pretty straightforward with a Fantastico scripted installation.
  5. Customise WordPress – pick a template (Andreas Viklund’s WP-Andreas01), install and activate plug-ins (WP Suicide, New Blogger Import).
  6. Commit WordPress Suicide, in the process wiping out default posts etc. but leaving behind users, user metadata and options.
  7. Migrate Blogger content to WordPress, maintaining the existing URL structure – this was the bit that scared me most and actually it was really simple (hosted WordPress users can also directly import from Blogger). First of all I needed to switch Blogger over to host my blog at Google (BlogSpot) – as all the previously-published content was still available on my server then users would not have seen any change. Next, I used the New Blogger Import plugin to suck over 700 posts and 600 comments out of BlogSpot and into WordPress. I had an issue with the formatting of the URLs but Ady Romantika very kindly updated his script for me and the updated version ran very smoothly (a couple of posts were missed but I found them from an XML sitemap generator broken links report and migrated them manually). It’s worth noting that Ady’s script also leaves the Blogger post ID as a comment in each migrated post. Once migrated, I switched Blogger back to FTP publishing and ran the old and new sites in parallel for a short time but found that to be too much work and have since removed the Blogger site from the server (an archived version of the old site will remain in place for a few weeks at least).
  8. Install and activate the Category Tagging plugin. Start to assign categories to posts and create a new post, which removed the PHP error messages that originally appeared (Warning: array_keys(): The first argument should be an array in /usr/home/username/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/category-tagging.php on line 95 and Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /usr/home/username/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/category-tagging.php on line 96).
  9. Make more template formatting changes; deactivate WP Suicide and New Blogger Import; install and activate Fancy Archives and AdSense Deluxe; register for a WordPress API key and activate Akismet.
  10. Create new pages to replace the non-blog content from the old site (and redirect requests using .htaccess).
  11. Remove the old content and generate a new XML sitemap.

Looking back, it’s odd that one of the things holding back the redevelopment of the original site was the lack of a good design – as it happens the WordPress template that I chose is also available as a standard website template and there are loads of good-looking templates at freecsstemplates.org and at Open Source Web Design.

At the moment I’m still adding categories and tweaking the formatting (there are some CSS glitches to iron out – hence the beta tag) but I’m hoping that within a few weeks the site will be pretty much there. I also plan to go back through the template code and implement some of the CSS tips that I’ve been picking up from the old .net magazines that Alex gave me as well as two excellent books:

If all goes to plan, subscribers shouldn’t have to change any settings, the URLs for the content should be preserved, the quality of the content should improve and my search engine placement should be maintained.

The search engine friendly way to merge domains

Posted on By Mark Wilson

In common with many website owners, I have multiple domain names pointing at a single website (markwilson.co.uk, markwilson.me.uk and markwilson.it). There’s nothing wrong with that (it’s often used to present localised content or to protect a trademark) but certain search engines will penalise sites where it appears that multiple URLs are being used to present duplicate content (hence increasing the link count and inflating the position within the index).

The trick is to ensure that the domains are merged in a manner which is acceptable to the major search engines. It’s generally accepted that the way to do this is to choose the primary domain name (in my case, that’s markwilson.co.uk) and to rewrite any requests received by the web server(s) on any secondary domain names so that they are redirected to the primary domain name (using HTTP status code 301 – moved permanently).

For a site running on an Apache web server with the mod_rewrite module compiled, this is achieved using some directives in the .htaccess file. A description of the required code can be found in various locations, including Brian V Bonini’s 301 permanent redirect article but my site uses some code from a recent .net magazine article to combine the domain name rewrite with the placement of any missing www prefix:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^primarydomain\.com$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?secondarydomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.primarydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

After making the changes, it’s important to check the server headers (e.g. using the SEO Consultants check server headers tool) and ensure that the server is correctly returning an HTTP status code 301 that redirects to the primary domain name, hopefully resulting in an eventual HTTP status code 200 – OK:

#1 Server Response: http://www.secondarydomain.com/
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:19:42 GMT
Server: serverdetails
Location: http://www.primarydomain.com/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Redirect Target: http://www.primarydomain.com/

#2 Server Response: http://www.primarydomain.com/
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:19:44 GMT
Server: serverdetails
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

Oops! Dropped off the ‘net for a while…

Posted on By Mark Wilson

No sooner had I blogged about the smooth transfer of my domain name to a new registration agent when my website dropped off the ‘net for a day or so. I had naively thought that, if I left the domain using the old name servers for a while, everything would work as it had done previously until I was ready to launch the new site – I hadn’t reckoned on my old hosting provider removing their DNS entries for the domain, leaving all my visitors with HTTP status code 404 – not found.

As soon as I noticed, I uploaded the old site to my new server and updated the name server records for the domain but, for the time it took to propagate that update, www.markwilson.co.uk was effectively offline.

Sorry. My mistake.

Sender verify failed with incorrect reverse DNS record

Posted on By Mark Wilson

What a week! Switching hosting providers, setting up a new content management system for this blog (more on that as soon as it’s ready) and all at the same time as suffering e-mail problems as, since the middle of the week, every e-mail that I’ve sent to a particular contact has bounced back with the following message:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

someone@somewhere.net

Reporting-MTA: dns;mymailserver.markwilson.co.uk

Final-Recipient: rfc822;someone@somewhere.net
Action: failed
Status: 5.5.0
Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550-Verification failed for <myalias@markwilson.co.uk>
550-No Such User Here
550 Sender verify failed

I have various anti-spam measures on my mail server, but this appeared to be a problem when sending mail to a particular external host – e-mail sent to the same contact via a different mail server was received with no problems.

I set about researching the 550 Sender verify failed message and found various suggestions as to what might cause such an error – the most useful of which was a message on a newsgroup post which suggested it may be caused by an incorrect reverse DNS (PTR) record (thanks to Ben Winzenz for replying to that group a couple of years ago).

Even though much of my mail was being delivered successfully, that seemed like a perfectly reasonable explanation – the reverse lookup for my IP address would have returned a hostname in the format username.myisp.co.uk, rather than mymailserver.markwilson.co.uk (as confirmed by a DNS report on my domain, which also commented that “RFC1912 2.1 says you should have a reverse DNS for all your mail servers. It is strongly urged that you have them, as many mailservers will not accept mail from mailservers with no reverse DNS entry”), so I set about getting the record updated by my ISP (it has to be done by the owner of the IP address block).

Initially I asked my ISP to add my mail server’s DNS name as a second PTR record for my IP address but in practice I found that DNS responded in a round robin pattern (rather than returning all the matching records) so I couldn’t rely on a consistent response and was still experiencing mail delivery failures. Finally, after reverting to a single PTR record for my IP address and waiting for DNS propagation (again), I was able to successfully send e-mail to the contact with whom I’d previously experienced issues (phew!).

As more and more hosts take action to prevent unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE – also known as spam), this is likely to be a more common occurrence and it just underlines how important a correct DNS configuration is.

Simple UK domain name transfers

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve been the legal registrant of the markwilson.co.uk domain for almost 8 years now and it’s the domain name that drives most of the traffic to this website. Consequently, I would be very upset if I was to lose it and I’ve never been confident enough to move it away from the ISP whom I first registered the domain through (PlusNet/Force 9). Even though I have an ADSL line on a separate account, I have kept a dial-up account open with them for many years, just to maintain the webspace and domain name. In recent months, however, I’ve been getting close to the bandwidth limit on that service and they have been pretty poor at responding to my queries about what will happen once my traffic gets too much (I even offered to pay more money). Support from PlusNet/Force 9 has always been variable (excellent or poor – nothing in between) so I decided that it’s time to move on and my friends at ascomi are able to provide me with a very reasonably-priced hosting service with plenty of headroom.

So, it was with some trepidation that, this afternoon, I finally changed the IPS tag from FORCE9 to FASTHOSTS and transferred the domain name to my account at UKReg. That was it. Easy. Once the transfer had taken place, I could update the DNS server details to point anywhere I like (although at the moment they are still pointing exactly where they always have been, just until I get the new website up and running on my server at ascomi).

I was amazed at how efficient the process was – so much so that I raised a paranoid support call with UKreg, just to make sure that they will re-register my domain when it comes up for renewal.

I appreciate that for many people this is a very simple process and why does it justify a blog post? Well, it was a very big deal for me and I’ve been putting it off for years (literally). I just wanted to be sure that anyone who has similar issues and who stumbles across my ramblings can have their concerns laid to rest.

Further information on UK domain name transfers can be found at Nominet.

Do we really need trusted computing and digital rights management?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve never thought much about the trusted platform module (TPM) inside my PC but recently I’ve heard a lot about the rights and wrongs of digital rights management (DRM) – a technology which looks certain to make ever greater use of the TPM.

I also came across a (well-produced) short video about trusted computing. It makes a very interesting point based on a definition of trust (confidence) being a “personal believe [sic] in the correctness of something… a deep conviction of truth… which cannot be enforced… [and which] always depends on mutuality”.

In the last few weeks, I’ve heard a lot about Microsoft getting bad press for implementing DRM technologies in Windows Vista (it seems to me that Hollywood gave them very little choice in order to allow Vista to play back high definition content); Apple’s Steve Jobs has spoken out in favour of dropping DRM in iTunes (and Daring Fireball published an alternative view on what Jobs might actually be saying – my view is that it’s an elaborate ploy by Apple not to appear as “the bad guys” as unrest with the questionable legality of the iTunes Store grows in mainland Europe); and EMI are reported as considering the release of their catalogue in a DRM-free format (make the most of it before they are bought by Warner).

Of course, supporters of DRM (which may be enforced via TPM) insist that without it, piracy and theft of copyrighted content will spiral out of control. Perhaps they should look at why this might be – only last week I wrote about how I had considered downloading music from underground sources because I couldn’t get hold of it legally. Over-zealous use of DRM will drive law-abiding citizens like myself to break copyright because the latest wave of DRM measures goes too far. With previous content (including digitally-produced CDs), I could make a copy for personal use under fair use legislation. So why should I have to buy high definition content over and over, just so that I can watch it on my TV, my computer and my iPod?

As the transition of audio/video content to an online delivery mechanism continues to gather pace, the vast majority of consumers will still buy their music/video legally – at least in the first world – and let’s face it, do we really need to clamp down on this phenomenon in the developing world? Isn’t that just greed?

Sony BMG’s rootkit fiasco showed how copy protection could be taken too far – a complete breakdown in the public’s ability to trust of one of the world’s largest content providers. If I’m to trust the content providers not to put bad things on my computer and if trust really is, by definition, mutual then why do we need DRM?

(A few moments ago, a poll of almost 6000 readers of the UK Financial Times – not exactly known for dumbing down to the masses – showed that 98% of those polled were in favour of music companies dropping DRM).

Virtual PC is alive and well

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve commented before that I wasn’t sure what the future held for Microsoft Virtual PC as much of the marketing and visible product development for the last couple of years has related to Virtual Server. Well, despite killing off Virtual PC for Mac, the Windows version appears to be alive and well as Virtual PC 2007 has been released.

I haven’t had time to check it out yet (I’m using Virtual Server 2005 R2 at home and until recently was using various VMware products at work) but I’m sure more details will become available in time at John Howard‘s blog.