Punderings

I did. I suppose it’s not an amazing feat, but it was still pretty cool for me. The weekend after 4th of July we spent at my grandparent’s place on the shoreline, and the local towns had a number of fireworks displays throughout the week.
On Friday night, we had a double bonus. First, we let Roxanne stay up until the first scheduled town fireworks display. We were out late anyway, but it wasn’t hard to keep her up a little later. Then, the town across the bay started their display, which from our perspective as still pretty obvious. Not sky-filling, certainly, but big enough to be fun, with a reasonable echo following after each set of shells. She really seemed to like it, which was gratifying. Even better was the group of homeowners right down the shoreline with their own roman candles and small-sized rockets. I think she liked those better because the sound was much more obviously associated with the display.
But the second bonus was staying up. From a comfy chair on our screened porch, I ended up watching 6 separate displays across the bay. They included two nearby town displays, which were quite loud and lasted about 20 min each – with some overlap, and plenty of echo’d reports. There were three other twon displays further away, so no sound, but plenty of pretty colors. Plus the nearby neighbors continued to send off roman candles every now and then through the night.
Overall, it was a great display, and reminded me how much I love fireworks. Unfortunately it may be a few years before Roxanne really appreciates the best spot: right underneath the big ones, so the flowers fill the sky, and so the reports from the finale shake the ground around you. Ah, the sound of safe explosions.

nic.name lists plenty of registrars, but the majority of them either don’t actually support .name registrations, or don’t support third-level registrations at all.
I’d love to get my wife and in-laws their names, but holbrook.name isn’t available at second level, so I need a reputable third-level .name registrar. Any suggestions?

(Hmmm, I should really put this into my new Questions blog once I get that started. Keep me aggregated for more!)

Perhaps a naive question, but I was thinking about legal and social ways to combat splogs and blog scraping (since even with my limited scope, I’ve been scraped at least twice). In particular, I was wondering: do CreativeCommons NC licenses prevent blog scraping?
There are a number of detailed questions I haven’t investigated, but I figured I’d post this now to see if anyone comments. Personally, I chose the CC BY-NC-SA license because the human-readable version seems to be closest to what I want my philosophy to be for much of my content. That is:

• BY – By attribution. This means anyone who uses the license must attribute the work to me. It’s the least to ask that if you’re going to use something I create, that you let the world know I created it first.
• NC – Non Commercial. It’s my work; I’m certainly not going to give it to you for free if you’re making money off of it. If there’s money to be made in what I create, it’s mine!
• SA – Share Alike. Although I am not a Free Software type (a’la FSF) for code myself, for personal writings like my website and blog, I want to ensure that others who re-use my content will allow their versions of my works to be shared alike.

My question to my legal and geek readers is: can CC NC licenses help combat splogs? Splogs being original-content-free sites that simply copy other people’s feeds, and have lots of AdSense or other advertising links on them. The more content they steal, the more search hits and therefore ad revenue they make from the site.
Either on legal theory, or technical issues, does the CC NC license prohibit this use? Have any of the CC licenses been tested in court? And where is the current legal line on commercial use? The whole fact that splogs are original-content-free would point a reasonable person to say it’s purely for selfish commercial use, but I’m sure that some tricky splogger has an argument about how their feed search terms constitute something original or such bull that it would take a number of cases to have anything effective.

Yes, I realize this is all very theoretical. For practical solutions I should download a WordPress plugin that poisons my default feeds with copyright notices or faux content. But with the relative popularity of CreativeCommons I was wondering if they’ve been thinking about this specific issue – of the EFF or some of the other great online legal sites out there.

Although with a 2+ year old we don’t celebrate the way I used to growing up, (she’s not old enough yet for the crowds or the late nights) all the memories of all the 4ths are a strong one. Growing up near Boston, they’re even stronger than most, since Boston’s 4th of July celebration has been a big event locally for well over 30 years now.
The proper ending for a 4th just has to have the 1812, church bells, and cannon. The older I get, the more important the music is – even if it’s just on simulcast, instead of live like I did when much younger – even more important than the fireworks.
The other thing that amazes me, besides all the obvious patriotic good feeling, is just how much Boston gets into the celebration – and nicely, too. It’s one big happy party – it’s amazing how nice and helpful Bostonians and others can be on the 4th, even when they’re sweating in the sun, and are all crammed along the banks of the Charles. It’s a rare glimpse of people being really decent and enjoying themselves together, especially in an otherwise taciturn and to many outward appearances rude New England culture.
The only sadness for me has become the telecast and the sponsors, who unfortunately have chosen to go for ad revenue and a national audience. If you’re relying on TV to watch the concert these days, trust me, you’re missing a lot. I definitely miss the days of yore when only Channel 5 and A&E carried the concert, and were very careful to minimize commercial breaks, and coordinated well with the Pops. Now, you miss large chunks of the music, and they even put commercials in during the 1812 itself, which is pretty much sacrilege in my book. Sigh. I think I’m going to have to drag out my copy on vinyl (no, I haven’t downloaded it on iTunes, it’s not the same) so I can get to sleep properly tonight. Too bad I can’t replicate the cannons and church bells too.

A special hello to all my non-US readers out there. Remember, we are a big country, and are filled with a lot of different opinions – ones that we traditionally have shared equally all around. Unfortunately, we’re kind of stuck at the moment waiting for things to change…

This is one of those muses I’ve had for quite a while. Earlier, I blogged about googling, and I was surprised myself to be reminded that it had turned into a verb long ago, back in ’01. (Ah, that makes me want’a'dopt an old-timer accent and talk about how ‘mazing that new Jaquard Loom is…) And it’s obvious that computers have changed the speech of many human cultures, both colloquial and academic. But I’m pondering not on specific words that have been invented, passed around, and come into wide acceptance with a speed rarely seen before, but rather on the styles of words themselves.
For my non-technical reader, I’ll spell out DNS: Domain Name Service. You can go look it up on Wikipedia or Google it or something; you’ll find a ton of references. If you want technical specifications (always a favorite of mine), look for RFC’s 1034 and 1035. I’ll wait.
With a huge wave of the hands, DNS basically takes the shane.curcuru.name part of the URL that you type in your web browser’s address bar, and translates that string into the computer-readable address of the computer my website lives on. It serves as the glue between human-readable website addresses, and part of the information your computer needs to actually get you the website you asked for. But that’s not the interesting part for humans.
What’s interesting is how marketers – and plenty of Jane/Joe website makers – are playing with words in their hostnames. One of the great early examples to become popular is del.icio.us. It’s delicious! It’s a study in using the TLD – Top Level Domains – to create readable words that are actual hostnames. TLDs are the .org, .com, .us, and so on parts of the internet.
One of the issues is that there are a strictly limited number of TLD’s allowed to exist. This is controlled by standards bodies, and each of the TLD’s has a theoretical purpose for being, however many people ignore these. .com stands for commercial entities, which means basically anything goes. .org is supposed to be reserved for non-profits and the like. .us is meant for websites based in, and about, entities in the US, or USA (depending on if you like 2 letter or 3 letter ISO codes for countries, a separate topic).
So we have del.icio.us – a social bookmarking site, who’s only reason for being in the .us domain is because that way, the whole website name is a simple english word! All you have to remember is that their bookmarks are deliciously good, and you’ll be able to remember how to get to their site. See why the marketers are excited? They get simple brand name recognition, and still theoretically play by the geek’s DNS rules for the internet. Theoretically, because the vast majority of .tv websites have absolutely nothing to do with Tuvalu, the owner of that ISOP 3166 country code (and hence the corresponding TLS), except that they’ve cut a deal with domain name registrars to make a profit from all .tv domains.
How long will it be before we have a word – a dictionary word, maybe even an O.E.D. one – that describes this technique? How much of our pop culture is being de.fined by br.ok.en up words? How many etymologists shudder every time they see a new word broken up with periods using the wrong syllable bo.undar.ies? And how prevalent are domain hacks in non-english languages?

As Pascal said, this post is too long for it’s core concept because I lacked the time to make it shorter.