Author: Teal

See you next week.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Disclaimer: This is not legal advice. If you think it is, seek help immediately.

Various reports on the web say Virgin Mobile has used images from flickr in their advertising campaing in Australia, and now people are outraged.

Here’s an idea: If you don’t want your images being used commercially, use a non-commercial license.

And another (they’re free today): If you don’t have a model release for a photo, don’t license it. Period.

Luckily, some commenters do get the idea. Yay, voice of reason!

How common is it for large corporations to steal amateur photos like that?

See, Virgin aren’t stealing (and that’s leaving aside the distinction of physical and virtual property). They are very likely completely in the right! The photographer released the picture under the CC-BY (Creative Commons-Attribution) license, which makes it okay to use for any commercial endeavour. That comes with at least a moral implication that you have actually gotten the necessary release forms, too, since otherwise the whole license is pointless.

I just can’t believe they would USE it like that!

Well, that’s the idea behind the CC licenses, that you can just use CC-licensed things by following the terms of the license. And that’s why you use any of the CC-NC (Non-Commercial) versions if you do not want to allow commercial usage. Seems simple, right?

And if you don’t have all the rights to the work… then you don’t license it at all.

Lately I found myself cussing at computers more than usual. Actually, not only computers, but almost all technology I encounter in my everyday life just annoys me very quickly now. Now, for a total geek like me, that’s a very strange thing to discover. I used to really like computers, programming, all the great things you could do with them… and now it seems more like a chore, something I have to do, but if I had a choice, wouldn’t. Even just using the computer, for example to sort through my photos is almost painful since it’s so slow and feels like everything is just getting in my way all the time.

Photography itself hasn’t grown stale or annoying yet. It’s a really stressful job at times, and it’s by far not as easy as it might seem, but it’s good stress. I like doing it, I believe I’m doing a good job with it, I’m getting to know people and people like my photos. It gives me a feeling of achievement.

On the other hand, programming has lately been either for myself (to fix stupid bugs or get missing features), or largely invisible and/or unsuccessful (work). It’s like continually running against a wall, without any personal gain or growth, or worse, just a whole lot of negativity wearing me down. I barely had any time to work on the chosen projects, which makes me feel even worse for kinda, sorta, abandoning them for so long.

Add to that the other blows in my personal life in the last few months, which I won’t detail here, and the result is not very pretty.

I need to reevalute my life.

All kind words and good tips are duly appreciated.

You may or may not know that I’m terribly busy at work at the moment, rewriting a large application that has its roots in PHP3 (oh yeah) and is a crazy mix of HTML and PHP. Things like ‘abstraction’, ‘layers’, or even just ‘separating code and presentation’ are completely alien concepts there.

So I decided to do the rewrite using one of the many PHP frameworks – CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Symfony, etc. – and decided on CakePHP (and, maybe more important, against Symfony). Doing the ‘reading’ parts of the app was simple enough, despite me being a complete newbie to CakePHP and using the 1.2 alpha versions which is mostly undocumented. But the actual data input and saving part, I hit a wall. Hard.

The problem I have is this (models are in bold):

To enter a Venue, you first select a Location. Then you add the Venue data, which is a lot of fields. Then, you add 0..n Images (which you upload just then). Then, 0..n Organs (as in music), either from a list of existing ones, or you can add one on the fly. Then, optionally, Ensembles (dito); and then you finally get to review your data and finalize the Transaction. All this should be on a wizard-like form, with multiple steps/pages.

Editing a venue is pretty much the same, except the data is already there. So the record and all associated records get copied as needed, with a reference to the original.

Then, the admin can either approve your Transaction and merge your changes into the DB, or deny it and delete the Transaction and all associated rows.

The problems start with getting everything wizard-like. There is a FormWizard component, but that seems to randomly overwrite or clear $this->data. I don’t know what to do with my data when I hit the ‘add 0..n images’ step, or when adding organs or ensembles. I have no clue what “the Cake way” would be here, since all examples I can find are rather simplistic with only a few fields, all on one page, and at most one relation (which always fits a select box).

Can any cake baker out there help me get back on track before I lose my mind?

… um rote Fahnen mit schwarzem Symbol in weißem Kreis zu schwenken?

(Absichtlich ohne Link.)

FYI: We’re going to Staden now to bask in the sun. Join us.

You are cordially invited to attend brunch tomorrow, Sunday, June 23rd, at about 11:30 CEST, in Perspektive 1. Registered attendees get seated first :p

Close the gate, they’re here now.

The London 2012 logo is even more craptastic than the color scheme they use on their website.

That’s why you don’t let your kids do LSD-laced crayons.

Update: German taz mentions the logo 😀

NEE Antwerpen candidate promises to blow 40.000 jobs. (NSFW). More info at politics.be antwerp.wordpress.com, dlisted. The blowjob offer is probably just a parody, though.