Aaargh! I’m still having trouble recreating my zed1.net sites! The DNS is now propagated, but I cannot get subdomains working. Worse I cannot get to the hosting services web site at the moment. their DNS is not working their main website domain does not resolve! Boo hoo, this is becoming painful.
So I’ve spent a couple of hours trying to sort that instead of doing other stuff. 🙁
zed1.net
I’ve got my new hosting sorted, which is good, but I can’t seem to do much with it until the DNS change propagates, which is not so good.
Ah well. I must get on with my WordPress work anyway.
The Bone Collector – Finished
I’ve now finished The Bone Collector by Jeffery Deaver. It was fantastic. Much better than the movie. In fact they made some significant changes to the story for the movie. The book was much better. Highly recommended.
zed1.net
Zed1.net is being moved to a different hosting service. I can’t yet go into what happened with the previous one, more when things are settled. I’ve found a reseller account I can afford which has all the facilities I want and am just waiting for my account to be activated. Fingers crossed it won’t take too long.
Blog Hot Or Not
I notice that Blog Hot Or Not is down at the moment. I’ve turned off the rating pulled from there in the side bar as it was stopping the page loading in a timely manner. I’ve also got my stats counter turned off as zed1.net is still down. Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left 🙂
Happy Birthday Journalized
Yep, this journal has been running for one year today!
In celebration, there is a new section in the left hand sidebar: “A year ago today” which will feature, each day, the posts I made on the same date one year before.
Here’s to the next year.
Debian GNU/Linux to Declare GNU GFDL non-Free?
I just saw this story over at slashdot.
“There’s some considerable argy-bargy in progress over whether or not GNU’s own GFDL is a Free documentation license at all. At issue are “invariant sections” which cannot be removed from derivative works.”
It took me about 60 seconds to read the relevant portion of the GFDL to see that someone has the wrong end of the stick.
“A “Secondary Section” is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document’s overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. (Thus, if the Document is in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them.
The “Invariant Sections” are certain Secondary Sections whose titles are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License. If a section does not fit the above definition of Secondary then it is not allowed to be designated as Invariant. The Document may contain zero Invariant Sections. If the Document does not identify any Invariant Sections then there are none. “
In other words if, for example, you were to write a book entitled “Hacking The GIMP“, license it under the GFDL, and include a section stating “The author is not a developer of the GIMP and cannot guarantee that your copy of the program will continue to work after following the instructions in this book.”, you could declare that section as invariant. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Without the invariant section a later author could take your work and modify that section to read “The author guarantees your GIMP will run faster and better after reading this book.” A trivial example, but without the ability to mark the given section that “deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document’s overall subject (or to related matters)” as invariant a more serious subject matter could land an author in a lot of trouble as a result of someone’s (legal) modification of the text.
Books Catch Up
Since the last book I mentioned finishing (Year Of The Griffin), I have read a couple more: Wild Robert by Diana Wynne Jones and Schott’s Original Miscellany by Ben Schott.
Wild Robert is another children’s book by Wynn Jones; it was pleasant enough, but very much aimed at younger readers, I finished it in about 90 minutes of reading spread through part of one day. Verdict — OK for kids.
Schott’s Miscellany is one I picked up cheaply at my local Asda: It is, as Stephen Fry describes in the sleeve notes: “A fabulous collection of essential trivia. Bless you for Schott’s Original Miscellany!”. Full of wonderful pieces of information such as: Betting Odds Slang (33/1 is Double Carpet); Antiquarian Paper Sizes (Emperor, a massive 66 x 47 inches); the Victorian Timetable of Mourning (husband 2 to 3 years, wife three months); and Nouns of Assemblage (an exaltation of larks). Essential stuff for the pedantic geek about town. I just need to commit it all to memory. 🙂 Recomended!
Finally, I am about half way through Jeffery Deaver’s The Bone Collector. Brilliant so far. Having seen the movie has not taken anything away from the novel. There is, of course, much more detail of character and event, as well as a significant difference to keep me enthralled. More when I’ve finished it.