All in all, it was a great week, nice and relaxing despite the fact it was work! So, to sum up some of the most interesting bits for me:
– Some various excellent sessions on Sharepoint, mostly on successful implementation plans and disaster recovery.
– Two fabulous sessions on UNIX/Linux authentication & authorisation with Active Directory (unusual to see *NIX represented at a Microsoft conference!).
– Good news that MOM 2005 SP1 is due out in August, and that it fixes a whole host of problems including DTS jobs for reporting, and the renaming of hosts.
– Oracle products run on Windows. Who would’ve thought it!
– Windows compute cluster edition looks great, it should give all those *NIX solutions a run for their money :)
– Exchange 2003 SP2 adds a whole host of interesting mobile features: ability to wipe remote devices, policy enforcement of PINs etc. A BlackBerry killer if ever I saw one (granted, they’re features that have been copied, but they’re free!!!).
A little late, but still…

So, this week I’m unexpectedly off to TechEd in Amsterdam. Yes, it’s a geek fest of monumental size; mainly geared around those who do MS related stuff in higher education (like me).
Presently I’m sat in poxy Heathrow waiting for my plane, which is now delayed. Hooray BMI. At least I have the miracle of company GPRS and bluetooth on my laptop for company.
Missing the boyfriend already …

Google Earth is absolutely awesome. Go play. NOW!

Just to reinforce that fact that this is a techno poof blog, I’ve uploaded three of my scripts for doing statistics with Exim, ClamAV and some Perl.
a l e x l o m a s . c o m – Exim statistics scripts
There’s even a mailing list to go with them. How swish :)

I bought a kit from wondermagnet.com that included a little slice of superconductor and a small gold plated Ne-Fe-B rare earth magnet. When you get the superconductor superconducting (by cooling it with liquid nitrogen) the magnet floats above it.
Watch and grin:
Download file
(Sorry about the quality by the way and the fact it’s in WMV format)

Noooooo! Not that!
No, this is even better – the satisfaction that comes with dealing with bandwidth leechers. These are the people who hotlink images from your site to their pages; mostly those who have avatars on bulletin boards and the like. Now, you can simply deny these people your images, saving you on bandwidth.
Of course, you could substitute the image the person’s posted for something rude – this doesn’t save your bandwidth (much) – but of course, this should be reserved for special people, especially right-wing cuntish kids in the USA who use you as examples of “homos what should be kiled” (sic).
So, two examples for all you apache & mod_rewrite users:
This will simply deny hotlinkers access to your images:

# Logging
RewriteLog /var/log/apache/rewrite.log
RewriteLogLevel 1
# Deny hotlinking
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !www\.yoursite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|bmp|BMP|png|PNG)$ – [F]

Remember to change yoursite to the URL of your own site, and the path to your log if you want to use that.
If you’re desired to change the image to something rude, do this:

# Fuck off little shit
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} myspace\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|bmp|BMP|png|PNG)$ http://www.mysite.com/cunt.gif [R,L]

Today sees the launch of a decent Government run website aimed at providing virus, secuirty & exploit information in one place. It offers free email & text message alerts as well.
Go see: http://www.itsafe.gov.uk/

And all that – since the upgrade to MT3, I’ve gone all seasonal with the theme…

I like this a lot:

I’m sure it’s definitely subject to taste, but the black one is certainly growing on me. They have a website all about it – I do rather like the look and that it can do so much stuff and pause and record to SD card and has a USB port and…
Maybe it’s time to retire that yellowing old Sony alarm radio thing I’ve had since I was 14 perhaps.

This morning I had an email concerning some pictures of the Brewer Twins I had posted up in my gallery.
I won’t post the emails here, but essentially the first one was from a company in Germany called net n net ordering that I remove the pictures by Sunday, the or else… was left dangling. It was short and to the point.
Being an intelligent and sane sort of person, I wrote back to query:
1) Is this person from an unknown company, using a dialup account from a Sony Laptop in Germany really the copyright holder (or representative) for a pair of model brothers from California?
2) I had collected the pictures from the public domain on the internet and that given these pictures have been freely available for some time, I questioned whether they had the right (legal or moral) to exert their copyright, so long after the horse had bolted.
The reply from a different person this time was rude, angry and threatening – large sums of money as penalties/damages were mentioned. They still didn’t demonstrate that they represented the copyright holder, however they did send from the @brewertwins.com domain this time. To be honest, I don’t really give a flying fuck about hosting the pictures – they’re available without much effort on the internet (how about here, sorry Mr. Webmaster, but I have to make my point) – so I’ve removed them.
Now, I’d like to come back with a few points and answers to all those questions I’m sure you’d love to pose:
Q: The images are copyright aren’t they?
A: Yes, of course they are. UK Copyright Law applies to things on the internet as well as in print.
Q: Does copyright expire then if the owner doesn’t enforce it?
A: Well, no, not legally. The images of the Brewer Twins have been circulating for nearly a decade – I remember seeing them when I first started using the internet for its true purpose.
I’m also sure that at some point, you would have to decide that the work had been in the public domain for long enough that it was nigh on impossible to enforce copyright on it. Oh, and Mr. Lawyer at net n net, you cannot copyright a name as you seemed to suggest (they ordered me to stop using “Brewer Twins” in order to improve search engine results – like I was doing that!) – that’s called a trademark.
Q: So, why do you feel so hard done by in being asked to remove illegal material?
A: I don’t object to removing illegal material. It’s just the manner in which it’s been done in this case. A lot of the good will towards the Brewer Twins comes from their fan base. A simple email from the webmaster at the Brewer Twins’ website requesting the removal in a polite way without threats of legal force would have achieved exactly the same result without annoying the very people you’re trying to entice to spend money with you.
Q: Yes, ok, but do you morally feel it’s right to rip off other people’s photographs? I mean, that’s how the models and photographers make their living.
A: Absolutely not. Having worked both behind and occasionally in front of the camera, I’m fairly sure I’d be just as angry if I found my work exhibited elsewhere. In that case, I’d either send a polite request asking the site to remove the images, or at the very least, put up some acknowledgement.
Q:Don’t you think you’re being a bit hypocritical?
A:Well, maybe. All I saw myself as doing was putting some freely available images together into one place, because I wanted to actually support the people in them, in much the same way as you might do any other celebrity. If the copyright owners take issue, then so be it, but let’s be pleasant and civilised about it rather than resorting to bullying tactics.
Anyway, hopefully this torrid event in a torrid week is sorted out now. I rather hope this isn’t the start of a concerted attack on Brewer Twins fans; as the MPAA and RIAA have found out to their cost it really doesn’t pay to sue your customers.
Edit: Forgot to say, if you pose any questions in the comments, I’ll do my very best to answer them.