Unicoding Big time!

Holey Moley! After plugging one of the nicest bands around in my last mini-article today drops in a biggie.

In my pursuit to make a great Unicode helper application for web content creators I'm getting a little bit of a waste brain with all those numbers. When you click the title link, you can see for yourself (awful lot of Y.O.U. in that blurb, ain't it?!) what I'm talking about.

Anyway it's even sorta fun to do it. Making software that will actually help people to do the right thing, which is also why I'm not going to write some gadgetry that just sucks the Unicode documentation in, but rather update it by hand and sort it in a way that helped me before (I'm using a similar app tom manage my character references since a few months now). Something like the QWERTY and the DVORAK keyboard system did for keys, sorting them according to their most frequent use (or in case of the QWERTY in a way that wouldn't jam the punches of the typewriter.

I thing the frightening thing about that is, that I can now actually read (and understand) those cryptic bits of character addresses and translate them to plain english - Look at them, you'll freak out!

When this baby is published, I'll need mental therapy!

And the Biddy Is...

In the last weeks while I've been ranting madly about the Lascivious Biddies some of you foiks out there asked me if I got a crush on them or what's up with it already.

Sorry to disappoint you, but there's no romantic ramblings going on here, just a great band that I learned about on Adam Curry's Daily Source Code and if you care to click on the article link you'll discover that the biddies have their own Podcast and aren't as distant to their fans as other famous and pseudo famous bands are. They're like, hmm… hands-on with their audience and behave more like real people than like posh-ass superstars.

But hey, there's something in for everyone and I'm not shy about admitting that, yes I do have my favorite biddy as depicted below. Ms. Amanda Monaco if you please ;)

It's all about the Guitar Players, right?

Time For The Little Black One

I'm just dabblin with a new design, well merely some UI tweaking of my official website, which is always a small adventure, you never know where this is gonna go.

The site seems to draw me in towards the next really big change as I feel the urge of working with stronger, bolder colors to emerge even more than before. I'm liking it. A little more, ok a LOT more contrast and a new material for my orange mini bar, or was it menu bar?!

For my dear Firefox users, yes there IS a background texture in the current version, you just can't see it properly because Firefox has problems reaming the gamma information stored in the PNG files (I had a look, it IS stored in the files). It works fine in Safari and all other WebKit powered browsers. - For my Windows Internet Explorer users, yes there IS a website behind all the clutter that you see there, you're seeing this because your browser is shit, basically just shit, or two shits since XHTML and CSS are misinterpreted, screwing up with PNG files makes it three shits. YOUR BROWSER STINKS! Get over it you whining weasels and stop bitching about how nobody likes your favorite Redmond company, just get informed and use something that's not 10 years old!

peace out

Licensing and Piracy

So here's me, a designer with a few self made tools to make my life easier. Now that I'm 2 days away from my first software release for one of these tools (in a swanky new outfit) I must say that I'm thinking about canceling the whole thing.

It looks like the pirates have scored another victory. The time it would take to secure my $10 application would make it a $49 application just to learn basic cryptography and write another application around it that locks it down until your name, serial number and e-mail address are entered and a new serial number is calculated that would append to the existing one to unlock it for use. I don't think that it is worth the effort and think about releasing it at all.

The other possible alternative is to load stuff that you don't see from my web server to track your name and location which isn't so bad and I'm just thinking to go for that and publish the names and personal contact information of the software pirates on static HTML documents that can easily be cached by Google and the Internet Archive of the Library of Congress, marking one as a thief till the end of all things.

Yes I think that's the way to do it and if you bought the software legally there's nothing to fear, but if you need to steal the software and are not willing to pay the remedy (all possible sales minus the actual sales from product launch to tracking of the pirate) then you will find yourself on the web, marked as a thief and reported to your local newspaper and police.

A Ban on Gum Daggers?

They certainly have something going on over in Ol'Abama! I actually have links to prove my rants here but you probably won't believe it anyway, I didn't believe it either.

Illegal use of Sexual Devices

Like what? Weapons of Mass Pleasure? So what is so bad about having someone use their battery power for some serious relaxation? Here's to the facts: Alabama recently passed a law that makes it illegal to buy what the call sexual devices, like dildos, fake vaginas, blow-up dolls, you name it. Do they have a right to cut that deep into the personal life of their citizens? I think someone needs to have read of something that starts with We, the People… and smarten up. I mean what would you like to have more of, guys that romp the rubbermaid in the closet or more guys on the streets that molest your kids?

Return of the Mixed Salad

Yep, it looks like the good old days of broom, pie and cucumber are back again, at least in Alabama if they keep it up (no pun intended).

License to Grind

Maybe they just opt for a license that allows you to buy sexual aid machinery of some kind, by prescription (or subscription) for people with disabilities that otherwise can't have sex at all. Otherwise they get a problem with the No Child Left Behind Act or maybe that was the intention, since we're talking about Alabama here.

The links of pleasure: Wired article | Usa Today | Outside the Beltway

It isn't really surprising to hear such stories from a state where the majority of the population is related a wee bit to close to get married. Till something changes… if you live at the Belt, prepare to belt it unless there's a law against "immoral use of bodily functions" -- peace out.

Media Break

I think it is best to have this entry as a sort of media break, especially with tomorrow's story in mind. I really don't want to have a topic like this back-to-back with Jef's passing.