Open Data

One of our current clients, Steve Anderson, runs COA News (not our site yet, but it will be) and, among other things, is also writing a thesis on the anti-competitive practices of digital media gateway companies (AOL, Google, as well as TimeWarner, Disney-ABC-- oops, sorry, AOL is TimeWarner) being akin to the enclosure -- the taking of common spaces and making it private property -- by feudal lords and new capitalists in 18th and 19th century Britain.

It's fun having cool clients. As I wrote to Steve:

Oh my... I don't use strong enough curse words to express myself. That CSS was just so, so, so, so, so, so, so much more complicated than it should have been.

It's finally attached.

A very nice graphical tab that expands to fit the line of text, has a left-side graphic bookending one side of the tab, a background behind the text, a right-side graphic leading into a background graphic that runs the width of the block, and finally a closing right-hand graphic on the end of that.

And it's still too fragile (looks bad when compressed), but it works.

If I can get a digital music playing device that does not mess with file structure, I can have iTunes manage the music on the device.

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/09/19/how-to-keep-your-itunes-library-on-an-external-hard-drive/

If I get one that does mess with file structure, maybe I can use the wonderful open source Songbird.

Any advice?

This isn't an Agaric request – Agaric hasn't had this problem – this is a Ben request. How do I stop my e-mail from SPF bouncing?

I just want to send my e-mail and have it get where its going. I want to be able to send my pwgd.org e-mail through my melanconent.com server. I want to be able to send both plus agaricdesign.com through the former and through rcn.com's SMTP, comcast.com's SMTP, and verizon.com's SMTP.

Is this so much to ask?

Are there no true SPF wizards out there?

Putting this bit of tech knowledge on my Agaric blog in the hope of speeding other folks to open source nirvana...

Right know the best search engine hit is a blog that's just a tease ("Even found the magic dialog box that let me permanently associate NeoOffice with Office file extensions.") -- and the service it's on, called Multiply, requires the full invasion-of-privacy log-in.

Ben, can we make sure that the new video section/rss feed is in a format that can be used for a DemocracyPlayer channel. I've had a few people ask about this in the last while.

http://getdemocracy.com

Other video sources
http://blip.tv/
http://ourmedia.org/

More details on Democracy Player:

Some Drupal themes (especially our custom themes) require a column, or sidebar, to look complete. This isn't unreasonable, but because Drupal 5 seems to display page not found pages with no columns, it can be a problem at least in this circumstance.

Agaric wants a solution.

Resolution

More from the beMWeb archive.

For the beMWeb blog...

If a file or folder is giving a 403 Permission Denied error when it doesn't seem like it should be, check to see if removing the .htaccess file fixes it. That was my problem with WordPress on Reed Lindsay's site (on Ebony).

From the beMWeb file... (beMWeb was the web site making division of Melançon Enterprises before I became part of Agaric Design.)

Picking a good web site address is important, and difficult.

For instance, the URI bemweb.com is a horrible domain name. [note to self: install automatic acronym identifier]

It's short, but impossible to remember if spoken, even for people who know I'm weird (think BEnjamin Melançon WEB design).

Upgrading a module from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5, form issues (FAPI, or Form Application Programming Interface).

This gets a blog entry rather than Agaric's tech documentation page because this is still anecdotal rather than canonical.

Agaric, pretty much for the fun of it, is updating the taxonomy_switch module to Drupal 5. The problematic part of this 4.7 module seems to be replacing use of $_POST['edit'] with the now recommended $form_values.