Burrowowl

I’m not a huge fan of US Copyright law as it currently stands (IMHO things should eventually be in the Public Domain after the creator of a work has a reasonable amount of time to make some money). That being said, I’m not a big fan of bandwidth borrowing. This appears to have been happening last month with a couple of images in my Final Fantasy Tactics Gallery.

I’m sure it was done without any malice, simply popping in a <img src="http://www.sonic.net/jdf/images/fftm/sorceror.jpg" alt="" /> tag into a perfectly harmless web log, but it caught my attention when going through my referrer stats anyway.

So I’ve re-implemented my passive-aggressive “image-theft” prevention mechanism. For the curious, it involves inserting the following humble code into my .htaccess file.

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "sonic\.net/" local_ref=1
        <FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpg)">
            Order Allow,Deny
            Allow from env=local_ref
        </FilesMatch>

Gracias to apache-server.com and the Apache Project for the express instructions and the underlying mechanism for this trick, respectively.

The reason I would put such a rule in place is not out of petty spite, but rather due to the bandwidth usage policies of my web server. I, you see, am responsible for the hundreds of folks that access anything I own on this web server, and have to pay for any excessive use out of my own pocket. Please feel free to use images in my galleries or elsewhere on this site, I don’t mind at all. Just kindly download your own copy (from this site if you like) and then put it into your own webspace.

Another silly cartoon. This time we’ve got Kiddy Grade, whose premise is somewhat similar to that of the Dirty Pair: two girls working for some galactic oversight group enforcing the rule of law, justice, and the good of society. Unlike the Dirty Pair, the ladies from Kiddy Grade have supernatural powers (the little one is a super-hacker and the older one has all manner of superior combat abilities). They are also minors. And competant.

Eclair is the tough-girl of the two, and as the older of two minors is the subject of 90% of the show’s fan service. She’s armed with a lipstick-based weapon that produces some kind of crazy ribbon, which she is able to use to great effect.

Lumiere is the younger, elegant teammate. She has a great rapport with their spaceship and can control electronic devices though… telepathy or something.

More images from this show can be found at the PBCC Online Gallery if you care to peek. There is some mild fanservice going on in this one, but nothing on the order of Agent Aika, or even Hand Maid May. The plotline and dialogue are a bit trite, but the animation is quite nice. It’s good in much the same way a James Bond movie is entertaining: nothing to challenge you with, and you’ve seen it all before elsewhere, but still nicely executed.

It looks like my workstation, Deathfish, and my home computer Meifumado can’t agree on the background of this month’s background image at all. Meifumado shows it as a straightforward #99948E whereas Deathfish shows it as a #9c928c instead. For now I’ll trust Meifumado’s cleaner install, but the fact that the color is off on mutliple browsers (Netscape 7.0 and IE 6.0 on both) makes be wonder if something’s up with my OS.

Oh heavens.

My buddy Chunkbot, aka Obyn the cleric in my D&D game, has been contemplating a Cyberpunk game for a while. It has run through a number of conceptual phases, ranging from a Cowboy Bebopish space opera using modified deep space rules from R. Talsorian’s orbital suplements to Delta Green-styled horrific near-future sleuthing.

He has called upon his fellow D&D players to start generating characters now, with the stated premise being a near-future (2009AD) sans-cyber Cyberpunk campaign revolving around a group of UC Davis students working their way through college pulling night shifts with a future-noir Pinkerton Security outfit. We expect Pinkerton to have returned to its union-busting roots in a post-energy-crisis near future.

Our RPG group, which has met weekly for about five years now with a rather low churn-rate of players, has developed an internal reputation for irrationally making situations more violent than necessary. Our first Cyberpunk game together resulted in a rather ugly massacre at a Starbucks coffee joint. Chunkbot has made ominous references to making sure that such behavior is immediately and unmistakably discouraged. I project a 50% casualty rate amongst PCs during the first two sessions of play.

From sonic.help.cgi:

> I am requesting feedback from any and all who have installed the weblog
> , movabletype, at sonic using the option mysql.

> My initial installation, configuration and intitialization of the
> application into my sonic mysql database went without a hitch.

> However, the application hiccups frequently, but inconsidently, when
> attempting to update entries.  The error message indicated that the app
> can not connect to the mysqld host at timber.sonic.net.  

This is due to the style of DBI specification in MT.  The fix:

--- lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBI/mysql.pm~   Tue Sep  3 23:24:42 2002
+++ lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBI/mysql.pm    Wed Sep  4 12:50:00 2002
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@
     my $driver = shift;
     $driver->SUPER::init(@_);
     my $cfg = $driver->cfg;
-    my $dsn = 'dbi:mysql:database=' . $cfg->Database;
+    my $dsn = 'dbi:mysql:' . $cfg->Database;
     $dsn .= ';hostname=' . $cfg->DBHost if $cfg->DBHost;
     $driver->{dbh} = DBI->connect($dsn, $cfg->DBUser, $cfg->DBPassword,
         { RaiseError => 0, PrintError => 0 })

This will ensure MT works across all DBI's.

 -Scott