All my flickr photos are now under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. This means they can be reused by anyone for non-commercial purposes as long as I am attributed. I think these are fairly reasonable terms; should the unlikely happen and someone wants to use a picture for commercial usage, they are free to contact me.

I’m not sure whether my writings here will be placed under the same license. Though I think their value to be insignificant, the principle is sound. Before doing this, however, I need to rewrite my site’s FTP client so it doesn’t swamp the destination server so much.

I must sign up for accounts on innumerable websites; it seems barely a day goes by without my requiring to come up with a supposedly unique password for yet another account. Of course, I don’t have unique passwords, and I can’t imagine any but the most paranoid do. It would be simply untenable to remember them. This situation is self-evidently ludicrous. It would be much simpler if there were a single location which can verify my identity on behalf of other sites.

This is a very quick recipe for using a backend process with a Rails frontend. I’ve been experimenting with Rails at work and needed a long running backend process to keep the information displayed in the frontend up to date and to do house-keeping tasks.

I wanted to share models and helper code between the back and frontends, so required the ability to use Active Record outside the typical Rails environment. It turns out this is simple to do. I couldn’t find an example on the web on how to set this up, so I decided to write one.

Six weeks ago, BBC 6music first broadcast a new show called Introducing. The idea behind the show is fantastic, as articulated by Tom Robinson:

For one show let’s bypass CDs, pluggers and record companies and play new tunes by unknown artists as heard on their own web pages. The sound quality might not be the same as compact disc, but so what.

The standard of the music on the show is amazing, beyond anything I expected. Each week, without fail, I am entranced for two hours.

The twenty-first century has arrived in the house of Mike: I have bought some digital music online. It’s quite exciting, and now I’ve taken the plunge I’m finding it all too easy to spend money on music. Instant gratification is a powerful thing.

The provocateur of this was my discovery that CD Baby now sell mp3s alongside their CDs for many of their albums. I instantly snapped up Regina Spektor’s 11:11 and an album by Jill Tracy, Diabolical Streak, an artist who I found during some aimless myspace browsing. Tracy’s music is really lovely; dark and sensuous parlour music. CD Baby is awesome: for mp3 downloads, 91% of the money goes directly to the artist.