Schonhose

“I realize, you know, it is good to go out and accomplish individual accolades. I’ve done that in my career but my ultimate goal is to win a championship. Your ultimate goal should be to win the state championship. In order for y’all to do that, you can’t do it by yourself. I don’t care how good you are, if you don’t have a team, you ain’t going nowhere. Everbody has to have two feet in the circle man. I’m all about the team, you dig?”

Tracy McGrady at the Brotherhood Adidas Camp

Since my photoblog layout is based upon a very old Mootools version I decided to redesign and reprogram the layout, switching from Moo to jQuery. The initial sliding sidebar along with some other options were quickly established and proved to be ok in Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Enter the dreaded Internet Explorer, currently at version 8. After having the luxury to debug my JS using Firebug I have to say JS debugging on IE still pretty much sucks. Sure, it will give you errors, but these are so cryptic I couldn’t understand them if my life depended on them. Luckily we have Google at our disposal, so a quick search around the net showed several people having similar issues. So that is a good thing, it means we’re not alone in this.

But after reading several threads it just boiled down to one thing: trail and error. Shape and reshape the code until it finally starts working. It took me several hours, but now the code is working on all browsers, including IE 7 and IE 8. Looking back 1/5th of the time was used to created the page so it worked and the other 4/5th of the time was spend debugging IE specific issues (a fact well known as illustrated by the image below).

Today I managed to get to the root of a problem I have been trying to eliminate for some time now. It all has to do with the “use the EXIF coordinates” feature of the GoogleMap addon for Pixelpost. It seemed when using this feature the location magically shifted a few meters or even more.

When using reverse geocoding for latitude and longitude values Google Maps focuses on nearby (and sometimes not so near by) “points of interest” or the closest address it can find. This behavior can be changed by changing the following Javascript function function showLocationLatLng().

Change the code of that function to:
function showLocationLatLng() {
var latlng = new GLatLng(document.forms['view-latlng'].lat.value,document.forms['view-latlng'].lng.value);
editMap.addOverlay(new GMarker(latlng));
editMap.setCenter(latlng, 16);
}

This will force the addon to use the exact location of the image provided in the EXIF.

Seems justice has prevailed. Buma/Stemra has decided not to go through with the collection of money for embedded content from YouTube.

Good riddance!

Most of my international readers might just wonder who or what Buma/Stemra is. Well, let me clarify this before continuing on this story.

There are people who make music although you’ll never hear them make a sound: they are called music authors. Their efforts precede the successes of the artists who perform their works. The music that we enjoy is their intellectual property. Just like other authors, they have the right to remuneration when their works are played, sung or recorded. Buma/Stemra takes care of these matters.

Source

Yesterday information about the new 2010 rates for using music was posted on their site (PDF here, in Dutch only). One of the new things is that blog owners (either commercial of hobbyists like me) have to pay for using Youtube video’s containing music on their blogs.

That is right. Every blog owner (and I do suspect social networking sites like Hyves as well) has to pay an yearly amount of 130 euro to be allowed 6 youtube clips with music on their sites. First off, this raises some interesting questions.

1. What if I have posted a video in 2002, when it was perfectly legal, and this post is still readable in the archives. Do I still need to pay for this?
2. What if I don’t actually post a video but merely a link to youtube. Do I still need to pay?
3. Lets assume for a second this is only valid for videos posted after January, 1st 2010. Say I pay 130 euro for a year and upload 6 videos. What happens in 2011? Do I have to pay twice the amount so I can have 6 more in 2011 as well?
4. What about Hyves, who is responsible? The servers are in the Netherlands, making them subjected to Dutch law. But the question is are the people who own the profile page responsible for the content or is that the responsibility of Hyves?

Anyway, everyone who has youtube vids on their page with hosting in the Netherlands will probably receive a letter first. This letter will gives us a choice: either take it down or pay up. Imagine the cost involved for sending all those letters…. I’m sure this is much higher than the revenues from people who actually decide to pay.