The Technical Exorcist

Most of the work on been doing on EtherealLand.com has been related to getting advertisements in place with Google Adsense. Google Adsense provides us with content sensitive advertising in an unobtrusive manner. It is my goal to eventually have the site pay for it’s own hosting. As easy as Google makes it to put ad’s up, it has still taken a fair amount of work on my part, in part because I am working with people whose goals are artistic in nature rather than economic. Another problem I ran into was Google limitations on ad placement. Google doesn’t want people to create Ad-Farm sites with their product, so they limit you to three text ad’s per page. I wanted to put a text ad at the bottom of each post on the Troll Cave, but I wanted to have more than three posts on the main page. In the end, I decided to have one Google ad per day, rather than per post. To my disappointment, WordPress doesn’t have any built-in function to make this easy, and I had to write one of my own.

If you’d like to try out targeted advertising, you should

Other than that, I helped Chickenman get set up, put up the Good Doggy’s latest version of the site map, and made more optimization changes.

Most of you have probably already read the letter about DRM Steve Jobs put on the Apple site, but if you haven’t, you should check it out. He doesn’t say anything that isn’t old news to most of us, but it’s nice to have him finally admit that DRM doesn’t do anyone any good. There are a few things I’d like to point out though.

Rather than trying to make it solely the job of consumers to convince the music publishers to sell DRM-free music, pressure still needs to come from ITunes and the other pay-for-download companies. As should be evident from Mr. Job’s own essay, it’s not just our problem. Music download services are wasting a lot of valuable resources on DRM, and still they are left with the threat of having all the music pulled out from under them if they can’t make their flimsy, purposeless, DRM systems stand up to a couple of hackers with a weekend to blow.

Secondly, I’d like to point out that Mr. Job’s is incorrect when he says that “No DRM system was ever developed for the CD”. Sony, in their typical incompetence, did make a DRM system for CD’s. The end result was basically a root-kit—a security vulnerability that tended to result in damage to the system if you tried to remove it. Sony got burned for that one, but still not as badly as consumers were.

I came across an article about “random” numbers recently that I found quite interesting. It found that when people are asked to pick a random number between 1 and 20, they favor prime numbers, particularly the number 17. Read the article here, and the follow-up article here/

Tatterdemalion asked me for help with her site the other day. The titles on some of her posts were so long the didn’t fit on the sidebar, and it was messing everything up. Since she didn’t want to change the width of her sidebar, we needed a way to truncate really long post titles when they were listed on the sidebar. I didn’t feel like going through the headache of figuring out the PHP myself, so I searched the web for a WordPress plugin that would do the job. I managed to find one that works well called ODEN latest posts. Simple installation, and works well.

I thought it was pretty funny that the President of Romania had the gall to tell Bill Gates he was glad his country steals Windows. Long live free software! Or whatever. . .

Bill had nothing to say. Maybe he’ll buy Romania as a punishment.