Brian's Blog

Today I signed the papers to my new apartment in Malmö, Sweden.

The new 67m² apartment is located in the area called “Kroksbäck” which is a decent area. I’ll be taking over the apartment 1st. of September 2006.

I’ve just finished reading an article from APG (AntiPiratGruppen aka. The Anti Piracy Group) where they write (roughly translated):

The Danish Anti Piracy Group, who handles the music- and filmindustry interests in matters regarding illegal copying of copyrighted material, have today applied for an injunction against the ISP Tele2. This is done as part of APG’s endeavour stop the illegal, russian website AllofMP3’s activities in Denmark.

They’re surely growing balls, or are they?

Looking at the statistics for 2005 it shows that there are 31 ISP’s offering xDSL services in Denmark. The statistics also show that the biggest by far is TDC with a whooping 72% of all xDSL subscribers in Denmark, 2nd. comes Cybercity with 13%, 3rd. is Tele2 with 10% and then the last 5% is spread over the remaining 28 ISP’s offering xDSL services.

I would think that if APG really wanted AllofMP3 blocked and was so sure that it would happen as they seem to think, they would have gone after TDC right away, this would certainly block the biggest amound of connections. But I guess APG is just grasping for straws as always.

Addition:

Tele2 have made a response to APG’s injunction:

It’s impossible to close the access to the russian site AllofMP3.com, states Tele2, after The Anti Piracy Group applied for an injuction against the site. “The only way to do this is to close all access to the Internet”, states Tele2.

From my basic knowledge on how the TCP/IP protocol works, the following methods would be how to block a specifik site, and the drawbacks of those methods.

• Using packet inspection/transparent proxy.
  This method is a simple way to check all trafic from the users, checking if it’s directed toward AllofMP3.com.
  The drawbacks to this are
  • Ressources.
    Running a transparent proxy takes a great deal of CPU and Memory, which in turn drains more power, which in turn cost more money. I somehow doubt APG are willing to pay for the extra expenses they’re forcing on the ISP’s.
  • Encryption.
    It’s really easy to set up an encrypted tunnel, where the packet contents can’t be read. That way anyone can get around this method, and the only way to avoid it is, as Tele2 stated, to close all access to the Internet.
• Blocking IP/IP-ranges.
  Changing the A record on the DNS for AllofMP3 is easy and takes a very short amount of time. Once again the only certain way is to block, if not all the Internet, then all IP’s assigned to Russia.

I wonder when APG stops this nonsense.

What

The new site uses WordPress as backend with my own theme (mostly inspired by PHP.net design) and some added/modified features.

Why

Using a boxed blogging system ofcourse has both advantages and disadvantages, although the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

The obvious advantages ofcourse are

• Complete and tested administration interface
• Customizability
• Ability for extending it with plugins
• Comments
• And much more…

Some of the disadvantages I see in such a system are

• Custumizability
• Features

Yes, I listed customizability as both an advantage and a disadvantage; because the system is highly customizable within it’s own framework, but sometimes you have special requirements for some parts of your site that is outside the framework. To make it work still I just had to make some compromises, but I also had to add or modify some of the features, which at the time of this posting is still work in progress.

Features

One of the features I’ve added is the gallery. I wanted it to work in the same (dynamic) way as on my last site while still seeming integrated into :wp:. I might be posting the source for that at a later time.

The old Scrapbox have had a namechange and is now known as The Page Formerly Known As Scrapbox. Okay, I figured that name would be a bit tiresome to say or write, so decided on just calling it Codebin.

I initially attempted to use the a combination of standard blog entries assigned to specifik code categories along with the Simple Syntax Highlighter plugin, however after having add all my code manually, I found that the only way I could filter the code category from all the other posts on the front page, was to loop through all the posts and simply skip any post which was in a specific category. Now this was all fine and dandy in theory, however, a minor issue I found with this was, the total number of posts still included the skipped posts, which in turn made :wp: add a lot of blank pages *sigh*.
The codebin is now just a reworked version of the old Scrapbox, has the same features, only thing it’s missing at this moment is a link to download the source code with. Fear not though, it will be added As Soon As Possible

Final words

This ended up being a lot more babble from me than originally intended, guess I just felt like writing a lot of nonsense
There’s still a lot of work to be done on this “new” site, but I’m confident that I’ll have it all done before the end of this decade. Just need to implement my Books database (still have some minor SQL queries I need to have finetuned).
Make some minor code/design changes here and there and ofcoure actually put something on the various pages, such as the Wishlist and About everything in due time