I had been wanting to do this for a while, as the old theme’s color scheme was rather dark and grim, and the fonts were unusual for a Web site. I couldn’t just “switch the theme” as I had built up on the theme quite a lot. So I eventually decided to focus on the two stylesheets – few changes were done to the actual theme.

I had been working on this for over a week during my spare time.

I was able to completely sever the two stylesheets from the original theme, enabling me to start from scratch and avoid being forced into the GPL. As of the date of this post, the two new stylesheets are fully copyrighted.

If anyone has any problems, feel free to e-mail me at the address in the “About Us” tab.

Enjoy!

(The blackout on the X-Cop Fly Company blog started a few hours late for EST people such as myself, since the plugin I used here had a bug, and I could not upgrade to the fixed version until I woke up yesterday. Rogue Central @ coredumpcentral.org followed the full 8AM-8PM EST blackout.)

Why did I not announce this? Especially after posting material from Rogue Central @ coredumpcentral.org on the VOGONS forum just a few hours prior?

This was done deliberately. When you give the President dictatorial powers over the Internet, your business will just freeze. All financial transactions will be put on hold, including the ability to hire a lawyer. Already Obama has shut down thousands of domains using assumed nonexistent power. Many of these sites had a valid legal case, with Obama refusing to show any justification for his actions.

SOPA/PIPA is being sold in terms of how and when the MAFIAA will use it for copyright purposes. But the real issue is the amount of power given to the President over any business he feels like targeting, a further moving America away from capitalism and towards government-managed Hitler/Mussolini/FDR fascism. SOPA/PIPA enables the President to cut off any enterprise’s commercial activity (including hiring lawyers) and seize any property he wants.

SOPA/PIPA also subliminally targets Wikileaks-like organizations, since they often host copyrighted material as well as material exposing the fallibility of the governments of the world, and were subject to similar cutoffs from capitalism.

In other words, SOPA/PIPA gives dictatorial powers to one man. Obama has already seized banks, investments, and car companies, it’s only natural that he wants to seize the establishment’s biggest enemy, the Internet, and anything else he feels like seizing.

See these two articles and the podcast I appeared on regarding SOPA/PIPA’s non-piracy-related consequences:

• The Blacklist Bills Are Just Plain Silly
• Hussein Obama’s Upcoming Dictatorship: The Virtual World & The Physical World
• Podcast: SOPA, S. 1867, and the Police State

Again, remember that if SOPA/PIPA becomes law, all it takes is a single copyrighted sentence on a Web site, and any business in the country can be destroyed, anytime, anywhere, and forever.

• Diablo II is getting tough. Any possibility of addiction is not coming true.
• The shoutbox breaks the Cynthia Says compliance, so this page is no longer compliant with those standards and the button has been removed.
• The tapes are all backed up. They rock.

On June 30th, 2009, 2:21:01 AM EDT, the first post to the “Azz Pizz Institute” blog was made. This predecessor to the “X-Cop Fly Company”, this blog was named after an inside joke. It was a personal journal coming from an immature humor perspective – a major step “down” from my past political blogs, such as “Life, Liberty, and Property” (a Blogspot blog which lasted a very long time and was once cited by a minor news source). At that time, “Azz Pizz Institute” was hosted on a subdomain of a file archive (which is currently a parked domain redirecting to xcopfly.com).

On July 27th, 2009, 5:02:53 AM EDT, a post entitled “Something Big Is Coming To A School Near You…” was made.

On July 28th, 2009, 5:58:14 AM EDT, a post revealed the purchase of a domain name and work on a new site.

On August 7th, 2009, 2:04:25 AM EDT, xcopfly.com was revealed to the public – “The X-Cop Fly Company”, another inside joke, would both supplant “The Azz Pizz Institute” as well as be a pseudonym to develop software for the TI Calculator (later canceled after lack of interest, the inefficiency of the TI-BASIC programming language, and disgust over legal actions taken by Texas Instruments.)

On August 25th, 2009, 10:52:31 AM EDT, an intention to obsessively and unnecessarily have xcopfly.com comply with all sorts of Web standards was announced, and changes were made for this purpose.

On November 13th, 2009, 10:42:20 PM EST, a post was made announcing an X-Cop Fly Company-owned server for the game UrbanTerror. (It was canceled later due to lack of use.)

On January 28th, 2010, 4:10:56 AM EST, I responded to comments of the “gross” photo of a brown gnat – by painting one myself! Made with pastels and charcoal pencil, the logo exists on the top right corner of xcopfly.com to this day.

On May 18th, 2010, 5:35:54 AM EDT, I took a brave, countercultural, and definitely unusual stance on Internet copyright licensing issues. With my other option being special-interest-controlled legal traps like Creative Commons, I released most of this blog’s text content into the public domain! And I’m not talking about the Creative Commons “CC0″ and “Public Domain Dedication” waiver trickery (see link for important updated information on this)

On May 26th, 2010, 8:11:52 PM EDT, a separate stylesheet was created for xcopfly.com for compatibility with mobile devices, TVs, and older browsers.

Thank you all for reading xcopfly.com!

British film archivists yesterday have released footage which apparently shows the world’s first mobile phone being used – in 1922.

They…attach a wire from the device onto a fire hydrant before erecting an umbrella which has been converted into an aerial.

Read the article and watch the black-and-white silent video.

In other news, last week I set up my site to support, with full graphics, CSSv1-only browsers, handheld devices, and TVs, using an alternate stylesheet. The only difference is that the alternate stylesheet lacks the pretty shading in the menu bar. (I was not about to give that up, so I created an alternate stylesheet.)

The alternate stylesheet is the default for handheld devices and TVs. If you’re on a computer and want to take a peek, or have a very old browser and want the site to work better, from selecting “Mobile/TV/Old Browser” in your page styles menu (Firefox has it under View->Page Style and IE has View->Style)

There are two “Valid CSS!” buttons on the side now – one for each stylesheet, both of which validate to the standards labeled.

Slackware 13.1 doesn’t play nice with Audacious or my wireless card. I’ll be back…

I have been putting off deciding this – I will not use the popular Creative Commons licenses because later versions include a sneak GPL-style provision allowing relicensing under “compatible licenses” approved by Creative Commons (the organization) as “in the spirit” of existing Creative Commons licenses. The hard-to-find page of “compatible licenses” states that no additional licenses have been approved yet. But the GPLv2, created in 1991, featured an automatic upgrade to later versions, unless one was smart enough to take it out of the template. Many thought this was not a problem, as the GPLv2 came out in 1991, and just used the standard template. Version 3 of the GPL came out in 2006, and was very favorable to special interests.

In keeping with my attitudes towards modern copyright law, privacy rights, freedom of speech and censorship, I have decided to (mostly) stop being hypocritical and release portions of xcopfly.com into the public domain, with other portions subject to copyright.

UPDATE: Apparently Creative Commons’ “CC0 1.0 Universal” allows waiving additional rights (and responsibilities) in addition to copyright, which is what I had intended, and there are no special backdoors specific to Creative Commons Inc.’s management decisions (at least if the version number is stated). As of October 16, 2010, the use of “public domain” in the terms below has been changed to reflect this.

Here are the details:

1. All publicly-accessible text content originating from xcopfly.com (with the exceptions listed below) is dedicated to the public domain according to the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
2. Unless explicitly stated, this excludes software, audio, video, images, graphics, comments, ZIP files and their contents, the shoutbox and its contents, all material found on the Rogue Central @ coredumpcentral.org site, and any content copyrighted by others.
3. Certain non-text content originating from xcopfly.com may, but only if explicitly stated, be in the public domain or subject to CC0.
4. Any thumbnail images, which have been created for images which the X-Cop Fly has explicitly stated are dedicated to the public domain according to the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, are also dedicated to the public domain according to the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. This does not apply to copyrighted images.
5. Certain content not originating from xcopfly.com may already be in the public domain or subject to CC0.
6. All additional waivers found in the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication apply to material released into the public domain by the X-Cop Fly Company prior to October 16, 2010. If waiving the copyright to any of this material was not possible in your jurisdiction at the time, the whole of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication applies to such material.
7. The statements given in this list of inclusions and exclusions also apply to xcopfly.com Web feeds and their contents, and no additional restrictions apply to syndication or other use of these feeds.
8. This list of inclusions and exclusions, including the portion below under the heading “HISTORY”, is copyrighted by the X-Cop Fly Company. The X-Cop Fly Company grants you the right to reproduce this list in verbatim form only. According to the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, reproduction of this list is not a requirement for any use of material dedicated to the public domain.

HISTORY:

11/23/2011: Added note regarding Web feeds as #7, shifting pre-existing #7 to #8.

9/19/2011: Added note regarding thumbnail images as #4, shifting pre-existing #4, #5, and #6 down to #5, #6, and #7. For clarity, in #2, “all contents found on the Rogue…” changed to “all material found on the Rogue…”

9/18/2011: Added the Rogue Central @ coredumpcentral.org site to the list of exclusions.

8/9/2011: To avoid confusion, “downloadable content” in #2 was renamed to “ZIP files and their contents”. To make #2 easier to read, this phrase’s position moved in the list from before “software” to before “the shoutbox and its contents”.

7/2/2011: To avoid confusion, removed “now” from #5.

12/12/2010: Replaced “CC0 1.0″ with “CC0 1.0 Universal” for clarity. No other edition of “CC0 1.0″ exists as of this date, and all links on this Web site referring to “CC0 1.0″ instead of “CC0 1.0 Universal” went to the same “CC0 1.0 Universal” page.

11/14/2010: #5 Grammar fix: “any or all of” changed to “any of”. #6 clarified to state that this “HISTORY” section is part of the copyrighted list and asserts the CC0 1.0 status of the work with regard to reproducing the list.

10/16/2010: CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication replaces “in the public domain” in #1. “or subject to CC0″ added to #3 and #4. #5 moved down to #6, and new #5 deals with material which had been previously released into the public domain prior to the X-Cop Fly Company utilizing CC0 1.0.

(the date the shoutbox was added, sometime after 7/19/2010) Added “the shoutbox and its contents” to the list of exclusions.

(unknown date after 5/18/2010) Added “software” to the list of exclusions. All software on the site had been “downloadable content”, but clarity was needed, for example, with Web-based games, if any would be developed and/or hosted in the future.

I didn’t look at any of the links above, or click on any tags or, or explore the page at all – I just asked her to scroll down. Embedded videos were missing, as were all pictures (excluding the Web buttons on the side). The design of the page, including the X-Cop Fly logo, were also missing giving a simple “1996″ blue-on-white page. Written portions, however, were visible, though we didn’t click on any links.

After weeks of being up at night listening to my favorite night talk radio host, I finally got it done. It is a great program, with three character classes, each with their own 6 levels of unique weapons and armor, 13 enemy types plus 5 bosses at the end of the game. All in less than 6K of calculator RAM.

Sounds good? Well, it turns out there was a lot more to that “ERR: MEMORY” I was getting on those games.

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” – Edsger W. Dijkstra, 1975

TI calculators include assembly programming and (in my case) TI-BASIC. If you’re familiar with BASIC, you know how completely unlike modern professional programming languages (like C/C++, C#, Java, and even modern MS Visual Basic) it is. Instead of storing data in an object or passing parameters to a function, BASIC is procedural – the code is read in the order of a page, from top to bottom. This result in you hopping all over the place with GOTO commands. Thus it was very difficult to program.

But there’s much more.

TI-BASIC has a major fault in it – unlike other BASIC languages, GOTO commands leave behind pointers with each step – causing memory leaks! It wasn’t about squeezing variables in on my calculator, it’s about a poorly designed programming language leaving allocated memory open – with no means of deallocation as with modern programming languages.

The only solution would be to redesign the whole thing. Having put off writing this program for probably almost a year, this is not likely to be done for a very long time.

All the wasted nights. I could have been screwing around but instead put all my effort into a pointless waste of time. So sad. And the TI Calculator Community is in desperate need of a program like this. We have great, simple hacking-related ones, but not working, complicated medieval ones.

Also removed “Pages” from the sidebar, it’s unnecessary when the same thing is at the top.