Adam Wilcox

Adam Wilcox writes this.
He snaps, tweets and occasionally does other stuff.

Notes on media, politics and technology, by Adam Wilcox.

For King And Country

As I write this, “Don’t Ever Come Back” is the headline on the Huffington Post. It refers, (not quite correctly), to proposed legislation from two U.S. Senators following the move from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin to renounce his US citizenship. (For reference, Eduardo Saverin was the one played by Andrew Garfield in The Social Network). This move will save Saverin a reported $67 Million in potential taxes as Facebook goes public. Some Americans seem to have taken Saverin’s decision to leave as a personally offensive. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo wrote, “It’s ungrateful and it’s indecent. Saverin’s decision to decamp the U.S. suggests he’s got no idea how much America has helped him out.”

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CSS on Amazon S3

Hosting websites on Amazon S3 gives you an incredibly cheap and robust platform to work on. To save myself, (and hopefully you), from having to figure this out again, here are the solutions to two issues I’ve found.

For details on how to set up a website on S3, here is Chris O’Sullivan’s guide.

Displaying CSS on an S3 Hosted Site

When you view your uploaded website, the stylesheet probably will not display, this is because when you upload a .css file to an S3 Hosted site it will set the content type of the file to ‘binary/octet-stream’.

To fix this, log into the AWS Management Console, click on the Amazon S3 tab, then your website bucket. Find the .css file and click on properties. Under the Metadata tab set the Content-Type key to value: text/css

CSS Content-Type on S3

You have to set this every time you upload the file. But there is a fix if you use Transmit on OS X, (more in a moment).

Using Reduced Redundancy

Amazon S3 has two different storage costs: Standard, and Reduced Redundancy. So, the standard storage costs for the first 1 TB / month is $0.125 per GB standard, $0.093 per GB. (Prices were accurate May 2012). Amazon describes Reduced Redundancy as suitable for “storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than Amazon S3’s standard storage”. If you have a local backup of your website, then personally I would recommend setting your storage to Reduced Redundancy. But, the S3 web interface only lets you set Reduced Redundancy per file which if you have a couple of hundred-odd files in your S3 is not a fun task. Here is where Panic’s Transmit comes in. Don’t ask me if there is a non-OS X application that does this- I neither know nor care.

Set the following custom headers in Transmit’s preferences to use Reduced Redundancy by default and setting the Content-Type of css files correctly:

Transmit CSS custom headers

Transmit Reduced Redundancy custom headers

Thanks to Les Pozdena at Panic for helping me figure this out.

Online Child Protection Report

MPs are back on the internet porn hand-wringing. A new report (pdf) from a cross-party parliamentary inquiry found that the government and internet service providers need to do more to protect children online.

As Pаul Bаttley points out, “(the) ‘evidence’ in the context of a parliamentary inquiry actually means hearsay & speculation.”

This is the same old “block the internet for the sake of the children” argument that has been trotted out before. It is worth noting that the report was sponsored by “Premier Christian Media”, which would explain the willful disregard of evidence.

Assassin’s Creed III

Assassins’ Creed III has been announced, and will be set during the American Revolution. The box art has been released, so obviously he’s killing a Brit… bastard.

Not a Self Portrait

I am occasionally allowed out in public.

Cookies and Privacy and EU Regulation

John Gruber writes on Daring Fireball about the Wall Street Journal report that Google (and a few other ad networks) were storing third-party cookies in Safari and Mobile Safari even when the option was set only to accept cookies from visited websites, as it is by default.

Essentially Google were bypassing the browser settings, and tracking users across huge numbers of websites, not just Google’s own sites. Tut tut, slap on the wrist- Google disabled its code after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal. But not end of story. In Gruber’s piece he writes that:

No one is criticizing Google for using third-party tracking cookies in general. No one. What’s being criticized is Google devising and implementing a method to store third-party cookies in web browsers which are set not to accept third-party cookies. It didn’t happen by accident. Google wrote code specifically to circumvent this setting in Safari.

Actually the EU is criticising Google for using third-party tracking cookies. They’ve wrote a law about it.

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Oscar Nominated Films 2012

I always enjoy the ‘lets take a look at this years nominated films’ montage at the Oscars, so I had a go at making my own. A short video I made of all of the nominated films for the 84th Academy Awards. Watch full screen on Vimeo. Music by Lack of Afro