Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, a Flash guide to one hundred and forty-two genres along with music samples. 142! So you can know your Illbient from your Artcore, your Trip-Hop from your German Techno, your Synthtron from your Nu Italo House. Labelling genres is useful (if you see genres in a liberal way, as poles of attraction instead of as tiny hermetic boxes), but this is mesmerizing and utterly exaggerated. Still, it's fun to browse and listen to all samples. ¶

Someone sporting a Blogspot address had the very unfortunate idea of copying this weblog's HTML source and pasting it into the Blogger template, probably to reverse-engineer it turning it into a functional template. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and this page ends with a copyleft sentence, so I shouldn't be pissed. However, two things really pissed me off: One, although the URL in question gave you an exact copy of a few days old IF THEN ELSE, this person did go change the author meta tag, which considering the graphic element in the left side stating 'this is a weblog by Eduardo J. Sousa...' made me think I visited a work in progress of a webpage which would only change the name of the author and then remain exactly the same. And two, all graphic elements and CSS were deep-linked to my own server, so I was actually paying for being stolen, in the form of bandwidth. Hey, the site is copyleft'd so you can - I allow you to - take things from the webpage, but it's ethical to credit the original author - and copying it entirely just changing the signature is something you can't do. Of course, I'm just guessing the intentions of a hipothetically malevolent author, the worst case scenario. My realistic guess is this person knows nothing and is trying to customize my design slowly, bit by bit, turning it into a Blogger template with his/her own content. But that still leaves deep linking and bandwidth theft. That's what happens when your page contains images (and other content) hosted elsewhere. And with that, I dealt the most radical way, which also solves theft I might not be aware of. I googled for some webserver help (do people know this by heart?) and added these lines to my Apache .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?asseptic\.org/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|css|js|swf)$ - [F]
JPEG, GIF, BMP and PNG images, Cascading Style Sheets, Javascript and Flash files will only be served if they are requested from within asseptic.org. Also, that third line will allow those files to pass if no referer is given - call it benefit of the doubt. The practical consequence is that invoking images, CSS or Flash from other websites will return a 403 - Forbidden error. Obviously that doesn't stop people from visiting your site, grabbing the content and hosting it on their own server, but I'm ok with it - I'm not billed for that. ¶