Quixotic Evil

Open-source CMS Drupal has a PHP mode: in addition to HTML (with or without restrictions on available tags) suitably permissioned users can put PHP in the box, enter it into the database and have it executed (eval()'d, in particular).
At first glance, this is really useful. After some more thought, although you might be tempted to throw in the odd 'echo date();', running worthwhile scripts within the environment of your CMS is going to have unnecessary overhead, even assuming you can get the two to coexist peacefully.

As regular readers may know, I'm something of a glutton for punishment, so I tried it anyway.

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Normally I have little complaint against Dell. There are plenty of issues, of course, but not enough to stop me using them or recommending them (for business use at least). But there's one thing about their annoying flyers and things that really bugs me.

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It went something like this:

1. My boss
2. Country life
3. Being prepared to kill things
4. Killing everything that moves...
5. Tyrannosaurus Rexes with guns!
6. Designing weapons suitable for little tyrannosaur forelimbs
7. Cybernetic T. Rexes!

It then continued into such important fields as how you would paradrop your cyberwarrior dinosaurs with in-built lasers into enemy territory, and so on. For some reason there was a strong thread about getting T. Rexes to push shopping trolleys, because their little hands are ideal for holding a horizontal bar: it was decided that rather than laser weaponry the cyberdinos could be given barcode readers and sent around to fill the orders for home deliveries. Due thought was put toward the challenge of breeding pygmy tyrannosaurs in case the trolleys were too small for full-size ones.

What is the plural of Rex, anyway?

Mike is raising money for Comic Relief by publishing a book of funny blog posts submitted by UK bloggers. See Troubled Diva for details. The deadline for submissions is now 6pm on Tuesday the 13th of Marth (tomorrow), but that changed once already as far as I can tell so if you want to submit something best get over there ASAP.

And if you don't have anything to submit, you could help by bringing more attention to it, or by buying the book when it appears.

Anyone know anything about intellectual property law (in the UK) as it applies to software? I may be about to embark on a major new project at work, for which I'll need a few parts of my contract clarified or revised (I'm not really employed as a developer at the moment; I just do what's needed to make my systems management tolerable).

As far as I can tell, a piece of software has particular copyright, which by most contracts would remain with the employer. What I don't get is that often there will be an optimal solution to a given problem, so that in some sense all other decent solutions should be the same. How different would subsequent programs/scripts have to be in order to avoid being found derivative (and additionally, to avoid appearing so)?

I may also be confusing copyrights with patents. I realise they are different but I'm not sure I understand how...

Anyone recommend any places to look this stuff up? I realise that the ultimate advice has to be to seek legal counsel, but I'm not quite there yet.

Lately I only seem to have something that seems worth posting when it's a huge rant (about people overtaking on the inside, or similar) that somehow doesn't seem worth mentioning once I get back to my computer. Sooner or later I might have something interesting to say, but in the interim I'd like to direct you again to Cryptomail, because someone must be able to find something to say about it.