corz.org faq

All the text files on corz.org are formatted in Unicode, specifically UTF-8 (no BOM). You'll need a real text editor if you want to appreciate the beauty of my code structures. *grin*

On the Mac, BBEdit is still excellent, and SubEthaEdit is well worth a look, too. On Windows, I recommend EditPlus; which now has code-folding, and I use it every day. It's quite excellent. TextPad, which froze a long time ago, but still offers the best file comparison tool around (though that's a cinch with Editplus, too), UltraEdit; even just for its ability to perform search & replace inside multiple files, PSPad; a nice editor on its way to becoming a great editor, EM Editor; which gives you a free license if you develop free software, and has beautiful cross-platform handling, and Crimson Editor, all capable editors, and unicode savvy into the bargain.

Kate and Kwrite (parts of the KDE Desktop) along with most other Linux text editors will do a grand job, and JEdit looks good on pretty much every platform.

You need an editor you feel comfortable with, something that has all the features you need plus decent syntax highlighting. New ones pop up all the time.


Using Unicode is smart for so many reasons, and all the world's major web browsers are unicode-savvy, too, so you might want to consider putting this line...

php_value default_charset utf-8

into your php-serving Apache config file (.htaccess is fine) and just be done with it! phpsuexec users, or anyone that has a real php.ini to deal with, can instead insert..

default_charset = utf-8

Ahh.. That's Arabic Start Of Rub El Hizb! Everybody knows that!

Unless your computer isn't equipped to deal with complex script, left-to-right languages and what-not, in which case you see a wee rectangle. What can I say? Get equipped!

I use it force my text editors to interpret the document as utf-8. Because, at least in the lower regions, utf-8 looks exactly like ASCII text, and with no BOM, and without some non-ASCII character in the document, the text editor would put "UNIX", as opposed to "UNIX/U8" in its status bar, and that just annoys! I want UTF-8 DAMMIT! EVERYWHERE!

If all you see is a wee rectangle, then your computer sadly lacks the ability to handle complex scripts, or else you didn't install that. For your information, it's an eight-sided star composed of two perfect squares, with a circle inside the octogon. ;o)

Well, aside from the often excellent site comments, it's all me me me! Back-end code, page design, text, buttons, photos, articles, the content; art, tech, software, scripts, music, all the rest; Me. Call it a Labour of Love.

I am Cornelius Conn, folks call me Cor. I live and work in Aberdeen, Scotland with my partner Kate and now a son, Samuel. These days I'm as often found writing code as much as songs and poems, such is life; there's so much to be done in the world.

I like to work. Most of my work, so far, has been given away for free, from my earlier work on browsers and the web code that now finds itself replicated all over the web, to those desktop accesories and programs that make your life so much easier. And of course there are my world-class articles so many of you come to digest, for free. Don't forget the millions of man-hours I saved the British public during the BT Broadband rollout hacking the voyager 205. And of course, I've always given the poems, images and songs away for free, no matter how good they are!

But times change, so I've added "shirtware" into my Windows apps - now you can pay me something for my many efforts. Feel free to do just that!

In a word, NO. If you want to link to corz.org, you go ahead, but please don't consider this an incentive for me to link back to you. I only link to sites that are relevant to my content, and that I personally enjoy and recommend. That's the way is it. No amount of promised fame/money/persuasion will get you a link from corz.org. Sorry.

I got my PR the old-fashioned way, by having great content that folk want to link to all by themselves. I suggest you do the same.

There are a number of reasons why this could have happened. The most likely, is that you asked a question that was already clearly explained in the article you are assumed to have read before posting a comment underneath. Or perhaps the question has already been asked by someone else, and answered. Or the question was so poorly written as to be indecipherable, in which case you are invited to try again, but first, please read this.

Bottom line: unless your question, and its subsequent answer adds something  to the site, it will probably be deleted. Deal with it.

I don't use anti-virus, so I can't comment on which is least likely to throw up false positives. As to whether or not to trust the integrity of my downloads, that's up to you. After all, you probably don't actually know me.

Feel free to rake around corz.org, read my blogs or whatever, maybe Google for some forum posts where my downloads are recommended, until you feel secure.

Most people,when faced with this situation will, I hope, immediately mail the anti-virus manufacturer along the lines of "Your brain-dead program brought up a false-positive for one of Cor's apps. No way that's right!". Thank you! That's way more efffective than mailing me about it!

Also, I publish MD5 and SHA1 hashes for most of my downloads - feel free to check those.

Firstly, I take no responsibility for this. If your sense of sight makes is difficult to access corz.org, that is something you will need to compensate for at your end. I have similar issues myself, with other sites. White on black or near-black nearly knocks me out, and is common in certain circles.

I take control of this issue by first using a decent browser, and by that I mean Firefox. Firefox is Open Source, and can take plugins (meaning your solution requires only: any human with intent + coding skills). One of the plugins I consider essential, is called "ReadEasily", and is, sadly, fiendishly difficult to obtain online. It removes all the styles from a page, so you can see it in its raw HTML. All the pages at corz.org are coded in standards-compliant XHTML 1.0 strict, so look quite excellent when viewed in raw format, even as raw source.

You can achieve a similar effect with a few other Firefox plugins, including the Web developer plugin, which comes as standard with the Firefox install. Most of these plugins can also be configured to run from HotKeys, so you can easily and instantly switch between a styled and non-styled state (and because it's open source, another plugin will almost certainly be available to enable Hotkeys for those which don't.).

Opera, also free, has many "User Modes" available, which render a page in a variety of useful and/or fun ways. Because the pages at corz.org are coded in standards-compliant strict blah-blah, they will look beautiful in whatever mode you might choose to view them in.

What I'm saying is, this is MY site, and it looks the way it looks because that is how I want it to look. All the time you took complaining to *ME* about it could have been better spent installing the better browser and/or plugins required to compensate for your personal acessibilty issues. Did you plan on mailing the other twenty seven billion web sites out there, too? As the yanks say, "Good luck with that!".

In other words, this is YOUR issue, so deal with it, and by that I mean, computer configuration, and by that I mean your own personal computer. BANG! No more issue.

As for corz.org styles, see here.

I think of the org as my internet home, the hub of my online presence. A place to share my life and work, output. Folk can drop in and chat, or leave a comment, email, ask for help, whatever. I do what I can. It is my strong belief that this world is filled with real human beings with amazing gifts, people like me. And one of the reasons we magicked the internet into existence was so that we could share our unique gifts with the world, if only we knew how. So I learned how.

I create tools, always have. A song can be a tool, a poem, too, if it functions; does its job well. In learning all this web-craft I created a whole bag of new tools; tools for my site, and for my life. I give these away for free, some have been quite popular. These web site spare parts™ are programs, code that you can pick up and drop into your site, crafted for ease of use and customization; I often labour over the comments and notes much longer than the code itself, which your emails tell me is a good thing; though I do it for me, mainly; if I'm off to the hills for a year, these comments are a crash-course in corz-style php.

So I have this functioning site, composed of many parts with many more to come, modules that other creative folk can make their own, to get their shit out there; it's uniquely "Me", infinitely expandable, always in motion, constantly improving, representing. Real artists don't use "templates", they want to craft something unique for their guests. The web site spare parts take a lot of the grunt work out of this, enabling real people to create and maintain interactive web content, breathe life into your site, make your dreams come true, set up your 24/7 internet shop, gallery, publish your opus, whatever you like. Anything is possible now, with the right tools.

There has to be millions of people out there, in the same state I was; knowing exactly what they want to do, how they want things to be, but just don't know how. If painting or music is your bag, any creative, or "artistic" field; most probably you find it maddeningly difficult to get your right-brain to comply with all those logic structures and variable scopes and AARGGHHHHHH! But it doesn't have to be that way. You can have a site that does all the things you want, as well as being a unique representation of your life and work, of you. And make a living, too.

I'm often told I have a "gift for technical writing", so I create instructions for things I'm knowledgeable about, tutorials. I make difficult concepts easy to understand, so they say; well, at the time of writing, a Google for .htaccess tricks gets you me, and sites pointing links at me filling most of the top ten spots!; so clearly I have a certain knack for this. I believe that with the right approach, almost anyone could get useful with php, unleashing their imagination. So I'll be building on the .htaccess page affect with a series of down-to-earth, altogether different approaches to wonders of web-side coding, and some of its possibilities, I've started this, teach a man to fish..

Because I believe that with the right tools, and a good approach, creative humans can have their own piece of virtual real-estate, a place to share their work, and make enough money to keep on doing that. It's like this..

You see, I can't find the lamp I need. I want it! I've looked and looked, I've experimented with designing it (the nearest I've gotten is paper cones) but something's still not right; I just can't nail it! But I know that somewhere out there in the six-billionness of the world is a guy who makes the exact lamp I seek. Even a generation ago he might of died with a house full of lamps - his neighbours thinking him insane - the lamps thrown in a big and burned. Criminal. Everyone has something to share with the world, something they could sell. What's yours?

The idea is that the org eventually "pays for itself". A couple of my spare parts I plan to charge for. I already charge for commercial use of corzoogle; my cool realtime site search engine; but mostly companies just rip it off, and can't even be trusted to even offer up the meagre lifetime license fee, to me, the struggling artist, you know, some rich and powerful companies, too (*cough*Satchi*cough*). *sigh* But there are enough honest folk in the world, I think, folk that would buy a CD or a T-Shirt or some other thing. Are you one of them?

I'm no debt collector, preferring to concentrate my efforts on the honest people of the world, leave the other sorts be. Non-profit organisations and individuals can use corzoogle for free, by the way, and many do; universities and schools seems to like it, clubs and societies and more, and that does give me a warm fuzzy glow. Not that that would be much consolation if I ended up living on the street!

So I'm looking for around a thousand people a year willing to give me ten bucks to devote myself entirely to my work, and getting it out there for all. Or two thousand that will give me five! Think about it; this place is amazing value for money. All the words, images and music, the tutorials and instructions, the code, the tools and insights, and much much more. Or ten thousand that will give me a quid! An email saying "Your blog changed my life!" is nice, but even a fiver would really change MINE! Consider it.

I pay my staff the most meagre allowance, if they get anything at all! They get few treats, and a frugal life, though mainly by choice. But I want to do a more, both online and in my local community; a deprived place; I dream of remodeling my flat (apartment), running computer training classes, yogurt and bean-sprout workshops, super-food seminars, meditation pit-stops and other long-term productive stuff, rather than just ad-hoc efforts. Most of the kids around here don't even have a computer at home, for starters. What you doing with your old one? And in the larger world, wherever I can be of real use.

I desire to upgrade the equipment here, get some basic, clean audio recording facilities, work on some of the thousands of songs and sketches I have kicking around the place, because they deserve it, people tell me. All in time, of course, though just how much time, can be partly up to you, and people like you; real, honest human beings. I'm betting that's there's a few left, you see. What about a key-fob?

For instance; it's been suggested that my work on the Voyager routers alone (a section I have more than once considered simply nuking), has saved the British working public over a Million man-hours so far (a conservative estimate). Question is, exactly where do I pick up the cheque for that? A thing saved is the same as a thing earned, isn't it? Money. It's going around, thanks.

The router section here represents hundreds  of hours work, refining and testing the information, answering all those questions (almost two and a half thousand comments on the main voyager page at the time of writing) and tuning the pages to make them even easier to use, creating resources to save even more of your time, at the cost of only mine. Well, someone had to do it! BT didn't have a clue, but they are learning too, even took the Ethernet advice on-board. Good Work Guys! A wee link on that new leaflet would have be nice though, a bit of credit where it's due, eh. Och well, you;re in the bag with Saatchi; folk who owe me. haha!

The bottom line is, if all the folk who had been "bashing their head against a wall for weeks", and now find that "everything works great! Thanks!" had donated even ten pence (10p), I could work for a whole year without having to waste my time taking daft jobs that any fool could do, signing-on the brew and suffering the DSS's debilitating fortnightly interrogations, or any other crap. I offer my work here in exchange for the freedom to continue my work uninterrupted, no more. Most people just don't consider that, or don't know. I'm asking you to consider it. Now you know. If you even got this far.

Heh, well, back in the middle of the Nineties, I had a company, and I thought it might be cute to have a wee slogan under the cute company name. This was long before this practice became the norm, by the way.

Simple Solutions in a Complicated World

But I had the domain name swiped from me (my own fault for searching before purchasing - NEVER do that!) and, losing the option to take the whole thing online (my original plan), I abandoned the company name itself. I keep the business stationary as mementos, but don't really bandy the slogan about much, these days, preferring to let my smiley do the talking.

I do still live and work by it, though.

Ahh! My most frequently asked question!

In the "real" world, and by that I mean the flesh-and-blood existence where you visit shops and Post Offices and such, I don't answer this one directly. Even from the earliest age, most folk are ageists. I usually reply..

I'm infinite!

Been here as long as time, feels like. And some people leave it at that. Some press on. "Hahah! I mean, how old are you, in this life?" They must have thought I meant reincarnation, fair enough, "You mean this body?", I ask. Sure.

I'm seven years old!

They look puzzled, so I add "mostly. The skin barely lasts weeks, dust! You know they say that most of the weight of an old pillow is dead skin cells. Yum! New stomach lining every eight weeks or so, everything is constantly replaced, don't you know; that's all that food you eat! Which part were you interested in?"

This filters out even more fools, but some press on. It's like those puzzles in children's puzzle books, the real corkers where you stare blindly at the words again and again and still can't get it. But when you read the solution it was so obvious you pluck your eyes out with a spoon and blend them with carpet fluff. Most folk just don't know how to ask the right questions. This phase can last a while. Fun, though.

"The oldest bit of you, how old is it, apart from the soul, I mean." Okay, that's a good question, and I found it almost impossible to skirt. "The retina", I replied" They haven't had an upgrade since incept date, circa 1970. So at the time of writing, "I", whateverthefuckthatmeans, is Fourty Three earth years. Depending on when I last shaved, and how well I've been living lately, I can look anywhere between Twenty Eight and Fifty Three . Ask me again in Fifty years.

But understand, it's just numbers. I know Six year old's that can match me in logic and insight, common sense and wisdom, and pensioners that really should have been shot in the war. Kids! If you believe in reincarnation (and really, how else does one approach such a thing) then you'll figure these old goats could have been on the next life by now, maybe learning how to take responsiblity at last, control their desires, focus their mind, meditate, in short; grow the fuck up.

How old are you?
Of course, it's a state of mind.

;o) Cor