afongen

SSSCA gets a hearing Oct. 25. This is a good, reasonably comprehensive and clear article covering the effects of the proposed Security Systems Standards and Certification bill. It is written from an ardently pro-open source position. I don’t think you have to be an open source fanatic to see the dangers this bill poses, though.

With Mozilla’s support for the link element, you might be wondering how to use it. Wonder no more.

Now, how can I reconfigure this blog to take advantage of link? Doesn’t take much to imagine flipping back and forth between entries or months. I might have to move away from GreyMatter, though, which I’ve been considering anyway.

One of the things that attracted me to GreyMatter was that it creates static HTML pages instead of making database queries, which made for much faster response times. Now that I’ve moved back to PHP, though, and added that news sidebar, that benefit’s pretty much shot. And since it’s too much of a pain to add my own HTML to entries and still produce valid code, and since I’ve been thinking about producing the same content in multiple versions, well it may be time to move on already.

So now I’m on the search again. Maybe I’ll turn to Blogger after all. Or just write my own. Or hack GreyMatter’s code, if the license lets me. There’s a whole lot that I like about GreyMatter to just throw it away. Time will tell. It’ll most likely come down to what I have the patience to work on.

Building Apache 1.3.22 and PHP 4.0 for Mac OS X 10.1.

RIAA Wants to Hack Your PC

“If the current version of the USA Act becomes law, the RIAA believes, it could outlaw attempts by copyright holders to break into and disable pirate FTP or websites or peer-to-peer networks.”

Damn straight!

Apparently the RIAA feels that this would maintain the status quo, ensuring that current Federal law, which gives them these rights (?!), wouldn’t be overturned. Yeah.

Update: Looks like their efforts failed, thank goodness. See Lisa Rein’s weblog on Oreillynet for more information and an update.

MySQL 4.0 has been released. Currently in alpha. Why is it that major version releases are alpha? It’s that way with Apache 2.0, too. As time goes on, I understand version numbering schemes less and less. This does not detract from my excitement over MySQL 4’s release. I’m looking forward to a stable server that I can feel comfortable using in production.

Eight planets found around nearby stars. “The eight new worlds bring the total number of planets known to be circling other stars to 74.” I had no idea.

General details of the MAPE settlement.

People are back at work today. I haven’t noticed any tensions yet, which is a relief to me. Oh, except for this message from our Vice Chancellor for Human Resources:

“As we all get back to the business of serving students and our campuses, I want to make perfectly clear to all employees that we expect everyone to respect the choices individuals made during the strike. We will not tolerate favoritism, retaliation or harassment of individuals based on their actions during the strike.”

Nice words, and they have to be said, but there’s been some grumbling about them. Probably because of the phrasing of “We will not tolerate” . . . Oh well. Make a common enemy in HR, maybe it’ll help smooth things over. :-)

WebReference: XML Import/Export for the Masses. Add-ons for Word and WordPerfect that allow the import and export of XML.

Or you could just use StarOffice.

A couple releases: Mozilla 0.9.5, which includes a couple neat new features like tabbed browsing and (at long last) support for the link element, for easy browsing of multi-page documents. Mozilla just keeps getting better.

Too, Apache 1.3.22 has been released.

I’ve made some changes to the layout. Got rid of the news page in favor of the sidebar on the left there. It probably looks pretty nasty on Netscape 4 and other older CSS-almost-supporting browsers, but I no longer care.