Wednesday, October 16, 2002

ACLU Acts Against Patriot Act. The American Civil Liberties Union has had enough of some aspects of the Bush administration's Patriot Act, and it's launching a visible, nationwide campaign against it. By Julia Scheeres. [Wired News] 9:24:38 PM    Comments []

Red Hat recently published a security patch that, thanks to the infamous Digital Millenium Copyright and Suppression of Free Speech Act can only be explained fully to people not within US borders. [Daypop Top 40] Red Hat has struck a small blow against the DMCA, by publishing a security patch which can only be explained fully to people who are not within US jurisdiction. The company's position here seems to be not altogether voluntary - according to a spokesman "it is bizarre, and unfortunately something Red Hat cannot easily do much about," but like it or not Red Hat has been recruited to the campaign to make the DMCA look ridiculous. 4:13:35 PM    Comments []

I *really* hate web pages that insist on IE for no good reason, even though Chimera has all of the capabilities it needs. I just renewed my auto registration at www.broward.org/revenue, and for no good reason it insisted on IE or Netscape. 3:00:11 PM    Comments []

I figured out how to integrate content from my PHP-Nuke content into a static page on my site. At WorldBeatPlanet, in addition to the dynamic content, I also have static sites for several artists. I now have database content integrated with Youssou N'dour's page. I renamed the main page from index.html to index.php and added the following bit of PHP code where I want the database content to appear: <?php $query = "select sid, title from nuke_stories where hometext like \"%Youssou%" or bodytext like "%Youssou%" order by sid desc limit 10"; $dbi=@mysql_connect("localhost", dbname", dbpass"); @mysql_select_db("worldbeatplanet_com"); $res=@mysql_query($query, $dbi); echo "<ul>"; while(list($sid, $title) = mysql_fetch_row($res)) { echo "<li><a href=\"http://www.worldbeatplanet.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=$sid">$title</a>"; } echo "</ul>"; @mysql_close($dbi); ?> 2:16:24 PM    Comments []

This is a really cool testing tool. Enter a URL and it will display the full HTTP headers returned by the server. Very useful to find why some page displays incorrectly - usually the server is returning a MIME type of text/plain instead of text/html. 1:01:04 PM    Comments []