The Net

They've been slashdotting the hell out of us this week. Two of the three major EFF-Austin legislative initiatives recently have appeared on the Slashdot front page.

Last Monday, they posted an article on SB 1116, the Texas Super-DMCA. Then on Saturday, they wrote about SB 1579, the Texas Open Source Bill.

I'm hoping they go for the trifecta and post an article about our efforts on the Texas Spam Bill. Of course, that will happen only if somebody (hint hint) will submit the story to them.

If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer as your web browser and were encountering problems with this web site earlier, I want you to know we were not experiencing technical difficulties. The problem is in your bloody set.

Over the weekend I converted this web page from HTML version 4.01 to XHTML version 1.0. The W3C validator says the site is a-ok. The standards compliant browsers, such as Mozilla and Opera, are delighted with the change. Microsoft Internet Explorer, however, started crapping bricks.

The first problem is that people were reporting they were seeing the RSS feed and not the normal web site. It turns out this was triggered by the addition of the XML declaration:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>

I downgraded the page by removing the declaration. Then IE started botching the page styles. The font styles weren't rendered correctly.

In the end, I decided I'd have to appease the 20-ton monopolistic gorilla, and fall back to the old HTML 4.01 standard. It's a shame so many people--and the net as a whole--are held victim to Microsoft's inferior products.

Link: Wi-Fi is Right for Austin.

I got a few minutes at last night's City of Austin Telecommunications Commission meeting to advocate for Wi-Fi wireless networks deployment. I feel like we are so behind the curve on this important technology.

SXSW Interactive is nearly over. Officially it's done, but it really doesn't end until the fat lady is singing on Bruce Sterling's front doorstep. Before I crawl into the corner to collapse and vegetate, I want to list some of my very favorite moments of the conference.

Link: Amazon.com Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering (link to abstract)

The Jan/Feb issue of IEEE Internet Computing magazine has an interesting article on the collaborative filtering algorithm used at Amazon.com. This brief tutorial does not provide sufficient information to implement or evaluate collaborative filtering systems, but I found it a good introduction to the technology.

Due to numerous design flaws in Microsoft software, email worms are an Internet pandemic. While the situation is mostly aggravating, it has its moments of amusement.

The current generation of email worm forges header information, picking some random email address found on the infected computer to stand in as the supposed sender. This can, on occasion, be entertaining, such as in the case of this message received last week:

From: torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
To: chip [at] unicom [dot] com
Subject:
Message-Id: <E18c8JD-0000Dt-00 [at] gull [dot] mail [dot] pas [dot] earthlink [dot] net>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 10:12:07 -0800