Some changes will be made to this weblog over the next few days or weeks. This means there will be times when this website will be completely non-operational, and other times when what appears will not even look like a webpage. These less-than-ideal changes will be temporary, as we upgrade some of the software.

We currently use ancient (in android time) weblog and anti-spam software. While it used to work superbly, changes our host has made, that I will not attempt to explain except to say we now have hanging MySQL queries, are causing problems for folks trying to comment.

So, be advised that our websites will be non-operational at times, but that these glitches will hopefully be temporary.

Update (of same day): The upgrades went a lot smoother on this weblog than I expected. Now I have to watch how it reacts in actual operation. This weblog is the test box.

Update (Saturday, March 21 2009): Made it through the night without any apparent issues requiring manual maintenance! This is a tentative, “Yay!” Even if the current solution is not as good as the old one (it may be better), our need to make the change seems somewhat forced by realities of our current host’s and the recently-increased existence of the hanging queries that manifested as several different interactivity problems.

Debian GNU/Linux “Lenny” 5.0 is released as stable! A free operating system? Highly recommended!

Can local school districts and kids or their parents save money? “OpenSource, Linux, belongs in schools. Ring their ears and wake them up!”

Thanks all you great programmers!

According to the the Wall Street Journal, referenced in the freepress.net e-newsletter regarding grants for high speed internet services, telecom carriers will be getting government grants to expand Internet access into underserved and underdeveloped areas:

“The Commerce Department’s Internet buildout grants carry several conditions, including a contentious requirement that Internet networks built with the government grants be open to all devices like cell phones and laptops, regardless of the manufacturer or provider.

CTIA, an association of wireless companies, sent a letter to committee leaders Wednesday asking that the “vague, undefined, and unnecessary ‘open access’ obligation” be removed. CTIA said carriers will be reluctant to apply for the grants if they are uncertain of their open access obligations.

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D., Calif.), an ardent proponent of an open Internet principle called “net neutrality,” brushed aside the carriers’ concerns. “These are public dollars. Networks built with this funding should be open,” Ms. Eshoo said.

While the above grants are said only for underserved areas, one has to wonder if areas already served by a few big providers couldn’t use a little more competition.

We know the huge telecom ISPs don’t seem to care nearly as much about service as profit. Today’s example is from an article titled Cox . . .  BitTorrent Users with More Slowdowns:

“In February, Cox will trial a brand new throttling scheme that aims to slow down so-called “non-time sensitive” traffic when the network is congested. This includes all P2P, FTP and Usenet traffic. Although Cox announced the trials – which will start in Kansas and Arkansas – on its website, details are scarce.
. . . 
Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, is also concerned with Cox’s new plans. He said in a response to the news, “The lesson we learned from the Comcast case is that we must be skeptical of any practice that comes between users and the Internet.” Indeed, network neutrality is at stake – again.

While I don’t generally use bittorrent, I do use FTP quite a bit when working on the websites, and I used to love Usenet, particularly the astrology channels, some 15 years or so back. Unfortunately, the astrology Usenet groups seemed to get taken over by activity which, for me at least, was distracting, though I know I’ve read recently that some still love Usenet, and if true, why should they be “slowed down”?

On the momentary topic of “slow downs”, recently I did some maintenance work for an old friend that required room & board (to keep commuting costs down) for a few weeks. This was in a BIG Southern California city, one with well-developed broadband markets! I took my laptop, as the residence had cable-delivered Internet and a router. Wow, what a slow down it was that occurred in the evenings, slow downs on webpage requests, and this was so-called premium Internet service! Very irritating. I was able to fix the issue on my computer by wiring around some of their systems, but how many of their customers just figure that’s the way it is and nothing can be done about it? Much better if people watch TV in the evenings is possibly the big-company “incentive” of intertwined interests we’re talking about here.

Could local public school districts provide Internet service to their surrounding communities at a competitive cost to that of the current broadband ISPs with sufficient incentives provided by the Federal government to do so? It seems the path of local school as ISP has been done in the past (link dated 1999) with dial-up Internet service:

“Although the Williamsville Community Unit School District already received Internet access courtesy of the state, reselling this access was not an option, explains Marty Benner, a board member in the district. Instead, the district installed a leased satellite system to acquire additional Internet access that could be resold. After an initial investment of $33,000, the district began selling the Internet access to the community last April. “That’s really why we did it,” Benner says. “It was not meant as a money-maker, but rather as a service to the community.”

As long as our government continues to grant corporate welfare to the largest telecom providers (privatize profits and socialize risks), it seems the likely answer is that local schools could not offer the service competitively. Can public schools receive federal government grants so they can be just as competitive in the ISP arena? If so, this might be something that schools could do to help fund their goals of educating the local community’s children, without needing to take more money from those of us without children, instead we could choose to purchase Internet access from the them.

I’d bet a lot of folks would LOVE to get high-speed broadband from the local schools, but it would have to be competitive price wise with current cable and DSL providers in order for this model to be successful. You can bet the corporatist would fight this one: ahem, only going for “underserved” areas, such as that reported by the WSJ’s article linked above. The more corporate welfare telecoms can get, the less competitive local ISPs, such as schools, could be.

Can you imagine the economic stimulus for local communities if tax monies taken by the federal government were given back to local communities as services for the commons?

It is undoubtedly true that the schools of the future will be much different from the recent past and presumably current model of Absolute Authoritarianism or Prussian methods.

Is this white paper a glance at the future of the new schools of the 21st century?

“As important as it is for physical structures to be adaptable, “it is even more important that class time be elastic. Instead of assigning a certain amount of time for teaching one subject per day, teachers need the flexibility of bigger and more adjustable time slots to truly impact learning,” said Charles Fadel, global lead for education for Cisco Systems. “There must be a renewed focus on increasing the quality of teaching by [giving] teachers more time and opportunities to plan, collaborate, and work with advanced technology systems.”

Local public schools as broadband ISPs, perhaps wireless to the local surrounding community, could be an incremental step in that direction, though it would have to be applied not only to undeveloped and underserved areas, but also to already developed broadband markets.

What better way to learn computers is there than to have students help maintain the technology infrastructure alongside true computer engineers and professional teachers?

The other day I was looking for a way to keep a window on top while entering its values in another window, and laying both windows side by side wasn’t the best option for one of the windows. So, I started searching for a Stay on Top utility.

PowerMenu adds a right click menu to each window’s title bar, adding the following features:
Priority
Transparency
Always on Top
Minimize to Tray.

Under Win98, the Transparency control is not supported.

While the Stay on Top feature was what I was looking for, I was surprised to also find a solution to an organization issue that has bothered me for some years: the inability to reorganize the order of the items in the task bar. When Firefox 2.0 added the ability to move the sequential ordering of tabs, it was a real breakthrough for users who wished to organize their browser’s windows.

With PowerMenu, by minimizing the various program windows to the tray, then strategically clicking on them in the order you wish them to reappear in the task bar, one is able to reorder task bar items!

This is definitely one of the handier utilities for Windows that I’ve seen: PowerMenu by Thong Nguyen.

In my last post I wrote about one technique proofreaders use when checking their documents, and offered simple instructions regarding how to modify a WordPress 1.5.2 wp-admin.css file to help bloggers use the technique. Unfortunately, the 2.x versions require changes to post.php to achieve the same effect.

This post shows how to have more than one Post Preview section on the Write Post page in 2+ versions. It involves slightly altering the /wp-admin/post.php file with a small portion of ever-so-slightly altered code that was originally included in the same file from the earlier 1.5.2 versions. If you decide to try this, any WordPress upgrade you perform will overwrite these changes, and the programmers occasionally make changes to this file (version 2.0.5 to 2.1.2 had changes), so saving it from version to version is not a very good idea. You’ll also want to make sure you save a backup copy of the original file so you can easily undo these changes.

These instructions are specific to WordPress 2.1.2. This has also been tested to work in WordPress 2.0.5. (more…)

One of the techniques used by proofreaders when checking their documents is to change the font from proportional to non-proportional and read again. I’m no great proofreader or writer, however, this is a known technique. In reading, I’ve noted that I often look quite quickly at the whole word, or several words, instead of focusing on each separate character in each word. Changing from a proportional font to a non-proportional one, and increasing the line-spacing as well as line-height, helps me to see each and every letter in each word.

Therefore, I wanted WordPress to show me the post text in several different fonts on the Write Post page as a proofreading aid. The following How To applies to WordPress 1.5.2. This will not work in the newer 2+ series because the Write Post page, specifically post.php, has been completely reworked in the newer version. It is possible to recode post.php to do this (I’ve tested it in 2.0.5); however, that goes beyond the scope of this post which is limited to a simple CSS formatting change.

This was first implemented as a project on another 1.5.2 blog that I participate in as co-administrator, and it seemed like it had been quite awhile since I had posted anything here, so I thought why not share the template modification. (more…)

Alternate title: My first experience of voting on a Direct Recording Electronic or DRE device.

On Nov 7, 2006, upon arrival at the polling place with completed sample ballot in hand, unfamiliar voting machines were visible from the doorway. I asked the poll workers if paper ballots were available. They were! They asked me if I would like one. No, I decided, I wanted to experience the computerized system first hand.

Most elections I’ve participated in over the years have used the punch card machine, the one made infamous by the hanging chads of the presidential contest of 2000 between Bush and Gore. Since that time, our district of San Diego County has sometimes used a paper ballot and pen that was optically scanned as a last step before the voter left the polling location. This time, and for the first time, our district used DRE machines made by Diebold.

I don’t intend to vote using one again. (more…)

Recently I added a plugin named Sociable to another weblog. While perusing the blog of Sociable’s developer, one post caught my attention. Peter Harkins asked his readers if they could recommend a good feedreader for Linux. Unfortunately, not having yet made the switch to Linux on our personal machines, it’s not possible to fully answer his question from the perspective of that operating system.

Recently I looked around for a newer feedreader for Win98SE, either one that runs under Firefox as an extension, or as a standalone program similar to FeedReader, and had some success. After finding some that didn’t work quite in the desired way, and others that had promise but unfortunately were still quite buggy, what I eventually settled upon was BottomFeeder, a standalone cross-platform Atom and RSS reader. It appears open-source and released under an Artistic License.

From the BottomFeeder front page:

“BottomFeeder runs on Linux x86, (also FreeBSD), PowerPC Linux, Sparc Linux, Windows (98/ME/NT/2000/XP/CE 4), Mac OS8/9, Mac OS X (PPC), AIX, SGI Irix, HP-UX, and Solaris (SPARC and x86).”

I have no intention of critiquing the program, as they all seem to have shortcomings and strengths of one kind or another; in the case of BottomFeeder, its feature set is impressive. This may imply it isn’t the simplest feed reader out there. I’m currently watching just under 100 feeds and have noted no big issues, but then I’m a simplistic user with basic needs who has always been attracted to the usefulness of powerware.

While it’s not perfect, you might like it — try BottomFeeder.

Now that Microsoft is no longer supporting Win98SE, where will people get security patches as they become necessary? Via cnet.com, one such third-party Win98 security patch source is calling themselves the Zero Day Emergency Response Team, or ZERT.

I noted this hardware firewall via a digg.com posting with a title that suggests it is designed for Windows XP, which in turn leads to a linuxdevices.com entry, which in turn references the portal where the Yoggie Gatekeeper will be sold.

I don’t see any information regarding a particular operating system required, presumably this device would work for networked computers of different OSs because it seems independent of them. The company’s PDF brochure doesn’t seem to make or infer any similar OS dependency claims. Whether it does or not is something to check out before a purchase.

Linuxdevices.com says the pro model will cost about $220, and the site selling the product claims it will be available by the upcoming winter holidays.

I wonder if the firewall can be secured from the Yoggie Management Server, a separate device marketed to corporate IT departments. The brochure claims “proprietary patent-pending developments”.