evought

Only old Minix systems that I am aware of (they were limited to 14 characters plus 3 character extension).

Personally, it does not matter to me much in that it does not affect how I live my life. I am a Christian, but I do not follow Christ for the promise of new life or immortality. I would be just as happy if death were simply an end to labors. I think I would deserve that after the things I have done and been through. Rather, I serve Christ/God because that is built into my nature. Throughout my whole life I have had surface doubts, sometimes serious ones, but there has always been a core of faith to carry me through. I have no doubt that whatever reward I get for my toils will be just and leave it at that. Christ is my Good Lord, my liege. Who else would I follow? One of the things which immediately comes to mind when discussing this sort of thing is Stonewall Jackson who was standing on the battle field with artillary shells exploding around him. He stood stock still and directed his troops as if he were in his living room in front of a comfortable fire. An officer asked him how he could do this and he responded: "God knows the time of my death and I cannot affect it one way or the other." That simple and direct faith is something I have always tried to remember. In the same way, what happens after death is neither something I am likely to understand nor my concern. One way or another I will be provided for when the time comes and, in the meantime, I have other things to concentrate on. Another thing which comes to mind, however, is Terry Pratchett's Disk World series where someone dies and is visited by Death. "What? No Judgement, no Justice?" "No," says Death, "there is only me." In that world, people go wherever they expect, something like in "What Dreams May Come." That means that good people who do not believe in themselves may punish themselves and bad people who think they are good may be rewarded. I would like to see the Maker at some point to ask some questions. Sometimes I would like to punch Him in the nose. I would like to think that Death will make things make sense in some way. As you (I believe) said in a different thread, the story of God is as much the story of humankind and our developing relationship with God. My relationship has changed much over time, but there has always been a strong relationship.

I finally convinced my wife to switch to Linux after our ISP shut down our account because of a virus on her Win2K box. We told the ISP that we were changing it to a Linux box and they reactivated the account, no questions asked. Now she works between my Mac and her Linux box and we are planning to get a new Mac Mini for her next semester since both our existing systems are patched with duck tape, chewing gum and prayers. The biggest thing that she has complained about on Linux so far is that she cannot play the Quicktime movies for her classes--- she uses my Mac for that. She was, however, rather impressed when she, the avid Civilization player, was introduced to FreeCiv on Mac and Linux. I may get roped into doing some multiplayer gaming. The main reason we are considering a Mac Mini is that it is low power (we have had to run off of batteries and a generator or panels before) and will function as a PVR. Especially with many classes being televised or Internet, it will make it a lot easier to be able to just store them on the hard disk with meaningful names and folders with SpotLight searchable keywords. Then we will slurp our movies while we are at it.

Agreed. This is in the same category as the "Abort; Retry; Cancel" dialogs which do the same thing no matter which button you choose--- the process is tried again and the dialog comes right back up until you reboot or do something as drastic. It is also very seldom clear what the difference between the buttons, such as "Abort" and "Cancel". Another variant on these are the ones that give you an opportunity to try to save your work and just keep coming back to the dialog.

Something else to keep in mind, too, is that Xisto makes money from ad revenue largely driven by search engine hits. Poor spelling means less search hits, means less revenue, yields less service. If you appreciate Xisto, keep this in mind when posting.

Having hammered on servlet containers in the test lab, I think the major reason you do not see low-end Java providers is that the footprint of a Java/Servlet (let alone EJB) environment is just too large. You can get into hundreds of MB of memory usage before loading a single site. You do not start to see the benefit of a Java-based system until you get into at least dozens of sites (which amortizes the startup and load cost), but the servlet containers do not necessarily scale that well, especially on the MS platform where occasional reboots are necessary to reset the network layer. Another really big problem is library usage. If you have several dozen sites all using their own servlets and JSPs, how do you control what libraries are used? I am not talking about security here, that is actually handled quite well. Instead, I am talking about the fact that you cannot load several versions of the same JAR at once. If my servlet wants to use version 1.0.2 of the fancy jizmagizer library and yours wants (requires) 1.0.3 or later, we are out of luck. Whoever loads first wins. This is bad enough in enterprise environments where the entire application/library stack must be upgraded at once, but in a shared environment it is a show stopper. It is sad, because the shared environment is exactly where JSPs and co should shine. Another advantage of the servlet container environment is that service providers should be able to move whole sites seemlessly from server to server and VM to VM, even across platforms. This should give them a flexibility in load balancing that rivals anythng out there. Some of the issues which make tis difficult are silly design choices, such as the fact that RMI stubs must through a RemoteException, but certain stream operations are not allowed to throw exceptions at all, so streams are not remotely controllable via RMI without very involved stubbing, making many operations which should be transparent anything but.

One of the issues I have been monitoring is the spread of bird flue and the development of policy toward combatting it. I am still not sure whether the spreading panic is justified, but I will tell you what the official story is, the problems I see with their analysis and what we are doing about it currently.As you are probably aware from the news, bird flue has continued to spread world-wide. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) are both alarmed and believe that continued spread, to the U.S. in particular, is inevitable. Official statistics estimate 1/3 of the U.S. population will be infected and the CDC's current projection of 50% lethality means that up to 1/6 of the U.S. population may die from the disease. The government has stated that people should expect a breakdown of basic services for as much as 18 months. The WHO has also announced a general shortage of one of the few flue-fighting drugs available (Tamiflue) due to a bad harvest of the star anise which is a critical ingredient. The WHO has enacted sales restrictions to curtail panic buying.Now, that being said, I think their estimates are seriously high. The 1/3 infection rate depends on a mutation making the disease transmissible directly from human to human, something which is possible but has not happened yet. We do not have that kind of infection rate even in Asia where the flue started. The 50% lethality is based on reported/identified cases, but there very well may thousands of people who have been infected, were not seriously affected (standard flue symptoms), therefore did not report it, and recovered. There is some support for this in Asian press outlets. I do believe the disease has potential to do serious damage, but at much lower levels than is currently publicized and do not think outright panic is useful or justified.What I do think may be very detrimental is knee-jerk responses by the government and a panicking public. In particular, the Department of Agriculture has already stated it intends mandatory culls of all birds within miles of a possible infections site, before any tests can possibly be conducted. Culls have not been effective in any other country, bird flue is transmissible by wild birds, and, as it turns out, even by domestic and feral cats. Panicked culls have the potential to compound whatever damage the flue actually does with devastation of our food supply and of farmers nation-wide. I think there should be an organized response for this but, at the moment am at a loss on where to start.Anyway, I would recommend people stock up a bit anyway, because what the flue does not do, general panic might. I am going to keep tracking this and hope that people start to lighten up a bit.For ourselves, we are stocking up on seeds to medicinal herbs which research has demonstrated are effective against flues and flue-like infections but which are not in common use (primarily different species of echinacea and St. John's Wort). The logic is that if standard medicinal practices fail, the solution (if there is one) will be something they have not yet tried. We are stocking up on seeds rather than the herbs themselves because of very poor quality control in the preparation of the commercial herbs. Less than half of the echinacea products in a recent survey were correctly labeled and several had dangerous levels of lead. By growing our own, we know what we are getting. This is especially important since research shows that the different echinacea species may have very different effects (early flue trials with E. angustifolia may have been successful because of mislabelled E. pallida).

I have to wonder if this scales up to my sheep: an empty cable spool and some hardware cloth around the outside. They could wander the pasture, eat the grass that fits through the hardware cloth, but could not get through the fencing around the main pasture which is not yet sheep-safe.Hmmm....

I, myself, am still on the fence about euthanaisia (Euthenasia, euthenasia: what about youth in America?), but I do make a distinction between mercy killing and not going to excessive and obsessive lengths to prolong life. My grandmother died about a year ago, and before she died, she went through several years of constant agony. She would have a bad spell, require intensive care, recover some, go through difficult therapy to regains some functionality (eating, talking, walking, dressing, etc.), then lose it all again. After several rounds, she was no longer the person she had been, was worn out, and simply did not see the point of traumatizing herself more to regain less and less functionality each time. The family, on the other hand, kept coaching her to push and keep trying. More and more invasive life support was required and each episode continued a downward spiral until she was fighting for less and less. In this case, it was clear to me that 1) my grandmother was done living and had no quality of life and 2) that I would want to die myself in her situation. She continued to live for the family but the family was being (understandably) selfish. They were too concerned for their own loss to see (or balance) what it was doing to her. Many times, we get too caught up in grief to see clearly. I think the right thing in this case and many others would have been to suspend life saving measures earlier on. There would have been no need to "euthanize" because her body was already dying. I think this is the case 99.9% of the time. When someone's time has come and there is no more point to a losing battle, say goodbye and let them go. If a person has something specific to live for (waiting for their first great-grandchild, making it until a wedding or other event, etc.) and they are fighting, then help them. But if the person themselves clearly wants to give up the battle, do not fight by proxy and do not make them feel guilty. Mercy killing in a more direct sense often has the problem of being driven by outside, not inside, forces. Euthanasia can be a gruesome way for a family or caregiver to end support for an ailing relative. The patient themselves can even be guilted into asking for the action. This is someting that should be looked out for. Outright murder or assisted suicide should not just be an easy way out. It is always difficult to separate a desire for suicide from psychological issues: should a teen who has lost their love be allowed to "euthanize themselves"? I had a neighbor who did just that, but I would consider it wrong, or at least short-sighted and stupid. The hypocratic oath says to "do no harm". I think doctors often forget this. Sometimes it means withholding treatments where there would be no point. I think it seldom means killing, although I would be hard pressed to argue where pain killers are given to ease pain where it also removes the person's ability to fight if the patient is obviously beyond help (e.g.: a wound to the liver on a battlefield). [Corrected Typos]

In the New Testament Epsitles, The Gospel of Mathew Chapter 7, The Letter of James Chapter 2, and The Letter of Paul to the Romans Chapter 14 and other places in the new testament, much is said about "judging others," specifically about God being the final authority and taking judgement upon ourselves a usurpation of that authority. This article talks a bit about some of the Greek words underlying these texts, distinguishing "judgement from authority" and "right perception". This article was published in part on a closed Yahoo Bible study list. Greek translations here come from a King James Version Hebrew-Greek Keyed Study Bible using Strongs Hebrew, Greek, and Chaldee Concordance. There exist newer, better translations, but I do not have access to keyed versions of them. Mathew 7:1-3 says: In James 2 and Romans 14, this lesson is echoed and expounded on. Romans 14:4 says: Generally, when speaking of "do not judge," the Bible use the Greek words Krinos, Krisis, and Krima. "Krinos" means "judgement from authority" and is intimately connected with the dispensation of justice. Judgment from authority yields a "Krisis" as in John, 4:17 "Judgement". Krisis is the source of the modern word "crisis" meaning an irrevocable change or sundering. Krinos is final and irrevocable. "Krima" is where we get "crime" and is again connected with judgement from authority: when a crime is authoritatively identified, justice and irrevocable change must follow. When speaking of Krinos, the Bible makes sure that we know God is the final and only arbiter. In the quote from Romans 14:4, we are admonished from judging another man's servant. We are all servants of God and only God may judge us from true authority. There are several words in Greek which are often translated as "judgement". Besides "krinos", there is also "agon", a word closely associated with "arete". Arete, simply put, means excellence in all things. It is what the Greeks thought should be striven for always and in every moment, in art, sport, morality, learning, fighting, etc. In later Latin: "Mens ano en corporus ano" : " a sound mind in a sound body". We get "art" from this word, but it is much more to the Greeks. Agon is the root of "agonize". It means a never-ending struggle to perceive clearly and judge those things around us. This type of judgement is tempered by Arete. Who are we to judge? We are given eyes and minds and therefore judge; it is human nature. Arete requires that we *judge well*, with mercy and pathos, but *judge accurately*, calling manure "manure" (so to speak). Krisis is the edge of a knife, a conclusion; agon is a process which never ends. We cannot judge from authority because we are not Authority. ("one law ... one law giver"). On the other hand, in order to balance the needs of the Law, we need Agon, "good judgement" or, "discernment" constantly. We have a responsibility as creations of God to Arete, excellence in all things. Honor the Giver by using the gift. The Greeks believed that and I think that Christ did too. In the end, Christ admonishes us to not be "critical" of others, from the Greek "kritis": "judge", which is also derived from krino. But only in seeing clearly, removing the plank from our own eyes, can we discern relationships, identify Good and Evil, and find our own place in the world. Evaluate and re-evaluate others constantly in order to understand yourself, but always remember that only God may judge from Authority.

The problem is, I am sure they will use them for thir own defense, conventional or nuclear. I also do not trust our current leadership to not back them into a corner where they feel it is "use it or lose it". Yet another possibility is that some terrorist group may set off a weapon (say, in Isreal) and blame it on Iran.

Yep. of course, having logical volume management means you can start out with: 120 GB - 500 MB Boot - 500 MB Swap - 119.5 GB Logical Volume a) 4 GB Linux 1 GB Music c) 1 GB Games d) etcetera And add space where you need it when you need it, so you can have both organization *and* flexibility. Hmmm... my "b" came out as a smiley. I will have to start using smileys as bullets

Ha! I started out with Color Basic on a Z-80 microprocessor and then went to TRS-DOS when I could actually get one of the new floppy drives. I used Wordstar, Visicalc, etc. When I actually got an MS-DOS machine, I still used either PFS-First Choice or Word Perfect. It was quite a while before I got into MS products. I have never liked Word or Office applications. In college I regularly used NextStep, Solaris, Dos 6.0, Linux, Mac OS 7-9, OS/2 Warp, and Windows. I beta tested Windows 95. No, MSes problems are not quite as bad as sometimes made out, but they are pretty bad. A Beta is supposed to be feature stable and lacking in critical defects. An Alpha (internal or limited test release) is for the real trips through the looking glass. as a vendor, it is considered bad taste to nuke your customer's computers, even with a Beta. I have Beta tested for a number of companies (back in the day when you had to apply to be a Beta tester and actually got paid, at least in free software, for the effort), and MS was really the worst of them. Linux's unstable tree, for instance, is usually better, and Betas of OS/2 Warp were nowhere near as rough as the Betas of Win 95. Most of IBMs products tend to be more stable when they go beta (I have worked in their test labs and have seen exactly what criteria they use to pass the software for Alpha or Beta releases). It is all a matter of having a defined *process*, which MS, by admission, just does not have.

That is the really sad part. You folks spend much less on health care and get more than we do. We pay more than any other country and yet still get crappy care and have many people uninsured. [qoute] i really feel sorry for those without a proper state healthcare system, as i do for someone without a proper welfare state. as i once heard someone say a free healthcare system is one of the basics of civilized society. i recently saw the morgan spurlock documentory about living for a month on minimum wage. i was plainly shocked by how the minute he stepped into a accident and emergency he owed $500. it seems crazy and certainly a discrace when i know anytime i can go into my local hospital with anything wrong and have someone sort it out for free. admitedly i will have to wait for an age if it is non life threatening, but at leasts i wont owe £300 after it. are there any people in america campaining for free healthcare? Yes and no. I have no confidence that the current government could implement a system half as good as UK's right now. I think it would turn into a big handout to corporate lobbyists. I think the best we could hope for as a revival of the idea that low-income workers could pay to get Medicaid (where as no-income non-workers would get Medicaid free). This would at least cover the gap between the non-workers and workers who get insurance as a benefit without costing the (dramatically underfunded) Medicaid programs more. Better yet, I would like to see anyone be able to purchase Medicaid as an option, regardless of income. That would mean that commercial health plans would actually need to be competitive. For Non-US folks, Medicaid is for the poor, Medicare for the elderly (or disabled).

Yes, I have been using SSH for years (I think ~1998). Most UNIX systems these days have it enabled in place of telnet. Internet sites like Sourceforge require SSH to access some of their servers. As you say, one if its interesting aspects is the (optional) use of public key encryption instead of a password. I actually make this required on servers I set up. Besides being much more secure (there simply is no password to snoop in transit), it is extremely convenient. With SSH key agents like SSHKeychain (for OS X) or SSHAgent (for Linux/UNIX), I only enter my password once and the agent provides the proper keys for the proper systems. Something you do not really mention is the ability to tunnel ports for other protocols over SSH. I can run X-Windows programs over the connection, for instance. I can also open a secure HTTP connection to test my server before making HTTP available to the rest of the world. Another extremely useful feature is forwarding connections. I can set up my database server so that it can only be contacted by the webserver. I can ssh to the webserver and then ssh to the database server using a key stored only on my own system. I can also forward ports from end to end. Yes, SSH is definitely a useful tool to have in your kit.

This is part V of a serial publication of my Essay, "Liberty Starts At Home--- Secure People Make Secure Community. In the previous posting, we discussed community health care, particularly among the lower working class. In this posting we discuss issues with outside control of technology and education. The most important aspect of technology is that the local community understand and be able to maintain its own infrastructure free of outside control. If a community cannot comprehend, create, or maintain the technology required in its daily life, outside forces can, intentionally or not, control the local economy and disrupt it at will. The local availability of tools and the education required to use them defines the industries in which local workers can participate. This can be as basic as access to reading and writing limitting the advancement of post-civil war blacks to the United States' current dependency on foreign chip manufacture and foreign oil. Sources of energy are important considerations here but can be approached from two directions: the community taking control of outside energy sources required for their operation (imperialism in the Middle East) or the community adapting its technology to fit available resources (domestic ethanol, biodiesel, coal, solar, etc, or conservation and efficiency improvements). The second option, that of adapting local technology, is more stable in the long term than military or economic conquest. Even if tools and energy sources are available and cheap, they are useless without the education required to deploy them. When community members must travel for education, only those who can afford it can be educated. Further, someone from the community who is educated elsewhere may or may not come back and the expertise may never be integrated into the local economy. Communities with local education opportunities retain and amass the knowledge needed to increase the stability and prospects of the whole. Going back the example of Reconstruction-era blacks, many communities of freed slaves banded together to create local schools and share knowledge. They could not teach what no one knew, but at least everyone in the community had access to the sum of its knowledge. Anyone who returned with outside knowledge raised the bar for the entire community. The modern equivalent of these communal schools is the Adult Education Center which appears in many cities either as an University extension or religious ministry. Members of the local community teach other members of the local community everything from computer skills to cooking. In the countryside, craft circles, agricultural societies (e.g. a beekeepers association) and agricultural extensions fill this niche. As a whole, however, these efforts are funding starved, short on volunteers, and made up mainly of the older generations. Further, many critical skills, such as automobile maintenance, are deliberatly made difficult to acquire. A vintage Volkswagon Beetle, for instance, was designed for end-user maintenance. This is not the case with a modern Ford Topaz. Not only is the technology more complex, but manufacturers attempt to patent or copyright computer interfaces to their maintenance systems to stifle end-user repairs. A secure community exerts pressure on manufacturers to produce maintainable and standards conforming tools, but this only works when the community is otherwise strong enough to say "No." Mechanization is often a death knell to small business in any community. Increasing dependence on tractors, for instance, destroyed and is still destroying many small farms. Dependence on a tractor requires a large capital investment, then creates a dependency on foreign fuel, parts, and depending on local capability, maintenance. Fluctuations in any of these things can destroy a farm, usually by forcing default on the loans which made the purchase of the tractor possible in the first place. Large commercial operations get enough use out of a tractor to quickly pay off its investment and they have the resources and clout to affect the pipeline of parts and fuel. A horse, while less efficient and having its own trade-offs, is locally produced and locally maintained, generally fueled by local resources. Many times local regulations can force businesses to mechanize against their will. Dairies outside Seattle Washington, for instance, are required to have stainless steel milking equipment which costs tens of thousands of dollars, all in the name of public health. Many small dairies which have been around for decades have wooden equipment which can be locally produced and maintained. These dairies do not have enough animals that tens of thousands of dollars for equipment could ever be paid off. Large dairies, which benefit from economy of scale, buy the equipment and force their smaller competitors out of business. It stands to reason therefore that communities intent on preserving small business must be very careful in regulating technology lest they hand large corporations, generally not locally owned, effective monopolies. Regulation always carries a non-trivial cost which must be balanced against legitimate public needs. Generally, outcome based standards ("There must be less than n parts/million of a certain contaminant.") are better than technology based regulation ("You must have steel components."). In summary, then, a secure community must be able to provide its own educational resources, must rely primarily on locally produced technology or energy, and must force outside suppliers to produce maintainable and standards conformant tools. A community can only wield this kind of influence, the power to say "No" to vendors, if it is secure otherwise, or willing to suffer through a painful transition.

Agreed. They are talking about protecting features that Gnome and OS X, Windowmaker (X11 window manager), etc. have had for years now. Heck I remember that being avaliable in NextStep in the early '90's and in '98 or so, I had them under Linux. The underlying problem is that have set up a market requirement to have Windows and charge much too much for it.

This is part IV of a serial publication of my Essay, "Liberty Starts At Home--- Secure People Make Secure Community. In the previous posting, we discussed securing a community food supply. In this posting we discuss issues with communty medical programs, access of lower class workers to healthcare, and practical programs to improve our healthcare systems. Health care is perhaps one of the biggest issues that faces our small communities today. Just under 12 percent of Missourians and about 14 percent of Illinoisans lack health insurance, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Frighteningly, this is less than the national average of 15.7%, or some 45 million people. That is one in six Americans without access to health care and yet eight in ten of the uninsured come from working families according to a Kaiser Commission report on Medicaid. Employers are increasingly dropping health coverage while private insurance premiums rise and Medicaid programs raise their threshold for entry. This squeezes lower class workers out of the health care system and that is not all: Medicaid coverage has been steadily shrinking to exclude items like dental care and durable medical equipoment. The last item is the most disturbing; while, for instance, Governor Roy Blunt of Missouri rationalizes Medicaid cuts as encouraging the unemployed to get jobs--- which deny them health benefits anyway ---these same people cannot get the assistive devices they need to work. The uninsured often do not have regular access to doctors, but even when they do, they generally cannot afford follow up care, such as prescriptions, tests, or surgery, even for serious conditions. Drug patents and more sophisticated medications bring ever increasing prescription costs. Controled substance laws like those against medical marijuana or FDA bans which dissallow sassafras (later retracted) but allow Vioxx (later found to kill people) prevents access to less expensive local remedies in use for centuries. Of course, few in lower class Urban neighborhoods have space or leisure for herb gardens anyway. Doctors must go through years of expensive training. The cost of medical school and certification fully justifies their high cost. As HMOs attempt to force these prices down, it simply results in Doctors being squeezed out of the market. For people who cannot afford doctors, there is no lower tier to act as an alternative. Many states dissalow certification of Naturopaths or dissallow the above-board practice of naturopathy or herbalism entirely. People without adequate access to Doctors should have access to other professionals such as midwives, naturopaths, and apothecaries, even if they dot meet the full standards of the AMA. At the very least, lower level profesionals should be able to provide preventative care, prescribe certain classes of drugs or herbal remedies (which should tax deductible), and decide when a patient needs more serious care. In order our workforce to remain healthy, communities must take charge of their own healthcare, growing medicinal plants, trainig a lower tier of medical professionals and banding together to change laws which prevent access to adequate care and local control. These changes include allowing the open practice of professionals who are not Doctors, redesign of the Drug Enforcement Agencies nonsensical categories for controled substances, tax deductibility of prescriptions and medical equipment prescribed by a lower tier of medical professionals and mandatory licensing of critical patented drugs on Reasonable And Non-Descriminatory (RAND) terms, and low-cost subsidized insurance programs. There is a distinct lack of quality control for many commercial herbal medicines and supplements, including adulteration of harmless herbs with deadly ones either through misidentification or sloppy harvesting and processing. Nearly all illnesses or deaths caused by herbal remedies are caused by poor quality. Lawsuits against these companies are expensive and must often be in remote jurisdictions. Instead of imposing certification which will just drive up herb prices, communities and local professionals must take charge of medicine production with their own quality control accountable to the local community. The United States has among the worst healthcare for a developed nation. The system is fixable, however, through increased local control, low cost middle-tier helth programs and reasonable patent reform.

Everyone will have their favorite. Here is a good starting point, The Ruby script language with the Rails framework. Ruby is a good language to learn because it has a good structure and clean syntax--- it will teach you good habits for learning other languages and tools. I highly recommend Pragmatic Ruby as a good beginning book.

Yep, one would think so. I started with Google and am searching the Joomla forum. No luck so far, but I figured it would be worth asking here given that I know there a couple of regular Joomla users. If not, I'll have to get an account and post to the Joomla forum.

I am trying to set up Joomla on this site and woud like new visitors to start at the "What We Sell" page rather than the Homepage. The What We Sell page is less busy and has some nice photos; I want them to be able to click on Home to view news and other things. I tried a 301 redirect from the .htaccess file to redirect index.html to http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ but this did not work. Visits simply went to index.php as normal. Any ideas?

Do you mean like DVD Backup?

XHTML is HTML redefined according to the stricter rules of XML. The original HTMl was designed using SGML (a government standard for designing languages) which had fairly lax and hard to check rules. XML is a strict subset of SGML. Practically speaking, XHTML is easier for your browser or any other tool to verify that your page is well-formed and syntactically correct. It is also easier to use tools on, to change something into XHTML, or transform XHTML into something else. For instance, I have other DTDs (XML document types) that transform technical articles (DocBook) into XHTML or PDF and fiction stories (my home grown Book DTD) into XHTML or PDF. This allows you to write your web pages in a language specific to what you are working on and turn it into XHTML before displaying it. You can test your own XHTML in a number of tools. Many editors, such as JEdit have validation tools either built-in or as a plugin. There is also a W3C web page that will test pages for you. I believe Firefox has an extension to validate pages as well.

Well, a couple things: Iran has no coal that I am aware of and they know they have hit pak oil (there are folks here who still have their heads in the sand about that). They do not have hydro power readily available. What oil they do have is better used for export. That leaves very few options as to what to power their economy with. I am not saying Iran won't use the process to create Nukes (given our recent behavior, that only makes sense as well), but that they do have a perfectly legitimate and reasonable purpose. Now, they could negotiate with us for another way out, like North Korea did. Then again, we did not hold up our side of the agreement with NK, either. Which is why Nk is once again building a nuclear program. We have no credibility with anyone right now. Again, I am not saying the situation is not bad, just that we are also to blame and Iran is acting in its own interest. Can we tell them they should not help themselves?

Recently, my wife needed a new printer for her classes. We had an array of dead inkjets which had either stopped working or the ink was simply too expensive to bother replacing. For our next printer we wanted to get a low-end business printer rather than a high-end consumer printer so that our price per page would be lower. We looked at both the HP 2600n and the Samsung ML-2550.We found them both at a local Best Buy. Both were color laser printers. They were the same price after rebate, but the Samsung's rebate was mail in, making the HP lower-priced at the store. I was hesitant to buy a Samsung since I had never used a Samsung printer and had always been satisfied with HP printers, especially lasers. I was concerned about the HP's lack of RAM and PCL/Postscript support. In the end, we went with the HP for one simple reason: there was only one color laser printer left and it was the HP.We got the printer home, unpacked it, set it up, connected it to a USB port on a Windows 2000 machine and installed the drivers. With a little bit of fussing, we had it printing a test page and soon after, some of my wife's work. The print output was quite good in both color and balck and white. As it is a GDI printer, CPU usage was higher than I would like.We have yet to have any problem with the hardware, but the software is a very different story.We have two computers, one a Widows 2000/Linux box, one a Mac. They are connected to an Airport router, the 2K box by ehternet nd the Mac via Airport. The printer prints fine under Windows 2000 with its own drivers. The Mac cannot print through Windows cannot print through Windows to this printer due to driver issues, however, so we moved it to the Airport and got everything reconfigured. It printed from the Mac, but not from Windows. We moved it back to Windows, and the Mac still could not print to it. We moved the printer to the Mac, shared it to the Windows box. Windows could print and Mac could not (driver).We installed the Drivers HP shipped for the Mac. Now the auto printer setup on my Mac crashes constantly and I cannot set up any printers. The HP driver did not contain the correct property files to select the driver manually. The driver has no uninstall and no updates. I was able to delete enough by hand to only cripple the 2600n driver and free up the auto setup dialog.After that fiasco, we had to hook it back up via USB to the Windows box. I had to print from the Mac by copying PDFs to a shared drive. This from a "network ready" printer with support for Windows and OS X.Now, we get a virus on our 2000 box, even with all of the protection we have in place. Our ISP cuts our account to protect the network and, since we cannot find where the virus is hiding, we end up reinstalling. "Heck with it." We wipe the drive, repartition and make it a Linux (FC5) only box. Linux, of course, cannot print out of the box to this thing. The 2600n does not support any of the standard HP protocols and HP refused to release the necessary specs to the Linux driver developers. Nevertheless, some enterprising soul has written a driver anyway.In order to setup the printer, I now have to install a development system on my Linux box (my wife's office/school machine) to build the driver. I get it built, installed, and 'lo, 2600n appears in the selection box and a test page comes out of the printer. I turn on print sharing, verify that it is running, and advertise the printer with ZeroConf (what Apple calls 'Bonjour').. Of course, I still cannot setup that printer on my Mac until I reinstall to get rid of HP's bad driver and install this new 3rd party driver (Works on mac as well as Linux). How is it that a 3rd party driver written with no specs is better than HP's driver for their own printer?Anyway, I expected to end up with a printer that skimped a bit on performance and quality for an economy printer. Instead, I got a great printer that cannot be printed to. It spits out pages quickly and efficiently as I swear and curse to get it connected. Some time this week I will reinstall OS X to un-hose my drivers. Only a driver vendor can screw up a Mac that badly. I have had enough problems with this printer that I will never buy an HP again. Samsung next time for me.