You don't "install" web pages; you simply visit them. Why should applications be any different? ... Existing HTML/JavaScript developers can be productive immediately developing XWT user interfaces. This is because XWT visual layout is specified using a dialect of XML which is extremely similar to HTML tables, and because interactivity is scripted in industry-standard ECMAscript (JavaScript). No special tools are required -- just a simple text editor and a zip archiver.

This is a test post to make sure everything's working correctly.

I moved my main computer system to be a mostly-permenent Linux box for my job, but I missed Radio Userland, which is now the only Windows program keeping me in Windows at all. So I shuffled the stuff I had my 233MHz onto the main machine, and loaded up Windows XP onto my 233MHz Pentium I with 96MB RAM.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, tell all your friends about the CBDTPA!! [Scripting News]

And remember, the The CBDTPA is immune to criticism while you're thinking about how to attack it.

I haven't watched the Flash yet; the server is still slashdotted. I hope that it's good quality.

You may have caught an earlier post on this topic if you're subscribed to the RSS feed. I got Radio working quite well under WineX* from Transgaming, but it's just flawed enough that I can't quite use it or fix it. But it's getting close...

Current summary of Radio in Wine:

* The news aggregator works. There is an issue with the date/time APIs... my computer thought it was 10am when it was 2pm (UTC vs. EST?), but otherwise, the aggregator appears to be working fine.

The good news is, I've got a summer job so I can continue to eat this summer, before going back to school and resuming the TA jobs.

The bad news is, the job has a lot of perl, and I'm a python kinda guy. Though I'll live. (And it's still up in the air whether I'll have to write any, difficult directly proportional to the quality of the existing code. I'm hoping the original code at least has use strict...)

A month ago, the MPAA filed its report [PDF] with the Senate Judiciary Committee on the terrors of analog copying. I quote: "in order to help plug the hole, watermark detectors would be required in" -- are you sitting down? -- "all devices that perform analog to digital conversions." At their page Protecting Creative Works in a Digital Age, the Senate lays out the issues they'll be looking at, including briefs from corporate groups, and provides a comment form so your opinion can be heard as well. As Cory Doctorow writes: "this is a much more sweeping (and less visible) power-grab than the Hollings Bill, and it's going forward virtually unopposed. ...the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group is bare weeks away from turning over a veto on new technologies to Hollywood." Doctorow's article on the "analog hole" for the EFF does a great job of explaining the issues to non-electrical-engineers, and has many thought-provoking examples of how requiring such technology would be a giant step backwards.

'House Approves Bill for Child-Friendly Domain Names:

'The House of Representatives' approved legislation designed to cordon off a safe online 'playground' for young children. House members voted 406-2 to approve the 'Dot-Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002,' which would mandate the creation of a "dot-kids" extension within America's sovereign "dot-us" Internet domain. ... [Ernie the Attorney]

'Ernie asks why this is a bad thing, so here's the answer....'

Good read. There's quite a bit more then what I'm quoting here, and it may not be clear who's saying what, since I had to kill the formatting. In regard to the Shifted Librarian's comment: 'I haven't followed up on this to see who is defining the standards for this domain, but I can't think of a single person (let alone committee or entity) that I would trust to do this for the entire country.', I went ahead and looked up the bill, but the linking is confusing me. This should go to the text of the bill as passed, but you may need to use this page; look up "dot-kids" and pick the first result.

Simson Garfinkel: 'Just as nations now regulate their physical frontiers, so too will they regulate their electronic ones--using computer security rather than objectionable ideas as their justification.'

This won't work very well on a national level, because of the virtual impossibility of determining what a bad packet is. A virus forwarded over email could very well be a McAfee employee in Europe forwarding something found in the wild to the main McAfee labs in the US. Most other "bad" documents may have similarly importent legitimate uses. On the national scale, you just can't block on any reasonable criterion without paying a horrible price (by which I mean actual money).

Yesterday Creative Commons was announced. I just browsed the site quickly looking for a spec describing the XML format they're using. Megnut suggested that if blogging tools make it easy for people to declare their intentions and automatically generate the XML, that would be a good thing. I'm into helping if I can. First I gotta find the spec.

Let's say the spec emerges. One of [Userland, Blogger, LiveJournal] implement it and make it easy for their users to use this. Thanks to the very healthy competition in this space, the other two follow up within a week. (This assumes a simple "Creative Commons" spec, which is likely.) Bam; in two weeks, quite possibly less, a new XML standard has been rolled out to thousands of sites. In short order, tools that use this content will emerge, too.

Icky.