Of course, this means you have to login before posting a comment. But really, that isn't too hard, is it?<Location /mt/mt-comments.cgi> AuthUserFile /home/service/httpd_data/main/data/htpasswd/mt AuthName "username: no, password: spam" AuthType Basic require valid-user </Location>
Joe Gregorio: lacking any other indications, a browser will submit the data from a form using the same character encoding that the page is served in.
Surfing the web for abandoned sites is always great fun. It's a bit like cleaning up an attic and finding homework papers from highschool. Take this site on Tamagotchis and other digital pets. It was last updated in December 1997, more than six years ago. I imagine the writer was a teenager back then. By now, he or she must have finished her or his education and might have become a parent. In any case, I bet there are other things on his or her mind by now than "virtual pets" (which were a short-lived craze in ca. 1997, anyway). But the page is still there.
Even cooler (or spookier, for that matter) are the audioblog test messages whytheluckystiff found. Browse through his collections of voices of people who don't have anything to say (it doesn't get more profound than "... and maybe I'll use this service") but say it nonetheless. A true blast from the past. And it's only one year ago...
Free speech issues around the infamous Chinese Internet censorship tend to frustrate and confuse me. There doesn't seem to be a logical and coherent set of criteria for the blocking of foreign websites in the Middle Kingdom.
Another blog I maintain on ohlig.info (not this one) is apparently partially blocked in the People's Republic of China. The strange thing about it: This blog is entirely private and may be of interest for friends and family members alone, containing photos of my baby daughter and posts about our family life. I don't have a clue why the photos in this blog get blocked in China.
But I'm not alone. Among the blogs that don't pass the Great Firewall of China are all major blogging services such as Blogger or TypePad, the hosted weblog service from the people that made MovableType (a rather carefully-worded comment on the blocking by the company itself is available on their pages). This Chinese crack-down on blogs has even lead to a solidarity movement called "Adopt a Blog: Support Free Speech".
Truely annoying. Latest in a long row of blocked (but mostly harmless) sites are some domains (not all, mind you) of Axel's weblog from China.
Unicode has its shortcomings with Asian scripts, but it's currently the best we have to display characters of many non-European (and many European, for that matter) languages on web pages. Unfortunately, large amounts of the Web aren't ready for Unicode yet, Wikipedia being a prominent example. This basically means that Asian scripts or other non-Latin scripts, when entered as Unicode, get displayed as "??".
There is a way to work around that, however, even if the web page uses an ancient encoding scheme: Just use HTML entities for your Unicode characters. For some reason I don't quite understand, they ALWAYS get displayed correctly in modern browsers, regardless of the encoding set by the server. Of course, looking up the correct values is a tedious task. But don't let that stop you: The Unicode Characters to HTML Character Entities Converter will do it for you. What a gem! Life can be wonderful with the right tools online.We're able to get the "copyright" information from Apple's XML, so that means we know the record label that released each song (musicians usually don't even control the copyrights to their own work). Since we have the label names, we can check those against a list like the one maintained by RIAA Radar to see if that label is an RIAA member or--even worse--one of the Big 5 labels that runs the RIAA. Once we make this script developers can integrate it into filesharing clients, and we'll always know what we should and shouldn't pay for.
"a construction site", but bknr.net, a wonderful web-thingy done in LISP, already looks cool enough to get excited. They have a del.icio.us clone, blogs, an object store, images, a wiki and a bunch of other features. Best of all, they generate RSS feeds for almost everything on there on the fly. I especially recommend the excellent comic-strips RSS feed. Subscribe!
