Ars Technica has an article about an intellectual property case where someone if France sued someone in the U.S. for publishing something that's protected by IP laws in France but not in the U.S. I'm a little torn on cases like this--we don't want other countries imposing their laws on us, but we also don't...
[read more]

When I first heard people calling XML the next big thing some years back, I gave it a quick look and didn't get it at all. As far as I could see, it was something that looked like HTML, except that the tag names could be anything the publisher wanted and browsers didn't know how...
[read more]

Today, Sam Ruby started redirecting from all of the feeds from his blog to the Atom 1.0 version, and on the same day, changed the links in his Atom 1.0 feed to relative URLs. NetNewsWire (the feed reader that I use) promptly began failing to resolve the links correctly, and from the comments in the...
[read more]

A few notes about the migration of a bunch of my blogs to this one:

WordPress has a script that does a fantastic job of importing data from Blogger-powered blogs. I have one recommendation however for anyone combining multiple blogs. If you wish to put all (or most) of the entries from one Blogger blo...
[read more]

Welcome to my new weblog, Alpha Gecko. This blog combines a number of old blogs into one (thus all of the content before the welcome entry). Why combine?

Many (most...maybe all) of my narrowly focused blogs were not updated often enough to live very well on their own.

I can easily create a place fo...
[read more]

If you run a web server, you probably have some forms on it, and if you have forms, you probably get spammed through them. Up until yesterday, I used to get 5 or 6 spam messages a day sent to me through my own press room contact form. How dumb are these people? The messages...
[read more]

It has again been suggested on the AtomPub mailing list that a link relation of "stylesheet" be used to point to an XSL template that could be used to transform a feed to some other format. This lead back to the question of what the link element was designed for. Unfortunately, we didn't nail the...
[read more]

The CSS Trappist Monastery got a few more design submissions yesterday, along with a boat load (think Titanic, but hold the iceberg!) of traffic after it got blogged over at MetaFilter. To those who questioned the seriousness of the site in the comments there, yes, it's completely serious. To those who commented on the crappy...
[read more]

A while back, I overhauled my shopping cart system so that it guided the user through the process better. I'll admit that I didn't bother tracking the difference that it made, but my general impression was that the change was for the better. Today, I realized that I could streamline the checkout process further, and...
[read more]

AOL and Yahoo! are implementing a new system which will guarantee a free ride past their spam filters for senders who pay something in the neighborhood of a penny for each email they send. As long as they don't alter their spam filters in ways that generate more false positives to try to force people...
[read more]