Category: Internet


  • The answer to the differences between the wiki and browserchecker.xml according to Blackboard? It is very much intentional to leave unsupported browsers in the browserchecker.xml just in case those unsupported browsers do still work. Also in the answer was that in general only the two most recent stable browsers will be kept as supported. Since…

  • The below text is from a ticket I opened with Blackboard this morning. I used this unix command to dump a list of all supported browsers from the browserchecker.xml. grep -A 1 ‘supported=”true”‘ serverconfs/browserchecker.xml | grep descript | awk -F\> ‘{print $2}’ | awk -F\< ‘{print $1}’ The list of supported browsers does not match…

  • When To Upgrade

    After Firefox just upgraded, I noticed it did a check to on the compatibility of the Add-Ons I have. Should any be incompatible, then the add-on gets disabled. The rationale being, “Add-Ons which do not work under the current version should not be enabled.” Seems like I as the user of the software really ought…

  • How Google Works

    A few basics of Search Engine Optimization came up at brunch a couple weekends ago. A few of the key points were that its not just important to have good information, but one has to have good metadata, good incoming links to raise authority, and no nefarious techniques. When I saw this, I immediate thought…

  • The upgrade to WordPress 3.0 doesn’t appear to have broken anything? Good. It pointed out my Tarski theme was a point revision behind. That has also been upgraded. No apparent problems. No need to go mess with code. That makes me verrrry happy.

  • It’s like the Electronic Frontier Foundation is Captain Obvious? It says web-sites fingerprint browsers to identify the users. The website anonymously logged the configuration and version information from each participant’s operating system, browser, and browser plug-ins — information that websites routinely access each time you visit — and compared that information to a database of…

  • One of the out of session discussions at the Georgia Baha’i School yesterday morning was on how bad online media are for us. (I’ve boiled down what was described to neurotransmitters.) Dopamine: Anticipation with each click will lead to a reward leads to addiction-like behaviors. Oxytocin: Lack of touch leads to feeling lonely. For those…

  • My hosting service, Dreamhost, announced they would be upgrading every one off PHP4. Only people using old software would get bitten. I’ve kept my software current, so I wasn’t worried. Only this of all eight domains started showing an HTTP 500 error (Internal Server Error). I dreaded having to go through and determine why. Turns…

  • I noticed today comment spammers are getting craftier. Some of the comments I approved I now believe to be comment spam. Perhaps they are probing to later deliver the real deal? They use the name of people who legitimately commented. Because the scammer cannot see the real email commenter’s address, they use a different one…