Are aliens hiding their messages? – an article to be published in New Scientist speculates that interstellar transmissions might be using a method of encryption that hides the sender’s location. Sounds like a way to avoid a Forge of God scenario (here’s a review).
(link through Roland Piquepaille‘s weblog.
Month: May 2003
Categories
Spybot
PC Magazine recommends Spybot Search & Destroy. Is is better than Adaware (which is horribly slow, doesn’t delete the CE dialer that taunts me in the Programs menu and the C drive…)?
Of course, I’d probably not need any of this if my girlfriend was using freeBSD and browsing the web with lynx, but this is far from the case. She uses an old PC running Windows 98, applications like Odigo (contains Spyware) and Hotbar (IS spyware – also apparently unstable, so I uninstalled it), and she needs to use IE because most of the sites she visits don’t work that well otherwise).
Daniel Glazman outlines his plans for Composer, the Mozilla HTML editor, which he’ll be maintaining in the post-application-suite world.
Glazman is also responsible for this supercool example of tabbed navigation using only CSS 3 selectors (that page, on the W3C site, is proudly HTML 4.01 – it doesn’t even close it’s <p> tags…)
If a site has an RSS feed, it’s becoming standard to stick a link to it in the <head> section of the webpage, using markup like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://corky.net/dotan/log/index.rdf" />
Apparently, I deleted that markup when I re-did my site. Oops. I should fix this sometime.
It’s easy to find that link if you’re using Mozilla and have set it to show the Site Navigation Bar (look under View > Show/Hide). It’s easy to get at with Javascript on Mozilla (and probably on IE6 too), the only question is, what to do with it?
Well, Radio Userland has a feature which let’s you subscribe (in Radio) to an RSS feed by clicking a link (the standard icon for that is an “XML Coffee Cup”. 
Other aggregators (like SharpReader, which I’m using now) support this feature, or similar methods. There’s an online service that acts as an adaptor, letting you subscribe with a click through any of the methods it knows.
Here’s a bookmarklet (favlet? nah.) that can find the link markup and subscribe to the RSS feed. There are two versions, one for the XML Coffee Cup protocol, and another for the adaptor service.
Update: apparently, Marp Pilgrim already wrote pretty much the same thing, except his code is a bit more anal. It’s not as if this is hard. If my stuff doesn’t work, try his.
Categories
Thanks, Phil
In response to my previous entry, Phil Ringnalda posted a comment here explaining that there’s an undocumented Movable Type option that does what I want (print your timezone in the format required by RFC822).
Phil says he prefers to use the 3 letter code for a timezone (i.e, PDT), and talks about the problem of daylight savings time and your server being in another timezone. However, I’m in Israel, and I think 3 letter codes only cover the USA; my server is in the same timezone as I am, so no problem there, but daylight savings time is determined by government fiat and coalition-wrangling (the religious parties traditionally want to early, apparently to make life easier for those observing the early morning rituals related to the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur, or something like that). So my timezone here isn’t really scientific, it’s political. Oy.
Also, using trackback takes some getting used to. I hit Phil’s site with multiple pings while copyediting this entry.