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OK, it's been a few days since my last update and I have added a few new articles to the Articles page. These include "How to stop spam? Don't look to legislation" which is a critical look at the impotent CAN-SPAM act passed by congress, "Attack on SCO's servers intensifies" a justly deserved attack, though definitely not legal, as well as a follow up "Attack on SCO sites at an end" and a brief mention of an SCO legal setback (YEAH!!!!), "NEC shoots for PC-sized supercomputer" a possible glimpse at the future of computers, "Microsoft wins HTML application patent" another possible influential factor on the future of the internet and application developers, "Canada deems P2P downloading legal" an outside view of the P2P phenomenon, "AOL offers discount ISP peek" an interesting attempt to stop AOL's profuse bleeding and, "When is a Solar System Not a Solar System?" an off topic (computers) article on the use of the word Solar System to refer to planetary systems that revolve around other stars. My personal opinion is that they should follow a convention like star planetary system, where star is the name of the central star of that system, i.e. the Vega planetary system or the Aries planetary system. Just my 2 cents.

Just made a slight modification to the page. I created a History page and added a link to it to the left frame. The same information used to be at the bottom of this page but people had a hard time finding it so I thought this might be a bit better. I welcome feedback so if you have any suggestions for how to make this site better please e-mail me with "pithy" comments using the e-mail link in the left frame.

Added a link to Jacksonville Links to the WebPages page.
And, although I'm certain TYAN wouldn't be too pleased, I also added a file download for the S1598 BIOS (1.06e) to the Software page. Supposedly, it's a TYAN beta BIOS from somewhere between 2000 and 2002 that makes the board more compatible with XP. All I know is my machine blue screened (BSOD) when I tried to shut down using XP or would only go to the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" when I was using BIOS version 1.06c. With 1.06e it shuts down completely. Since TYAN is not offerring it on their site I will offer it on mine. Keep in mind that you can cause permanent, irreparable damage to your BIOS and motherboard by flashing the BIOS and only undertake the process if you are willing to accept the risks and the potential loss of your motherboard. Finally, I made the fateful mistake of buying a flash BIOS upgrade from esupport.com ($25) thinking I could get support for both XP and large hard drives, greater than 36GB, by doing so. Their version completely FUBAR'd my BIOS to the point it would not read from ANY attached drive, including the floppy. Had I not had an old S1598 motherboard with the BIOS chip still in it you would not be reading this website right now. You have been warned. There is significant risk involved. Should you decide to embark on the BIOS flashing journey, follow the instructions on TYAN's web site. I am only serving up the files at this time not the instructions. I am offerring nothing more than the files. I am not offerring risk abatement nor tech support nor legal indemnification nor do I accept any responsibility for lost data or equipment damage resulting from YOUR use of this BIOS. By downloading and using this file YOU accept all responsibility for any consequences associated with the downloading or use of this file. As a final warning I would add that although I would never knowingly serve a file with a virus you are always well served by scanning any downloaded file prior to using it.
If you don't have an S1598/S1598C2 TYAN motherboard or you don't know what a TYAN motherboard is or what a motherboard is
DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS AT ALL!!!!
This is NOT something that someone who is not intimately familiar with computers and computer hardware should attempt.

Today's news is a bit slow but I did find a few articles that are definitely worth reading "The computer virus--no cures to be found" and "Scoring SCO's legal games" which have been added to the Articles page and a new information site for the most important lawsuit facing the Operating System realm, SCO vs IBM, called GROKLAW which has been added to the Information page under the heading Legal Matters Site(s). It details a great many of the arguments and explains them.

I have also come across some amazing pictures of our sun, Sol, taken by SOHO and have decided to host them here as well. I especially like this one and some of them are less spectacular than the first but good ( 1 2 3 4 5 ) and some are interesting but not as impressive ( 6 7 8 9 ). You can read more about each of them at Space.com.

Just added two articles, "SBC challenges RIAA over subpoenas" and "Senate may move on bill to ban Net-access tax", to the Articles page. I have an interest in the legal wrangling that goes on in reference to the internet because I believe that is the second most powerful force for shaping the internet we know and use. The first, of course, being the power of the dollar, that is, the money we spend on the internet and internet related goods.

I decided to remove the W3C compliance from my pages. The page looks significantly better with the frameset properties frameborder=0 and framespacing=0 and even though the page renders essentially the way I want it to in Konqueror 3.1.4-6, Mozilla Firebird 0.7, FlashPeak's Slimbrowser 3.84 build 3, Avant Browser 8.02 Build 117 11.16.2003, Epiphany 1.0.4, MyIE2 0.8.2126 and IE 6.0.2800... the W3C says you can't use those properties and be in compliance at the same time. It renders OK in Opera 7.22 build 3221 but it seems to have some trouble with the columns being equal to 25% each, none of the other browsers have that problem so I guess that is a good reaon NOT to use Opera. Since I am serving these pages from a 500MHz K6-2 home machine over a standard DSL connection with supposedly a 256Kbps upload speed, anything I can do to limit the upload bandwidth utilization (ie using frames) is an advantage I am going to use. I also have an issue with the dtd for the left frame where the validator tells me I have an end tag for element "A" without an opening tag but the tag is a quoted value in a javascript document.write( ) method in a javascript block. Thus my decision to go "rogue" and give up compliance. You may also notice I made another stylistic change to my page. Previously, I was using the "tbody" element and table "rules=groupings" property to render the horizontal lines but attempts to change the number of columns in the table proved to be far too difficult when I added the Farscape news so I removed both the property and the elements and have gone to using a simple horizontal line across all the columns in the table and I think it looks even better than before.

It may not be obvious, but I am a huge Farscape fan and I have some good news (as posted on tvguide.com).

The new Apache James e-mail server seems to be running just fine now. I upgraded to the newer version (2.2a15) and actually read some of the documentation to be sure I had the settings right. I did encounter a problem with Ximian Evolution on my Redhat Fedora Linux box but it turns out the problem was a setting in Evolution. It's amazing how one little check box can cause so much trouble.

Well I got the new email server working yesterday (sort of) it receives fine but it seems to have trouble sending to certain servers. The server is the Apache James server with pop, smtp, and nntp capabilities. Can't wait for them to get IMAP working so I can run a web interface to it. This comes up because I can now have my e-mail address on this site and use the sites domain name so you might notice the e-mail link in the left frame.

Changed all the spacing on the pages I am authoring to use the html DIV property vice the P (paragraph) property. That way I can fit more per page without having all that distracting whitespace (greyspace in this case). I still would like to change the behavior of some of the links, for example, I want to add mouseover properties to some of them and set the color defaults and timeouts for all of them. It will take some time but eventually they will all have the behavior I want. I am also considering a page or two in jsp, asp, php, and one or more that take advantage of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and possibly MySQL just for the database coding experience.

Just added four new articles, "All about Longhorn", "Tech offers Microsoft a helping hand", "Patent office to re-examine Eolas patent", and "Open source software as a viable business choice", to the Articles page. I added a somewhat older article called "Business intelligence worth betting on" as well, just because the concept is VERY interesting. Also fixed the W3C image behavior in the left frame so it will open in a new window when clicked. And, of course, I fixed the left frame so it was compliant. I converted all six images on my site to PNG format since it is open standard and free. JPG is more efficient space wise but suffers from more degradation than PNG, in my limited experience that is.

I was forced to change the link to the article "Computer Makers Sued Over Hard-Drive Size Claims" since Reuters has pulled the page from their site. I am now hosting the article myself. The same holds true for a few of the articles on the Information page since the entire site that those articles came from appears to no longer exist. Just another example of the transient nature of the Internet and a good reason NOT to use it as a reference when writing papers. I also added two new articles, "Treaty could cast shadow on Webcast rights" and "Computer-in-a-computer idea gains ground", to the Articles page. In addition, I have decided to do all my website editing tasks in MED editor, the link for which can be found on my Software page, since it gives you all the color coding for a web page and none of the extra garbage that other editors put in your page. I would also like to point out that I am making few if any changes to the articles I am hosting myself, though I do remove images from them to minimize load times and maximize my minimal upload speed, so those pages may not be W3C compliant but they are true to the original author's format and all the authors references are maintained as written, that is, I am NOT changing any content. The links on my Favorites page open in the main frame of my site because of the way I generate the page. I am not going to change that behavior but ideally they would open in a new page (or new tab for those of you who use more capable browsers). If you want to open in a new page or tab right click on a link and choose open in new window (or tab). Lastly, I would like to point out to all you Google fans out there that they have a new tool that allows you to initiate a search without opening up a browser. It's called the Google deskbar and can be found here. My personal opinion is that it could use a little work but it's not too bad. The Google Toolbar is a better deal since you get pop-up blocking (for IE) and form fillin as well.

Added two new tweak/fix pages to the Information page. One for excessive processor usage in Windows XP Pro and one for logging on automatically to a Windows XP system with more than one user defined, this is useful if you or a friend use a login other than normal to get on your machine when away from home via ssh, telnet, or ftp.

Added a new link for Crisp's Corner to the Webpages.

Added a .NET developer site to the Information page. I also added an article about an internet speed record accomplishment and the enterprise software model to the Articles page. Finally, I added a link to another Personal Webpage and validated most of my actual pages with W3C to ensure compatibility (I only validated the frameset previously).

Validated these pages on W3.org to ensure compatibility with current browsers. To validate your own page visit the W3 validation page at http://www.w3.org/ . Additionally, I changed the background colors to grey. According to research a grey background with dark grey print is easier to read and less stressful on the eyes. I only changed the background though.

Decided to change the layout of the home page slightly so that updates were more evident.