Domain: wox.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to wox.org.
Comments · 53
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Re:bug sorted?
Here are DVD labels for FC5 LINK
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Just SciFi, or can I suggest "fantasy"?
Anything by Kim Wilkins, Freda Warrington, Storm Constantine or even Starhawk should be fairly interesting to anyone who's interested in depth to their characters. The genre is (mostly) "Dark Fantasy".
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Re:Djdns to the rescue?
bind 8,9 and djbdns
original
update
You might want to check out some of his other stuff, too - http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ -
Re:If you need to Kompile it yourself...Well, I'm going to guess that the Sorcerer page was defaced, though I can't be sure. Looks as though The Hype page (which only contains screenshots) was edited to contain this message:
Feel free to peruse our humble eye candy. The backgrounds, themes, icon sets, so on are freely available to you so that you may use them in your GUI of choice. Of course, they only really feel right if you're using them with non-free software like Sorcerer.
The link leads to a blog by a former developer about how the project screwed itself, and the history of Sourcemage.
I've left the project and taken the artwork that I (and dogalope, as he requested it of me) hacked up with me. Later kids.The license. I don't care if this is the way that anybody else remembers things
... I know what I perceived as happening when the fit hit the shan. A while after Sorcerer experienced a rather substantial slashdotting, people started to become annoyed for much the same reasons that I am. Things were changing radically overnight, shit was breaking, fire and brimstone, cats sleeping with dogs, et cetera. Since everything was licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License at that point, some of those that were hollaring the loudest about the problems basically told the sole coder to fuck off ... they were going to fork the codebase and take off running with thier own distro. It was originally called Lunar Penguin, but it's been shortened to just Lunar nowadays. So what happened?
Aforementioned sole coder seemingly went batshit. Nuked any trace of SGL and put up a nasty note in its place that explained that anybody that ever forks a codebase should roughly fuck off and die. Where did this leave the folks that did not run off with the coder's code? -
Re:If you need to Kompile it yourself...
Sorcerer [1] has an estimated time left to compile.
[1] http://sorcerer.wox.org/ -
Goths and Geeks.Actuallly a lot of Goths ARE geeks.
Geeks come in many stripes. Check out Dragon*Con in Atlanta and their new Gothic Journeys programming track for confirmation.
At D*C 2004 acoustic Goth musician, artist, writer and filmmaker Voltaire mistakenly claimed that Goth was NOT really a 'geek thing'. The other members of the panel, and most of the audience immediately disagreed and Voltaire (who has an EP of Star Trek parody songs, btw) immediately conceded the point.
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Who's Who
Ugh. Not the best written Slashdot entry.
Larry Osterman -- former Microsoft guy; someone forwarded him a post to Bugtraq.
Michael Zalewski -- absurdly brilliant security engineer out of Poland. Did the pioneering work on visualizing randomness of network stacks, passively identifying operating systems on networks, and way way more.
Nothing bad against Larry. But this is all Zalewski :-)
--Dan -
Re:Menus
Sorcerer allready have something along these lines.
http://sorcerer.wox.org/ -
Gentoo is not the only source based distro
In descending order of (my) preference:
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LFS vs Source Based Distros
I don't consider myself a guru, but 'I would say I know enough'. I've done the whole LFS/source based distro thing for a while now so here's my take on things.
I think it's important to make a distinction between LFS and Gentoo/SGL/Sourcemage/Lunar/uPM. LFS is a book that describes the process of producing a minimal linux installation that is capable of building software. The source based distros provide scripts/tools that automate the build process for you. Which you choose is largly dependent on your needs.
It seems from your post that you are interested in learning what makes GNU/Linux tick: what files do what, what software is required and what's bloat, and generally what goes on under the hood. For this I found that there is no substitute for LFS, it took me from Mandrake newbie to power-user in a couple of months. This was a good few years ago and at the time there was no BLFS, I feel that that actually helped me with learning the stuff. LFS held my hand through the installation of the base system, but after that I was forced to RTFM, making my own mistakes and learning from them. After 2 or 3 months I had a fully functional system with KDE, apache and a bunch of other stuff. I also had learned many times more than I did in over a year of using mandrake.
My new shiney LFS system was a joy to behold, but it became a real pain to maintain. I found that an unacceptable portion of my time was spent updating software manually and it was effecting my productivity. This was around the same time that SGL first appeared on freshmeat. I had tinkered for a while with LFSmake but found that it wasn't flexible enough. SGL was wonderful, I traded a small amount of the total control that LFS gave me for a system that saved me 80% of the time I was spending on keeping my system up to date.
Unfortunatley there was a bit of a storm in the SGL teacup which resulted in SGL going offline for a while and 2 forks appearing (Sourcemage and Lunar). Initially I went with Sourcemage but I found that after a while it became too unstable and as I was using it for work I couldn't have that (it may well be better now, I've not checked it out in a while). I switched to Lunar and am still using it now. It doesn't provide the same education as LFS, but once that knowledge is aquired it provides a much more efficient means of installing/maintaining your system.
I should say that I did once try gentoo but I was put off by the complete lack of an installer. You have to jump through too many hoops (and triangles, hexagons and other polyhedra) to get the thing up and running. uPM also looks interesting but is still in a relativly eary stage of development.
To sum it all up: LFS cannot be beaten for it's educational value, but for day-to-day use Lunar suits me best.
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Easy
The Japanese do it any time a quake hits Yokohama. Yokohama's Landmark Tower, 70 stories, has a fully suspended base, computer controlled, that reacts to earthquakes by countering movements in order to offset jolts that would bring ordinary buildings down. Why raise the bridge, when you can just as easily lower the water.
If an active base works for something this large, it can be scaled down, I'm sure. -
Re:SWT binaries?You actually don't have to rebuild anything but you do need to test it on all platforms. However, there are more then three UI toolkits:
- Win32
- GTK2
- Motif
- MacOS (not sure which API)
- Photon
Just for some eye candy - here is Eclipse running on QNX with the CDT:
http://qnx.wox.org/qnx/screenshots/ide2/
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Kyle back at Sorcerer?
It looks like Kyle, the original Sorcerer developer is maintaining it again at the original url sorcerer.wox.org. I gave up on following that soap opera a while ago, but what did I miss? Is Kyle back to running his Sorcery tree?
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Why Lunar?
Mainly because Lunar Linux and Sorcerer GNU/Linux aren't quite as difficult as Gentoo. More of the installation chores are automated. For example, while Gentoo expects the user to manually chroot and copy the system over from the CD to the root partition, Lunar and Sorcerer do this automatically. Also, optimisation is broken down into a series of easy-to-grasp choices (the optimisation setting for really fucking fast code is labelled clearly) rather than expecting the user to muck around with CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS.
Best of all, IMHO, it's feasible (though almost time-consuming as installing software through FreeBSD's ports system) to install Lunar on a machine using a dialup. As far as difficulty is concerned, I'd class Lunar between Slackware and Gentoo. Hope this helps a bit.
--
St. Matthew, Patron Saint of Cheeky Programmers -
Re:source based distros make no sense
Here's good stuff about source based distributions, and comparisons to binary based. Basicly, if you install your operating system "once" and use it for say atleast 12 months, the cycles used during setup are not "wasted" - the bonus you get from it during the lifetime of your setup is significant.
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Alternatives to Binary distro's
Get a source distro! Nothing beats a compile-yourself distribution optimized for your system in every ELF:
lunar linux
Gentoo
Rock linux
Sorcerer linux
SourceMage
In the end... binary distro's are just like windoze -
Re:7 is about right...
Yeah! And IE fails to show my riddles page but shows an error message instead. So IE must be bad, right?
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Re:Mirror picture
Hey! It's the same pic!
Here's the real _mirror_ picture. -
My riddles page...
I have put up my own little riddles page. Time for a little slashdotting...
;) -
Re:some selected answers:
Your solution to the egg dropping problem is wrong. Check out my riddles site for a correct solution (and a few extra riddles).
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The risks of fly-by-wire: Crash Video
In 1988, a brand-new Air France Airbus A320 crashed into trees during maneuver at an airshow in France. The aircraft failed to gain height during a low-altitude pass with the landing gear extended. Three of the 136 passengers were killed.
The A320 was the first civilian aircraft to use fly-by-wire, which replaces conventional stick and rudder control with 3 computers and miles of electronic cables. The pilot uses a game-like joystick to his side.
Some good video of this accident is available here, among other places.
Ultimately, the pilot was blamed (when in doubt, claim human error). But you have to wonder what role the computer played in this crash, even if it simply confused the pilots or acted differently than they expected. Apparently, this wasn't the only A320 crash where its flight control system was suspected, either.
It's interesting to note that Airbus has a different design philosophy vis-à-vis fly-by-wire: they believe the computer should restrict the pilots from putting any undue stresses on the airframe, or doing anything that the system thinks is "unsafe". This is contrary to Boeing, who program their computers to allow even the most dangerous manuever, with the intention of giving the pilots ultimate control over the aircraft.
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Re:mirror
I have setup Another mirror here
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Re:More RPMs for more things more timely?
I could not agree more. Gentoo is a great distro. It is simple and easy to understand the package management. However, I have found that Sorcerer Linux has a slightly better package management system and it is a little bit easier to work with.
But regardless of which one of these you use, I would totally agree that it is much easier to understand than other mega-distros (RedHat, Mandrake, SUSE, etc) not to mention it's a tiny install.
Scott -
Re:AnanovaSpaceballs made fun of everything in hip culture at the time. The character Vinny the Gangster, Pizza the Hut's sidekick, is one of the more subtle spoof of Max Headroom.
Maybe I'm wrong though, I never really saw much of Max Headroom, but this post made me go watch Spaceballs again. I'm so glad I bought the DVD!
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The Content-Type HTTP header
Even if the msie-crash.txt file was named msie-crash.html but there was "Content-Type: text/plain" in HTTP response headers it should be displayed as plain text, and in fact I was sure that this IE bug is only present in exactly such a situations. I'm really surprised that if MIME type and file suffix (the main data type indicator in MS software) tell the IE that it's a plain text, it still tries to render it as HTML.
It's a very serious problem if you want to make an HTML tutorial website, having links such as: http://tutorial.host/example/foo.html and http://tutorial.host/source/foo.html where both foo.html are just symlinks to the same file but you set up your web server to send "Content-Type: text/html" under
/example to show how it looks like and "Content-Type: text/plain" under /source to show the source.Not to mention problems with sending different MIME type to force the download and saving of file instead of displaying it (try downloading a 100MB flat text database when your browser wants to display it first). It's a serious problem and making all of the workarounds can be often a real pain in the ass (like when you have to display HTML source, as HTML page including HTML source with s/</</g etc.) because 90% of "web browsers" out there can't even understand a damned Content-Type header, the most important HTTP response header, present in six years old HTTP 1.0 specification (and with the Web, six years are the whole ages), and I'm sure it was used in pre-RFC, pre-1.0 HTTP much earlier (if anyone knows, I'll be glad to hear about the real age of Content-Type header - thanks).
OK, I'm glad you touched this subject. For those who don't know about it, let me quote HTTP 1.0 from May 1996: "HTTP uses Internet Media Types in the Content-Type header field in order to provide open and extensible data typing." and HTTP 1.1 from June 1999: "HTTP uses Internet Media Types in the Content-Type and Accept header fields in order to provide open and extensible data typing and type negotiation." It's not used without an important reason.
See also:
- RFC 1341 - MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions): Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies (June 1992)
- RFC 1945 - HTTP/1.0 (May 1996) Sections: 10.5 Content-Type, 7.2.1 Type, 3.6 Media Types
- RFC 2616 - HTTP/1.1 (June 1999) Sections: 14.17 Content-Type, 7.2.1 Type, 3.7 Media Types
Very serious bug, I wonder when are they planning to fix it.
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Re:The article is missinformed.IE is a better browser?!
Well, IE is technically not a browser at all. To call something a "web browser" it must at least adhere to RFC 2616. Well, MSIE does not. To quote the RFC:
7.2.1 Type
[snip]
Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body. If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the resource. [snipped]
Thus, a browser MUST adhere the Content-Type if it's given.
OK, now load IE and try to visit this site, or this site (warning: browser will crash). Note that the content type of these sites is text/plain and thus the text should simply be displayed on screen.
Therefore, IE6 is not a "web browser" and thus cannot be the "better" browser. -
Re:The article is missinformed.IE is a better browser?!
Well, IE is technically not a browser at all. To call something a "web browser" it must at least adhere to RFC 2616. Well, MSIE does not. To quote the RFC:
7.2.1 Type
[snip]
Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body. If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the resource. [snipped]
Thus, a browser MUST adhere the Content-Type if it's given.
OK, now load IE and try to visit this site, or this site (warning: browser will crash). Note that the content type of these sites is text/plain and thus the text should simply be displayed on screen.
Therefore, IE6 is not a "web browser" and thus cannot be the "better" browser. -
Re:You know...No browser better that IE6?!
Well, IE is technically not a browser at all. To call something a "web browser" it must at least adhere to RFC 2616. Well, MSIE does not. To quote the RFC:
7.2.1 Type
[snip]
Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body. If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the resource. [snipped]
Thus, a browser MUST adhere the Content-Type if it's given.
OK, now load IE and try to visit this site, or this site (warning: browser will crash). Note that the content type of these sites is text/plain and thus the text should simply be displayed on screen.
Therefore, IE6 is not a "web browser" and thus the best browser for the M$Win platform is Mozilla. -
Re:You know...No browser better that IE6?!
Well, IE is technically not a browser at all. To call something a "web browser" it must at least adhere to RFC 2616. Well, MSIE does not. To quote the RFC:
7.2.1 Type
[snip]
Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body. If and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the resource. [snipped]
Thus, a browser MUST adhere the Content-Type if it's given.
OK, now load IE and try to visit this site, or this site (warning: browser will crash). Note that the content type of these sites is text/plain and thus the text should simply be displayed on screen.
Therefore, IE6 is not a "web browser" and thus the best browser for the M$Win platform is Mozilla. -
Re:Sorcerer and LFSFirst there was Sorcerer/GNU. About a month ago the maintainer of the original Sorcerer went slightly wierd and pulled the project off the web. Then the community tried to save sorcerer and forked sorcerer at least two times: sorcerylinux and lunar-linux.org. Now the original maintainer is back confusing matters even more. Sorcerer/GNU seems to be coming back and has become Sorcerer.
It used to be a great distro, but it turned into the greatest (and saddest) web-soap ever.
I hope Kyle gets back to coding so he can start building the killer distro Sorcerer could be.
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Re:Tonight, I celebrate my love for you!!
Hello Chairman Mao, In your honor I have created an ASCII portrait of you. While I intended to post this likeness of you to Slashdot, I was prevented from completing this action because of the lameness filter. Thus I would encourage you to visit the page I have created to view this work of art.
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Re:Explain...
You bring up good points. I'll work on a "New to Sorcerer" FAQ section for the site. We've just reorganized after the leader of the project went awall. He just took off without helping to ensure continued development. So we have reorganized a new team and have been trying to get the website together with some better documentation. This FAQ is from the old Sorcerer site, which is back up after being taken down by Kyle, the former leader of the project. We'll probably have more on the new site soon.
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Re:with apologies to Douglas Adams...I have the series in VCD format...
Made me take a look at the first episode (out of 6). Cut out a 30 second clip of the scene of which you speak. It looks to me like sort of a yellow tinted goldfish. Take a look if you wish. -
Uprising Politechs...
It seems that more and more people are using politics to spur linux distributions. Spinning-off a GPL project is all well and good; but do you have to wish ill on the original project? It doesn't seem like this is different enough from smoothwall yet to indicate a new distribution. On a similar topic, has anyone checked out Sorcerer GNU/Linux lately? Seems this is happenning a bit too much for my taste. I'm all for things like K12LTSP which don't attempt to take anything from there originators, yet add productive/usefull features for anyone in a specialized nitche.
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Re:Disgruntled?
I think the disgruntled people are at the Sorcerer site http://sorcerer.wox.org/ where the home page gives the blow-by-blow account.
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Second best?
You've bashed Opera and Netscape. What browser do you think is better than Mozilla? Mosaic? Lynx? HotJava? Links?
Don't say IE, because IE does not comply with RFC2616 HTTP/1.1 content-type header (it shows text/plain documents as if they were text/html documents). See my site for a demo. -
Re:this is an enterprise ready os?If your mobo has a removable cache chip (very common in the time period that I'm guessing your board is from), try removing it. If it's not removable, check your BIOS for an option to diable it. This *might* fix the random rebooting problem.
From the tech experience that I have, a machine that reboots randomly generally has a bad cache. If this is the problem, I'm at a loss to explain why it would show up in kernel 2.4.17. Anyway, it's just an idea.
Oh, and I haven't tried Linux From Scratch, but I use Sorcerer GNU/Linux, and even though I think the spell metaphor is cheesy, my system (475 AMD K6-2, 512MB RAM) is much faster than it is with any of the several binary distos I've tried. I'd be interested to see an in-depth article comparing the "compile everything" distros.
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From the article
>In a nutshell, the Linux community must develop both
>a quality GUI system for configuring hardware and a
>standardized system for installing and removing
>software. Developers must be persuaded to provide
>Linux drivers, especially for "Winmodems," and to
>port their software products to Linux.
Agreed on the need for a GUI "system properties" type hardware configurator. KDE's hardware configuration leaves something to be desired. (Specifically, it doesn't offer much in the way of actual configuration options. If you want to do any non-trivial fiddling with your hardware, you might as well go straight to a console, 'cause you're going to need it anyway.)
As for installing and removing software, it would be good to have a more-or-less universal software management system. The two current contenders are RPM and Debian's apt-get, of course. Both have advantages and disadvantages -- for example, it's more common to find fresh builds of programs in .rpm format; but apt-get handles dependencies more gracefully. Perhaps what we need is a synthesis of the two, which would use the .rpm file format and apt-get's syntax. Instead of having a centralized package depot like apt, or many randomly distributed files like rpm, you strike a balance: maintain a server that lists current URLs for packages, which would be hosted on the project's page instead of centrally. Typing "rpm-get install Snicklefritz1.3" would check the central database for current URLs of the RPM and its dependency BruberMIPS0.9.5, download them from two different sites and install them. (Note: the "spell" system in Sorcery GNU/Linux works kind of like this, only it downloads source and auto-compiles instead of downloading pre-built packages.)
In addition to persuading companies to release Linux drivers for their hardware, we also need to convince them to open-source the drivers. I seem to recall ATI already did this. There is even less reason than usual to make your driver proprietary; after all, the driver is useless without the hardware to match. People would still have to buy the product in order to get use out of the driver, and in the meantime students could study the driver code to learn about low-level hardware interaction. And stuff. (nVidia, are you listening?) -
Source-based Distros?
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MSIE Bugs
Nothing, and I mean nothing, approaches the stability and conformance to standards of IE on Windows in the Linux mix.
For example, rendering a file declared by HTTP as being text/plain as a HTML document, that if using JS can easily cause MSIE to crash.
Or, when a page tries to link to a page with the nonstandard backslash character in the URL, MSIE turns it into a forward slash.
In addition, by supporting many errors in HTML, MSIE makes web developers create nonstandard HTML that makes most browsers render not as intended. -
MSIE Bugs
Nothing, and I mean nothing, approaches the stability and conformance to standards of IE on Windows in the Linux mix.
For example, rendering a file declared by HTTP as being text/plain as a HTML document, that if using JS can easily cause MSIE to crash.
Or, when a page tries to link to a page with the nonstandard backslash character in the URL, MSIE turns it into a forward slash.
In addition, by supporting many errors in HTML, MSIE makes web developers create nonstandard HTML that makes most browsers render not as intended. -
MSIE Bugs
Nothing, and I mean nothing, approaches the stability and conformance to standards of IE on Windows in the Linux mix.
For example, rendering a file declared by HTTP as being text/plain as a HTML document, that if using JS can easily cause MSIE to crash.
Or, when a page tries to link to a page with the nonstandard backslash character in the URL, MSIE turns it into a forward slash.
In addition, by supporting many errors in HTML, MSIE makes web developers create nonstandard HTML that makes most browsers render not as intended. -
Re:Not a fair classification.
While it was true when DVD was first released that most DVD movies were re-releases of VHS with virtually no additional content, many of the new DVD's have great features. The Imax movie Everest, for instance, is available on DVD, and has an additionaly one hour documentary on the making of the film as well as deleted footage, and an interactive map.
As for the legality of copying DVD's to your computer, the easiest way to do it is legal. At my website, my guide provides an entirely legal method. The main issue is using DeCSS, which is illegal because it circumvents copyright protection. But the alternative is to manually verify the DVD by beginning playback in a DVD player program, pausing it, then begin ripping. -
software vs. movies
I think the main difference between a piece of software and a game is how much interactivity is offered. The first CD-ROM games that I played, back in the early 1990's, were "Spaceship Warlock" and "Hell Cab". While these were computer games and as such would be classified as software, they interactive experience entailed essentially clicking on things every once in a while and the rest of the time watching the story unfold.
The main difference between "playing" these games and watching a movie was the fact that they had a "choose your own adventure" style of playback; i.e. you could dictate the basic actions of the main character. So I would conclude that most DVD movies are indeed movies and not pieces of software, because they are mostly non-interactive, and for the most part, people by them to watch the movie and not play the silly little games included.
I think my sig has never been more appropriate than now. Check out my site if you want to know about backing up DVD's. -
FreeBSD ports and Sorcerer
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Re:Try this at home (or "not just a threat, also a
Try this too:
If a page is called '.txt' and mime-type is text/plain, MSIE will *still* treat it as HTML, if it "looks like" HTML source.
See this for example, or if you want to be naughtier, try this for a crash. -
Re:Try this at home (or "not just a threat, also a
Try this too:
If a page is called '.txt' and mime-type is text/plain, MSIE will *still* treat it as HTML, if it "looks like" HTML source.
See this for example, or if you want to be naughtier, try this for a crash. -
Re:fast development
Maybe you should use SGL instead.....
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Re:Amazing...
Hey idiot, it's not nice to call people idiots. Calm down. Sorcerer
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Big Brother
There is/was Big Brother Web Stats (a cgi written in C) but it appears to be dead to me (search BBStats on freshmeat). On my site, I like to use BBClone. BBclone doesn't use a database and is written in PHP. It works entirely on any webserver that has PHP support. (Search BBClone on Freshmeat). You can see BBClone in action on my site here.