General

For the last few days I’ve been tearing my hair out over a piece of code. I’m able to send HTTP requests and receive the reply if I specify connection: close, but it doesn’t work if I try to use keep-alive.

This is really nasty.

IE & IIS are handling TCP/IP connections in a non-standard way to speed up connections when both are used together. Normally a web browser does a handshaking & synchronization sequence before sending the request, but IE will send the request immediately, which IIS will respond to, while other servers will reject it, and it will then fall back to a standard handshaking sequence.

I’m not sure if the Mac version of IE does this as well, but I doubt if it does, since it doesn’t display any enhanced performance with IIS servers.

Totally cool—the Fink folks have added three RSS feeds:

Fink Project News

New Fink Packages (Stable)

New Fink Packages (Unstable) [inessential.com]

The RIAA has a website, musicunited.org, which among other obviously misleading statements has a page on the law that strongly implies visiting a copyrighted web page could get you a $250,000 fine and five years in jail.

What the Courts Have to Say About Illegal Uploading and Downloading

[…] “When a person browses a website, and by so doing displays the [copyrighted] Handbook, a copy of the Handbook is made in the computer’s random access memory (RAM), to permit viewing of the material. And in making a copy, even a temporary one, the person who browsed infringes the copyright. […]”

[…] If you do not have legal permission, and you go ahead and copy or distribute copyrighted music anyway, you can be prosecuted in criminal court and/or sued for damages in civil court. Criminal penalties for first-time offenders can be as high as five years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

Of course they omit the fact that these criminal penalties are only for those who have willfully copied more than $1000 (retail value) of material in a 180-day period. And I really hope the RAM argument is invalid; I much prefer the server makes a copy theory.

[Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]

This proves how clueless the RIAA really is. They just don’t get technology, as we’ve seen by how frequently their site has been hacked.

Test your Hidden Bias. Tolerance.org has a set of Java-based tests designed to shed light on personal hidden biases w.r.t. race, gender, sexuality, and body image. Your results may surprise you. See also this New York Times article mentioning these tests and more rigorous studies. [metafilter.com]

Unfortunately these tests don’t seem to work either in Chimera or OmniWeb.

I’ve enhanced the RSS feeds for MacMegasite and WorldBeatPlanet. Both have been updated to RSS 0.92 instead of 0.91 and both now have category & pubDate entries.

I’m trying to decide whether to ultimately move to RSS 1.0 or 2.0. RSS 1.0 looks like it would be a big pain. 2.0 looks very easy, although it doesn’t seem to be very widely supported.

I’m now listed in the GeoURL ICBM Address Server. For a RSS feed of sites near me (currently none), subscribe to http://geourl.org/rss091/?p=http://www.mc-development.com/~mike.

I just checked the report for MacMegasite and I notice that NetNewsWire Lite is the 3rd most popular browser:

With some 14 million subscribers, AT&T Broadband is emerging as the latest prize in the
fight between Internet giants Microsoft and AOL Time Warner, which soon will lose CEO
Gerald Levin, who has announced his pending retirement. [osOpinion]

This is bad. I may have to go back to BellSouth DSL, which was pretty bad, or find a different cable or DSL option.

(The Segway may not be the cause of these things, but it might be, and it seems like it’s worth writing about.)

Learning to use the Segway is not difficult, but it is rather unnatural. Instead of learning new skills, it requires that you forget old ones. You need to forget how to balance, something you’ve been doing subconciously ever since you learned to walk. And in doing so, it seems, you’re almost brought back before you did learn to walk.

Everyone who first rides a Segway starts smiling. There’s something irrestible about forgetting, about this new extension of your body sparing you all that work. So you just enjoy the moment and play. It makes the Segway fun, but also irresistable. [Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]

Cool! I’d love to try one. A Segway would be the ideal way to get around here with the new downtown redevelopment project building a pedestrian friendly “main street” on Wilton Drive.