Someone told me that the text on a page I made was coming out too light, which I hadn’t seen when testing that page in Mozilla, Safari, or Opera. Yet in IE some text on that page was very light gray. The page uses several style sheets, and it turned out there was a line with a color attribute commented out using ‘//’ in one of those style sheets. When I removed that line, it came out right in IE. No other browser was affected by it.

I’m having a very weird problem with an XCode project. It’s a converted PowerPlant project. I’m able to build it on both of my machines, both interactively from inside XCode and using the xcodebuild command line tool.

When one of the other programmers tries to build it on his machine, he can build it from inside XCode but when he uses xcodebuild he gets lots of files not found (all of the PowerPlant headers included from the prefix header). We’ve verified that he’s set up the CodeWarrior source tree in XCode and all of the paths are correct in the project. In the logs from his computer, I see it’s failing on the ‘ProcessPCH++’ step, which isn’t even being run on my machine. Yet he’s able to build successfully from within XCode.

Any ideas?

I suddenly started having trouble with Movable Type yesterday and I was no longer to post entries, so I’ve moved this weblog to WordPress. Importing entries from MT was fast & painless. I’m still tweaking the stylesheet a bit. The old weblog can still be seen here.

From the Miami Herald: Within a few months, 4,500 Broward students — some as young as 9 — will be on the front lines of a technological revolution in the county’s classrooms. Each student in the pilot project will be issued an Apple iBook computer.

The School Board has spent $5 million from its capital budget for the iBooks — the first step toward putting a personal computer in the hands of every child in grades 3 to 12.

School officials caution they’re still working on details of what’s called one-to-one computing, which is planned for Monarch High in Coconut Creek, Miramar High, Attucks Middle in Hollywood and Broward Estates Elementary in Fort Lauderdale.

But technology leaders are already thinking bigger. “One-to-one is a big initiative for us,” said the school district’s new chief information officer, Vijay Sonty. “We want to reform and restructure how technology is used in schools.”

Barack Obama gave one of the greatest speeches of recent years at the Democratic National Convention.

There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.

There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Via Lockergnome Bytes:

Automated SQL injection: What your enterprise needs to know: “SQL injection exploits may soon be as common as those targeting Windows and Unix flaws, experts say. An estimated 60% of Web applications that use dynamic content are likely vulnerable, with devastating consequences for an enterprise. A presentation of an automated attack targeting SQL injection flaws is planned for Black Hat Briefings this week in Las Vegas. This two-part interview with SPI Dynamics CTO Caleb Sima will tell you what you should fear, why and…”

This is why PHP-Nuke should be avoided. It doesn’t attempt to be secure, with user-provided values passed directly to SQL queries without any error checking or quoting. Drupal, on the other hand, never passes any user-provided values directly to any query.

I’ve posted some pictures from ADHOC here. UPDATE: I added a second album with pictures from the ADHOC Labs Showcase (formerly the Hack Show).

I’m now at the ADHOC conference and David Pogue is giving the keynote. My first impression is that it’s a lot smaller than the usual MacHack and has a very low-budget feel. There are only about 100 people rather than the usual 200-300. A lot of people who were here previous years weren’t here. I think this was the first MacHack that Leonard Rosenthal didn’t attend. Even Miro isn’t here.

We only have half of the main hall where the keynote & hack show was held. Internet access was a bit different. There’s no DHCP server; we have to obtain a static IP address.

At first there were no power strips in the atrium. We had to beg for them in the machine room. The keynote is as much fun as always, so maybe things will pick up for the rest of the conference.

I leave tomorrow morning for ADHOC Conference (formerly MacHack). Posting will probably be light the next few days.

The Right-Wing Squares: “Media Matters for America launches an Internet ad that lets some of the nutjobs hang themselves in their own words. Worth viewing and passing along, especially to people who think the ‘liberal’ media is full of hate.” (Via Life and Deatherage.)

I’ve been concerned about MacMegasite’s bandwidth usage, so I’ve been looking into ways to reduce it. The first thing I did was re-compress the logo as an optimized gif, which reduced it from almost 12k to 4k, after trying several settings and comparing gif & png for size and quality.

Finally, I added gzip compression, which drastically reduces the page load time, and in a few days I should be able to see how it affects the bandwidth. It was simply a matter of adding the following lines to .htaccess:

   php_flag zlib.output_compression On
   php_value zlib.output_compression_level 5

I also made this same change to all of my other domains.

I’m not in danger of exceeding my bandwidth – I have 20G/month which I can distribute however I want between all of my domains. Right now I have 10G allocated to MacMegasite with the rest distributed among my other domains, which are well within their limits. For this month, MacMegasite is already over 7G. I can always allocate more bandwidth to it if necessary

Interesting article about rappers in Senegal (via metafilter):

We’re not like the Americans, whose texts are just insults and abuse,’ many rappers assure me. ‘It’s not a question of money, weapons, sports cars, or beautiful women either. Senegalese rap, it’s the street speaking. We are journalists, reporters of everyday life.’ Others consider themselves teachers or educators of the masses who did not receive any schooling. The question is: who were their own teachers? Yes, they can read and write, but they barely finished grade school. Few are interested in secondary school training. The school uniforms are expensive, not to mention the writing materials, school bags, and copybooks. Besides, what’s the use of all the boring stuff they’re trying to teach you there?

Phpnuke.org is reporting a massive DoS attack to their server which damaged their forums. Maybe this will wake them up to the security issues which plague PHP-Nuke.

I love DirecTV since I got it a few weeks ago. I get DVD-quality video and sound from it since I connected the settop box to my TV’s S-video input instead of using the antenna connection as it was originally installed.

One channel I like is Link TV (channel 375). They often show World Music videos and last night they had a nice show about Baaba Maal. Tonight they have a show about Youssou N’dour.

The senate voted 48-50 against proceeding with the Federal Marriage Amendment debate. 60 votes were needed to survive a procedural vote on cloture, which would prevent a filibuster. Bush is “deeply disappointed” with the vote, but considers it only a temporary setback.

Here is a complete rundown of the vote. As expected, the vote was divided pretty much along party lines, although 3 democrats – Byrd (WV), Miller (GA), and Nelson (NE) voted for the measure. I’m proud to say both Florida senators voted against it.

Maybe now the government can get back to more important business, like Iraq and the war on terrorism.

They Might Be Giants meets Homestarrunner: The Spine.

This country was founded on the principles of acceptance, tolerance, and religious freedom by people who left their old countries to find the freedom to worship as they please and escape a state-imposed religion. Now we have a group that’s trying to turn this country into exactly what it was meant to escape from.

I don’t care what anyone believes. We’re all free to follow any religion we want and live our lives according to our own religious and moral beliefs. However, no group has the right to impose their religion and morality on others who don’t share their beliefs. Haven’t we learned that it isn’t possible to legislate morality? It’s been attempted before and failed (remember prohibition?). Accept the fact that we’re human. Don’t preach abstinence – it’s just not realistic. Meanwhile, with abstinence-only education, teens are still getting pregnant and getting infected with STDs. Anyone who thinks it works needs to get back in touch with reality.

With the senate now debating whether to enshrine discrimination into the constitution, we’re at a very dangerous crossroad. The social conservatives are trying to frame it as “protecting against the attempt to redefine marriage”, which is just plain crap. It’s no such thing – marriage is defined by religious groups. We’re not forcing them to change or accept something they don’t want to accept. The word ‘marriage’ has always had two meanings: the religious meaning, which the government shouldn’t meddle with; and civil marriage, which is a contract between two people which gives them many special rights related to financial matters, medical care, and many other aspects. These rights should be available equally to everyone.

Furthermore, the religious meaning of marriage has changed drastically throughout history. In many societies bigamy has been accepted and encouraged, including the Mormons, who are now among those most strongly opposed to gay marriage. A lot of societies still have arranged marriages, in many cases to establish or strengthen business relationships between families.

The US Constitution is one of our most important documents, spelling out what rights and freedoms we have. The Constitution helped make the U.S. into a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world. Other than prohibition, which was repealed, it has always been used to guarantee rights, never to deny rights to any group of people. Adding a discriminatory definition of marriage to the constitution is one of the most disgusting abuses ever of our most important document. It also violates the principle of separation of church and state, since not all religious groups agree with the proposed definition.

We’re reaching a very dangerous point where the government no longer represents all of the people, only one select group. Also in the news, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is trying to determine how the vote can be delayed in case of a terrorist attack. It looks like the current administration will do everything they can to stay in power, whether or not they can win an honest election. They no longer care about the people, only about staying in power at any cost.

Over the weekend I decided to do some speed comparisons on the various browsers I use (strictly by “feel”, not scientific) and I found that Firefox was by far the fastest, even faster than Camino. I’ve now been using Firefox as my default browser for a few days and I’m very happy with it.

I’ve reached my target weight of 175! I no longer fret about the diet; I automatically avoid bad carbs and go for the healthiest choices when I eat out. I’ve discovered that I can live without bread or potatoes, although I do miss rice & pasta. Now that I’m on the maintenance phase, I can eat “bad” foods occasionally as long as I don’t overdo it.

When I went to a cookout last weekend, I didn’t think about the diet. I even had a thin piece of cake (not a big piece like I used to have), and after working out and being careful the next day my diet was back on track.

Brown Equals Terroist – the story of a photography student who refuses to provide his ID to a security officer, and is swiftly confronted by Homeland Security.

(Via metafilter.com.)