Yet another quick hello to a friend, VJ, who came to visit New York this weekend, and told me that he’s made Q his home page. (In my thinking, if someone goes and shows a commitment like that, they deserve a public hello!)

Once again, there’s now a DeepLeap plug-in for Manila servers.

ABC News uses a custom Perl redirect script to send people to stories on their site from the Go.com home page (look in the lefthand navigation bar for the links). This redirect script has an incorrect implementation of HTTP responses to requests — it terminates every line with a straight line feed, rather than the carriage return-line feed combo that’s required by both the HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1 specifications (see sections five and six). Some HTTP clients (the few I’ve found are all components that you can use in your own programs) fail with only line feeds, and won’t accept the HTTP response. I emailed them about this in late January, and they responded in early February that they were aware of the problem and would fix it. It’s now mid-April, and it’s unfixed; that’s pretty pathetic.

To me, this is similar to the way that CNN responded to the hundreds of users that complained about the fact that their redesign resulted in the fonts on the home page and article detail pages being way too small to read. They initially told everyone to increase the size of the fonts in their browser (who cares that it was only their site that was broken); then, they just stopped responding at all. It wasn’t until two months had passed that they actually fixed the problem. Websites like this act like they don’t need to attract users, and they manage to push people like me away.

A while back, I logged the accusation of a Pennsylvania cop of paying $2 to a 10-year-old Little Leaguer to bean another player. The (now ex-) cop was convicted of the offense Friday, and now faces up to three months in prison. To protect and to serve, eh?

In perusing the logfiles on a Linux box of mine, I’m seeing a few distinct, obvious attempts by a University of Delaware student (or someone affiliated — I shouldn’t assume it’s a student) to break into the webserver. They’re all from one of the university’s shared Solaris boxes; at my school, this is an offense for which your account is immediately revoked on the machines (meaning you lose your university email, as well), and you’re brought before the disciplinary board of the entire school.