Archive for February, 2010
Should ISP’s be copyright enforcers?
Feb 5th
A few months ago I started this blog entry and then left it sit because I was so angry about what the potential outcome could mean to the ISP industry. Today I read this article on Wired that give me some hope that the world isn’t about to end for ISPs so I decided to revisit this entry and see if it still makes sense. Let’s see…
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We live in a society that has mostly agreed on what is right and what is wrong. We have coined the term, Common Values in order to build communities where we can agree on what is acceptable behaviour. To enforce our safe communal living, we turned these common values into laws. As a society, we have set up governments to enforce the laws (common values) and protect us from those who would harm us.
As members of society, I think we’re all in agreement that theft is a bad thing. No matter what country you are from, it’s pretty much a given that stealing is frowned upon. It’s a pretty common value, maybe even sacrosanct.
Request For Comments
Feb 4th
One of the many terms you’ll hear thrown around an internet service provider is Request For Comments, aka, RFC: “This isn’t per the RFC!” or “We follow the RFC!” or “Read the <expletive deleted> RFC!” So what is an RFC, and why do you want to know what it says.
RFCs are, in a nutshell, the description of how a program, or procedure should work. The history of RFC is long and boring, but basically, they’ve been around since the ARPANET Project began, as written or typed memo that were literally Requests for Comments, open ended questions that someone wanted to solicit answers to. As ARPANET grew, RFCs became the standard way to record procedure, and a way for people to implement the fundamental technologies that make up the Internet as it stands today. Today, RFCs are managed by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
tabbing content with script.aculo.us
Feb 3rd
this week’s project is tabbing content on a web page. it should be simple to implement, with as little intrusion into the HTML structure of the page and doing as much work automatically as possible. it should degrade cleanly, so that the entire content is presented normally if javascript is not enabled, and content should also present normally if the page is printed instead of viewed on-screen.
we’ll be using the prototype and script.aculo.us javascript libraries to do most of the heavy lifting. prototype provides all the DOM selection and introspection tools we’ll need, and better array management. builder, which is part of script.aculo.us, provides tools for creating new DOM nodes, which we’ll use to build our tab navigation and insert it into the document.
