Russel Coker has posted a SELinux on Debian etch in 5 Minutes guide.

Some small things to note:

• This is for etch, which has Linux 2.6.18 - there are SELinux changes in 2.6.19 which require policy version 21, whereas 2.6.18 has policy version 20. Changing it in /etc/selinux/semanage.conf may or may not be enough.
• rjc posted this Policy fix you'll likely need for running enforcing
• strict, while being more secure, will likely require you to write some policy modules on your own
• policy is a snapshot from october, you might want to get an updated policy. However I currently don't have time to work on it, and I just heard that etch was frozen. But maybe Manoj has still time to update the policy and get it into etch...

Check out this patent, and read claim #9.

So much for patents being seriously checked before being granted.

I wonder if I could get a patent on filing patents that get granted without ever being read, because they're so full of legalese and templates you'll go crazy if you actually try reading it.

(via: Daniel Silverstone)

CSSzengarden has reached 200 CSS files. It's an impressive site full of CSS tricks to learn.

Go there, and just click through a few designs. There are many impressive designs there. And while most a very different in their visual experience, they all have the exact same HTML code.

So please avoid using HTML for layouting purposes. That's what CSS is for. CSS is much more powerful and does a better job for this, so use it!

From time to time, I use technorati to monitor for links to my blog. I intentionally do not allow comments or trackbacks, but often people send me replies in their own blogs.

In technorati, I noticed a link to my blog that wasa quite surprising. Spammers have been around for some time, that take part of your blog posting and add their random shite to it. This was somewhat different.

This spammer quoted an old version of a blog posting. When I wrote that blog positing, I noticed like 10-20 minutes later that I had a fact wrong, so I changed that, even renaming the blog postings title. This spammer still had the old title, that only live for some 20 minutes at most.

So either this spammer was very lucky in crawling my blog exactly at that time - or they've received a ping for it. I'm usually pinging different services using the ping-o-matic.

I'm convinced at least one of these services allows you to subscribe to all blog posts that contain certain keywords (I've seen political web sites linking to posts favourable for their candidate within minutes!), and I have the impression some spammers are doing this. They're probably sending trackbacks to my site then, hoping that I'll add a link back to them automatically, or that they'll at least go up in the Google rankings.

Update: I've found out that Google blog search still has that incorrect version of my blog posting; the spammers site heavily links back to Google blog search; the search terms were "computer science"... so apparently they are not indirectly subscribed to my pings, but they're just polling Google blogsearch every five minutes.

Ajax, when used properly, can be a great user experience.

Badly written ajax however can be a pain. Often huge javascript libraries are loaded, it makes your browser and system slow and sometime you just end up staring at an spinning animated gif for "Loading ...".

Good Ajax makes the application snappy, responsive, fast, and avoids screen flicker. But with your traditional "get new HTML page" model, error handling is done by your browser. DNS issue? Your browser will say server not found. Connectivity issues? Browser will inform you of the timeout. Slow connection? our browsers throbber [wikipedia] gives you an indication something is happening.

With AJAX, it's up to the authors of the Ajax application to do proper error handling. And many AJAX application have serious issue here.

User proofing Ajax application [A list apart] is a good article on some basics on how to improve your Ajax applications.

Ajax is in the need for some software engineering for QA. Right now, it's so much low level hacking there, it makes you expect 90% of Ajax applications have serious usability and reliability issues.