Geocities has closed down.  Frankly, this came as a bit of a surprise to me, as I didn't know it was still around.

The whole service represented everything that was wrong with not only web authoring, but the whole idea that anyone could (or should) do it.  It gave people a venue to publish whatever they wanted, no matter how inane, vapid, or just irrelevant.  The result was that people who could barely write a sentence in their native language were now all "webmasters."

Webmasters!  Talk about empowerment.

Some guy yelled at me about this today. People seem to yell a great many political things at me lately. Frankly, it's all quite tiring. Anyhow, this doofus went of on an unsolicited rant about how President Obama was going to "shut off the internet at will."

Man, I thought, I gotta know how he can do that. So, I googled (is that a verb now?) "Obama shut down internet," and I was led to the documents for the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. The actual bills are S. 773 and 778. The first draft is here [pdf].

I skimmed through it and found that it echoed almost everything I'd heard about last year's CSIS report. Basically, the report acknowledged a few things that should have already been glaringly obvious:

That our government's computer infrastructure is vulnerable to attack and disruption,
That you can trust Congress, who are experts on these things, to throw tons of money at it if you like, and
It won't do much good.

So, in the interest of doing something, Congress came up with S. 773. It's a really professional-looking, well-organized proposal that's basically full of hot air. And it's expensive hot air, too.

Still, I didn't see anything sinister until I neared the end. There's some boilerplate about funding, qualifications and clearance for Federal I.T. contractors, and a program of "challenges" to incite students into becoming code monkeys for The Man.

First, the good news. Neil Gaiman reads this site, which is really quite a compliment, since the man is one of my favorite authors.

He's worked in several genres, but I first came across his work when he was collaborating with Dave McKean in the classic Sandman series. The two did several books together, my favorite being the strange and moving Mr. Punch. He collaborated with Terry Pratchett in Good Omens, and he's written several great novels, including American Gods.

William Gibson, one of the defining authors of the "cyberpunk" movement and author of the classic Neuromancer, also reads here.

I'm also referenced on this very odd site. I'm not sure what's going on, but the idea that ninjas may be acting on an extraterrestrial level certainly gives me pause.

They save me from wading through nuggets of wisdom like this, from akryr@hotmail.com:

WTF?!?!! I try to register on your site but it doesn't work…98% of the world uses Explorer, so get over it LOL! It's only like 10% use Firefox!

No, really. Some people really have nothing better to do with their time. This is why I don't cater to IE on the site. It just brings out the worst in people. To those who insist on using it, I have only one thing to say:

perl -e …

No, the site wasn't hacked. Stop asking. I've been using an old version of WordPress (1.6 IIRC) to manage content, and it looks as if it finally gave up the ghost.

To be honest, I hadn't even moved up to 2.0 a year back. I'd stuck with the older version because the bulk of formatting and scripts for this site are handmade, and I was worried that upgrading would make a mess of things.

I don't know why I keep trying. As Homer Simpson once observed, "trying is the first step towards failure." I think he was onto something.

I had a stylesheet that I liked and almost worked with Explorer. Almost. There are three nagging problems, though.

The first is with linked images. I've defined the default link color as a pleasant green to match the site layout:
a:link {
color: #5e882c;
text-decoration: none;
}

I've had problems with Comcast as a customer. Sometimes big problems. Most recently, I noticed huge amounts of lag on my connections and interference on the phone lines. Most troubling was the type of problem I was having. The connection would be fine, then it would throttle down to zero over the course of a few minutes before restarting.

That's usually a sign that it's being managed and rationed.

I went ahead and updated to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) tonight. The whole process went smoothly, with only a couple of hitches, which I thought I'd share.

I think it was Sartre who once wrote something along the lines of, "walking away in disgust is not the same thing as surrender." Or maybe it was Camus. I'm pretty sure it was one of those Existentialists. Or maybe Absurdists. Probably just a little crazy, too.

In any case, insanity is defined as the practice of repeating the same action over and over again, expecting different results. That's kind of my relation with Internet Explorer.

This CSS code can crash Internet Explorer 6 if embedded in a page:
*{position:relative}style>table>
IE7 appears to load the page, but if you open a new tab, it crashes on navigation.

Try it here. You've been warned. Firefox, Opera, Safari and text-mode users aren't affected.

I can't take credit for this, unfortunately. Hamachiya discovered this a few days ago, and it's repeated here. Apparently, mshtml.dll looks at it as a rogue request and closes down.

This is another unfortunate example of Explorer's continuing inability to handle the most basic …

New site theme up, and a few fixes to the CSS so that IE6/7 wouldn't render fonts so small.

It's a bit easier now that I can run Explorer without having to reboot. Turns out it doesn't do so well at rendering em units for text. I also added a smarmy link to prove that the CSS on this site validates, and that the fault lies squarely with Explorer.

Now, if anyone can explain how to remove the extra scrollbar that IE adds on the right, let me know.