Dreamweaver Extreme: Five Steps to More Professional Pages with Dreamweaver MX by Drew McLellan; re: Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver UltraDev. [Macromedia – Designer Developer Center]

Here is the suggestions. XHTML is a little hard but doable if you read the manuals.

Step 1: Export your JavaScript and CSS to external files
Step 2: Export your site without template mark-up
Step 3: Future-proof your site with XHTML
Step 4: Tidy up your code with the Apply Source Formatting command
Step 5: Validate your page to find basic errors

Gas enters counterterror arsenal. The unprecedented use of a secret toxic gas leaves 400 still hospitalized, and starts a debate about Russian tactics. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]

I guess it is obvious but gas has just become a weapon in the fight against terrorism. This was a shining example of what can go wrong. Unfortunately, I suspect we will seem a lot more use of gas in terrorism confrontations before we see less!

I guess I should comment on why I think Exchange is the way for a small business to go. Although a person like me might enjoy playing with IMAP from different vendors and comparing it to Exchange and Notes, most small businesses want to focus on their business. Email is an important tool in supporting the business but is also a source of major headaches such as spam and viruses. With a product like SBS2K you can almost ignore the upfront cost and focus on the headache issues. At this moment in time the tools to minimize those headache issues appear to be more robust for Exchange than the other products. It just doesn't take too many lost hours to justify a more professional approach to email.

OK, I know I am taking the path less traveled but let me rehash my server upgrade project. The plan was to upgrade the server with mirrored drives. I decided on two 75 GB drives from IBM and teamed them up with the Promise FastTrak 100 TX2 controller. I bought two round ATA 100 IDE cables to insure success. Well, things did not work out as planned. It didn't work. Since I had so many new parts it took quite a while to identify which part was the problem. The two IBM drives are bad. I verified the disk drives were the problem by checking the drives with the on-board IDE controllers for two different PCs. The round IDE cables I verified as good by testing them with the CDROM & Zip drive. The FastTrak controller I have not been able to verify. It doesn't seem to like to the old(but working) IDE drives I tried to verify with. I ended up sending an email to Promise support to see if they have any ideas. This snafu is really disappointing because I received my NFR copy of SBS2K this week. It is a NEW copy. It includes the SBS2K SP1 service pack.

New validator.

I'm testing the new RSS Validator from Mark Pilgrim, Sam Ruby and Bill Kearney.

The following feeds validate: Scripting News, Dave's Handsome Radio Blog. One of my feeds did not validate, I don't want to say which one, but when I went to read the spec, the validator was right! Yay.

The announcement is on Mark Pilgrim's weblog.

[Scripting News]

This post by Dave and a previous post on the RSS Explorer Tool continue to make Radio Userland a very dynamic environment for weblog content using RSS. RSS is quickly becoming the next evolutionary step for the web.

Today I finally verified the Microsoft Security Bulletins. I found it interesting that Microsoft uses PGP to sign the message rather than the signing builtin to Outlook. It took me awhile because PGP is almost in limbo. NAI jettisoned them and Zimmerman has been vocal that PGP should be free. PGP Corp is trying to encourage people to fork over $70 a year. All of this bantering about encouraged me to give GnuPG a try. After a little searching I settled on WinPT. I tried the Outlook plug-in from Gdata briefly but I couldn't get it to work. It kept generating an error messages about spawning tasks. WinPT was actually quite easy to use. First you have to import the key from Microsoft. Then you highlight the signed portion of the e-mail, press Ctrl-Alt-D, and wait for the popup window to tell you it is valid. Okay, this is simple enough I can use it. An added bonus is that I can use WinPT with any of the email readers I use.

New RedHat Kernel Patch Illegal to Explain to U.S. Users [Slashdot] An amusing but ridiculous result of following the rules set out by the copyright act(DMCA).

To install SBS2K I am going to need more disk space. So I picked two new 75GB disk drives off of Ubid last week. I was going to put one on my main desktop that needs more disk space for video files but have instead opted to install both of them on the server in RAID 1 configuration. Since I will be replacing a 8GB drive I should have ample capacity. Since cost remains a higher priority than performance I restricted choices to ATA RAID 1. A little research showed me that there is a lot of interesting work being done in this area by Promise and Highpoint to make affordable and high performance ATA RAID. SCSI is too expensive for the modest improvement in performance. I narrowed my choices to the Adaptec 1200A which uses the Highpoint chip and the Promise Fasttrak100TX2. Both of these companies look like they will be survivors in this business and have current drivers and bios. I ended up getting Fastrak100TX2 for fifty bucks off eBay. So for about $210 I have put together a 75GB RAID 1 configuration and significantly improved the server reliability. I did a quick look for SCSI drives and found a single drive 18GB going for $250.