Reclaim the public domain. With a click of your mouse, you can help persuade the U.S. Congress to undo some of the damage caused by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.[Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]

If you follow the link you can vote on a petition to reclaim some of the public domain. I am continually amazed and disappointed with how copyright and patents have morphed into an entitlement for corporations and have almost eliminated the concept of public domain. The original intent to benefit the creative person has long been superceded by the need to benefit the corporation in perpetuity.

I have been doing some more playing with Jedit. Jedit is the open source editor available at sourceforge. With so many free or almost free editors available you might wonder why I am I playing with another editor. I think I started out looking at the HTML Tidy plug-in. Then I added the XML/XLST support and Visual Diff. It is not as good for my work as Topstyle but it is not that far off. The most recent plugin I downloaded is CSS2 support. It is color codes the correct entries (or incorrect entries in my case). It's pretty handy.

E. B. White. “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” [Quotes of the Day]

Pure CSS2 Drop-down Menus. Drop-down menus without JavaScript? Enterprising designers like Stuart Robertson and Eric Meyer have created standards-based pull-down menus using the :hover pseudo-class to display other elements. By Andy King. 0529 [WebReference News]

Unfortunately all of these proof of concept menus do not support IE completely because of the sparse :hover class support. I still find www.gazingus.org use of a little javascript and css to be a more pragmatic approach.

Today I worked on cleaning up the blog category pages. Radio is very inconsistent in the way it updates category pages. I set the theme and unset the theme to make sure no files were left on the community server. I changed the navigation items so that they referenced index.html. I seemed to get newer and more consistent results when I used specified index.html rather letting it default. Then I cleaned up some html 4.01 validation errors when I inserted links in the post. I did a lot of research into renaming categories. I got it looking better but I am not sure when the data will be truly consistent with my actions. The local server and the community server are still not in-sync.

I finally worked with two of the tools that Mark Pasc has kindly provided to the Radio community. They can be found at markpasc.org/code/radio/. I had been hacking around Radio trying to clean up some category web pages when I went back to his tools. I had installed them sometime ago but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with them at the time. I first looked at kit and turned on the preference to allow me to past date my posts. I really wanted to force Radio to update the templates out on the internet since they were correct on my local website. I previously tried to publish the site and categories and was partially successful. One category got updated. While I was mucking around I checked out Stapler. It made more since this time when I read the help file so I set it up to read the news page at Legacy Farm. It worked so I setup the subscription in my news aggregator. That was cool! It gives me some ideas. While I was at it I realized that I was not subscribed to the default feeds for comments and errors so I set them up, too. That is when I realized some people had left comments. Oops!

I finally implemented the Block Quotes styling Simon discussed in his continuing series on CSS. You can see it demonstrated below. For some unknown reason Simon used png files for the quote characters and the resulting file size was a little over 1 Kbytes each. I created my quotes images using the Century Gothic font and saved as a gif. They are a svelte 199 bytes.

I decided to buy a server and workstation copy of Undelete from Executive Software. I think most of the functionality of this undelete software was included in Netware. That was one feature I missed when I installed my W2K network. I was surprised that M$ did not offer it but they never offered one of the best features of WordPerfect, Reveal Codes, either.

qotd may 23. Edgar Watson Howe: “When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is any thing you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.” [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Last Saturday the check engine light came on in our Subaru. The last time a check engine light came on in one of our vehicles the vehicle ran so poorly I had to have it towed. Since we have multiple vehicles we opted to drive the other vehicles until we could get the Subaru looked at. On Sunday night I saw that a local television station was gone to do an expose on repair shops taking advantage of customers with a check engine light problem. Yesterday my wife and I drove over to the Subaru dealer to drop it off. This looked like a problem that would not get fixed for a few days and it looked expensive. I thought a sensor had failed or possibly the engine computer had become flaky. When I got there the customer service manager grabbed a portable analyzer and ran a diagnostic on the car. He turned and smiled at me. He said he had reset the error message, “Misfire on piston 2”, and I should come back if it reappears. He left me and went off to tend to other customers.