I found a new widget for web pages, a wysiwg editor written in JavaScript. It is called htmlarea and is an upgraded version of the one generally available for IE. It is provided for free by Interactive Tools. The beta version adds most of the markup provisions of Textism in a wysiwyg format. It's biggest problem is that it produces code that fails a variety of xhtml tests because they use IE as their engine. It looks nice and is fast. With a little html fixup code it can easily generate good xhtml. I am going to testing it tomorrow. I am planning to modify my present Tikitext page and see what happens.

I have been working hard at coming up with a simplified news application for a static web site. I would like to work in Dreamweaver and then parse the document. In the process I have found that the perl module, XML::RSS, is not supported in Win32. So I am looking at substituting RSSLite and XML:Writer. It is getting so complicated I really should bail out and do it by hand.

I spent most of the day cleaning up code on Legacy Farm and updating the horses. I have let this slide long enough. It is time for me to stop playing with HTML/CSS and get down to some serious writing about horses. It's funny… most people play with horses and work on web pages. Oh well!

I did something foolish again! I decided that Textile was really neat and I needed it local. Textile is a tool to generate good html code from a simplified markup language. Since I would prefer to generate valid XHTML code for my postings this is a convient way to clean up the code. It's fast and convenient. I have become a fan of Textile. Recently I got nailed when I pushed the button to submit my code but my internet connection was disconnected. I lost all of my typing. So I started to investigate what it would take to make it part of Radio Userland. I ended up focusing on what it would take to make it run locally. Although I could set up to run off a server, I finally decided on running a local web page using PerlScript. PerlScript allows me to run Perl from IE without a server. I was looking at several other alternatives but this is what I really wanted. So I took the Textile web page and converted it over to run Perlscript. It took the better part of a day figuring out how PerlScript interfaces with form data but I got it to run. Documentation and FAQs are hard to find. I have a Perl module for Textile but that was mod'ed to be a plugin for Movable Type so I substituted a program called Tikitext. I will give Textile and Smarty Pants one last try tommorrow but Tikitext is adequate. This post was written on my local Tikitext web page.

I spent some time today trying to work out a plan for having more current news updates on Legacy Farm website. One of the alternatives I looked at was static sites with Radio Userland. I couldn’t see how it would function so I have been playing around with making updates on my Radio Userland category and then using a Perl program to create a static page. I had a Perl program called pullrss but things got complicated when I found out that ASPN does not support XML::RSS. Now I am looking at coding my own program. I did some brief research and found that RSS feeds have a lot of problems.

how many kurds died?. After some morning conversation with my inlaws about Iraq, I decided to do some research on Saddam. I find it difficult to believe that I've never seen much visual proof of the 1.4 million Saddam alledgedly killed. Mind you even one person is too many in my book, but google came up with an interesting article from World Net Daily

The article was originally published in 1998 and again in october 2001 after 9-11 and accurately predicts more:

Pointers to Saddam atrocities are appreciated.
[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

I made two comments to this post. The first comment was how I used google to find forensic evidence about the gassing of the Kurds by the Iraqis at the Physicians for Human Rights website. The second comment was made when I finally located the PBS Wideangle web page about the gassing attack. Then I started to wonder if I understood the question so I read the article in World Net Daily. The author alleges in the article:

1. The Iranians are better suspects for the gassing then the Iraqis.
2. It is illogical for Iraqi military to use gas on the local population.
3. The UN sanctions are responsible for 1.4 million Iraqi deaths.

Here is hopefully my last rebuttal:

1. I did not find any sources that confirmed that the Iranians were likely suspects. I did find numerous reports from various sources who gathered the facts that show that the Iraqis had the means, motive, and opportunity.
2. The gendercide website has a detailed description of the Anful campaign of which the gassing of the general population was a small part. The Anful campaign was a systematic plan to eliminate all Kurdish males between 15 and 50. It is obvious that it is logical for the Iraqi military to gas the general population. When you are looking at exterminating a large group of people, the military did not have a moral problem with using gas to do part of the job.
3. For those who have read Black Hawk Down it is obvious that starvation is a powerful tool used to gain and maintain control of the population. Blaming the UN for the estimated 1.4 million deaths is hogwash.

Today I thought I would try and update the Radio Userland template to make it XHTML compliant. I fixed most of the problems but I still have a few problems. The macros are a stumbling block since they generate v4 html code. I also squeezed the background jpg to a much smaller size. I still have the annoying problem with the template not propagating to the catagories. Obviously it is going to take more time.

Today I finished cleaning up most of the html for legacyfarmltd.com. I ended setting the doctype to XHTML transistional since strict required more changes and research. I ended up using both Topstyle and Dreamweaver to clean up the code. Topstyle was very useful with its Htmltidy integration. When I started moving the formatting over to the css I found I could use either but Topstyle was nicer to use. I used Dreamweaver for some code cleanup but mainly for visual confirmation of the changes before uploading.

Today I finally changed out the memory in my workstation. It was a HP Pavilion but I changed out the motherboard when I finally narrowed down an intermittent problem to the motherboard. Stability issues are tough to debug but I was frustrated and determined. I put in a Intel 815EPFVL motherboard on a hunch. I put in the old PIII 677 and memory and have pleased with the results. It has been very stable since the swap. I was lured into the memory swap when I noticed the low prices for PC133 ram. The Intel board is PC133 capable were the HP board was PC100. For $63 I swapped out 512 MB of PC100 for PC133. My son's PC or my AMD350 PC can use the freed up memory. So far everything has been cool.

I reinstalled Dreamweaver 4 and lost my XHTML mod's. I liked the features added by the mod's but the mod's left something funky with the DW4 menus. Funky menus are inevitably bad news(i.e. registry problems). Today I modified a preference concerning the site manager and could not get back in. XP kept wanting to call home to the mothership(M$). My favorite backup plan continues to be uninstall and re-install. Thirty minutes later I am back and better than before. I have been debating whether to go back and manually apply the XHTML changes. I have been pretty pleased with Topstyle and would like to see if it is a better solution to getting XHTML 1.0 code. Dreamweaver MX is a solution but expensive. I tend to skip generations unless absolutely necessary. The developers continue to solve other peoples problems.