After moving on-campus at Tri-State University, I no longer had any need of a dial-up ISP, so I am now without a web hosting account. I am currently looking for a new place to host my web site, but in the mean time it is only available to people with local and/or network access to my computer (that means the Tri-State campus network).

It seems that there is a problem with older (ie. Netscape 3, M$IE, etc.) web browsers displaying the source code (!!!) of web pages instead of rendering them if they use the (proper) XML declaration at the top of the page. Of course, I had no way of knowing this until someone in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html pointed it out. The offending declaration has been removed from my code, and since these pages are all conforming UTF-8 (heh heh) it is still valid XHTML 1.0. Happy surfing! (I must point out here that Lynx had no problems rendering …

I seem to be the stats maintainer for rec.arts.drwho. More information on my Usenet Wanderings page under the section entitled "Stats: Maintaining The Divide".

(Editor's note: that dark history seems to have gone the way of all organic matter: down the tube.)

In case you didn't see the story on News of the World, British Telecom has decided that it has a patent on the hyperlink. The hyperlink! You can read about it on LinuxMall, or you can read a different article about it on The Register.

They have apparently had this patent since the late eighties, but have only now realized that it covers hyperlinks as well! Are they stupid, or what? Or perhaps their patent doesn't really apply to hyperlinks and their just making it all up? It doesn't matter anyway, because their suing all of the ISPs in America …

Over the past few days (it is May 15 2000 while I write this) I have been converting many of my old "HTML tricks" (which are allowed by the standards) to the proper way of doing things: Cascading Style Sheets. In doing this, I have noticed that many web browsers out there just aren't up to snuff. Netscape Communicator 4.x, for example, seems to think that URLs specified in stylesheets should be relative to web pages, and not the stylesheets themselves. The CSS standard says "Thou shalt make all URLs relative to the style sheet" and Communicator just blindly …

As promised, I've finished upgrading the old almost-HTML I had been using to XHTML 1.0 (transitional). This was a fairly easy task. The hard part was getting WML to generate my XHTML code. However, using WML I can create consistent and valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup. Add in a little CSS and you get pages which look pretty much the same in any web browser, from Netscape Communicator, to Mozilla, Konqueror, and M$IE, and even Lynx! In fact, it has been my hope all along to make The Home of AlexDW accessible to people using non-graphical web …

It's official, it's the year 2000, just one more year 'till the new millennium. To celebrate, I've got my official Year 2000 usenet posting!!! Yes sir, it's dated Sat, 1 Jan 2000 00:00:00 -0500. Here it is:

Path: newsfeed.slurp.net!alexdw
From: alexdw@locl.net (Alex LaHurreau)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.drwho
Subject: Re: Arthur C Clarke
References: <386cf279$1_2@news.calweb.com>
Reply-To: alexdw@locl.net
User-Agent: slrn/0.9.5.8 (ABACUS LINUX EDITION)
Lines: 26
Message-ID: <B9gb4.1518$S%2.8395@newsfeed.slurp.net>
Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 00:00 …