As blogged by my good friend Jeff, Steorn, an Irish company, has apparently come up with a method of producing clean, free energy. This has come with some scrutiny being that it defies a basic law of physics, the one that says energy can neither be created, nor destroyed. It can only change in form. This is exciting as it means never having to charge your cell phone, electricity would be virtually free, and cars could run on electricity without having to recharge.

I was running version 4.1.1 of the free version of VNC software and have never had any problems, until about half an hour ago. VNC activated (the icon turned black) and someone started using my computer. I was able to disconnect my internet connection before anything was done.

I've noticed another odd behavior in FireFox while using the XMLHttpRequest object. When posting to a page on a server that requires authentication, the first post will go through just fine. But the second post, without refreshing the page, will cause the server to want authentication. I'm not sure if this behavior was present in the previous version and this behavior his not present if the object is querying a page using get. Using post works fine using IE 7.

On July 26, 2006 the House of Representatives passed the bill titled Deleting Online Predators Act Of 2006 (House resolution 5319). This bill aims to block the use of online chat rooms and social networking websites in schools and libraries, basically federally funded institutions. A website has been started dubbed saveyourspace.org with the goal of collecting one million signatures in hopes of pursuading the senate to vote this bill down.

The latest version of Firefox seems to have broken the XMLHttpRequest object. Specifically, if the asynchronous flag is set to false, the object will no longer function. I haven't done much research into this. I just wanted to jot a quick note. Set the asynchronous flag to true and everything should be fine.

Here's a fun little error message I encountered while using Microsoft's Enterprise Manager.

I don't even know what to say.

Well, to be fair, it wasn't their fault. It's only named because the popularity and, I assume, the computer saviness of the average user, which allowed for a massive adware infection of users' computers. Brian Krebs on WashingtonPost.com reported that an ad on MySpace and other sites distributed adware using a vulnerability in IE that Microsoft patched in January. Ok kids, once again:

As I demonstrated, the XMLHttpRequest object can be used to query a page using the get method. The object can also query a page using the post method. It is a bit more difficult as one must create the request header. Here is an example:

I've been working with some aspects of the Ajax group of technologies lately. It sounds complicated and difficult to learn, but it really isn't. It uses the XMLHttpRequest object supported by many browsers. My current development requires I code for IE and Firefox, although it seems to be functional in Netscape.

To use the XMLHttpRequest object, I put together two simple functions and put them in a file named SimpleAjax.js. Here are the functions:

Here is a neat trick for using conditional processing in a view.

I needed to create a view that contained an employee id and employee name amongst other data. The original view included two joins, but for the sake of simplicity, I have altered the view. This view uses a case statement to determine which "full name" to show, the full name using the first name or the full name using the nickname if the employee has one.