I know it has been a while since I last posted but Anti-piracy ads on the radio have prompted me to say that there is no reason to use pirated software. We, meaning CLUE members and affiliates, use F/LOSS but I think that we do not do enough to get our message to the general public. As a result, Microsoft Office, one of MS's best money generators, it is also one of the most pirated suites.

Today I received two pieces of information. One was my copy of Computerworld in which there was an article about how Michigan aims to emulate Canadaś e-gov. The second piece of information was in a note from Russell McOrmond about the slow response to petitioning against Bill C-60.

On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 10:26 -0400, G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
> There is a critical upgrade required for our drupal installation. This
> message is fair warning that during the upgrade the site will have to be
> shutdown. At the same time, we will also attempt to correct whatever
> was done to the frontpage node of cluecan.ca so that it again will
> adjust the centre column for various sizes of browser displays. If any
> of you know the secret to correcting this an email will be appreciated.

Upgrade completed for www.cluecan.ca and we found the cause of the wide
middle panel. Thanks to Bill Traynor who took time to track down the

On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 10:26 -0400, G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
> There is a critical upgrade required for our drupal installation. This
> message is fair warning that during the upgrade the site will have to be
> shutdown. At the same time, we will also attempt to correct whatever
> was done to the frontpage node of cluecan.ca so that it again will
> adjust the centre column for various sizes of browser displays. If any
> of you know the secret to correcting this an email will be appreciated.

Upgrade completed for www.cluecan.ca and we found the cause of the wide
middle panel. Thanks to Bill Traynor who took time to track down the

On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 10:26 -0400, G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
> There is a critical upgrade required for our drupal installation. This
> message is fair warning that during the upgrade the site will have to be
> shutdown. At the same time, we will also attempt to correct whatever
> was done to the frontpage node of cluecan.ca so that it again will
> adjust the centre column for various sizes of browser displays. If any
> of you know the secret to correcting this an email will be appreciated.

Upgrade completed for www.cluecan.ca and we found the cause of the wide
middle panel. Thanks to Bill Traynor who took time to track down the

On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 18:02 -0400, G. Matthew Rice wrote:
> Evan Leibovitch writes:
> > > There's always tinyurl, shorturl, ...
> > >
> > Doesn't help. The problem isn't in the length of the URL but the text
> > between and . If that is a long, unbreakable "word", most
> > browsers will scroll to acommodate. Thus the longer and unshrinkable
> > middle column.
> >
> > Going to tinyurl is only useful here if you care about reading the raw
> > HTML or really want to use the URL in the displayed text.
>
> Wasn't Bill's problem a URL _as_ the text? Anything in a language

On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 18:02 -0400, G. Matthew Rice wrote:
> Evan Leibovitch writes:
> > > There's always tinyurl, shorturl, ...
> > >
> > Doesn't help. The problem isn't in the length of the URL but the text
> > between and . If that is a long, unbreakable "word", most
> > browsers will scroll to acommodate. Thus the longer and unshrinkable
> > middle column.
> >
> > Going to tinyurl is only useful here if you care about reading the raw
> > HTML or really want to use the URL in the displayed text.
>
> Wasn't Bill's problem a URL _as_ the text? Anything in a language

As a followup to yesterday's thought on phishing, I thought a quick review of how to check if a message is phishing or not might be useful.

1. What is "phishing"? The best answer I found was this google link
2. What to look for? Well links that ask for updates to personal information, accounts or memberships et cetera.
3. Check any links offered to see if they actually belong to the company perportedly asking for the information. In yesterday's email example the link to developer.bellmobility.ca turned out to be in other IP space.