When you censor, you make people curious.

Silly MCMC. Dont they know that "censoring" a website via DNS blackholes is the lamest way of blocking it? I mean if they wanted to really censor, then deny all traffic into Malaysian backbones. Do it properly.

Instead they just told ISPs to blackhole entries to malaysia-today.net. Circumventing this is really easy, either by direct IP, or changing DNS server to any other foreign one, or having other people "mirror" the IP addresses.

Now we, the Malaysian public, know that someone doesn't want us to read the ramblings of RPK. Instead now RPK gets the credibility. Now there is more of a suspicion that what he is writing is hitting a nerve.

So shame on MCMC, shame on the people who authorised this, and shame on the ISP who bowed to this directive.

Don't they know that whenever you try to ban something, the desire for people to want to read it increases? duh.

yk.

My Ten Commandments

A good set of commandments to live by:

1. Thou SHALT NOT believe all thou art told.


2. Thou SHALT seek knowledge and truth constantly.


3. Thou SHALT educate thy fellow man in the Laws of Science.


4. Thou SHALT NOT forget the atrocities committed in the name of god.


5. Thou SHALT leave valuable contributions for future generations.


6. Thou SHALT live in peace with thy fellow man.


7. Thou SHALT live this one life thou hast to its fullest.


8. Thou SHALT follow a Personal Code of Ethics.


9. Thou SHALT maintain a strict separation between Church and State.


10. Thou SHALT support those who follow these commandments.

yk

IE6 on Linux ... why?!

Revamping a website to make it more CSS compliant, and getting rid of a whole load of <table> gunk. Playing with unordered lists and list items and tailoring the look with simple CSS is very addictive and somewhat rewarding. However this comes with a price, and its the Microsoft tax yet again. This time its a tax on my patience. Things just don't appear as they should on IE6, while Firefox, Netscape, Konqueror, Safari and Opera works perfectly. Considering that it still has about 30% market share (still way more than Firefox), it is a problem which needs to be addressed.

So to help me debug it without having to pull up a Remote Desktop, I had to install IE on my Linux machine. Eugh.

Fortunately the pain of installation was rather ... painless. IE4Linux has a great installation process which allows you to install IE5, 5.5 and 6 using wine and cabextract. The process is described here, and the screenshots looked like this:

It took about 7 minutes to download the CABs and run through the installation. The binaries are kept in a ~/.ie4linux folder. Running a user friendly symbolic link from ~/bin/ie6 displays ie in all its glorious splendour:

"Master, It Lives!"

yk