Wiki’s are amazing things. Community maintained founts of information. Many are run using MediaWiki, an open source project on sourceforge. If you are running version 1.3.10 or below, you should immediately upgrade to 1.3.11. If you are running the beta release of 1.4, you should immediately upgrade to 1.4.ec1. This is because a routine security audit turned up several flaws in prior code.

In what appears to be an amazingly anti-democratic sign of the problems faced by the EU, the European Commission has declined the European Parliament’s request to restart the legislative process on the “Software patent directive”. The directive no longer has a majority backing in the EU, but it has been said that other forces have been pushing to get the patent directive into place. Twice now certain parties tried to slip the approval process into EU Fisheries meetings, and twice Poland stopped them. It seems that the powers that be are not going to allow democracy to get in the way of big business. Read this rather more descriptive breakdown of the situation.

Open Source languages are often deficient in one area when compared to commercial proprietary languages like C# (C Sharp). The problem is the lack of easy tools for application building. Tools like MS Visual Studio took programming out of the realm of guru’s and put it in the hands of just about anyone. This trend seems to be slowly disappearing with IDE’s for Open Source’s most popular languages slowly appearing as companies get behind OSS development. First it was IBM starting Eclipse for Java, and now we have the news that Maguma are releasing their PHP IDE “Maguma Studio” as Open Source starting in March. When it becomes available, you’ll be able to find it here. I’ve not used Maguma’s tools in the past, but the screen shots look very encouraging and I’ll be reviewing it when it becomes available.

With the recent news of potential price hikes for online music, one can’t help but wonder if the days when we actually need the recording industry in it’s current form are drawing to a close.

Promotion is already a mainstay of the Internet, as is distribution, and online music doesn’t require CD stamping, cover printing and the other hardware associated with old style music sales. So the question needs to be asked, why is online music priced comparably with store bought media when the cost is so much less? For that matter what exactly do we need the RIAA for any more? If Mozilla Firefox can get 25 million people to download a web browser in only a couple of months, how hard could it be to supply something that people are actually actively looking for be?
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The Open Source Apache web server project is celebrating their 10th birthday today. Apache is by far the dominant web server on the Internet, with approximately 69% of the worlds domain names hosted on Apache based servers. This translates to about 40 million websites hosted on the Open Source Apache. The closest competitor to Apache is Microsoft IIS with around 28% of the web server market. Congratulations to the Apache team for helping to make the Internet free and open for all. Here’s hoping for another successful 10 years.

One of the new “offers” Godaddy makes you click through when renewing a domain name is an ez-complete copyright registration. For a mere $16.95 (read the small print to find you still pay the $30 government registration fee) you can register your copyright. Some people will think the $16.95 is instead of the $30 the way it is worded. For some this might still be a good deal because they can do it right now with no delay and it gets done. However, you need to get your complete work into one computer file to use their submission method. That will make getting your website registered less than convenient. For many others however, this will be a waste of an extra $16.95.

We have previously covered copyright on our site. We can save you that $16.95! Feel free to donate $6.95 to us if you wish 🙂

Registering a copyright is simple and need not cost you any extra money:

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We renewed our domain name today, HTML fixit dot com’s second anniversary (brief pause for a song and cake). We look forward to another year providing web site designers; html, perl, php and other language coders; and others with help in their work on the web. All for just your thanks and a voluntary donation if you choose to make one. We also offer live chat help, free scripts and inexpensive scripts, including our very popular counter the tracks all sorts of things like visitor screen resolutions, sites referring to your site, etc.

Because it was time to renew, we looked around at some domain name registration sites. Many are currently offering renewal prices below $5.00. The conclusion is that Godaddy is still the best place for a regular priced renewal (non-transfer) as all other places have catches or inefficiencies. Examples would be one renewal at the lesser price, or the hosting must be with the registrar, or the transfer must be confirmed via facsimile to some far away place. One registrar even places advertisements on your site. Do not be fooled.

Godaddy has it’s own flaw: you have to go through pages and pages of offers clicking “no thanks” just to buy your name. If I wanted those things I would have looked for them. It is offensive.

Enjoy our next year, we hope to enjoy it with you.