RSS Replacing Mailing Lists

I have recently discovered the joy of RSS subscriptions first hand.  Before RSS, the only way to stay informed of the news and events that interested me was to subscribe to the appropriate mailing list.  This resulted in a cluttered mail box.  Last week I downloaded an RSS news reader for OS X called Vienna, and I started subscribing to the RSS feeds of the web sites and message forums that I enjoy.  Wow, is this empowering.  No longer do I have to spend an hour surfing the web to see if there is anything new on my favourite sites – or on the Dataface forum.  Now I just have to check Vienna and see if there are any new posts.

DHTMLXGrid Part I

    After much deliberation, I have decided to use dhtmlXGrid to develop a portal widget for Dataface.  This will improve the usability of Dataface for complex data sources dramatically.  Among other reasons, I have chosen dhtmlXGrid because:

 <ol>   <li>It is available under GPL.</li>     <li>It seems really cool!! and polished.</li>   </ol>     <p>My initial observations are:</p>   <ol>  <li>Documentation and examples seem to be quite good and mature.</li>   <li>There doesn't seem to be a forum or mailing list available.</li>   <li>I am only using the Standard edition.&nbsp; The enterprise edition is not open source.&nbsp;</li>  </ol>   <p>One of the things that I like about this component is that you can load it with XML.&nbsp; This should make it relatively easy to define dataface actions that just output XML that is compatiblle with a the grid.&nbsp; I am stuck in a couple of spots, however.</p> <ol> <li>I can't see how to define como-boxes and select lists using XML.&nbsp; There are examples using javascript to programatically define them (which is okay), but I would rather do everything from XML.</li> <li>.. okay only one thing right now...&nbsp;</li> </ol> <p>I will scour the source code a little bit more and will probably end up emailing the company who makes it to ask about this one.. as it is pretty important.</p><p>The lack of a forum or community provisions seems a little limiting.&nbsp; I feel inclined to set up my own &quot;fan&quot; community site for this, if I begin using it a lot.</p><p>&nbsp;More on this later when I have some results.<br /></p>

Suing Spammers for Fraud

I have recently become more annoyed with spammers and their deceptive tactics.  Especially since I have launched some web sites recently that leaves me open to receive more spam.  I found this interesting article that goes over some of the developments with larger corporations like AOL and Microsoft engaging in court battles with spammers.