Just when I thought I understood how images work on the web; the differences between GIF, JPG and PNG; and when to use each type of image; along comes a new technology: color correction. The ICC (International Color Consortium) has a standard that allows for information about how an image should render by an application. Most commonly this is used by image editors like Adobe Photoshop. But now web browsers are getting into the act. See Is Your System ICC Version 4 Ready? for an example. In Safari (under OS X) the image looks fine. Under older browsers you see the different color profiles used in the image.

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Cool, a stand alone version for the Mac of Apache, Mysql and PHP: MAMP.

I’ve never needed to run Windows on my Powerbook, but have needed to run some old DOS programs I wrote. So I would either use the Windows XP machine at work, or my ancient Windows ME machine at home. But today, I found an alternative: DOSBox. DOSBox is a DOS emulator for Linux, Windows (why?), and OS X. Very cool.

Watch out for highly annoying yet legal invoice-looking things from the Internet Corporation Listing Service. If you register a domain name, you have to give a working address. That address will be sent a soliciation that looks very very similar to a bill. This is for an annual subscription for being listed in search engine. What search engine? Oh, “14 major search engines.” Well, the major search engines will spider your site automatically, so why bother paying anyone to ask the search engines to do it? Plus ICLS.net does not seem to accept credit cards. They want checks. Once they have a check, could they drain your account? I don’t know, but be safe: 1. Don’t buy services from junk mail; 2. Always check a web site’s privacy policy before giving them your personal information. (Note that ICLS.net does not have a privacy policy - hint hint) 3. Use a credit card to give yourself some protection from fraud; and 4. Put a unique address in your domain registration information so that you know where the losers out there get the information they use.

They do provide an email address to get questions about their services: inquiries@icls.net.

Here are some other sites that comment on ICLS.

I’m experimenting with RSS Digest. It takes news feeds and allows them to easily be included on other web pages.

I am researching audio formats for the Internet Caucus and found an interesting quote in a PDF. I selected the text, hit copy and got an error box asking for the document’s password so I could copy and paste. What purpose is that? I wanted to use one sentence from the file. Instead I had to spend 15 seconds retyping the sentence. Or I could take a screen shot:

In my opinion, this is an example of how copy protection is getting in the way of a fair use of a copyrighted work.

I just started a personal subscription to MacWorld. And got my first issue the same day I got junk mail from MacWorld selling my address info. How do I know they sold my info? Simple, I gave them a tagged mailing address. Their opt out information is at BuySub.com.

They also helpfuly tell you to opt-out with the Direct Marketing Association to help reduce your junk mail. Why don’t they do everyone a favor and simply respect people’s privacy and NOT SHARE SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION? My opinion of MacWorld has gone down slightly, although my opinion is slightly helped by them providing opt-out information fairly easily.

I’ve been running RedHat Linux 7.something on an old test machine at home for a few years. About a month ago I upgraded that machine to Redhat 9. Nice operating system, it seemed to work fine. So, what did I do? I just erased and installed Fedora Core 3. The install went much more quickly than I thought it would. Now I’m running the up2date process, and we’ll see what else I can do with the system.