I’ve been using Apache 1.3x for my web sites. Recently I upgraded one server to have Apache 2.0x. I had been using the “Options +Multiviews” feature to allow me to link to web pages without a file extension. For example, I link to /directoryname/something instead of /directoryname/something.html. This gives me flexibility if in the future I want to change my pages from .shtml to .php.

But the settings in Apache 2 have changed slightly. I had to add in “MultiviewsMatch Any” to my configuration file. I restarted Apache, and voila! It worked.

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I just spent more time than I should have trying to figure out why wget was not retrieving web pages correctly. I’ve been using wget for ages with no problems. It turns out the ampersand & in the URL was behaving badly. The solution is obvious, once I found it buried deep in a discussion at RedHat.com. Enclose the URL in single quotes. Works like a charm.

I surprised myself, but Firefox is slowly getting my attention over Apple’s Safari. The latest feature I love is a plug-in called AdBlock. It blocks advertising images and some of the pop-ups and pop-unders that Firefox can’t block yet. I used a list at http://www.geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/ of what to block. So far, it is working quite well.

You can customize tons of Eudora settings by using s. They are mostly defined at X-Eudora-Settings.txt. All you do is copy the tag to a new message in Eudora. It will become a link, double click it, and then change the options.

A very useful one is: . It allows you to change the text when you reply to a message. I use the string: “At ^3 ^1, ^0 wrote:” to show “At time date, person wrote:” and the time, date, and the original sender’s name are placed automatically before the quoted earlier message.

Several years ago, I added in a Eudora setting that reads aloud the “bad” words in incoming messages. Unfortunately, that code is not publicly listed on the eudora web site any more, and I have no idea how to turn it off now. So I have to mute my computer when it starts spewing obscenities.

Here’s an easy way to tell an email message is a phishing attempt: If the message refers to a technology that doesn’t exist yet, it’s a scam of some sort. I just recevied this attempt to phish my PayPal account info:

Your account will be suspended ! We are contacting you to remind you that on 8 April 2005 our Account Review Team identified some unusual activity in your account. In accordance with PayPal’s User Agreement and to ensure that your account has not been compromised, access to your account was limited. Your account access will remain limited until this issue has been resolved.

Since today is April 4th, and the “unusual activity” will take place this Friday, I’m pretty sure this is a scam. Other hints include the message headers showing “Received: from paypal255.com (615270.ds.nac.net [66.246.246.62])”. Paypal email always comes from paypal.com. And SpamAssassin and demime helped protect me as well.