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[Aug-29-2001]
I released GCGI yesterday. GCGI is a CGI library programmed in C and released under the LGPL. The library implements NCSA's Common Gateway Interface specification and RFC2388.

The library processes data from HTML forms and provides that data to CGI programs. It handles standard URL-encoded data and MIME-encoded multipart/form-data. This includes everything from integers and strings, to file uploading.

I had been using Tomas Boutell's CGI library for quite a while, but it did not have support for RFC2388 and there were things about how it was structured that I never particularly liked. So, I implemented GCGI, following Boutell's API loosely when it made sense.

You can find GCGI here: http://catchen.org/gcgi

I am pretty excited as I have been working on this program, in part, several months. I originally developed it for use with the Webbug Mailing List programs and have since extended it to handle the functionality required by cgiPop. With its release, I can now add email attachment functionality to cgiPop by using the RFC2388 facilities.

I also released GCGI on http://freshmeat.net/projects/gcgi/. This was the first time I have used freshmeat and the first time I have publicly released any software.

[Aug-22-2001]
Well, it was a weekend of text-layout programs. First, in an attempt to scrub the topeka website, I got deep into Cascading Style Sheets and HTML 4.0. CSS is a genuine improvement over vanilla HTML and I wish I had started learning it earlier. I rewrote all of topeka HTML code to take advantage of its superior text-layout properties and to move the HTML up to version 4.0. My goal was to get rid of all tables that were used only for formatting and to use DIVs instead. However, the "cascading" part of CSS is still a bit of a mystery to me. I can't seem to lay out my site exact enough without CSS cascading it to the left or right, up or down. Clearly, CSS is meant as a lazy approach to text formatting. In the sense that when you have a lot of text, CSS will lay it out well -- in columns or paragraphs -- whatever. But when you have a small amount of text, that needs to be layed out precisely, it is much more difficult to do it.

From that point I started to update my resume, with two goals in mind:

  1. Use CSS to (finally) get a good enough representation of the resume to put it on the web.
  2. To produce a resume that did not use Microsoft Word as a file format.
As I mentioned before, however, resumes don't consist of a large amount of text that can be lazily formatted, but rather a small amount of text that needs precise formatting, so getting a precise representation in CSS/HTML is difficult. Because of this reason I stumbled upon LaTeX. LaTeX is a really neat language. With it I can produce a resume in TeX format, and convert it directly to Postscript, PDF, HTML or any of several other formats. It allows me to put my resume in a format that is universally readable -- PDF and provides a precise representation of what the printed resume will look like. All of this, and I get to avoid expensive, proprietary software from Microsoft and Adobe.

So, anyway, here is the (nearly) finished product:

[Aug-07-2001]
On Saturday, Sam and went to a PHX protest for Dmitry Sklyarov. Sklyarov is a Russian Hacker/Grad Student who wrote a program that breaks the encryption on Adobe EBook Reader Software. When a consumer buys and "EBook", that book comes with certain restrictions that are enforced by the EBook Reader software. These might include, that the book may only be read once, or that it cannot be copied (for a backup, say). Using Sklyarov's software, people can translate their restricted EBook files into plain PDF files. They can then do what ever they want to them (copy, delete, modify, etc). So, for example, a blind person could use Sklyarov's software to bypass restrictions on an EBook so that they can have that EBook read to them by their computer (using a text to speech program along with the decrypted PDF file).

Sklyarov came to the US to give a presentation on his software at a Security Conference. After the presentation, he was arrested by the FBI for criminal violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA makes it illegal to produce or distribute a device that can be used to circumvent copyright protections. The US is currently the only country in the world to have such a draconian law, and it has had serious consequences here (see here and here)

Yesterday, after two weeks in jail, Sklyarov was finally released on $50,000 bail.

So, there have been many protests around the country, including here in PHX. We went to the Phoenix Public Library on Saturday for several hours and handed out literature to the public and held placards. We reached a good number of people and only briefly had problems with Library Security guards. We plan to continue doing these protests until the DMCA is repealed.

The protest lasted about 2 hours, which is about the limit one can stand in the July Phoenix Sun (and my sunburn can attest to this fact).

For much more information on the subject, check out the following: