Bill would allow Obama to sieze control of the internet

I don't really who is in power, a socialist democrat or a conservative republican. There is a bill sponsered by Sen Lieberman that would give Obama a 'kill switch' for the internet. The bill is entitled Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act.  Given the actions of this administration and the heavy handed tactics, this is a truly frightening bill. As much as I trust Sarah Palin, I would not even want her to have this much power.

Obama has shown his willingness to use regulatory tricks to try to shut down opposition such as Fox News. If he has this power, he could shut down our free speach on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Declan McCullagh points out in his article that, in a time of crisis, pulling the plug on the internet could weaken us.

The question one has to ask about this is "are there ulterior motives?". Over the last 200 years, the political elite in this country have become used to a fawning media and the ability to control the news. The recent incident where a congressman attacked two students is upsetting to those who are used to contol. A decade ago the congressman or speaker's office could have made a phone call to the reporters and quashed the story. Today, it goes out on  Youtube and the power elites find themselves powerless to stop it.


This is also frightening in that an ever increasing portion of our communications is dependent on the internet. Many people have moved to Voice over IP for there phone service. Consider the following scenario. Terrorists detonate a nuclear device in a major city. The years of 'community organizing' have not prepared our commander in chief to deal with this. He panicks and pulls the plug on the internet. Now you try to call your kids at school to see if they are safe and make arrangements to get them home. You find out all of the lines are dead because Obama pulled the plug on the internet.  You try to google 'radiation pills' to find out if the pottasium iodate you have in the medicine cabinet is an antidote. Your spouse is at home trying to go online to determine what to do for your diabetic child since the pharmacy can't process your prescriptions for his insulin but there is no internet.

Oh, Obama, won't mind, like everything else, HIS internet will be working and dozens of govenrment agents will be looking after HIS family... Let them eat cakes.

• The senate version of the bill
• PrisonPlanet article
• Article by Declan McCullagh of ZDnet

Verifying a blogger hosted blog in google webmaster tools and submitting a sitemap

Google recently ended FTP hosting for blogs. We went throught the conversion process with no problem.

One of the side effects of the change was that the blogs were now at http://blog.oursite.com/  instead of www.oursite.com/blog.

The first step was to set up a new site in webmaster tools for the blog. That involved simply creating a new site in WMT of http://blog.oursite.com/ . The verification appeared to be a little tricky. With the new hosting, we weren't sure if it was possible to add a file. You can also verify via a DNS record which would probably be a more elegant solution. However, we didn't have the time to work through that. The easiest way was to set up a meta tag. We are using the layout tools with the gadgets. All we needed to do was select EDIT HTML and paste the metatag into the template.

One word of warning. There may be situations were you lose the metatags and will have to reinsert them. The same technique should work for the Yahoo site manager as well.

We were using the atom feed for the google webmaster tools of www.oursite.com/atom.xml.   There wasn't any easily found documentation on the site feed name. Through some simple trial and error, we found that the site feed was simply http://blog.oursite.com/atom.xml.  or, as it looks in webmaster tools /atom.xml.

Waterproof Phone Pouches

Nothing says "ruined phone" like a good dousing with salt water. We were watching the festivities at our local boat ramp. Most of the people going out in their boats had cell phones... in their shirt or pants pocket. One good wave over the bow and you end up with an expensive paperweight. There are any number of good waterproof pouches available to help protect your phone and camera

 Now that it's summer and time for boating and the beach, consider getting a waterproof pouch for your phone. 

Showing a Fabrik Form in a Joomla Article

If you want to show a fabrik form inside a Joomla Article, you can do that by the following

1. Download the Fabrik Plugin, currently Fabrik Plugin 2.0.rc5
2. Make sure the plugin is enabled. It will be labeled Fabrik
3. Make a note of the syntax. If your form is #2, then you can insert the form with {fabrik view=form id=2}

Note - Fabrik is a Joomla extension that allows you to easily create forms.

Bucks County Fios now requires port 587 for outgoing mail (SMTP)

My outgoing mail suddently stopped working today. I had forgotten about a verizon email stating that I had to change my outgoing smtp port from 25 to 587. This is in a supposed effort to slow down spam from infected machines.

We use our own domain for mail.

The process is pretty straightforward but it did involve a few steps

1. Change the outgoing server from mydomain.com to outgoing.verizon.net
2. Change the outgoing mail port (SMTP) from 25 to 587
3. Set the outgoing server to "My server requires authentication" and enter my VERIZON user id and password (not the id and password for my email). Fortunately the verizon tech was able to reset the password. Don't forget to change it since it expires in 24 hours.

I still have to figure out how to configure the mail settings on my verizon samsung saga phone. We get lousy cellular coverage at home and I often end up using the wireless for connectivity.