Dan’s Web Spot

NTIA DTV coupon program

UPDATE: The DTV Coupon Program officially ended on July 31, 2009. Further information regarding background and statistics can be found at at the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) web site.

On February 17, 2009, the television stations that broadcast analog signals over the air will be required to switch to digital. You don't need to worry about this unless you currently use a roof antenna or "rabbit ears" on your television to view TV.

If this is how you receive television signals in your home, then you will no longer be able to do so without a converter box to convert the new digital signal into the older analog format so your TV can understand it.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has been issuing coupons for DTV converter boxes since early 2008. They have set up a program to help people with the cost of a converter box. You can apply for up to 2 $40 coupons towards up to 2 converter boxes per household. » More...

I was minding my own business today and looking at some links on my "Web" page when I realized that Stella, Zack and Rocko's Home Page on AOL Homepages had been taken down.

Back in the late 90's/early 2000's, I had AOL for my Internet access (dial-up). On the free space I got with an AOL user name, I had a created a simple page that had a picture of my 3 cats at the time, along with some comments about them. What I learned today when visiting the link, was that as of October 31, 2008, the AOL Homepages service is no longer in operation.

Determined to find some hidden, cached copy of my old (and mind you, not that valuable at all) stuff, I Googled the URL to no avail. There weren't even any cached copies of the page listed. It seems that Google only maintains cached copies of pages that currently exist. Of course, this does make sense, but didn't help me in the least...

After some more Googling I struck gold! I found a little gem that I think everyone should know about:

The Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" » More...

IE6 non-compliant behavior

When testing my own blog in Internet Explorer 6, I noticed that the text inside some posts was randomly disappearing. An example of what this looks like in IE6 is to the left. There can be several reasons why this happens, but the main reason is that following a "floated" element, IE6 sometimes loses track of the width of elements that don't have a height specification, no matter what value it is.

A floated element is one, such as a DIV or SPAN, upon which a CSS rule specifying "float:left;", "float:right;", or "float:none;" has been applied. Hovering your mouse over such elements randomly causes them to reappear.

I primarily use Mozilla Firefox for surfing and development work because it is compliant with W3C valid CSS standards and has a host of cool and useful plugins, such as Firebug. Firebug has an inspection mode where you can reveal any page element's CSS or HTML code merely by just hovering over it. You can also "inject" CSS, HTML and script statements in real time or comment out existing CSS rules to immediately see how the content is affected by such changes (my favorite). » More...