UCI Housing Network and Cable TV Issues

Unfortunately not at UCI...

From a post to a mailing list that discusses CCA administration (the official name of CCA is Cisco NAC), in answer to another post (partly quoted on top):

"When we get support issues with any AV product, we typically say 'uninstall what you have, and put Symantec on.'"

This is becoming an increasingly unrealistic option for us. It was certainly fine in an era when few computers showed up with AV tools installed. But good work at increasing awareness of the importance of AV software means more students are arriving with pre-purchased (and pre-subscribed) software, and telling students the $100 they spent on a year's subscription isn't going to be used leads to frustration.

It is nice to see some network admins actually doing what they are supposed to do, serving the community, not being an adversary of the community...
Being a BOFH may be good for the ego, but ultimately, a non-adversarial situation is better for everybody, as I hope UCI Resnet personnel understands by now. When they found out the hard way that the community doesn't accept their "we know best" attitude, they panicked...

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According to this link, Resnet has added ESPN, Speed TV (Part of ESPN/ABC), Fuel TV (part of Fox) and some other channels to their lineup.
It may be that CampusTelevideo drastically reduced the prices they charge for these channels. When I was a member of the "Cable TV Channel Lineup group" back in 2005, Resnet (i.e., Kevin Ansel and Ted Roberge) told us it would cost $4 per month and person to get ESPN (see here.)
Or maybe they pay this from the last rent increase...

It is rather hard to believe that all of a sudden they managed to provide ESPN "out of the goodness of their hearts"...
I know that Resnet reads my blog, so they may be able solve the mystery. Although I believe that after Mr. Roberge's ill-advised and ridiculous attempt to bully and silence me, he probably doesn't want to talk with me ever again
He has a new boss, though, so maybe this is a sign of good things to come? If so, they can show by providing an opt-out for CCA...

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For a while now, my website is using XHTML. That by itself is working fine.
However, recently, I decided to actually set the appropriate MIME type for browsers that understand it (pretty much every modern browser except IE...)
The PHP code looks like this:

function SetMimeType() {
    header("Vary: Accept");
    if (stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"], "application/xhtml+xml"))
        header("Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8");
    else
        header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
}

So far, so good.
But then, I noticed some strange thing: all my code for writing dynamic text on the client side didn't work anymore.
It turns out that the Javascript code to write to the document, document.write, doesn't work if the MIME type is set to application/xhtml+xml.
The reason is that with this MIME type, the webpage is considered XML, and the XML parser can fundamentally not handle content changes while it is parsing the content.
The W3C has a short blurb on their website:

Does document.write work in XHTML?

No. Because of the way XML is defined, it is not possible to do tricks like this, where markup is generated by scripting while the parser is still parsing the markup.

You can still achieve the same effects, but you have to do it by using the DOM to add and delete elements.

A quick Google search came up with two pages (here and here) that discuss this problem in more detail, and that provide some code.
I've tried the code in the second link, and it worked fine in Firefox. Interestingly, though, only if the code is directly embedded in the page. Including it from a separate file like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="write.js"></script>

unfortunately did not work.
But anyway, that's at least a way to get my rather simple document.write code to work again.

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So, the UCI Alumni Association has sent out emails informing people of the opposition to Prop. 92 by the UC Regents, among others.
While the Regents may have a point, they undermine their own position by not cleaning up the wasteful spending at UC campuses.
A case in point is right here at UCI: instead of firing incompetent people like Bill Zeller and Kevin Ansel, they are "promoted away", and continue to get pretty good salaries.
If the Regents were really serious about the funding crisis, they would get such people fired, in particular since they have done considerable harm to the university's reputation.
Until then, the Regents' opposition to Prop. 92 is rather hollow. UC's funding crisis can't be all that bad if UC can keep demonstrably incompetent people employed...
Although one regent apparently has recognized that there is a lot of waste within UC, the whole UC governing body doesn't seem to want to act on that. Given that, they need to clean up their house first before they have any standing opposing Prop. 92.

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As usual, Illiad from User Friendly brings it to the point:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080203

'nuff said.

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