To open source or not too open source

Quite often I encounter a (java) project and while using it I download the source to see how it does things. When looking into the source I often see usage of things like jakarta-oro, xerces, xalan, jdom, dom4j to name a few. As the current jdk1.5 contains an xml parser/xsl transformer/regex I often see myself getting rid of these dependencies as the native JDK ones are much faster. Only problem is, when I talk to the people developing it, they either don't answer at all (ok an old project) or they don't like the license of it (GPL or LGPL). The latter I can understand (well kinda) but the first put's me in some kind of dillema as it would be so much nicer to put an updated version back online to allow other people to use it. But since I'm not a lawyer and don't intend of becoming one, I'm kind of reluctant too.


So maybe someone has some other ideas regarding this.

Long live courier

Phew, turned kind of hot yesterday as I was upgrading my mail server (Courier .47 to .49). After a recursive configure and make, things got messy when I started to optimise permissions (and hence increasing security). Issues I've encountered so far:

   
• Public folders need the sticky bit, otherwise it's difficult to keep track who's done what.

   
• Personal folders can remain under 1 account provided they have permissions 0700.(so no sticky bit there)

   
• If you've tried your own email account long enough bashing it to pieces, Courier marks it as Temporarely Unavailable. Only thing to do then is just go into /var/track/ and remove your account in there.

   
• The file respawnlo, can be modified to restart once every x days (finally found that)

   
• maildirshared contains the public folders for everybody

besides those discoveries, I've never had a mailserver that good. I've tried qmail/courier-imap and sendmail/wu-imap and hopefully I don't start a religeous war here but much too difficult to install and to administer.

Pretty outrageous

Although I normally don't post anything even remotely related to politics in here, I couldn't resist now.
Check this out:

Nice DHTML calendar

can be found here.

Labels

Never been much of a spec guys anyway. But this is kind of neat.

the Html tag "label" allows you to use a larger region to select checkboxes or radiobuttons. How?

Try out a couple of check boxes:

Without a label

With a label

To operate the first check box you have to check on that little box. To use the second all you have to do is click on the text that applies to it. A much
larger target and much easier to use. And of course they are not just
for check boxes, but everything (radio buttons, text fields / areas,
drop downs, select boxes, ...)