Geek on Two Wheels

I present to you, Exhibit A:  Bug #1339—lighttpd doesn’t set empty QUERY_STRING in cgi environment

Now, please direct your attention to Exhibit B: RFC 3875, section 4.1.7. Specifically, the below quoted paragraph:

   The server MUST set this variable; if the Script-URI does not include
   a query component, the QUERY_STRING MUST be defined as an empty
   string ("").

A potential  poit user recently encountered this problem.   While I would like to update the lighttpd bug entry alerting them to this crucial violation of specification, I’m also unwilling to sign up to yet another bug tracker just to fire off a single comment; avoiding such overhead is precisely the reason why I support OpenID.

Update: Mere minutes later, said user has pinged the bug.  Hopefully this leads to a resolution more correct than the first.

Subject: “Mongoloid” is a no-no term?

It’s recently come to my attention that “Mongoloid” is on the list of off-limit words on the official volunteer training manual.

As a Mongoloid, I am frankly offended that you think people may be offended by the term.

(Yes, I am now aware of the secondary, archaic meaning of the term after having to look it up.)

What if you happen to encounter an athlete studying archaeology who is specializing in tracing the lineage of East-Asian people, and wants to strike up a conversation about said topic because you, by sheer coincidence, is also an archaeologist?

Think of the archaeologists. Oh, why won’t anyone think of the archaeologists?!

Windows has something in the registry called Image File Execution Options. The idea is to be able to have the process launcher replace one executable with another—like a debugger—, control some run-time parameters, and generally do things to the executable via registry options.

Now, let that sink in for a little bit…

Good job, Microsoft.