Language selection page / Page de sélection de la langue

Yeah, I know, you're tired of that metaphor, but in this particular case it's not lame poetics, I really did wipe the thing clean and reloaded the whole system from scratch en route of the long road to updating the teledyn.com web projects into the new Drupal 4.5.

and it's been a long hard road.

But I figured hey, I never promised you a rose garden and I'm hoping you'll all bear with me on this great adventure to salvage as much of the legacy content as possible while still bringing us up to date with all the new and wonderful things we can get out of Drupal 4.5 -- trust me, it's going to be worth it.

For you McLuhanites out there, you'll be happy to know that one of the retrievals in this updated site will be the return of the links database, a long lost component of the communiqué pages that somewhat fell to fallow in the back pages but soon to re-emerge as a hierarchical database of website reviews.

And there's more, much more, but for now there's this mountain of forward incompatibilities and I'm half-way up, camped in a tent, too far now to turn back, I can almost see the snow caps and I probably don't have to tell you all this because you've been here dozens of times if you do anything at all with technology.

stay tuned.

if there are any drupalers out there watching my pains, does anyone know how I can get the new textile applied to several hundred articles? I migrated the body but it seems each one must be ... ah ... er ... reloaded ...

Some time ago, maybe nearly 10 years ago, I remember Microsoft being challenged about the security of their Internet Explorer and giving the response that their browser should only be used for trusted websites ... which is to say, "never use it on the Internet," -- I started back then advising people to ween themselves of that browser, and before you laugh, they have just said the same thing again today reported in My Way News:

The infection ... appears to take advantage of three separate flaws with Microsoft products and can be difficult to detect.

Stephen Toulouse, a security program manager at Microsoft, said software updates to fix two of them had been released in April, but the third flaw was newly discovered and had no patch available yet.

He recommended that computer owners obtain the latest security updates ...

Pardon my observation here, but didn't he just say in the previous paragraph no such security patch is available? Ok, I thought so -- so I wasn't just seeing things. Anyway, minor point because it gets way better ...

...users should also turn up security settings on Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers to the highest levels.

Users could also turn off the "JavaScript" feature on their Microsoft browsers, though doing so could cripple functions on some sites.

This reminds me of the old 'cure' for air-sickness that says, "Lay flat on your back, place a large stone on your belly ... and stay out of airplanes!"

Anyone who's ever used MSIE with the max security settings already knows it's not much fun, so basically this is a remasked restatement of "Only use it for trusted websites" and therein a very curious side question emerges: Who can you trust online?

According to the BBC, the news may be a little worse than the US media are willing to admit ...  read more »