Devil is Blogging

I usually do not post about news events. But this one here made it irresistible for me to keep from blogging on it.

I got this news from the EFF Blog. A Boston University student’s computer, cell phone and other properties were seized by the police as a part of an investigation to find who send an email to the college mailing list saying that another student is a gay.

Though there is no indication of any crime he has committed, the police has issued a very stupid and funny warrant. Some of the supposedly suspicious activities listed include: the student being seen with “unknown laptop computers,” which he says he was given by Boston College for field testing or he was “fixing” them for other students; the student uses multiple names to log on to his computer; and the student uses two different operating systems, including one that is not the “regular BC operating system”(I think BC stands for Boston College. And BC operating system is some customized version of Windows) but instead has “a blackscreen with white font (I cannot stop laughing… they should have sepcified the font  size too..) which he uses prompt commands on.”

During their search, the police seized (among other things) the student’s computers, storage drives, cell phone, iPod Touch, flash drives, digital camera, and Ubuntu Linux CD ( Oh, I never knew u can send email from iPod Touch or Ubundu CD). None of these items have been returned to him.

To strengthen their arguments, the police also says the (computer science major) student is considered a computer genius by other students (Oh my god, they are hunting down geniuses,.. I must be careful ).

The student who was employed by college IT department was suspended from job. EFF has filed an emergency motion to quash and for the return of seized property on behalf of a Boston College computer science student Riccardo Calixte.

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cya. bye.

Reference: Computer science student challenges tech seizure – CNET News

Popularity: 38% [?]

I was not very fond of CSS, until recently.  I just used html elements to style my pages. But then once I happened to use some simple CSS elements, coz I had basic CSS in my college syllabus. Ever since I’m a great fan and admirer of this simple, kewl technique.. CSS.

I have been fascinated by round cornered elements in web pages. I tried to learn the ‘secret art of round corners!!’. Most of my searches returned tutorials for rounding corners using images, Including this one. It uses 4 corner images and is pretty simple to implement.

A few days ago, I was browsing through some script from DynamicDrive CSS Library, I found an unfamiliar css element: -moz-border-radius. I did a lil research and eventually I got to CSS3. Checkout www.css3.info. CSS3 is still in draft and all browsers have not started to support it. Yet some like Firefox, Safari etc has already started to adopt CSS3.

border-radius (reference) is an element which is included in the forthcoming CSS3. It can be used in the following forms.

If you use border-radius: 4em; , then all the four corners will be rounded by 4em. Or you can use border-radius: 5px 5px 0px 10px;, so you can use individual radii for all the four corners. Or the single attribute can be broken down as follows.

border-top-left-radius: 4em;
border-top-right-radius: 4em;
border-bottom-right-radius: 4em;
border-bottom-left-radius: 4em;

The Gecko Layout Engine which is the basis of Mozilla Firefox uses some equivalent attributes instead of border-radius. The border-radius equivalent in Gecko is -moz-border-radius (reference). It can also take 4 arguments as in -moz-border-radius:15px 0px 15px 0px;. If only 1 attribute is specified as in -moz-border-radius:15px;, the same will be applied for all 4 corners. -moz-border-radius can also be written as 4 different elements as follows.

-moz-border-radius-bottomleft:15px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomright:15px;
-moz-border-radius-topright:15px;
-moz-border-radius-topleft:15px;

Here is a few examples I made which uses the -moz-border-radius element for rounding corners. See the code of the page and see how simple it is. But remember -moz-border-radius works only in Gecko based browsers, which includes Firefox, NetScape, Camino, SeaMonkey K-Meleon etc (Google’s picture-organization software Picasa is based on Gecko).

That was Kewl, ain’t it? cya, babye.

Popularity: 41% [?]