Research has shown that violent and sexually explicit media contribute to aggressive behavior, early sexual experimentation, obesity, and depression.

Whenever I meet young parents... they tell me that they are worried about losing control over the raising of their own children and about ceding the responsibility of implicating values and behaviors to a multi-dimensional media marketplace over which they have no control...

I wonder when research will be done to see just how many of those parents are actually taking an active role in their children's development. I realize that older children are harder to moderate, but it is certainly not impossible. The only thing my wife and I let our son watch/play is shows/games from Noggin. I have personally watched at least a couple of episodes of every show that airs on Noggin, and approve of them.

Don't get me wrong here. I do approve of any legislation that would keep such games out of the hands of young children. I am just afraid that such games will eventually be legislated out of existence by the likes of Clinton.  It is not the government's job to parent our children. It is ours.

I have not yet had the opportunity to read the issue. I am actually quite afraid that I will like it. A PDF subscription is a whopping 60 bucks a year.

I hope this article mentions some plugins that are not that known and might be interesting for some webmasters who use Wordpress as their blogging plattform of choice.

Good resource for newbie bloggers like me. Thanks Martin.

I use to play MUDs quite regularly. In fact, I am an official zMUD Guru. Anyhow, while playing in linux, my client of choice was mcl. Mcl offered both PERL (which I was already familiar with) and Python scripting. Nothing ever came from that short-lived experience with Python .

Then a couple of years ago, I grabbed a copy of Python Programming for Absolute Beginners from Amazon. As I have previously mentioned, I have only now dedicated myself to reading it.

So why the sudden dedication? Why Python? Well, I came across this article on learning python titled Why Python? which just happened to link to a Linux Journal article by the same name written by Eric Raymond.

One of the reasons that I decided to learn python and put up this website was a fantastic article written by Eric Raymond. The article is title "Why Python?" and can be found here.

After reading the article, I found myself to be motivated as well. If you've thought about learning any programming language, I suggest you head over to linux journal to read Eric Raymond's Why Python? article.

Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner, Second Edition (For the Absolute Beginner)

Michael Dawson. Course Technology PTR 2005, Paperback, 472 pages, $29.99

This is a book I picked up a couple of years ago when I first became interested in Python. Unfortunately, due to life throwing a monkey wrench into my plans, I was never able to finish the book. In fact, I didn't get past the first two chapters.

Now that I've been able to pick up this book again, I am finding that the first handful of chapters are very basic and even boring. Nevertheless, I am dedicated to reading this book front to back if for no other reasons than to get a hold of Python's rather unique syntax.

I plan to give this book a proper review once I have finished reading it.

I decided that rather than editing the source of every file to include my own custom Google search, I'd use apache mod-rewrite and php to replace relevant code on the fly and cache it. It is really simple, but does the job quite well.

The PHP Code:

// Send content type
header('Content-type: text/html');
 
// Check if a cached version is available
// If it is, print and die
$cachename = str_replace('/','_',$_REQUEST['FILE']);
if (file_exists('cache/'.$cachename))
{
	print file_get_contents('cache/'.$cachename);
	exit();
}
 
// Get the file we're asking for
$realHTML = file_get_contents($_REQUEST['FILE']);
 
// Ads
$ads = file_get_contents('inc/ads');
// Replace SSI with real ads
$shtml = '<!--#include virtual="/inc/ads" -->';
$realHTML = str_replace($shtml, $ads, $realHTML);
 
// Proudly Hosted By
$hosted = "
<p class="Footer" style="border-top: medium none; margin-bottom: 8px"><u>Dive Into Python</u> by Mark Pilgrim is proudly mirrored by <a href="http://geekblog.info/">GeekBlog.info</a>";
$body = "";
$realHTML = preg_replace("/$body/i", $hosted, $realHTML);
 
// Replace the default Custom Google Search
$oldSearch = addcslashes('
<form id="search" method="get" action="http://www.google.com/custom">\s+
 
<label for="q" accesskey="4">Find: </label>
<input id="q" name="q" size="20" maxlength="255" value=" " type="text" />
<input value="Search" type="submit" />
<input name="cof" value="LW:752;L:http://diveintopython.org/images/diveintopython.png;LH:42;AH:left;GL:0;AWFID:3ced2bb1f7f1b212;" type="hidden" />
<input name="domains" value="diveintopython.org" type="hidden" />
<input name="sitesearch" value="diveintopython.org" type="hidden" />
 
\s+</form>
 
',"/");
 
$newSearch = '
<!-- Google CSE Search Box Begins  -->
<form action="http://www.google.com/cse" id="searchbox_004948342960141248740:vdxqp1bv-tm">
<input name="cx" value="004948342960141248740:vdxqp1bv-tm" type="hidden" />
<input name="q" size="25" type="text" />
<input name="sa" value="Search" type="submit" />
</form>
 
<script src="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=searchbox_004948342960141248740%3Avdxqp1bv-tm&amp;lang=en" type="text/javascript"></script>
<!-- Google CSE Search Box Ends -->
';
 
$realHTML = preg_replace("/$oldSearch/i", $newSearch, $realHTML);
 
// Create a cached version
$cache = fopen("cache/".$cachename, "w");
fwrite($cache, $realHTML);
fclose($cache);
 
// print and die
print $realHTML;
exit();
 

The Apache Code (.htaccess):

<ifmodule>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
 
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule ^(.+\.html)$ /hostedby.php?FILE=$1 [nc,qsa,l]
</ifmodule>
 

Head on over to Dive Into Python to check it out.

if (isset($_REQUEST['highlight']))
{
    print "Hello World";
}