Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

California Spam Bill

A new law in California will be in effect starting January 1st, 2004. According to the new law, it becomes illegal to send Californians unsolicited email. Doing so exposes the offender to the possibility of being sued for anywhere between $1000 to $1 million dollars.

Now, I think it's very unlikely that individuals will start sueing spammers, but ISPs will most likely do so. I'm not sure how the law is written, but I hope it holds responsible not only the actual spammer, but also the company the spam email is advertising for. With such a provision, companies would not want to bear the possible financial burdens.

J2EE security book

Pankaj Kumar, my old colleague at HP had his book on J2EE security finally published at Prentice Hall. The companion Web site, j2ee-security.net, has some more insights of the book, including a table of contents. The book promises to be a good introduction to the security of Web services.

Pankaj spent a lot of time working on this book, and I always admired his ability to concentrate on doing the work, even when our group at HP went through some rough times. I hope all this work was worth the effort!

ApacheCon 2003 speaker

I just found from Matthew's and Steven's blogs that ApacheCon is open for registration. It looks like my session on Cocoon control flow was accepted! Carsten, Stefano and Steven have sessions on Cocoon too, which makes things very interesting!

New server

I've moved the Weblog installation to a new server, with a lot more disk space and bandwidth. Please let me know if you notice any problems with the Web site or have troubles contacting me by email.

nXML - new XML editing mode for Emacs

James Clark released nXML, a new Emacs mode for editing XML documents (via Kevin Burton). The new mode provides validation and schema-sensitive editing using a Relax NG Compact Syntax (RNC) schema. You can convert DTD and Relax NG XML schemas to RNC schemas using Trang, another tool by James Clark.

Unfortunately, nXML does not seem to work with XEmacs yet. I'll take a look at it to see if it can be easily ported.