If you missed it, today the new FCC Chairman made a significant announcement regarding "Preserving a Free and Open Internet."  Hint, here's one way to start - don't lock everything up in a PDF, but thats not the point. The stated purpose of the policy is

 \ That's why Congress and the President have charged the FCC with developing a National\ Broadband Plan to ensure that every American has access to open and robust broadband. The\ fact is that we face great challenges as a nation right now, including health care, education,\ energy, and public safety. While the Internet alone will not provide a complete solution to any of\ them, it can and must play a critical role in solving each one.\  

You'll excuse me if I read that an hear "We're from the government, we're here to help." in the back of my mind.I'm very leery of getting the government involved in regulating the Internet because I'd rather let millions of consumers decide how the network should work than just a few bureaucrats in the federal government. The latter also invites companies who want to undermine neutrality to concentrate their lobbying efforts on currying favor with the FCC.

TLF breaks down the whole announcement, Government thinks it can "preserve" Internet, scrutinizing the major arguments made by FCC Chariman Julius Genachowski.

Regulation always starts out small, before it grows really big. It has to: Loopholes and other unintended consequences (and opportunities) are always discovered after the "product" launches.

Finally, in the TLF comments section is Ed Felten's concise and rational position on net neutrality.

Even without a regulatory czar, wheels are turning to punish Comcast for what they've done. Customers are unhappy and are putting pressure on Comcast. If they deceived their customers, they'll face lawsuits. We don't know yet how things will come out, but it seems likely Comcast will regret their actions, and especially their lack of transparency.

Migrating platforms can lead to broken links on your website. If you've cultivated links from other sites or if search engines send a lot of visitors your way, you'll want to redirect users from the old links to the new. Many content management systems have facilities for manually maintaining redirects, but you can also do this with Apache.  The big benefit of using Apache is that such visitors won't hit your CMS until they get to the correct page.

One way to redirect users is through mod_rewrite and clever use of its Rewrite Rules. If you have a lot links to redirect, you don't want to create one rule for each link, since its essentially the same pattern for each link. This is where the rewrite modules RewriteMap directive comes in handy.

In your VirtualHost or Server sections, add something like the following, making sure to change the rewrite rule regular expression to match your own situation.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap redirect_map txt:/path/to/mysite/redirect_map.txt
RewriteRule ^/news/detail/(.*) ${redirect_map:$1} [R=permanent,L]

Then, in the redirect_map.txt file, you can put the old link and new link one per line and separated by one or more spaces or tabs.

1877-avoiding_frustration_with_php_sessions     /avoiding-frustration-with-php-sessions
1877-avoiding_frustration_with_php_session      /avoiding-frustration-with-php-sessions
2062-howto_use_virtualbox_to_setup_an_internet_explorer_testing_machine /howto-use-virtualbox-to-setup-an-internet-explorer-testing-machine
2067-peter_wilts_pillars_of_management          /peter-wilts-pillars-of-management

Now that the MLS season is close to an end, the playoff picture will start to come into clearer view. Using the Embed Widget module for Drupal, I was able to take a block containing the standings as a single table and make it available as a widget that anyone can put on their own website. The hardest part was theming it to look halfway decent, because the module wants to use the Color API module to generate a color scheme automatically based on one color. I overrode that with a single theme preprocess function to get the exact colors I wanted.

You can get the code for the widget over at Behind the Badge.

Sounder at Heart has questions about how ties are broken, so I'll have to give that another look to make sure its on the up-and-up.