Eolas Patent Rejected!!!

This just in. Apparently the U.S. Patent Office has rejected the Eolas patent, which purported to cover all uses of "plugins" in Web pages - a baroque tale I've been following since last August.

I wonder if this means some of the other clueless patents that have recently surfaced will share this fate and we can all finally get some work done without some clueless git suing us...

Free Wi-Fi is apparently becoming a trend in both hotels and small airports - of course QoS and security issues will eventually crop you when you start giving internet access away to just about anybody, but small businesses see it as a cheap way to attract customers.

Lots of Office 2004 Screenshots

...over at MacWorld. Office should be coming out in July or so, but despite all the changes, it's still underwhelming. I mean, how much eyecandy can you add to humdrum everyday applications?

I've resumed fiddling around with the Cobalt Qube (after finding room for it atop my desk again) and followed up on my draft HOWTO to get RedHat (or Fedora) running on it by googling around and seeing if anyone got around to it too. Fallenknight picked up where I left off and got Fedora running on a RAQ, but failed to publish the critical bits that make it work (i.e., the kernel compile details). So I spent a good three hours fiddling around with kernel settings and can now get a kernel to load (which is a nice change) but fail with a signal 11 (segmentation fault):

Sending DHCP requests ., OK
IP-Config: Got DHCP answer from 192.168.0.1, my address is 192.168.0.125
IP-Config: Complete:
      device=eth0, addr=192.168.0.125, mask=255.255.255.0, gw=192.168.0.1,
     host=192.168.0.125, domain=internal.taoofmac.com, nis-domain=(none),
     bootserver=192.168.0.1, rootserver=192.168.0.1, rootpath=
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.
Looking up port of RPC 100003/2 on 192.168.0.1
Looking up port of RPC 100005/1 on 192.168.0.1
VFS: Mounted root (nfs filesystem).
Freeing unused kernel memory: 96k freed
Greetings.
anaconda installer init version 9.2 starting
mounting /proc filesystem... done
mounting /dev/pts (unix98 pty) filesystem... done
anaconda installer init version 9.2 using a serial console
remember, cereal is an important part of a nutritionally balanced breakfast.

could not set new controlling tty
trying to remount root filesystem read write... done
mounting /tmp as ramfs... done
running install...
running /sbin/loader
install exited abnormally -- received signal 11
sending terminatmd: recovery thread got woken up ...
ion signals...domd: recovery thread finished ...
ne
sending kill signals...done
disabling swap...
unmounting filesystems...
        /proc done
        /dev/pts done
you may safely reboot your system

Any pointers from folk who compiled custom Cobalt kernels are most welcome at this point (I'm using a stock 2.4 kernel from kernel.org and the iceblink.org patches slipped into a Fedora NFS install)