So today I spent about 15 minutes on a program to do something that I should have realized Opera can already do. I started writing a Perl script I called Earl Q* (you can use that if you want, please mention me) which you could set up as your default browser. If you were connected to the Internet it would hand off any requests to some real browser. If you were not, it would keep all URL's in a queue until you go online.

I wasn't sure if Opera could do this on its own and so I tested it. But of course, at the same time I started writing, and it got away from me. Fifteen minutes later I check Opera and it had done exactly what I wanted.

So here's a summary of what Opera will do when it cannot reach a page:

• If a page takes a very long time to load and you close Opera before it has finished, then when you start Opera again, a blank tab will open. This is what confused me.
• If Opera can determine that it can't reach a page, it will load an error page. If you close Opera, then the next time you run it, the tab will open to the same address again. Your URL will be saved there.

You can understand my confusion. Once upon a time I had slow connections, shutdown Opera and opened it again to discover that my tabs were blank. I assumed this was the normal behavior for all failed tabs.

For the technically minded, you may have guessed that Opera saves the URL of a tab once the tab has either started or finished loading (not sure which, don't feel like testing). On a slow connection it may never start or finish, so Opera registers no recent URL.

Moral: If you're offline using some application that gives you links (such as a news reader), you can click them. Opera will attempt a load, fail, and keep the URL for next time you get online.

BTW, if you haven't previously figured it out by accident, Shift-F5 will refresh all the tabs in an Opera window.

*Earl Q is what URL Queue would sound like if you pronounce URL as an acronym (which I've heard people do and caught the bad habit myself).

And we're back... see how long it lasts. Sorry, I lived too far from my server to really figure out why it can't keep working. Union issues I assume. But now it works in-house and I can keep an eye on it.

While I await its impending doom, I thought I'd share what Patton Oswalt had to say about foomor.org:

A literal roller-coaster ride!

Read all about it here.

Oh, and enjoy this awesome poster art:

WikiLeaks.org has won its case in defense against Bank Julius Baer, which last week filed to disable its domain name. The judge presiding defended his previous decision thusly:

This is a case in which we had a (dispute) with named parties, and the parties were duly served. One of which properly responded and came to this court with a proposed settlement in this lawsuit...Nobody filed any timely responses to the court's order.

E.G. his prior ruling was in response to WikiLeaks.org's failure to send representation. Sounds somewhat flimsy, but it does follow the laws of court room proceedings.

As of now www.wikileaks.org is functional.

If you're interested in governments silencing the truth, you'll want to check out WikiLeaks.org which recently had its domain name disconnected by court order. I've rarely heard of a more epic example of government censorship.

WikiLeaks.org encourages people from all over the world to anonymously submit incriminating documents that expose illegal acts of corporations and governments. In the USA, this is free speech, protected by the First Amendment. (Even if the documents are obtained illegally, it is legal to share the information.)

When this pissed off Bank Julius Baer, a judge in California ordered the DNS registrar hosting the WikiLeaks.org domain name to clear the record, thereby cutting off access to WikiLeaks via the WikiLeaks.org domain name. This was done exactly as requested by Bank Julius Baer and without any lawyers from WikiLeaks.org present. This blatant disregard for people's rights deserves harsh consequences brought against the judge and the bank. (The DNS registrar may be at fault as well, if it can be shown that compliance with illegal censorship is illegal.)

Find out more here 'Wikileaks.org' taken offline in many areas after fire, court injunction and access WikiLeaks.org via one of their other links such as http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks.

Of course, this is great publicity for WikiLeaks.org.

In case you're curious, if Bank Julius Baer believed the information on WikiLeaks.org to be untrue and therefore slanderous, they could have taken appropriate, legal action by filing suit for libel. If they won in court the appropriate action by WikiLeaks.org would be to remove the libelous material. However, this could not be done until the information was proven to be untrue. Censorship is illegal unless the information is verifiably false (ie, factual lies are not protected by Free Speech).

This website is coming back, byte by byte. Some changes are in the works though, so instead of reinstalling all the same old stuff, we'll wait until the new version is ready to beta test.

Until then, here's a video of my brother-in-law failing to catch up to our carriage:

This is what I was doing instead of taking care of my server... ;)