Technically Speaking

In general, I don’t wax political on this blog, and this isn’t an effort to do so. However, I do believe in the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, including the freedom of expression protected in the Bill of Rights.

That’s why I just don’t get this story.

Didn’t follow the link? That’s ok. I’ll summarize. The town council of Pahrump, Nevada decided last week to make it illegal to fly a foreign flag without flying the United States flag above it. This particular piece of legislation is targeting Mexican flags in the town of Pahrump, and I think it sets a bad precedent.

What’s wrong with somebody flying a foreign flag? It doesn’t necessarily mean any disrespect to the USA; it may simply be an expression of nationalistic identity and cultural heritage. I lived in Brazil for a while, and when I was in college, I proudly displayed a prominent Brazilian flag from my apartment window. It’s not that I don’t love the USA. I just celebrate Brazilian culture by showing their national flag.

I see this particular issue as discrimination against foreign nationals who want to fly the Mexican flag as a celebration of their cultural identity. Even if the town council disagrees with the expression, it should–in my opinion–be a protected form of expression. It doesn’t hurt anybody. It just allows a person to be proud of their differences that make them unique.

In some ways, this is similar to an experience I’ve encountered in my hometown. Near the train station I use daily, there is a biker shop that flies a prate skull-n-bones flag above their establishment. I hate it. I think it is disrespectful and celebrates anarchy instead of celebrating the government that protects us and our freedoms. I wouldn’t choose to shop at a store that flies a pirate flag–but I still believe that the shop owners should have the right to fly one.

I believe that people should be able to fly whatever flag they choose, even if it isn’t the Old Glory that I love.

Part of the protected freedom of expression includes allowing people to do their own thing, even when you disagree.

I’ve written about this a couple of times already, but I discovered some new functionality in Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) today that I thought I’d share.

Currently I’ve got a development box at work that I’ve upgraded (if you can call it that) to IE 7 while I keep my main box in IE 6, so it allows me to try out some of the “features” of IE 7 without sacrificing productivity on my regular box. Today I was attempting to log in to an FTP site using IE 7, and I got it to work.

If you are trying to use FTP in IE 7, try the following procedure:

• Open IE 7
• Enter a FTP user name, password, and site in the URL bar using the following pattern:
  ftp://<username>:<password>@<site.tld>So if you had a username of johndoe, a password of pa55word, and your site is example.com, you would use the following URL:
  ftp://johndoe:pa55word@example.com
• IE will display a directory listing of the FTP site.
• Click the Page menu (hint: it’s on the right hand side, under the search bar)
• Select Open FTP Site in Windows Explorer.
• Windows explorer opens. Windows can’t remember that we’ve already given the username and password, so we have to do it again.
• Click the File menu and select Login As….
• Enter your user name and password, and click the Log On button.

Yeah, it isn’t as smooth as IE 6, but hey, its doable!