UCI Housing Network and Cable TV Issues

The recent hubbub about banning all flags from a small portion of the UCI campus, not surprisingly, brought out all the xenophobic, racist, and ignorant trolls in the country.
These idiots obviously have never attended a university.

And not surprisingly, a state Senator (Janet Nguyen, a Republican, predictably) couldn't resist exploiting this issue for political grandstanding. She said she would sponsor an amendment to the CA Constitution to prevent such banning of the US flag.
As a politician, she really should know that the US Constitution prohibits such an amendment. I am sure she has heard of the 1st. Amendment. If not, she would obviously be unqualified for any public office.
She obviously just hopes that her constituents are sheep who don't know nor care about the US Constitution. In other words, Mrs. Nguyen is anti-American! Shame on her!

The students exercised their Constitutional rights to free speech. They should be applauded, not condemned.
But in Republican-controlled Orange County (where the racist "Minutemen" originated), even the UCI Chancellor caves in to racists and xenophobes. Shame on Chancellor Gillman!
Of course, current UCI Chancellor Gillman isn't the first UCI Chancellor to cave in to the Republican donors of Orange County. Former Chancellor Drake did the same when he rescinded the appointment of the first Dean of the UCI Law School (he reverted course later.) That was the beginning of the end of Chancellor Drake. I hope that the current display of a lack of a spine is the beginning of the end for Chancellor Gillman!
UCI needs a real Chancellor, one who stands up for the students, one who supports the students, not these spineless appointees!

There is a resolution out to support the students. I signed it and I urge everybody to sign it as a voice against racism, xenophobia and bigotry!

He speaks the oath as I write this.
What a great moment!

For a while now, my website is using XHTML. That by itself is working fine.
However, recently, I decided to actually set the appropriate MIME type for browsers that understand it (pretty much every modern browser except IE...)
The PHP code looks like this:

function SetMimeType() {
    header("Vary: Accept");
    if (stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"],
                "application/xhtml+xml"))
        header("Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml;
                charset=utf-8");
    else
        header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
}

So far, so good.
But then, I noticed some strange thing: all my code for writing dynamic text on the client side didn't work anymore.
It turns out that the Javascript code to write to the document, document.write, doesn't work if the MIME type is set to application/xhtml+xml.
The reason is that with this MIME type, the webpage is considered XML, and the XML parser can fundamentally not handle content changes while it is parsing the content.
The W3C has a short blurb on their website:

Does document.write work in XHTML?

No. Because of the way XML is defined, it is not possible to do tricks like this, where markup is generated by scripting while the parser is still parsing the markup.

You can still achieve the same effects, but you have to do it by using the DOM to add and delete elements.

A quick Google search came up with two pages (here and here) that discuss this problem in more detail, and that provide some code.
I've tried the code in the second link, and it worked fine in Firefox. Interestingly, though, only if the code is directly embedded in the page. Including it from a separate file like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="write.js"></script>

unfortunately did not work.
But anyway, that's at least a way to get my rather simple document.write code to work again.

So, the UCI Alumni Association has sent out emails informing people of the opposition to Prop. 92 by the UC Regents, among others.
While the Regents may have a point, they undermine their own position by not cleaning up the wasteful spending at UC campuses.
A case in point is right here at UCI: instead of firing incompetent people like Bill Zeller and Kevin Ansel, they are "promoted away", and continue to get pretty good salaries.
If the Regents were really serious about the funding crisis, they would get such people fired, in particular since they have done considerable harm to the university's reputation.
Until then, the Regents' opposition to Prop. 92 is rather hollow. UC's funding crisis can't be all that bad if UC can keep demonstrably incompetent people employed...
Although one regent apparently has recognized that there is a lot of waste within UC, the whole UC governing body doesn't seem to want to act on that. Given that, they need to clean up their house first before they have any standing opposing Prop. 92.

As usual, Illiad from User Friendly brings it to the point:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080203

'nuff said.