[svlug] Megan's Law Site

[Thomas G. Digby]

I tried that new Megan's Law sex-offender site at

 http://www.meganslaw.ca.gov/

and had problems with it.  


First, there's this, which I don't consider very encouraging:  

 Best Viewed Using:  	Screen resolution 1024 x 768 pixels or higher
 Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater
 Netscape 6.1 or greater

with links to download those browsers.  


I plunged ahead anyway, with Debian KDE Mozilla.  

 Mozilla 1.7.3
 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041007 
 Debian/1.7.3-5


After I clicked on the site's license agreement I found some of the maps
showed as broken images.  And after I'd been futzing around for a while
something hung.  I had to Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get another virtual terminal to
log in on to kill the browser process.


I don't know if this indicates a real Linux compatibility problem/bug, or
if it was just a fluke or something wrong with my setup, but some of you
may want to try it with whatever setup you have.  If it's real, somebody
may want to politely tell them that Linux users pay taxes like everybody
else, and *.gov sites should not favor one company's browsers over
another's.

Also, if it breaks more recent browser versions it may indicate something 
that the browser code should be hardened against.  


-- 
                       -- Tom Digby
                       bubbles at well.com
                       http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ 
                       http://www.well.com/~bubbles/BblB60DL.gif