Personal – Page 338

Internet Explorer Inferiority… Again

I’ve had a major gripe with Microsoft Internet Explorer for some years now, in it’s inability to handle PNG files correctly. Being able to use PNG files gives web developers some serious benefits in being able to make overlaid, semitransparent (non-binary transparency) images, compress files smaller, etc.

So, yeh – pretty much every web browser on the market has had near-perfect PNG support since 1998, and Internet Explorer has always been lagging behind (that’s why the ‘mugshots’ on abnib look ‘wrong’ in IE). But here’s the worst of it: I’ve just discovered that the MacOS version of Internet Explorer (yes; also by Microsoft) 5 – which was released almost five years ago – has excellent support for PNG graphics! That’s crazy!

It’s not that I’m affected directly – I don’t touch IE with a barge pole: my issue is that, as a web developer, I can’t take advantage of any of the shiny features of a decade-old technology, simply because the so-called ‘market leader’ hasn’t been bothered to finish writing a few hundred lines of code yet!

Okay. I’m breathing normally again now.

The Stigma Of The Amiga

LiveJournal Sells

Following up yesterday’s rumours, it can now be seen that, officially, LiveJournal has been sold to SixApart. The details look pretty good – the service will remain much as-it-is, nobody will be ‘migrated’ to TypePad or MoveableType, and – better yet – LiveJournal might actually (finally) get some much-needed new features, such as trackback (which can be seen in effect right here, on my post yesterday – this post will be linked as a ‘trackback’ comment, because this post follows it up – with trackback, this kind of thing can be posted cross-journal, too).

Ah; Computers

Heh! Celoxis, a web-based project management tool we‘ve been experimenting with, e-mailed me twice today – just past midnight, and half an hour later – to remind me that it will be my birthday on Saturday (in case I didn’t know). Better yet, our mail server picked up on these e-mails and flagged them as ‘spam’. Wonderful.

LiveJournal May Be Sold

I hear that LiveJournal – one of the world’s biggest blogging communities (and home to most of the blogs syndicated by Abnib) – is to be sold to SixApart, a TypePad/MoveableType-based blog-host.

What effect this will have on holders of existing LiveJournal accounts – particularly paid accounts – is as yet unknown. Nonetheless, I think this could be a very interesting year for LJ bloggers.

Which “Secret Of Monkey Island” Character Are You?

Golly, I’m Herman Toothrot. I’m unique, pleasent, er… unique. Oh, let’s face it, I’m an old pantless weirdo. I trained a bunch of monkeys to sail a ship back from a deserted island but didn’t go myself, I think my dead friend has never looked better, and I talk to people who aren’t there… kind of. But I don’t worry: that’s why everyone loves me.
*~What “Secret of Monkey Island” character are you?~*

Well; I saw that coming. The bigger question is: if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, what color is the tree?

Security Through Obscurity Reaches A New Low

PowerPizza! It’s a laptop bag that looks like a pizza box! No longer do you have to worry about your attractive laptop being an easy target for thieves – who’d want to steal a pizza box?

Fucking crazy. But I love it.

Completed Half-Life 2

(don’t worry – no spoilers) Well – I’ve finished Half-Life 2. I must say, it just got more and more stunning. The weapon you’re left using for the last two chapters is simply wonderful (think: gravity gun v2.0). The finish is… simply stunning, and suddenly the G-Man seems even more mysterious than ever… it’s just… wow.

There’s this empty space I need to fill with Half-Life 3.

The downside: it was too short – I was hoping for about another three hours of ‘gametime’ from it. Plus, there are things I’d have liked to have seen but didn’t (monsters I saw but never got to fight, mysteries left unanswered [including most of the ones from the prequel], etc.), and I found the final fights a little too easy (although I have the option to just replay any chapter at any difficulty level, so I can crank it up to Hard and try again). That, and, I feel a major lack of closure – despite a very deliberate ‘build-up’, that game ended in a way that felt quite abrupt and ‘unfinished’ (perhaps the last challenge was a little obvious to me, or something).

In any case – it’s well worth playing, and pretty much anyone I know is welcome to play through it on Duality, if they so wish. Now I’m going to go browse the forums for easter eggs and tips about what’s coming in Half-Life 3.

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2. The most immersive first-person shooter I’ve ever played. From it’s “throw you in at the deep end” beginning – chased around the streets of the overpowering City 17 by Combine agents, rushing through apartments as raids go on all around you – to it’s immensely clever, multi-faceted puzzles – how do I get past that guard? I could creep by him: I wonder if he’s paying attention… or throw that can to make a noise… maybe I could knock him in the back of the head before the security camera sees me… can he swim? – it’s a thrilling game. In the Half-Life tradition, very little is given away, and the player is left to make many of their own assumptions about the way the world around them works; I find this a little frustrating (I’d like to hear more back-story), but this is soon taken away when I’m drawn into another firefight. The game is gorgeously detailed – the characters around you frown, smile, wink, raise an eyebrow… and genuinely look relieved, scared, upset, etc. Meanwhile, explosions outside are rendered beautifully, water reacts like it should, and the ‘Havok’ physics engine means that if you can imagine it, you really can build it out of the myriad small items around you.

Despite Paul and my complaints about the Steam distribution system, it’s all seemed very good – owing to it’s modular design, I was able to start playing the game when it was just 69% downloaded (and when I ‘caught up’ with it, I only had to wait a few seconds for more content to be downloaded). Paul may be relieved to hear that once the game is downloaded (or activated, if it’s store-bought) it can be played in “offline mode”, and never accesses the internet without permission, it won’t auto-update unless you let it, and there is an option to back up the version you currently have installed – to CDs, for example – so that you could, if you wished, reformat and reinstall Windows and re-install the game without having to download it again. In addition, the modular design meant that my download was ready sooner than it might otherwise be, as it took advantage of the files I’d already downloaded as part of the demo version. I’m still not sure of any way to install to a different drive, which I’d particularly like to be able to do, but nonetheless I’m more impressed with Steam than I expected to be.

I managed to play Half-Life 2 for four hours… before I began to feel motion sick (I’d recently had a plasma cannon installed on my hovercraft, and driving it [with my left hand] while aiming and firing the weapon [with my right] left my poor eyes sufficiently confused that I’m now taking a quick break). I’ll probably go in again and blast some more Combine scum before I go to Sian and Andy‘s New Year’s Party. Yeah!

Update: Fixed link to Paul’s new blog after he moved it, breaking a universe of links. Old content was at http://www.livejournal.com/users/thepacifist/202607.html

Internet Explorer Exploit Of The Day

There’s yet another killer Internet Explorer bug out there, which is manifesting itself in the form of a new trojan, Phel.A. This one only affects Windows PCs updated with SP2 (the supposedly ‘safe’ people) and works by confusing the ‘trusted’ and ‘untrusted’ zones.

I always find reports like this interesting, so I’ve written an exploit of my own. If you’re still using Microsoft Internet Explorer, and you’d like to see why you shouldn’t be:

Click here to look at a web page I’ve set up [update: link long-dead]. It looks kinda boring, I know, but – if you’re using Internet Explorer, it will slyly put a tiny application in your Startup group.
Next time you log into Windows, the tiny application will download and install a bigger application.
Next time after this that you log into Windows, the bigger application will run, and tell you why you shouldn’t be using Internet Explorer.

The information on how to use this exploit is easily available on the web. Before long, we’ll be seeing another wave of web sites that can install software on ant Internet Explorer users’ computer.

If you’re still using Internet Explorer, take a look at BrowseHappy.

Santa! Santa! Santa!

If you’re a fan of Weebls’ Stuff (think Badger! Badger! Badger!), you’ve got to take a look at this. Can you guess how the fourth verse ends before it happens?

Old Posts Recovered

This is probably going to go on for months, yet, but I’ve just recovered some more of the posts that were lost last summer, including:

The second half of Suz, And Naivety – which is both sweet and funny.
Photos From Malawi; the first of my Malawi trip photos.
The majority of How To Make Invisibility Paint, which is also funny.
Letters After My Name, an account of my graduation.

If you didn’t read any of those at the time, before they ‘disappeared’, you can do so now, as they’re ‘recovered’. There’s a few more ‘recovered’ posts here and there, too, but they’re mostly for my benefit and not so noteworthy.

I’ve also found a cache of old “Avatar Diary” posts (my original blog – 1998/1999 – some posts available here) and some other microblogs I ran along the way over the last six years, so hopefully I’ll be able to “fill in” some the the gaps over the next month or so. Which’ll be cool, because then I’ll have what’ll be the longest-running weblog I’ve ever seen.

What Shall We Do For New Year?

Well; it’s New Year’s Eve tomorrow, and I know that some folks (like Bryn, Matt, and Liz) are back in town – what’s everybody want to do to see in the New Year (as good an excuse for merriment as any other)?

Symantec Warranty

If only we could get away with clauses like this in our warranties:

Symantec does not warrant that the Appliance will meet your requirements or that the operation of the Appliance will be uninterrupted or that the Appliance will be error-free.

In other words: we don’t promise that this will do what you want it to, and even if it does, we can’t guarantee that it won’t fall over or even work at all.

And we pay money for this kind of hardware? It’s amazing what you can hide in the small print. I also notice that this Symantec device is Linux-powered. Perhaps I should write to Symantec and request a copy of the OS source code, in accordance with the GNU General Public Licence.

Bloody Power Cut

For the last two hours, it seems, large chunks of residential central Aberystwyth have been completely without electricity. Anybody know what’s going on? Drop me a text.