Entries in Nov, 2004
Filters: Type: entry × Year: 2004 × Month: Nov × Sorted by date
Eclipse download hell
One of the many thing the Mozilla/Firefox team have got right is the fantastic ease with which the application can be downloaded. Visitors to www.mozilla.org are greeted with a nice big “Free Download” link, aimed straight at the version for their (automatically detected) operating system hosted on a mirror geographically close to their IP address. It’s hard to think of any way they could improve on this.
[... 527 words]No EU Software Patents
It would be nice if someone with some serious design credentials would knock up some more aesthetically pleasing banners.
[... 119 words]The Register hit by XSS
Here’s a nasty one: popular tech news site The Register was hit on Saturday by the Bofra exploit, a nasty worm which uses an iframe vulnerability in (you guessed it) Internet Explorer to install nasty things on the victim’s PC. Where it gets interesting is that the attack wasn’t against the Register themselves; it came through their third party ad serving company, Falk AG.
[... 262 words]Mumps!
I’ve become yet another statistic in the Bath Mumps epidemic of 2004. I’m quarantined until next Monday, and this afternoon we had a camera crew from ITV West come round to film some doom-and-gloom footage warning students to get vaccinated. Amusingly the camera man hadn’t had Mumps and took suitable precautions to avoid infection. I’m told that the piece will go out on ITV news for the south west at 6pm this evening.
[... 97 words]Usability blunders
I stumbled across this today and thought it was just too good not to share.
[... 62 words]Open source license help needed
Every now and then, I get an e-mail asking me to clarify the license associated with code that I’ve posted on this site, such as my date parsing script. I’m looking for an open source license that I can start slapping on things to ensure people that they can use it for whatever they want, but wading through the list of licenses is no fun at all. Here are the features I’m looking for:
[... 294 words]Let a thousand conspiracy theories bloom
I’m about to hit the sack, but current indications are that Bush has won Ohio by a couple of percentage points and thus has been re-elected as President of the United States.
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