Simon Willison’s Weblog

Imminent Death of the Net Predicted. Well, maybe not, but the way Windows Vista deals with round-robin DNS A records (using a new IPv6 algorithm from RFC3484 backported to IPv4) means that domains that serve up multiple A records to load balance between data centres will find that the IP nearest to the 192.168.* range will get the vast majority of Vista traffic.

# 5th March 2009, 9:50 am / vista, dns, windows, microsoft, networking

Load Windows ICO files. Apparently PIL has trouble with the most recent versions of the windows .ico format (Vista now embeds PNG images in them)—this clever function deals with the differences and gives back a PIL Image object.

# 17th January 2009, 9:48 pm / pil, python, vista, windows, ico, images, png

Linux Genuine Advantage. As with all the best parodies, this one ships with source code.

# 2nd February 2007, 5:29 pm / linux, funny, vista

Microsoft confirms Vista Speech Recognition remote execution flaw. “I have verified that I can create a sound file that can wake Vista speech recognition, open Windows Explorer, delete the documents folder, and then empty the trash.”

# 1st February 2007, 5:19 pm / funny, vista, security, speechrecognition, microsoft

Wow! Fantastic photo.

# 31st January 2007, 9:36 am / funny, vista, sethgodin

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection (via) Vista’s content protection is a nightmare for hardware manufacturers and consumers alike. It’s far worse than even BoingBoing readers would expect.

# 24th December 2006, 10:34 am / drm, contentprotection, security, vista