uRandom

24th April 2006:McNealy Steps Down

Scott McNealy demotes himself from CEO to Chief Evangelist

Apart from the news itself, the rest of the article is pretty bad journalism, not the standard I would have expected from Orlowski, unfortunately.

24th April 2006:Email headers in modern Email Clients : Bad for users, and a potential phishing attack?

To view the actual headers (not just toggle the pretty "From:" etc), the path with MS Outlook is (intuitively):

Open the message in a new window (simply viewing the message doesn't work), then choose View -> Options...

which opens a dialog[ue] box; that box has a section at the bottom labelled "Internet headers". Click in the box and hit "Ctrl-C" (there's no left-click or menu option available, you need the keyboard shortcut here) to copy the content, and paste it into Notepad or similar text editor.

The "Internet headers" box starts with a line saying "Microsoft Internet Mail Headers Version 2.0" (so the "2.0" is hopefully the only variable in that line) - the rest of the box appear to be the actual headers.

What remains, is - presumably - the actual headers. So - MS Outlook - dead easy to get the headers from the email.

What is the alternative? What does (say) Thuderbird use to provide this information? Free / Open Source Software is infamous for its awkward user interfaces, and for making simple everyday tasks difficult.

"View -> Headers -> All"

Why do I find the Microsoft way of getting at the open standards data so difficult to remember? It's intuitive, really, isn't it?

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However, Thunderbird's approach has its flaws, too - when the content is larger than the window can accomodate, no scrollbars are provided (I was amazed to find the same problem in MS Outlook when horizontal HTML exceeds the window width, with no apparent solution) - that's not a problem if the window can be resized to accomodate the content, but when the content is larger than the (virtual) screen, then both products fall down.

I am rather surprised and disappointed at this comparison; some pretty obviously useful stuff is made rather awkward to get at, from what are presumed to be two of the major desktop email clients.

In all cases, some kind of copy/paste workaround is available, but this need not be the case, surely? Now, more than ever, we need to be able to have easy access to the actual content and headers of emails we receive. The MS Outlook bug (unless I've missed something) seems like a particularly obvious candidate for phishing. I've probably gone too far by even saying so; I won't say any more.

22nd April 2006: MS on dodgy ground?

I have just noticed a comment at http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/how_licenses.mspx: By using licensed Microsoft software, you ensure that your products are fully supported, reliable, and that critical updates are available when needed. Does that mean that Microsoft ensure that licensed copies of Windows are reliable, and that critical updates are available when needed? Have their lawyers checked out this claim? I think I'm entitled to go on a suing-spree! ;-)

20th April 2006: 420 for Conspiracy Theorists

Mark Ballard of The Register evidently has far too much time on his hands, as he has been able to compile a huge list of 420s for Conspiracy Theorists and Pot Smokers.

Well done, Mark - as I'm sure your Mother, at least, will say. The rest of us might just say that it's a big list of incidences of the number 420, as could equally be done for any other number, but, well, that would be cynical. It's a good read, all the same.

3rd April 2006: The man from MoT : He say Yes!

(Eventually). The Polo went in for its MoT test on Wednesday, being due for renewal by Friday. They diagnosed it with three problems - hole in the rear section of the exhaust (as I suspected), headlamp alignment (as I thought might have been the case, since the bulb was missing when I got the car - of course, I replaced it as soon as I got it), and front-offside shock absorber. The rear exhaust was just over £30, and headlight alignment is of course, dead simple. No worries there, then. However, their phone link to the MoT was down on Wednesday, so they couldn't do the work til Thursday; by then they had a backlog, so they had to work into Friday. At the end of Friday, they were still having problems with the backlog, so it may be ready by lunchtime Saturday (when they close for the weekend, of course). It wasn't. On Monday, I was assured that it "yeah, should be on target" to be completed by 6pm, but that there was some issue with the tie-rods. I had never heard of tie-rods before now, but they were good enough to show me that because VWs are so reliable, the screw had never been touched since it was built, but being so exposed (just behind the front wheel) it was covered in muck and dirt, so they couldn't remove it without breaking (and therefore - at my cost - replacing) it. I got there at 5.30pm and eventually drove the car away, with the paperwork, around 6.10pm. I won't be using Revsons again. Somehow, I feel like Adrian Mole.

1st April 2006: Why I Love Internet Explorer

It is refreshing to see such an honest article as this one. Too many people have been sucked in to the simplistic belief that alternative is necessarily better.