27 Apr 2005: Network Rail

I see (or, rather, hear) that Network Rail are drilling away at the line again, late into the night.
I also see that http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Anetworkrail.co.uk+complaints+-pdf+-doc comes up with no results. There doesn't seem to be a way of sending my recording of their 02:40am drilling in order to communicate to them that they have woken members of my family (with no notice that any work was even going to be done).
That's a shame. I'll post it here instead. From a recording (and taken from a mobile phone, at that) there's not much way of knowing quite how loud it is. At 02:40am, it's loud, believe me. The works are taking place about 400 yards away from my house. The (much closer) traffic noise is not picked up, by comparison.

27 Apr 2005: No Adware dot Net

I see that Google see fit to put adverts to noadware dot net on this page - this seems to be a bastardised version of Mozilla.org's FireFox project. According to the above justenoughlinux.com commentators, it appears that it doesn't even work as well as the free (source) and free (download) Mozilla FireFox project.
Whilst the T&Cs (which allow me to get the many hundreds of thousands of pounds from Google [ !sic ] for advertising on this site) say something along the lines that I'm not supposed to talk about the adverts on the site, I don't think that this item could really be construed as prompting anyone to click on any links they might see for noadware. In case there's any doubt - please don't click on any noadware links from this site - this company (and, indeed, any advertiser on this site) do not have any explicit endoresement from myself. If you want a safe, secure, high-quality web browser with far more features than Microsoft's Internet Explorer, then please download (for no charge, and with the underlying source code also available from the same website) the real FireFox Web Browser - in my humble opinion, it's the unbeaten web browser - whether you'd define that by cost, features, or security.

I've only just contacted Google, asking them to look into noadware's adverts, and whether Google consider these adverts to be kosher. Hopefully they'll reply that noadware's adverts have been pulled - "do no evil", and all that.
So I won't archive this item, nor add it to the RSS feed, until Google have had the opportunity to respond.

23 Apr 2005: Moussaoui

Zacarias Moussaoui has pleaded guilty to charges of his involvement in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. The US Government are pushing for a death sentence, which is, of course, an option in the Land of the Free. Is it not obvious that making a martyr of this guy will cause more problems for America and its allies than simply imprisoning him?
"An eye-for-an-eye" has never worked, and it never will.

21 Apr 2005: Mac Mini

It is beautiful, it can't be denied. The specs are pretty good, too. It's a G4, not a G5, but a 40/80GB disk, built-in WiFi, and a DVD burner option. For the price, I'd love one of these in my cupboard. It's Darwin (FreeBSD Unix-based), after all... gcc, all the tools are there, I think. Certainly, the Mac OSX box I played with a while ago had a developers CD which had all the tools I'd expect to find on a GNU/Linux developer install. If you do get all that (I'll check it out), then It's a damn' cheap PC; if you can make the GUI work over a LAN to a Linux laptop, then I'll be sold. We'll find out soon, I'm sure. But for that money, a full-powered PC which I'd probably only want to ssh into anyway, that's a good deal. I need to buy a new HDD for the x86 desktop PC first, though. Budgets, who'd have 'em?!

17 Apr 2005: Starting with PayPal - Part V

(discuss)
(cf. #4, #3, #2, #1) It seems to be working smoothly now - with just a little bit of PHP code (available upon request) I've had a few buyers, and I can confirm that I do get their account details - postal address, etc. I do nothing with this information, but it's worth being aware that others could store this information and do with it what they like (local laws allowing).
It's working smoothly for me - the link's on the website, and people occasionally make a purchase. It's an experiment for me, not a livelihood.

16 Apr 2005: Labour promises 'voluntary' ID card

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/labour_2005_manifesto/ In the name of balanced reporting, Labour are scum, too.
The labour manifesto includes such delicacies as:

We will introduce new laws to help catch and convict those involved in helping to plan terrorist activity or who glorify or condone acts of terror.

Personally, I reserve the right to condone whatever I wish, even if it is considered an 'act of terror' (whatever that may mean). In a free democracy, that is not something I expect to be caught and convicted for.

If you're British, you may (or may not) be interested in http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/ and/or http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/.

10 Apr 2005: MSIE: Security Via Bullying

There's an interesting article here from an MSIE developer about why a certain link failed to work on IE7: It turned out that Opera and FireFox honoured RFC2616 ("Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol"), but IE never had. FireFox and Opera honoured this, by sending nothing (presumably "-") as their referrer, so they passed the test. IE sent "http://referrer.example.com/", so it failed the test.
The workaround? Pretend that the original page was also an https:// webpage. Genius. And the MSFT developer has the nerve to say Wow, that’s really silly. Rather than developing a real security mechanism, they’re using a crusty old bug to check to see if the user is coming out of the secure login page. It's not the web developer who's silly - the only thing a web developer has is the headers sent from the client. What is silly is that MSIE continues to violate the RFC's, where FireFox and Opera honour the RFC's and ... surprise! ... they work!
What is shocking is that the article is on a "proper" blog (unlike this one) where readers can post their comments (you can always post comments at the forum), and the MSDN groupies seem to be in agreement that getting the webmaster to fix the code to work with MSIE7, instead of making MSIE7 comply to the RFC's, makes this man a genius.
I had some hopes for MSIE7; this blows any hopes I might have had. Advice for everyone: Go to Mozilla.org and download FireFox right away. If you can't download it, you can buy the CD. Then set FireFox as your default browser - you won't look back.

03 Apr 2005: Pedro de la Rosa: Man of the Day

It was another great F1 race today, in Bahrain. Pedro de la Rosa has to be the man of the day; whilst he does know the car, he's not raced in F1 for years now, and whilst he fudged quite a few passing attempts, he did a fantastic day's work to finish 5th overall of 13 finishers.