IE6 Scripting security

Well, IE is notoriously insecure, but today I was hit with one particularly stupid (though supposedly not undocumented — someone on WSG had encountered it before and alleviated much pain!) ‘feature’ of the browser. Basically, I’ve been dependent upon PNG alpha channel working. Hey, the design isn’t mine and I’m just trying to make the CSS work with as few images as humanly possible — though I have realised I have one that isn’t required, but can’t be bothered changing… because once I’ve slated my markup, I only ever add things to it as required, and never work backwards. Otherwise, I wind up in a perpetual cycle of markup optimisation that culminates in a loss of probably under 2KB over about as many days. Tis bad. Must post the way I do CSS/markup workflow here some day, coz it’s something I’d be interested to see other people’s processes of and how different it is/isn’t from my own.

Anyway! Digression aside, I was using IE5.5+’s filter thing (pretty well documented PNG fix with some caveats… it’s the best we can do until IE7 in all its splendiferous glory dribbles from Microsoft’s front door. Don’t ask me where that came from.) with great success, but for the incessant security warnings every time I loaded the page. Yeah, great, this really looks usable. Not. Every twit using XPSP2 is going to be pretty happy to stay on a page when their browser is blurting security warnings at them… and don’t get me started on IE7′s proposed phishing alert thing that lets users report false positives. Dumb users (i.e. 97% of the population) are going to be scared away regardless, and malicious users (i.e. 2% of the population) are going to write viruses that exploit the reporting mechanism to let sites through.

Wow. This is a really windy post.

Okay. On topic (hah!). The moral of the story is, don’t execute web pages locally. IE won’t trust you. However, if it’s on any random web server (I ended up installing Apache on loopback), IE is perfectly happy to let it execute whatever the hell weird kinda code it wants. And that, kiddies, is why we all love Microsoft.

Dying switch

I don’t know if I’ve blogged this before or not. Probably. Basically, my switch (network connecting thingy) that is screwed onto the wall from when we moved in is dying.

It’s bugging me. Lots.

It’s always made these high-pitched noises (kinda like “dying-capacitor”, but without the “essence-of-dying-capacitor” smell, so I always figured it was okay), which have traditionally denoted fluctuations in speed if not in connectivity. Of late, connectivity has become the principle benefactor (involuntarily) of these noises.

To the point that I just heard the sound and was turning around thinking how delightful it would be to punch its dinky, plasticy, 8-ports of junk through our dinky, plaster-board-y, cardboard-thickness external walls. There was a rare synergy in design between the two, there. I’m inclined to think the switch is dying/dead because of the fact that it’s bolted straight onto a wall that effectively acts as a big heatsink (think heating, not cooling). But whatever, it sucks.

It was saved by the fact there’s a moderate size solid piece of furniture in front of it (that’s the one I think I lost an Access Point/router behind) and I’m sleepy and I would have hurt myself if I’d tried. Probably would have felt better, though.

Anyway I’m probably going to buy a new switch tomorrow, coz this is driving me nuts. It’s kinda good, though. I decided it wasn’t worth trying to stay online and do stuff before, so I went and read [at home, here] for a bit. “At home” is kinda a big deal, because I only read when I’m away/on public transport and not completely zorked out to the world. Cool, though.

I also got a fileserver setup a night or two ago (only 11 months overdue!), ironically because the ‘net connection had been so pathetic I’d actually had time to think about what I was going to do. Woo, Samba for the masses! *dances* Yeah, sorry, joke that had to be made. For the record, I’m pretty cold on the idea of career journalism, so I’m allowed to make cliched to-be-expected-from-IT-journos-of-the-late-90s comments like that and get away with it. Uh huh. Smile, nod, keep walking.

Sydney to Hobart 2005

Took a bunch of photos of the Sydney to Hobart start yesterday, about as many of helicopters (there were 18 up there, only major networks I didn’t see were Ten and SBS) as of boats. Meh!

Here are a few pics from the lot.

Early colour photography

No time to do this justice, need sleep, but had to post this link from earlier today. It’s about a Russian photographer in the early 20th century who developed a unique colour photography system. Good stuff. Make sure you follow the link through to the Library of Congress exhibition pages with more photos, etc!

Out of space

Yesterday I realised my 40GB hard drive was finally full. And it was a most unpleasant sensation. Now I need to actually get a fileserver working, because it’s way too much hassle to install a new hard drive in this machine + copy stuff onto it (I’m out of IDE channels so I can’t just bang a new one in). Because, you know, setting up a fileserver is just so much more trivial.

One of the reasons the hard drive is so full is the ridiculous number of photos I take. The situation isn’t assisted by ridiculously beautiful sunsets ridiculously often. These two just in:

I’m contemplating moving all my photos onto the PC known as Media on our network (it’s a Shuttle XPC thing with Windows MCE installed), because it has a 320GB hard drive, and because WOW Media Center’s photo album playback is awesome. I used it today and was very impressed. Definitely not for everything, but if you just have a heap of photos to go through sequentially it’s great. I was sitting there with a remote clicking “next next next” as required, and it was a throughly painless experience.

[Aside: I am proud at having combined these three things – starting with my running out of disc space, actually more due to video than photos, but I needed the photo reference to launch into the sunset big and onwards to Media Center – under the title of “Out of space”. It really only applies well to the first one, but hopefully the post meandered transparently enough that no-one noticed or cared. I say this now because evidently people do read what I write here for the writing. Curious as to whether or not I can get criticism as well as praise, or if people will choose to say nothing at all rather than something nice. Not that I mind comments that are nice, but… it’d be good to move beyond that. Okay, this aside is definitely outside the scope of the title!]

Having said all that, Merry Christmas all. That bears absolutely no relation to the title, unless you’re some weird conspiracy theorist who is convinced that Jesus was sent by Martians. I prefer to believe he’s the son of God, which might strike some as no less weird, but at least it’s historically correlated (both in prior prophecy and contemporary recording)! Whatever your perspective, try and think about why you’re celebrating Christmas this year…