I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
Well… maybe not. Uncertain as to whether or not the changes to Australia’s notoriously retarded copyright law that are coming into force next year apply retro-actively… but who cares?! It’s not like they ever prosecuted because of it anyway!
Ah, reform. I might finally buy an iPod.
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.
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.
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.
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!