Mark Gilbert’s Blog

This month I came so close to leaving my trusty ISP Zen for new ADSL2+ provider Be. I chatted to friends who have used Be and after hearing sad reports of awful customer service, problems with hardware and constant disconnects I decided against leaving Zen.

Be could have provided more speed, but in my opinion a good stable connection backed by fantastic service levels are more important.

Cheers

Apparently 0.16% of people would click a link which clearly stated their PC would be infected with a virus on clicking. A security researcher ran an ad on Google for 6 months to see how many people would click on the ad. 409 people clicked on the ad which you can see below, out of a possible 259,723, making for 0.16%.

The full article is on the researcher’s blog. It really is amazing what some people will do given the chance.

Cheers

Last week I decided that I was fed up with Safari. It annoyed me, and it bothered me so much that I decided the time was now to find a new browser. So off I went, first of all stopping to check out the latest beta of Camino. Now dont get me wrong, I do like the Mozilla based browsers on Windows but on my Mac it just didn’t feel right. Somehow it just didn’t give the Mac experience which I’ve now become accustomed to.

When using Camino I missed some of the features I loved about Safari, such as the ability to type in the address bar and have my bookmarks searched as well as my recent history. It’s a feature I find sorely lacking when using IE7 or even Firefox at work.

Firefox on OS X simply doesn’t do it for me. Back when I used Windows Firefox was my browser of choice, I liked the extensions, I much prefered it over IE and had been using it since roughly 0.6, just after the name change to Firebird, which was sometime in the middle of 2003. Somehow though on OS X I couldn’t get on with it. The PPC build I found slow and just generally didn’t like it, so I changed to Safari at that point, leaving me knowing two years on that I wouldn’t enjoy Firefox now either.

So with Safari, Camino and Firefox out, I went to see the Opera in Norway, or should I say i went to use the browser called Opera from Norway. I liked Opera when I first used it, I had dabbled with it under Windows but it never really replaced Firefox for me although it was a very capable browser. Coming back to it under OS X was not such a big change. I used the latest 9.2 version and immediately found it likeable, it was fast and had the ability to search bookmarks from the address bar. The speed dial feature was nice, and I did use it quite a lot, however there were a few things I didn’t like so much. The first one is really petty, but I was seemingly unable to alter the default behaviour so that a command + left clicked link is opened in a new background tab. Command + shift + left click does it, but I don’t want to have to hold shift too. I know middle click does it but I don’t like middle clicking, see I told you it was petty. It didn’t integrate with the OS X Keychain, which Safari does and as you can imagine has a lot of details stored for me. So I found myself constantly opening keychain utility to retrieve passwords to use in Opera. While this is a workable solution, it’s less than ideal.

I should add at this point I have completely forgot what it was I didn’t like about Safari, so i now have no idea why I was looking for another browser anyway, but I pressed on regardless.

I was now very short of options, which is when I remembered OmniWeb.

OmniWeb is a browser developed by the Omni Group. It uses WebCore as it’s rendering engine, the same rendering engine Apple’s Safari browser uses, therefore you get the same high levels of standards compliance seen in Safari. Omni Group then make significant alterations to WebCore, as well as adding their own javascript rendering engine to the mix, instead of using the standard Webkit JavaScriptCore. All this leads to a very fast browser.

Omni Group also have more time to work on the browser UI since they don’t have to work on the HTML rendering aspect of the package. As a result of this you get a very nice package, all the best aspects of Safari but with more user orientated features such as better control over tabs and easier and more fully featured bookmark management, as well as a rather odd tab implimentation. There is no tab bar, but a slide out drawer which contains thumbnails of all open pages. This approach has several advantages over a standard tab bar method, the first being that you can actually see the pages that are not currently being viewed in the main window, the second is that a more visible green tick appears on a thumbnail when it is done loading. This is more visible than the spinning wheel that stops spinning when a page is loaded.

The one area where OmniWeb does lag behind Safari is in the Adblocking stakes. Safari out of the box is worse than OmniWeb, however safari can fall back on PithHelmet to cover its arse. Having used this combination it is most effective, and OmniWeb simply does not have a plugin that I am aware of which offers the same standard of blocking. OmniWeb has the ability to perform blocking based on known URLs but these have to be added manually one at a time, or as I discovered can be done as a job lot with a little tweaking. After this blocking does work very well with the Filterset.G rules, but I have to admit, it’s a far from perfect solution.

A feature I do like a lot is the ability to configure individual site preferences. Certain webites simply do not like to be so tightly controlled in terms of how they display and what elements of the page are blocked, so site preferences are a nice touch.

Overall I am really enjoying my time with OmniWeb and will continue to use it for a while to come. I may never know why I wanted to find another browser in the first place, but I am most pleased I did find OmniWeb.

Cheers

For the last few days Asus’ website asus.com.tw had been providing it’s users with not only drivers and BIOS updates, but also the new Windows .ani exploit.

The virus is apparently hidden in an iframe and exploits the viewers system.

According to reports the exploit has been coming out of Asus’ website for the past 3 days.

Nice.

Google today released their Google Desktop software suite for OS X users. The softwrae offers much of the functionality of the PC version including searching files on your local machine and indexing your GMail account, as well as allowing you to search your web browsing history. There are a few things missing, most notably the widgets, which are just like Dashboard widgets anyway, so why would you need the duplication? Now that I think about it spotlight already indexes my local files, so why would I need Google Desktop at all? Oh well, I suppose it’s always nice to have the choice.

If you are interested in downloading Google Desktop you’ll find the download link with all Google’s other Mac apps.

Enjoy

The title makes Google sound like an eccentric evil genius from a cartoon, harnessing the power of the sun itself to enslave mankind. Alas, nothing quite as dramatic, they have installed a large number of solar panels though, 9,212 to be exact, covering the entire roof of the Googleplex and then some. They produce a total of 1.6MW at peak output which is enough to cover 30% of Google’s peak power demand.

In order to install more panels they even covered parking areas to both cool cars and to generate yet more power. Google’s Anthony Ravitz explained that in 7.5 years they will have earned their investment back and after that will have inexpensive power for years to come.

This is a perfect example of corporate and environmental concerns acting as one. Google did mention that this was coming on their blog back in October 2006. Ars has the full story today though.

Cheers

The BBC is reporting that there is a flaw in the way Windows handles animated cursors that can leave a PC open to attack. SANS has adjusted the INFOcon level to yellow as a result. if you look at the bottom of the INFOcon page there really have been only a few incidents which has caused the alert level to be raised to yellow, this should give some idea of the problem with those silly animated cursors.

The infected cursor can come from a number of sources, such as infected e-mail attachment and malicious web pages. The exploit is totally silent and once installed can download any other it chooses.
the list of potential victims is long, including Windows Vista, XP, 2000 and Server 2003. Security firms said users can stay safe from this vulnerability by using an alternative browser, such as Opera or Firefox 2.0, with Windows. If you use IE7 on Vista then you are safe from the web page side but still vulnerable through Windows Mail.

Just turn off animated cursors. Don’t use them or go looking for them. Why people feel the need to have a bloody running horse or dancing sodding dinosaur as a cursor I’ll never know.

Cheers

Since my last post I have made some changes under the hood. Mainly to anti-spam engines and the such, but some other minor theme changes have occured too.
The anti-spam changes were brought about by a phone call from Zen, my hosting provider and ISP. They called while I was at work and left a message for me at home. I called them back fairly quickly to see what was wrong. The message I got was there was some kind of problem with my hosting, and indeed there was. When I spoke to Zen who were very courteous and helpful they explained that one of the plugins on my blog was making a of queries to the database. Not in itself a problem, but since I’m on a shared hosting package I share my database with other users. My blog was making so many database queries that it was crippling their database server and stopping other customers from being able to access their databases.

Zen however did the decent thing though and called me about the problem. They could have just taken my site offline or just generally been nasty about it, but they were very reasonable and understanding. We had a brief chat about the plugins that could be causing the problem and I decided it would be best if I disabled them until I could get the problem under control.

This brings me to my next point, how to control the rampant spam. I had a quick peruse of the Wordpress Codex and in particular the Spam tools plugins. I came across Bad Behavior and Spam Karma. Bad Behavior seemed like the answer to the problems I was having with Zen’s database. It filters out spambots based on the type of requests they make, and stops them ever accessing my blog. Spam Karma acts to then remove everything that gets past Bad Behavior. It applies a series of tests to a comment and it’s poster and comes up with a final karma rating, then decides whether it needs further testing, and sends it to purgatory, whether the comment is spam and so goes to hell, or whether its a genuine comment and so goes to paradise.

Have a look at the stats at the bottom of the page, they are quite impressive.

I will keep you updated on how the anti-spam stuff goes.

Cheers

Google, or more specifically the YouTube arm of it’s business is being sued by Viacom for $1bn. They cite the reason for this legal action as 160,000 of their videos illegally shared on YouTube. Viacom continue to allege that Google has done nothing to remove the infringing material and that they continue to profit off the back of Viacom works.

I would argue that this is not quite true as Google has offered tools for people to find and remove offending videos and has not really had much time since it’s $1.65 bn puchase to put a more effective method in place.

Viacom could be shooting them selves in the foot here. They are letting the courts decide what the DMCA loosely defines as “reasonable effort to remove copyrighted material”. There is a very good chance the courts could rule in Google’s favour therefore setting a rather unfavourable precident case against Viacom and other media companies. I think it is sufficient to say that Google will not simply roll over and take this, they have the resources to fight this.

Cheers

I just wanted to write a brief note to say that I am very pleased with Dabs.com and their return procedure. I bought an AMD Athlon X2 4200+ as a present on someones behalf for xmas. This processor has never been right since day on, crashes and spontaneous reboots but this is the first real chance I’ve had to start doing swap tests and all the other things. So after deciding it was the processor that was faulty it was time to brave the retailers return procedure.

At this point I was pleasantly surprised. All I had to do was log on to my account, select the order and select that I wanted to return an item. After a brief fault description and diagnostic description I was presented with the option of printing a free-post label out for the return, complete with RMA number. This is simply magic compared with what I have had to go through with some other retailers. I am a very satisfied buyer and would deal with Dabs.com again in the future.

Just thought I would mention

Cheers

Maybe this is old news but I just noticed that Gmail or Googlemail as it is now known here in blighty is now not only open by invitation only. Google have a link to sign up on their front page and if you go to gmail.com you can sign up from there too. I still have the option to send invites to people but I can assue that will disappear fairly quickly. It’s still beta though, just a wider public beta instead of invitation only.

Cheers

AOL just released a new version of it’s software for OS X. This new software called Chesire and is an Alpha version of a Universal Binary AOL client. Why on earth you would still be using AOL I have no idea. There are so many great alternatives it really would be silly if you couldn’t find a better ISP.

Cheers

I missed this somehow, but found out today, IE7 has now been pushed out by Microsoft as a high priority update over the Windows Update Service. This will probably mean a lot of users who were totally unaware of the existance of IE7 will now be using it, no doubt with some scratching their heads asking “why has the internet changed?” Personally I dont like IE7, I’ve been using the betas on a machine at work for some time now and I simply dont like it. I think the UI is a backwards sep as far as I’m concerned, but maybe that’s just me. Anyone else have any opinions on this?

Cheers

Microsoft’s anti-spyware application has finally come out of beta and you can download it from the Windows Defender homepage.

What’s even more interesting though are the statistics Microsoft have released along with this update to the program. These are based on the first three months the program was available and show that 22 million items of spyware were detected and 14 million items were cleaned. This really is a staggering ammount and just goes to show that no one on a Windows PC should be without an anti-spyware applicaton.

Cheers

Mozilla have now released Firefox 2.0. It is available to download from the Mozilla Website. Get it now and enjoy it while it’s still hot.

Cheers

Well it certainly took a long time but Skype for Mac is now finally out of beta. Tuck into it’s video goodness and enjoy. I don’t have a iSight camera though, but I just like new software all the same.

Cheers

The Seatlle PI is reporting that Firefox will be released on Tuesday of this week. I have been using 2.0 on an off since it was in Alpha and it does look good. Stability is impressive, much improved from some of the early betas and the latest RC3 is very nice indeed. Looking forward to this and how the Spread Firefox team get behind it.

Cheers

The calender is still an issue for me. I can’t seem to get it t work correctly, so it’s been disabled until I can fiddle with the code. Other than that though, most things seem to be ok now. Any people who are experiencing problems, just use the e-mail link in the sidebar to let me know what they are. I will always do my best to fix the issues people are seeing.

For the most part though the site is more responsive and generally a lot better for moving hosting. So thanks to Zen Internet for providing both my broadband and now my hosting. Customer service and reliability with them has always been second to none for my broadband connection, and I’m expecting similar things out of their hosting solutions.

Cheers

Well I really thought that it was all simply rumour which is why I was only planning to write a bit about the Google-YouTube deal. Well I was wrong. While watching Newsnight, Paxman said that there would be some discussion about the buyout of YouTube by Google, I was most surprised.

Anyway the beef of the deal is that Google are paying $1.65 billion in stock for the 18 month old start-up. All we really know for now is that the two brands will stay seperate and that Google Video will remain, but quite how it will differ in what it offers from YouTube remains to be seen. Eric Schmidt did mention that he believes that one of the principal strengths of YouTube is the soial networking aspect of the site. However Google have moved into the whole social networking thing before with the purchase of Orkut, and we’ve seen big things coming out of that side of the business of late haven’t we?

Cheers

Why is it so hard to get a video to embed properly in my site, and fit with the alignment of my site and display in all browsers without lots of testing? You would think it’s simple, but no. I still don’t test for IE anymore, I gave up on that thing a long time ago. I got sick of bloody code hacks to make the thing work.

Anyway, the Video now tests ok in Safari, Opera, Firefox and Camino, so all seems to be well.

Cheers