Things that are pissing me off this week: #37 people with a very odd view of internet explorer

Internet Explorer is a right pain in the arse - it's not standards compliant, I don't like the user interface, and it doesn't allow people to write addons easily.

It's also a major vector for malware and hacking attacks via its security problems.

However, it isn't a magical piece of software that does things that no other piece of software can do - and its security vulnerabilities are nothing to do with it being a special part of the OS that runs differently to anything else.  And what's been pissing me off is the five or six journals I've read in the last couple of days that say this.

People know that hacking internet explorer in certain ways allows bad people to execute arbitrary code on your machine.  What they don't seem to realise is that hacking pretty much any piece of software will allow that.  Looking at the vulnerabilities fixed in the latest release of Firefox (3.05) you can instantly see that since 3.04 (released just a month ago) that there are 8 security issues, including one that would allow for execution of arbitrary code.

Microsoft have previously claimed that Internet Explorer is "part of the Operating System" - but that doesn't make it part of the kernel, nor does it execute in a different user space, use undocumented kernel calls, etc.

It's just a really big app that's exposed to the entire internet, run by millions of people, and thus attacked as a way to get into your computer.

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 12-18-2008

• Obama's Chief Speechwriter, 27, Works on Inaugural Address While Making His Own Transition
  Good Lord. It's like being in The West Wing
  (tags: writing usa politics Obama speeches)
• U.S. Federal Reserve Sets Stage for Weimar Style Hyper-inflation
  The Federal Reserve has bluntly refused a request by a major US financial news service to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from US taxpayers and to reveal the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.
  (tags: economics money panic_now)
• Travelling while disabled
  In which my friend Hannah talks about the problems she had travelling from Edinburgh to California. Very enlightening.
  (tags: travel disabilities)
• Jeffrey Katzenberg on Tru3D:The complete transcript
  Yay for more 3D movies!
  (tags: movies 3d cinema)

Following a conversation in the pub...

1/10,000 chance of HIV transmission if you give a man with AIDS oral sex.
1/20,000 if (as a man) you receive oral sex from a person with AIDS.
Can't find any figures on oral sex and women with AIDS.

Happiness

I've been tagged a couple of times with the "post for 8 days about happiness" meme, and a couple of people have also mentioned I'm not updating much about personal stuff.

And the truth is that I'm having a happy, and therefore dull, time of it.

Julie is consumed with PhD, and I'm being supportive of that, occasionally distracting her with low-stress things (huzzah for DVD box sets!) and spending a fair bit of time just faffing on the internet in the same room as her.

Work is going well, insofar as I can tell, and I seem to be making more contacts, gaining more responsibility, and getting better at dealing with both the code and the people. Half the time I'm working on things where I need a (reasonably) deep understanding of C# and Windows, and half the time the coding is dead easy - but understanding what the business _wants_ is hard.

I'm really looking forward to going down to see my family for 5 days over Christmas, but I'm going to miss Julie like mad - we haven't had this long apart since last Christmas. I'm therefore looking forward even more to having the week off with her when we both get back.

Roleplaying is interesting - with a bit of time recently spent debating the magic item system in 4th Edition (works numbers-wise, but not for flavour, so we're going to switch it out for having items that are tuned to individuals, growing with them as they develop), but again, not that fascinating to other people.

Things are generally good. I am happy.

I'm not sure I have much more than that to say.

Cool furniture

I'm fairly sure I had this one at some point in the past:

but I hadn't seen this one before:

Speaking of dullness

Speaking of dullness, last night Julie and I watched the Sex and the City movie.

Which managed to take about two episodes worth of plot and spread them over two hours and make it feel really flabby.

The series worked perfectly - the characters managed to feel coherent the whole way through, while changing and growing up over the six years it lasted.

At the end of the final series they'd all found some kind of peace - some of them got what they wanted, others got what they needed, but they'd all found their way from a long-overdeveloped teenager-dom into (some kind of) adulthood.

The movie needed drama, and so it reset them back to where they'd been in series 4, unable to talk about their problems, either to partners or each other, and so unable to deal with them.

The only one who managed to hang on to what she'd gained was Chalotte. And strangely enough this meant that she had pretty much nothing to do throughout the movie - she was the only one with no arc.

Writing stories about adults is harder than writing them about teenagers - they don't behave in the stupid drama-producing ways and so you actually need to think about things rather than have them make the catastrophically wrong choice for no reason. It's a shame they didn't try harder.

Fantastic new feature for paidmembers!

You can now retrieve bits of your friends list by date!!

And it works with friends filters

http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/comics/?date=2008-12-15 will show you my comics filter for the 15th of this month.

Very cool.