There used to be a time when if a security advisory came out you should pay attention and take immediate action – it seems more and more these days most security advisories should be ignored because it’s just some brain-dead, wanna-be security company desperate for attention.  The most recent example of this is the so called “infection” is this piece of trash from Vital Security.

People, when a security dialog comes up with 3 exclamation marks you probably shouldn’t say yes.  I mean seriously, if you’re stupid enough to run untrusted code with full permissions, I just have to link to a .exe to own your machine.  Users should be allowed to use their computers, they just have to be taught not to trust unknown sources of software and not say yes to random dialogs that popup.  This is not a technological issue, it’s a problem of education.  Previously you used to have to teach people not to delete the Windows or System Folder because if they did the computer wouldn’t boot.  Now you have to teach them to not trust things by default.

Well that’s not true, there’s a lot going on in my life – I’ve been really busy, but there’s not much going on in the tech industry and the “blogosphere” that’s interested me enough to post anything.  There haven’t been all that many posts recently that I’ve really read either, mostly I’ve just been skimming everything that comes through the RSS feeds.

Oh well, at least the offline world is interesting at the moment.

If you’re having trouble with Airport reception dropping out a lot or the range doesn’t seem to extend as far as it should (in my case I could stand next to the base station and keep losing reception), it may be caused by something like Romeo sending out a lot of bluetooth traffic.  When I started using Romeo I also started getting frequent problems with connecting to the airport network and now that I’ve stopped using Romeo it’s been running smoothly again.

When importing entries from MovableType into WordPress, it doesn’t enable trackback pings on the imported entries.  Now I have about 300 old posts that don’t have trackback enabled.  Anyone know how to enable pings enmass?

Oh and yeah, that’s about the most evil thing I’ve found about WordPress so far, overall I’m very impressed but I’d hate to ruin my evil theme for the evening now…

Okay maybe not evil, just braindead in this particular area but I’ve got a theme going this afternoon.

If you have multiple form elements with the same name in a HTML form, PHP discards all but the last of them unless the element’s names end with [].  How’s idea was that?  Didn’t anyone consider the fact that you might not have control over the form element’s names?  Or that dealing with form elements with special characters in their names might just be difficult (the PHP manual has a number of useful tips on how to handle it).

Here’s a tip, if you configure IIS to use a custom 404 error page (or any type of error I imagine) and use the “URL” type, IIS will return 200 OK by default instead of the appropriate error code.  This breaks things in very unexpected and often difficult to track down ways.

You can work around it by making sure that the URL you use for the error page is a script of some kind that sets the return code to the appropriate error code again.  The default however should really have been to preserve the error code.  Sigh.  Using “File” or “Default” for the error page works correctly.

I thought I’d take another look at Skype – we used it at work for a while and eventually gave up on it as it was just too much of a hassle compared to a normal phone call even if a phone call was more expensive.

Anyway, my username is ajsutton so feel free to give me a call so I can test it out.

I have to say, I am really impressed by Robert Scoble’s attitude.  Someone rips into him and unsubscribes from his feed in a highly public and critical fashion and he takes it on the chin and points out how good it is that people can do that to him (and in fact to anyone brave enough to publish their thoughts on a blog).

As someone who has ripped into Robert’s comments before (and knowing me, most likely I took the odd cheap shot at him as well in the process) and being someone that disagrees with most of what he has to say, this is why I keep reading “Scobilizer”.  He can take criticism well and actually learns from that feedback.  Sure he mightn’t go so far as coming to his senses and agreeing with me but you can always tell that he’s thought about it instead of just dismissing it off hand.

Byron and I seem to be heading for another round of make it standard or make it work discussion.  In this case, Byron pointed out that pages on this site are served as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml.  After some brief investigation, here’s why I’ll be sticking with text/html:

It works.  application/xhtml+xml doesn’t.

Firstly, apparently IE 6 doesn’t support application/xhtml+xml, at least according to http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/03/19/dive-into-xml.html so I’d have to dynamically detect the browser and change the mime type anyway.  I really must start up my PC and check how the entire site looks on IE for Windows for myself - I haven’t bothered as yet.

If you’re seeing this post, you’ve made it through the maze of redirects to the new home of my blog.  If you normally read via a planet or RSS feed, now would be a good time to head on over to the actual site to check out the new design (featuring the Brisbane skyline courtesy of Iain Robertson).

Apologies if previous entries show up as new, the RDF feed has dates in it so hopefully it won’t cause any problems but changes to blogs almost always seem to cause some problems.

If you are finding that NetNewsWire doesn’t update your feeds like it should be and when you open /Applications/Utilities/Console you see a bunch of lines like:

2005-02-24 15:54:24.679 NetNewsWire Lite[371] HTTP download error -- Domain: POSIX Type: error code: 32 -- URL: http://feedster.com/links.php?url=http://www.intencha.com/adrian/&type=rss

and you’re using Privoxy try changing the proxy settings from using localhost to using 127.0.0.1.  Doing so will also fix a problem where Internet Exploreron OS X can’t connect to any sites despite the fact that Safari can connect successfully.

Iain Robertson and Robert Scoble have commented on Google’s new smart tags feature and while I agree with most of what they said I have to disagree on their views of producers rights.

Iain said:

Admittedly, the main people complaining will be those whose content has been altered, i.e. the producer of a given piece of work, who might find that some people are tracing new and interesting links away from their site. Fair enough that they complain, too — I know the idea of J. Random Company “hijacking” content in my site irritates me somewhat. To that end, I’d hope that Google would use the MSSmartTagsPreventParsing meta-tag, and/or a common tag standard can be agreed upon to allow content creators to opt out of the “service.”