Get Firefox 1.5If you need to find the new release of Firefox goto http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
The official place, GetFirefox.com, is currenly a redirect to the www.mozilla.com home page which doesn’t contain a working link to get Firefox, only a link back to itself (I hope that is clear). No doubt they will fix it soon.
Scrolling tables (with JavaScript)Whilst looking for a CSS way to do this (previous post) I came across ActiveWidgets Grid which is little short of brilliant—and GPL for non commercial use. It achieves almost everything you could ask for in the presentation of tabular data.
It is all client side but supports external CSV and tab separated data files. The only flaw I have seen so far is that it only supports the major browsers (IE5.5+, Netscape 7+ and Mozilla) and then only in quirks mode (no DOCTYPE at all). This is apparently being addressed in v2 for which a Beta was released a few days ago.
They could also do with a Noddy guide, just an explanation of the examples would be a start, for the benefit of those that know no JavaScript.
Scrolling tables and CSSWhen asked by a colleague on the Cornwall OPC Project for a way to present tabular data so that the headers remained fixed “like Freeze Panes in Excel’ I started to look at what was around. It is not easy, firstly because of quirks with the browsers and secondly because CSS doesn’t seem to cater for it properly. For a narrow table which just requires vertical scrolling, this seems to work ok.
div#tbl {
height: 300px;
width: 60%;
background: #ffc; /* this is relevant */
overflow: auto; /* triggers the scrolling in IE */
}
html>body div#tbl {
overflow: hidden; /* don't do it this way in other browsers */
}
div#tbl thead th {
position: relative; /* fix the top line of the scroll for IE */
background: #ffc; /* to hide the scrolling content */
top: -2px; /* need to move the header up a bit to
complete the illusion */
}
div#tbl tbody { /* both items ignored by IE */
max-height: 270px; /* adjust to lose bottom scroll bar */
overflow: auto; /* Triggers the scrolling */
}
div#tbl td:last-child {
padding-right: 20px; /* prevent scrollbar from hiding
last cell contents */
}
This is for a strict mode page with a table containing a thead with th elements and a tbody with td elements all surrounded by a div id=’tbl’.
If the table gets wide, however, and needs sideways scrolling, there seems to be no solution which works adequately. There is a way to do it in IE using quirks mode but the location of the fixed header in Mozilla browsers makes it impossible.
IM now or IM laterThis very interesting article came up in my inbox this afternoon. It talks about the different approaches to Instant Messaging(IM) by ICQ and AIM and how Jabber tries to cover both options. I must admit that I have been unaware of the Offline Message features but could use them for the more complex communications—or would an email be better for that purpose anyway? It does archive so I am not sure I agree with Julian.
If you can’t trust Sony …I have often had suspicions that Sony spoke with a forked tongue. On the one hand it is a world leader in equipment for recording (professional and domestic, audio and video). On the other hand it is leading the industry DRM campaigns trying to stop people using recording equipment.
Now it seems to be getting into the spyware business; perhaps they are going to start a computer security company as well <GRIN>. This article (Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far) describes a forensic look at a rooted Windows PC which turned out to have been infected by playing a Sony-BMG audio CD. The built in Media Player, in addition to installing the software to play the content, also installed software which hid itself so you couldn’t see that it was there and disguised itself as a legitimate Windows service. The EULA said “this CD will automatically install a small proprietary software program … to protect the audio files embodied on the CD … until removed or deleted” However no uninstall option was provided. Curiously it requires you to remove the software upon termination of the licence—but you can’t!
This is spyware without a doubt. It violates at least two of the terms of the ASC i.e. “material changes that affect their user experience, privacy, or system security” and “use of their system resources, including what programs are installed on their computers.” It probably falls foul of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 as well (the software is written by a British company.)
Sony-BMG claim, in the EULA, that the CD is red-book compliant which means that it must play as an audio CD on any player. This includes your computer so you should be able to play it without the software. This should be true of any CD that has the logo 
—if not, take them back and claim a refund. (note: the logo is sometimes impressed in the plastic inside the case rather than on the paper inserts visible from the outside. That does not matter).
This reinforces a couple of safety measures that all Windows users should adopt:
One final warning—if you discover that you have been infected by this, don’t try to remove it unless you know what you are doing, you could make your machine unusable, demand an uninstaller from Sony.
Meanwhile, I will be adding the RootkitRevealer to my toolbox (and looking carefully at any CDs I buy).
ZoneAlarm 6 (Free) is GoodThis may not come as a surprise to some people but I seem to have missed out on it. This is what happened. I have been a loyal user of ZoneAlarm through to version 4.5 and recognised it for the best personal firewall around. It was the only one I had seen that put complete control into the hands of the user without making the management incomprehensible to the novice. The only one which really controlled outgoing traffic properly. I was guided in this by well respected commentators such as Steve Gibson and Fred Langa plus many other votes of support far outweighing anything negative. Every machine that I built (and there have been a few over the years), even for the first timer, had it installed.
Then version 5 came along and things seemed to change. The pundits were urging caution and there were rumours of instability. The word went out to hold back before upgrading and let things settle down. That always seems like good advice to me. So I hung onto my last copy of the 4.5 version (4.5.594), switched off automatic notification and continued to install it on new builds. Then everything seemed to go quiet and, before I knew it, version 6 was out. And the story was the same, rumours of instability, hang on until 6.1 etc. Go back to sleep.
Then came the crunch. I was preparing a new laptop for a friend (a rather nice HP 17″ widescreen) and was going through the motions of creating accounts and installing essential software when BANG—a blue screen error. This was one of the very few BSoDs that I had seen on XP, especially since SP2 but fortunately I got the m/c into safe mode and discovered the error log fairly quickly. ZoneAlarm was clearly implicated—some sort of clash with the graphics driver—so I uninstalled ZA and finished the build. [The log is in Start—>Control Panel—>Administrative Tools—>Event Viewer.] Fortunately this machine wasn’t to leave my hands for a couple of weeks so I had time to do some research; find another firewall I thought.
But first, let’s see what ZoneAlarm 6 is like. The stories I had seen indicated that it had grown into a clumsy behemoth trying to do everything (there will probably be a post on this subject sometime) and, in the process, it had made itself intrusive raising alarms and warnings at the slightest cause and doing so in terms that the average user would not understand. I downloaded the freebie and installed it on my desktop, making sure I had a good backup and a copy of the tried and trusted version available. Much to my surprise it was identical to v4.5, even down to the bilious yellow. It was very hard to see the few changes. It now seems to be unable to distinguish between Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer and there are still the same meaningless internal processes but all seems well—and it was still fine a week later so I installed it on the laptop and there were no problems. I have since installed it on the Church Office machine with no ill effects and will do Mary’s laptop soon. Note: it is less traumatic to use the upgrade option rather than the clean install, especially for novice users, else they will get rather too many unexpected alerts.
Conclusion: ZoneAlarm (Free) is still a first class product and is quite stable. I recommend it to all home users. It does exactly what it should do and not much more (switch off things like the eBay password stuff). Just after completing the exercise, Fred Langa clarified his own recommendation saying that it was only the “Pro” version that he had doubts about. Thanks.
SlurpConfirm404 by Yahoo! SlurpThere is an article about this on the St. Buryan community site [link removed, article no longer there]. I had spotted similar strange entries in my logs so now I know what it is all about. Well, actually I don’t but at least it gives me a hook to find out!
What comes down must go upI have recently had a newsletter from my ISP saying that they are going to upgrade my broadband connection from 1Mb to 4Mb.
When I first bought this service, and I can’t remember when it was now, I got 512Kb download speed and 128Kb upload—and it was wonderful. At last you didn’t need to watch the clock as the telephone bill rose and at last you didn’t have to go and make a cup of tea while fairly ordinary things loaded. Last year they gave us an upgrade to 1Mb and, quite honestly, I hardly noticed. I am not into music or video downloads; yes, the MS monthlies were quicker but no big deal.
As I have already reported, last month I upgraded my hosting package. As a part of that I had to upload the whole lot again which, at the time, was about 60Mb. At 128Kb/sec I was up half the night. Now I am hosting my own search engine which means a regular 10Mb upload with the indexes. Which brings me to the point of this post.
No BY, I am not interested in your marketing exercise to upgrade my download speed. You are only doing it to avoid having to reduce your charges; as a side effect I expect that you are hoping to sell more premium content—pay-per-view video and Virgin music. What we need is a sensible upload speed—Look at it, 4Mb down, 128Kb up; that is silly. Even your premium service is daft—10Mb down and 384Kb up, I don’t think I want to pay double for that.
There are three groups of people (that I can think of) who need a decent upload speed.
Now I agree that No. 3 is daft. They are probably not competent and are the source of endless spam and other garbage, but don’t penalise the rest of use for the sake of them. You have other ways to stop abuse.
PHP noviceI have finally got my mailform up and running in the way I would like it. It is surprising how time consuming it is to debug online services like this.
I am not unfamiliar with programming (having done it for near 40 years now) and scripting languages are quite familiar, but there are always subtle differences in new ones to make us yearn for some sort of language standardisation. Neither is it my first sight of PHP as I had to learn quickly to customise this blog. But then it was mainly a matter of copying preformed chunks of code from one place to another.
A lot of the formmail script I have re-written from scratch. The main reasons I wanted to do it are security (the original was rather prone to be abused by DOS [denial of service] fiends and spam merchants) and to make it easier to customise the user visuals.
The other thing which takes a long time is the documentation—a much abused and underrated skill—come back technical writers, you are sorely missed.
The script is now working for my own mail form but some of the features that I don’t use still need testing. It is available to look at, if you are interested, from my mailform page [discontinued]. (there is a zip download at the bottom) No warranty is given or implied but please feed back your experiences.
Many thanks to Joe Lumbroso, the author of Jack’s formmail.php script, and Matt Wright for the CGI script which in turn inspired that one.
Blacklist MadnessI have been losing incoming mail (apologies if you have written to me and I haven’t replied). No mail from Wanadoo has been reaching my west-penwith.org.uk addresses.
Wanadoo, formerly known as Freeserve and soon to become Orange, is one of the largest ISPs in Britain; possibly in Europe as well. Despite its rather poor customer service reputation, it is very popular with low activity users, which is why most of the rest of my family, my church, and many friends use it. I wrote to my hosting company (DotEasy.com) and they said that
Wanadoo’s email server is black listed by spambag.org
The address in question is 193.252.22.157. When I queried this, because I deliberately do not subscribe to their anti-spam service preferring to handle it myself, they said
Doteasy does not use spambag.org
but that
Wanadoo.co.uk is appearing on our external relay blocking list, which includes more than one external spam blocking database. We are unable to “unblock” IP addresses that appear on this list.
I am not sure that I believe them but there is little more that I can do (except walk).
I also wrote to Wanadoo (in my role as Technology Manager for my church) and they said that they are
in contact with several well-recognised blacklisting organisations
but not with the
smaller providers such as Spews who do not provide contact details
(not mentioning Spambag.)
The feature of the blacklist in question is called a backscatter list. Spam often includes forged return addresses. If a mail server rejects the spam, some send a “bounce” to the reply address which ends up at an innocent third party rather than the spammer. This is backscatter and Spambag operates a “shoot first and ask questions later” policy listing whole domains and address ranges.
So where does that leave us—an unaccountable organisation (Spambag, just one guy and his vendetta) working with an unknown infrastructure organisation is blocking legitimate mail between my friends and me. Spambag justifies his actions on the grounds that he is entitled to block whatever he likes from his network and I agree. However he has also taken positive action to make his list available to anyone else and they have implemented it at random and unknown points throughout the internet. This is lunacy.
The real lunacy is that blacklists don’t work at all because the lister cannot keep up with the rapidly moving spammers; much spam comes from compromised user’s machines; blacklists penalise the innocent—they have no, or very little, control over their ISP and are often unaware that there is anything wrong. Blacklists are what has made email an unreliable form of communication and have caused a lot of disillusionment for Joe Public about the internet revolution.
In the mean time, for those who can’t get an email to me, I will put a Form Mail page on here as soon as I can find one written by someone who knows more than how to put two semicolons together.
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