Merry Christmas to all my friends online. This year has been trying for our family and we are greatly enjoying this Christmas.
Over the next couple of days I will be posting up some pictures of our fun.
The crazed ravings of Splinter (Tony Castley)
Merry Christmas to all my friends online. This year has been trying for our family and we are greatly enjoying this Christmas.
Over the next couple of days I will be posting up some pictures of our fun.
Just made a quick xmas style for you all. If you can’t see it click here!
To assist a friend of mine and to restate the reasons why I recommend and only use Firefox, I will explain my position below.
Firefox is the a web browser from the same organisation that makes Mozilla. It is designed to provide basic browsing functionality with extendable plugin capabilities.
Firefox is:
The last point is what I want to focus on here, as over the last 2 months or so I have had to rebuild/recover computers that belong to a couple of friends of mine. Both of these machines were so ridden with virus’s and spyware that they were basically unusable, one was rebooting everytime it went on the internet and the other was slower than a slug running anything. I spent more than 2 days on each computer removing software that had been unintentionally installed by these people. Now before you say it, these are not dumb people, they are cautious, read and understand most of the prompts Windows gives them, they do not click on attachments unless they are from people they know, generally your average user.
Due to the lack of security in IE and Outlook Express however these people are fighting a loosing battle, incorrect displays of filetypes, automatic running of code from a remote server, popup adds all just confuse the hell out of everyone.
Now Firefox like all software is NOT PERFECT, however it has been designed with the modern corrupt and insecure Internet in mind. It will not autorun code, it insists on saving executables so your virus scanner has a chance of checking it. It does not support Active-X controls that can run with all your permissions on your local machine.
References:
C-NET Review and award.
The Age says:
The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has warned users to stop using Microsoft Internet Explorer after a bug which Microsoft had previously claimed to have fixed has resurfaced.
The US Cert Warning says:
There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, local file system (Local Machine Zone) trust, the Dynamic HTML (DHTML) document object model (in particular, proprietary DHTML features), the HTML Help system, MIME type determination, the graphical user interface (GUI), and ActiveX. These technologies are implemented in operating system libraries that are used by IE and many other programs to provide web browser functionality. IE is integrated into Windows to such an extent that vulnerabilities in IE frequently provide an attacker significant access to the operating system.
It has been great over the last few days. Rain and storms keeping the place very cool. I am now just wishing it would travel west and give some relief to our farmers as they have had drought conditions for several years now.
Well work has rung and asked me to take 3 days out of my holidays to work on a new bid. So I am leaving tonight (Sunday) and will be back Tuesday night. I will then have to spend some of thursday working on finalising the detail of the bid.
It is nice that this group believes that they cannot do this without me, and they have stated that my work location will only get this work IF I lead the development team. However I don’t appreciate that they expect me to drop everything for them every time. As a friend of mine said I have to learn to say NO. 🙂
One good thing, I am planning to use this to negotiate for a promotion out of this. Wish me luck.:razz:
Well with the end of school year happening hear, I have been very busy doing parental things.
Swimming carnivals, String Concerts, Choir recitals and school parades all fun stuff that I normally don’t get time to be involved in.
Along with that I have been taking photo’s with reckless abandon (see the sidebar).
Well I am going on about 2 weeks leave starting… Thursday. It was that or sit at work doing nothing or travel away from home again.
So leave it is. Planning a few things while off, photography, kids events, new style for site, etc.
So keep your eye’s open for changes
Ok so the first full version of Firefox is out.
Get it now…
Ok so I took on the challenge to write a novel in a month. Well it is now 4 days in, and I have a staggering….. 500 words!!
At this rate I will have 3,750 words by the end of the month! Wait.. that is not enough, by about 46,000 words short.
Time to pick up the pace, stop playing computer games, ignore my visitors and saying NO to my boss when he say’s “Do you want to fly interstate for a daytrip, you will only be working 15 hours or so!”.
Wish me luck.
A while back my lovely wife wrote about our visitors. Well we still have one, my father-in-law. He has be very unwell and while not in hospital he has been at out place for nearly 2 months now.
This has been very hard on us, we have never really had a close relationship with him, and my wife ran away (back to her mum) from his household when she was 15 or so. He has very different values from us but in respect for his ailing health we have been reluctant to confront him with the issues we have with him.
We have been married nearly 17 years and have gone through some tough times. We get through these by putting the other one and our relationship first. First above everything else.
We have “ticked off” other family members at times as we set rules of acceptable behaviour in our household and around our kids. This includes (what is considered normal now) no smoking in the house, we decide what the kids can and cannot eat when we are providing the meals (if the relation is providing food or our child is at their house then our kids will eat what is provided). We have always made it clear they are welcome in our lives if they have respect for us as people and parents.
As yet we have not had this conversation with my father in law because, up til now, the longest we have seen him is one to two days. I am sure our conversation will occur soon, probably the next time he says “slope head” in our local shops.
Other than being really windows based, as OSX and BeOS and Unix don’t care about file extensions, I decided to give this Quiz a run.
Ali at CaffeEcletic has a pointer to an online handwritting analysis site. I love this stuff, used to do a little when I was younger.
Well as you could guess here is what it say’s about me.
For a graphologist, the spacing on the page reflects the writer’s attitude toward their own world and relationship to things in his or her own space. If the inputted data was correct Tony has left some white space on the left side of the paper. Tony fills up the rest of the page in a normal fashion moving the entire writing rightward as he moves down the page. If this is true, then Tony has a healthy relationship to the past and is ready to move on. The right side of the page represents the future and Tony is ready and willing to get started living now and planning for the future. Tony is leaving the past behind and moving on to what he perceives as an exciting and enticing future.
Something is incomplete in Tony’s life. He feels frustration relating to his physical needs and desires. Somewhere in his life there is some disappointment, non-fulfillment, and interruption. This is very likely to relate to Tony’s sexual needs.
Tony is sarcastic. This is a defense mechanism designed to protect his ego when he feels hurt. He pokes people harder than he gets poked. These sarcastic remarks can be very funny. They can also be harsh, bitter, and caustic at the same time.
Tony is a practical person whose goals are planned, practical, and down to earth. This is typical of people with normal healthy self-esteem. He needs to visualize the end of a project before he starts. he finds joy in anticipation and planning. Notice that I said he plans everything he is going to do, that doesn’t necessarily mean things go as planned. Tony basically feels good about himself. He has a positive self-esteem which contributes to his success. He feels he has the ability to achieve anything he sets his mind to. However, he sets his goals using practicality– not too “out of reach”. He has enough self-confidence to leave a bad situation, yet, he will not take great risks, as they relate to his goals. A good esteem is one key to a happy life. Although there is room for improvement in the confidence catagery, his self-perception is better than average.
In reference to Tony’s mental abilities, he has a very investigating and creating mind. He investigates projects rapidly because he is curious about many things. He gets involved in many projects that seem good at the beginning, but he soon must slow down and look at all the angles. He probably gets too many things going at once. When Tony slows down, then he becomes more creative than before. Since it takes time to be creative, he must slow down to do it. He then decides what projects he has time to finish. Thus he finishes at a slower pace than when he started the project. He has the best of two kinds of minds. One is the quick investigating mind. The other is the creative mind. His mind thinks quick and rapidly in the investigative mode. He can learn quicker, investigate more, and think faster. Tony can then switch into his low gear. When he is in the slower mode, he can be creative, remember longer and stack facts in a logical manner. He is more logical this way and can climb mental mountains with a much better grip.
Diplomacy is one of Tony’s best attributes. He has the ability to say what others want to hear. He can have tact with others. He has the ability to state things in such a way as to not offend someone else. Tony can disagree without being disagreeable.
Tony will be candid and direct when expressing his opinion. He will tell them what he thinks if they ask for it, whether they like it or not. So, if they don’t really want his opinion, don’t ask for it!
Tony will demand respect and will expect others to treat him with honor and dignity. Tony believes in his ideas and will expect other people to also respect them. He has a lot of pride.
Tony is moderately outgoing. His emotions are stirred by sympathy and heart rendering stories. In fact, he can be kind, friendly, affectionate and considerate of others. He has the ability to put himself into the other person’s shoes. Tony will be somewhat moody, with highs and lows. Sometimes he will be happy, the next day he might be sad. He has the unique ability to get along equally well with what psychology calls introverts and extroverts. This is because he is in between. Psychology calls Tony an ambivert. He understands the needs of both types. Although they get along, he will not tolerate anyone that is too “far out.” He doesn’t sway too far one way or the other. When convincing him to buy a product or an idea, a heart rendering story could mean a great deal to him. He puts himself in the same situation as the person in the story, yet he will not buy anything that seems overly impractical or illogical. Tony is an expressive person. He outwardly shows his emotions. He may even show traces of tears when hearing a sad story. Tony is a “middle-of-the-roader,” politically as well as logically. He weighs both sides of an issue, sits on the fence, and then will decide when he finally has to. He basically doesn’t relate to any far out ideas and usually won’t go to the extreme on any issue.
People that write their letters in an average height and average size are moderate in their ability to interact socially. According to the data input, Tony doesn’t write too large or too small, indicating a balanced ability to be social and interact with others.
Ok it is now one of the biggest problems in desktop systems. According to Dell and The Financial Express approx 90% of all [Desktop] computers are infected by spyware.
A new site GetNetWise gives some basic pointers on how to avoid and remove spyware.
My basic advice:
Well after the last three months providing the lowest rainfall on record, bushfires and drought, it is raining and has been most of the day!!!
10mm and counting, by the sounds of it will be raining all night.
It is Federal Election day in Australia! We get to chose if we retain John Howard and his Liberal Party (Conservatives) in government or put in place the Labour Party (Socialists) in.
The campaign has been run on “Trust” being the keyword, but both major parties have a different take on this word. The Liberals ask us if we “Trust” Labour with the economy, and the Labour party ask’s us if we should “Trust” the party that took us into war on “incomplete/incorrect” evidence.
I will update you later today on how it all goes.
Update: Well we have voted, including my Father in law doing an interstate vote. I can tell you now he and I are at total opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Update(2): The votes are in and enough have been counted for a result. Our conservative government has been returned with a larger majority than before. I must say I am not impressed.