Everything, Everything

I think I want Dale to win. He's made it clear he likes Jennifer and she seemed to like him, but now she seems to be a bit interested in Stuart and this has clearly upset Dale and yet she's not doing anything to reassure him. So I'm supporting the quiet underdog. I wish I could vote out both Sylvia and Mario on Friday. Especially after Sylvia hid food and tried to deny it.

Inspired by Henry's status on Facebook and MSN, and a subsequent exchange of messages:

One of the top articles at The Register for the last few days has been this one about AVG. Six months ago, AVG acquired Exploit Prevention Labs and its Linkscanner tool. The tool, which has now been rolled into AVG's anti-virus engine, automatically scans search engine results before you click on them. AVG 8 apparently scans search results on Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Live Search.

I can understand the problem of additional traffic (it does cost money, it does increase load on a server), and I agree with the argument that a decent tool should be able to identify problems when the user loads the page (rather than being quite so proactive, which may itself cause problems if there's a flaw in the scanning engine that can be exploited to perform remote code execution). I can also guess how painful it is when the user needs more than 10 links to be checked, such as when doing advanced searches with lots of results (then again, I've never been a fan of proactive web browsing/web accelerators, perhaps because I have so many things on the go). What I don't like is when people say stupid things.

Barry Parshall, director of product management at WebTrends, said: "I completely get the value proposition [of Linkscanner], but it would be responsible of them to identify themselves, with agent code or whatever it might be, so legitimate businesses can serve their customers properly."

It is clear that Barry, like many of The Register readers that left comments on the article, doesn't realise that anything used to distinguish AVG's tool from a normal user can therefore be (ab)used to hide malicious code until the user visits the page with a browser. The only way to avoid that from happening is to make the browser string indistinguishable from anti virus tools! This is something that wasn't mentioned until "Dan" left the 48th comment.

As much as I like free speech, there are definitely times when people shouldn't be allowed to state their opinions. It's even worse on the BBC News and Sky News sites. If you like reading uninformed opinions, extremist views and general gibberish, you might want to try The Twat-O-Tron.

Our pub quiz team came second in last night's quiz. The rest of my team got a lot of really good answers, but I was quite proud of a few of the answers I provided, such as Al Pacino in the film "Two For The Money" and Charles Dickens came before Charles Darwin on the £10 note. I also knew that Extreme was the artist that did "More Than Words" - I suspect I was the only person in the room to know that. Perhaps I shouldn't be quite so proud about that last one.

Our team's name was "Basket Cases" - I said to Cheryl we can pretend it's a reference to Green Day, but it was actually her mum's suggestion (and was better than all of the other ideas that had been suggested). There were a few half decent team names, but I was a little surprised that one of the teams called themselves "Crackers". What made it even worse was the entire team was made up of old white people. Unless they were doing it to raise awareness of the double standard where it's seemingly okay for people to use the term "cracker" but it's not okay to use the word "nigger" (unless you're black or quoting someone else). Or perhaps they were using their retirement to hack and crack their way into computers on the internet. Or maybe they all like the taste of crackers, perhaps with some yummy cheese. Why did my mind go to the offensive definition? Perhaps for the same reason why Randy guessed the wrong word on that episode of South park. For the same reason why "faggot" and "slut" were recently censored by the BBC from The Pogues song "Fairytale of New York" (but confusingly only on Radio 1, the BBC's other stations played the unedited version throughout the period). People tend to jump to the offensive meanings rather than putting words into context (and the South Park episode was funny because of a word game, where it should be obvious that the offensive word isn't the one they're after).

It's back! For those of you that didn't see last night's show, all the housemates are a bunch of freaks. Based on first impressions, the most likeable person in the house is possibly Michael, the partially sighted standup comic with a fetish for womens clothing.

Darrell had left the room and as I was waiting for the fresh coffee to brew for a couple minutes, I spotted the bunny (from Monty Python & The Holy Grail) and inspiration struck me:



It would have been funnier if I'd left the cap off the pen, so Darrell would catch the bunny "in the act", but it probably would have dried out the pen. It's still funny though. I think.

It's not often that I boot into Windows XP with a second monitor hooked up, but I resumed my copy of Windows XP Pro SP3 this morning, logged in, and was immediately presented with this message:



True, 0 X 0 won't be fuzzy, but I won't get to see anything either (also, it's not presented as an option). I have a feeling the 1920x1200 display combined with the 1280x1024 display must have slightly confused the drivers, as I was already enjoying the best viewing experience (I think).