The weather is getting colder and thus building a track on a Sunday afternoon seemed like a good idea:
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Author: otmar
After a long break we build a full set of tracks again. On the first go I used the bridges, but the kids almost immediately destroyed them as they move the tracks on the wooden floor. So, the next version only used the simple overpasses that survive being shoved.
By now both kids push trains along. Now I have to make sure that a) Clemens’ train doesn’t expand by assimilating cars from Elena’s and b) that Clemens doesn’t just crash his train into Elena’s.
I recently got a request for help concerning the generation of ENUM Validation Tokens according to RFC 5105.
In order to check what went wrong, I had to re-install the software I used while writing that RFC. That wasn’t so easy as the upgrade from Xerces 2 to Xerces 3 made a few changes to the XML Signing module necessary:
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Memo to Security Conference Organizers
First of all, there are more security conferences in September and October in Europe than any sensible organization will ever want to send people to. Sorry.
Aggressive hard-sell phone calls will not help. Quite to the contrary.
And if you send email invitations, remember that you’re sending mail to security professionals. Including tracking images in the HTML version and linking to a tracked version of your conference website is considered rude in these circles.
Cut it out.
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Windows 7 Sync Center
I’ve already written about the broken list of available updates in Windows 7. Today I spotted something similar:
Windows supports keeping a copy of a remote directory on the local computer and syncing back offline changes. Today I got confronted with the following dialog:
Okay, I press “Sync” and get:
Conflicts? Show me:
What gives?
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The privacy of fonts on the web
Today, heise wrote about Linotype’s offer in the “fonts for webpages” market.
If I’m not mistaken, that’s not the first commercial offering of licensing fonts for the new HTML/CSS font feature. On one hand, this a really good offer, as it allows amateur sites to use professional fonts for free and commercial, high-traffic sites can use these fonts for a reasonable price.
But one thing bugs me about these offers: In order to enforce the pay-per-pagehit business model, these services need to serve the fonts from their own servers. That means:
- On the plus side, potentially better caching between different sites.
- But: the font-servers implicitly track all visitors to the website using these fonts.
Given all the privacy implications that embedded ads and social media gizmos (“click here if you like this”) are starting to raise, fonts seem to be the next thing you need to be careful about if you’re conscious about the traces you leave in third-party access-logs.
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mod_epp 1.7 released
I’ve just uploaded mod_epp 1.7 to sourceforge.net.
Thanks to CentralNIC for funding the debugging effort.
(And no, there will no picture of me with a brown paper bag over my head on this blog. But yes, that bug was stupid.)
c’t magazine runs a biweekly column shining some light on the most egregious customer experiences with IT companies. To no-one’s surprise, thing start to get resolved if the company is facing public outrage and public shaming.
So, in the same spirtit: paypal is worst company in the world.
Further opportunities at Naming and Shaming are the Big Brother Awards.
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A very cold Hotfix
I recently upgraded from the old Nokia Suite to the Ovi-branded version. In other word, I replaced one piece of sh***y bloatware with another.
But one thing is interesting: When using USB-based tethering, I get the following notice:
Well, if they think it makes the bloatware work better, ok. Then I took a closer look:
Article ID: 925681 – Last Review: December 8, 2009 – Revision: 3.0
When you try to download a file from the Internet by using Windows Internet Explorer in a Windows operating system, the download stops responding and then times out. The problem occurs when you use a USB modem that has a data transfer speed that is faster than or equal to 240 kilobits per second (Kbps).
Just look at that date. Microsoft found a problem that affects a good part of their customers (USB-based 3G modems are quite common these days), managed to cook up a solution, and seven months later it still wasn’t folded into the monthly updates and is still sold as a “hotfix”.
Sorry, this fix isn’t “hot” any more. It’s cold and very much over-due.