Monthly Archives: March 2006

Apple Advertising to Satellites ?

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[April Fool! – Yes, I am part of the global conspiracy.. 🙂]

Here’s an interesting coincidence, was talking to a person I know interstate who told me that a friend at Apple had let the cat out of the bag by mentioning that they were planning a big PR stunt for their 30th anniversary in conjunction with Google, but shut up as soon as he’d realised he’d said too much.

Then I find that my good friend Rich has stumbled across what’s got to be the same thing – a massive iPod advert visible from space!

Now that’s a cool stunt…

[Update: MIT’s Advertising Lab have picked up on this as well]

Widget. It’s got a widget. A lovely widget. A widget it has got.

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(With apologies to Jack Dee).

Just did a quick revamp of the sidebar of this blog using WordPress’s new Widgets Plugin – and I’ve got to same I’m impressed!

As it’s really really new there’s a couple of plugins that are missing from the sidebar, but I’m sure that they’ll get fixed soon (hint hint!)..

Using ajax/dhtml style goodness with Javascript it suddenly becomes fairly trivial to insert, re-arrange, remove or otherwise modify your sidebar. As more plugins get converted to widgets I predict this is going to be a big boost for making WordPress even easier to use. Nice work guys!

3 New Serious Internet Explorer Bugs Found

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The BBC is reporting that three new serious security bugs in Internet Explorer have been found, two of which will let an attacker take over your computer.

Security firms said specially written websites and hijacked servers were already being used to host the malicious code that uses the loopholes to invade vulnerable machines.

Microsoft will not fix this until April 11th so until that day everyone using Internet Explorer on Windows is vulnerable.

Don’t panic – there is a free alternative! Firefox is a state-of-the-art web browser that will let you surf the net safely.

Get Firefox!

Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006) and Pro Hart (1928-2006) – RIP

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A sad day for the arts with the loss of a Polish science fiction author and an australian painter.

Stanislaw Lem has died (Via Alec – though it’s not obvious unless you grok Unix humour or click on the link). A controversial character, he was the author of books such as The Cyberiad and The Futurological Congress.

Pro Hart has also died (via ABC news) who had been ill with motor neuron disease. He was largely self taught and is famous for his “cannon art” where Christmas tree balls were filled with paint and fired at a canvas by a home made cannon.

I hate being ill..

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I’ve been really lucky with my health, so having come down with what I reckon to be food poisoning in the early hours of Sunday morning was not fun. I’m over the worst of it now though and I reckon I’ll be able to eat something for the first time in 36 hours – then it’s into the massage chair and have a nice bath.

Mikal’s Not An Overactive Anti-Spam Engine :-)

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Oops, looks like I inadvertently upset Mikal, which wasn’t intentional!

The only reason I got a little miffed was because I got a message that instead of saying “1 comment held for moderation” said something like “1 spam comment removed, you can be the first to leave a real message“. Anyway, it’s all fine now..

I’m using the Akismet plugin to WordPress (now a standard part of the install) which does a damn fine job of spotting spam.