Mental Health Hotline

Heard this today morning on the radio. Hilarious!!

Mental Health Hotline - The most amazing videos are a click away

GDB 7.0 Released

Now with support for stepping backwards! And many more features.

Sneaky Microsoft plug-in puts Firefox users at risk

An add-on that Microsoft silently slipped into Firefox [in an update delivered via Windows Update last February] leaves the browser open to attack:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139459/Sneaky_Microsoft_plug_in_puts_Firefox_users_at_risk


Actually its two Microsoft add-ons. Firefox has since blocked them:
"Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant and Windows Presentation Foundation, all versions, for all applications. Reason: remote code execution vulnerability (see bug 522777)"
https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/blocklist/


I never knew these add-ons were installed until I got a popup saying Firefox has blocked two add-ons! i first thought they were trojans by a 3rd party - because it's so unlikely for a so-called reputed company to install stealth plug-ins.

LSE Buys MillenniumIT

The Business:
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090916-709424.html
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/de196d06-a2a3-11de-ae7e-00144feabdc0.html


The Technology:
http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2568
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/1742203/London-Stock-Exchange-Rejects-NET-For-Open-Source

Finally!

Firefox 3.5

It really does what it says it does.

But my favorite new feature is the new error messages:

Outlook Is Painful

It's funny when such a supposedly sophisticated program cannot do a very simple task. Apparently, MS Outlook cannot keep attachments when you reply. If you want to keep attachments in reply, you have two options:

1) You have to Forward - losing the participants in the mail
2) Let Outlook attach the original mail as an attachment instead of including it.

Both options kind of suck. At the moment I'm stuck with having to Forward and manually add back all the participants. And this is one of the many problems I have with Outlook: it's agonizingly slow, The whole machine grinds to a halt when it's downloading a message, and when it gets a message it does not like, it obliges by crashing over and over again. Thunderbird in comparison is super fast and never crashed on me. I only use Outlook (2003) at work, and that too only because the company has standardized on Outlook as the default mail client. They didn't go with Thunderbird because it did not have a (good enough) meeting facility. That I guess is a good example of how bad software triumphs over good software simply thanks to Bloat.

PHP on Google App Engine

Earlier I blogged about GAE and the PHP implementation in Java called Quercus. There is still no official support for PHP on GAE. I was wondering about the possibility of combining these two to run PHP apps on GAE, and it seems like it's already been done. See here and here. A google search will return tons of results on it.

Hopefully this will make GAE apps a little more portable between the truck loads of web hosts that support PHP.

Update: there is a whole blog about running PHP on GAE here.

Redundant Advertising?

tpl: Simple, Lightweight Serialization for C

"There are no library dependencies. You can compile its source code (one file) right into your program."

Should come in handy when you want to do some quick serialization/deserialization but doesn't have the time or is overkill to bring in a heavy duty player (or if you are working in pure C). The API looks simple and elegant. License is BSD.

Site: http://tpl.sourceforge.net/