Spontaneous Monotony

Another cracker brought to you by Microsoft – a screwup in the way IE understands ‘body onload’ statements (not put them in chevrons as it would be interpreted as HTML) can give a remote attacker complete control over a system – with the same privileges as the user currently logged on (which means full access on XP as limited users can’t even change the damn clock). I repeat what I said a few days ago – if IE wasn’t in Windows (or wasn’t hooked into Windows Explorer the way it is now) it would be a much more secure operating system. The flaw is rated ‘extremely critical’ by Secunia.

I’ve decided to reinstate Spam Karma 2, because Akismet’s lowest-common-denominator approach (no configuration options, no feedback, ‘spam comments’ listing that didn’t work) was bugging me, but I still get the benefits of Akismet because there is an SK2 plugin available (you still need an API key, but they’re now freely available) that uses Akismet analysis as one of the filters within SK2 itself. Rock On!

Microsoft’s Visual Studio family has long offered powerful – but pricey – tools for those programming only for Windows platforms. Now (at least temporarily) amateur programmers, students etc. can get access to lightweight, easier-to-use versions with the new Visual Studio Express. Apparently they will retail for $49 (no UK pricing given) – but for the first year (specifically, until November 7th 2006) anyone who wants them can download any of the following for free:

• Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
• Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
• Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
• Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
• Visual J# 2005 Express Edition

And the best part is that (unusually for this type of offer) you get to keep them after the offer period expires, although the catch will of course be that you’ll probably need to buy the new version to make programs for the Great Crap Elephant formerly known as Longhorn.

Since the perfection that was Civilization II, the makers of the Civ series have struggled to come up with anything as good. They aren’t going to get any further with this offering – the reason being that it doesn’t work. The minimum system requirements are: 800Mhz processor, 8Mb graphics card, 256Mb RAM, so when I booted it up on my 3Ghz processor, 64Mb graphics, 512Mb RAM machine I was expecting the game’s performance to be at least passable. It just doesn’t work at all – seemingly incapable of understanding what proportions a modern computer screen is in, and runs like a dead dog when you eventually fight your way through the keyboard-only menus. I suppose I’d better look into Civ 2 compatibility with XP!

EDIT: Removed the image as Wordpress seems to insert them in a cack-handed way that causes all sorts of problems

I just noticed that the Cosmos page was kind of… blank! This is because it needs an additional file to be put in the WP theme directory, which of course got deleted when I did the upgrade. Back to normal now though.