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Microsoft plans to release a software update that removes support for handling user names and passwords in HTTP and HTTP with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or HTTPS URLs in Microsoft Internet Explorer. The following URL syntax is no longer supported in Internet Explorer or Windows Explorer after you install this software update:

http(s)://username:password@server/resource.ext

This article is intended to give you advance notice of this change in Internet Explorer's default behavior. If you include user information in HTTP or HTTPS URLs, Microsoft recommends that you explore the workarounds that are described in this article before you install this software update. Microsoft will post more information in this article when the software update becomes available.

Source: Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 834489

Oh my Lord, please tell me they aren’t serious. Internet Explorer has a slew of bugs that deal with this. Rather than fix these bugs, Microsoft is going to discontinue support for the entire thing?

You have got to be kidding me.

Is this innovation? No, it’s laziness. It’s sloppy programming work that caused the problems in the first place. They are relying on people downloading a patch, so should they make a patch which cripples the program or a patch that fixes the problem? WOW.

I really can’t believe this. The combination of audacity and stupidity behind this decision is just staggering.

But you know what? No one can stop them. They answer to no one. Who cares if Opera and Mozilla gets it right? (Opera gets it more right than Mozilla)

Then again, this is even more reason to not use Internet Explorer. These links may not work in Internet Explorer, but they will continue to work in Opera and other browsers.

So do you want a crippled browser with less features and more security holes, or do you want a more secure browser with more features? Download and try Opera.

What’s next? Will they remove hyperlinks altogether? Don’t laugh, they have already suggested that you should not click links.

Posted by TjL at 08:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Scale: 7/10
Should you see it? Yes
How's the writing? Good
Any gaping holes in the plot? None I could see
What stands out? We haven't seen this before
See it in the theater or wait to rent? Either

I like to not know much about a movie before I see it. Most times it pays off. I had seen a preview of this movie and the title stuck in my head (hey movie execs, a good title is very important!) so we decided to go see it.

I thought it was amazing. Sure the writing was a little weak in places, but not unlike any other movie if you examine it closely (every movie has a few bad lines in it).

What surprised me was when I later learned that this movie was getting trashed in reviews. I even heard that Ashton Kutcher was refusing to promote it. If true, that's too bad, because people are going to miss out on a very interesting movie.

Posted by TjL at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Scale: 8/10
Should you see it? Yes
How's the writing? Good and Fun
Any gaping holes in the plot? Who cares?
What stands out? Creativitity
See it in the theater or wait to rent? Theatre

This was a really fun movie. The characters were well executed, the story had several good threads. It wasn't your basic feel-good movie, it wasn't pure fantasy. There was enough depth to the characters to make you care about them, but it never got so heavy that it dragged the movie down.

It'll be fine on the small screen, but it's a movie about being “bigger than life” ... so go catch it in the theatre if you can.

Posted by TjL at 04:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Scale: 9/10
Should you see it? Yes
How's the writing? Very good
Any gaping holes in the plot? No
What stands out? Sequels usually stink, these are great
See it in the theater or wait to rent? Theatre

Ok, everyone else has weighed in there, so what else can I add? 3rd movies in trilogies are notoriously bad (see Return of the Jedi, The Godfather 3, and Matrix Revolutions.) This was every bit as good as the second (which was every bit as good as the first).

Now I know there are going to be rabid fans who complain about something that was left out/changed from the books. Don’t bother. The books were immense, and I doubt anyone could get in perfect.

My only complaint was that the movie seemed to end about 4 times, and could have done with a bit more editing (I know, it’s nearly heretical to say, but it really was too long). With the combined length of all 3 movies there were really four Lord of the Rings movies. The battle scenes could have been shorter. After awhile I was thinking, “Ok, I get it, lots of people dying.”

Minor complaints over an excellent movie, and excellent series.

Posted by TjL at 04:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Heh.... well, no one was ever fired for hiring IBM.

Quoting the Official press release about John Patrick:

Mr. Patrick was a founding member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT and is now the Chairman of the Global Internet Project, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and electronics Engineers, a member of the Internet Society, the Association for Computer Machinery, and the Working Group on Authentication at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Posted by TjL at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You gotta hand it to Microsoft.... they are innovative when it comes to how you ought to protect yourself.

For example, in a recent Microsoft bulletin describing yet another security flaw in Internet Explorer, here is their first suggestion in the category “Things that you can do to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks:”

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

Why of course! That’s exactly what you ought to do! Nevermind those pesky hyperlinks, type everything in yourself! (Anyone else think that perhaps Microsoft ought to spend more time fixing bugs and less time writing inane security bulletins?)

Here’s an easier solution: Don’t use Microsoft Internet Explorer! It has more holes than a swiss cheese factory! I would suggest either Opera or even Firebird would be a better option than Internet Explorer.

(Hat tip to C|Net’s story on this bug.)

Posted by TjL at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I don’t remember where I came across this, an announcement of a hard drive offering 1 terabyte capacity for the price of $1,199.00 USD. Expected shipping date is February 2004.

For those of you not up on the numbers, a terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, or 1024 gigabytes.

A megabyte = 1,024 kilobytes. 1,024 megabytes = one gigabyte.

To give a little historical context: when I was in college (1991-1995) student accounts were allocated 4 megabytes of space, which is roughly the equivalent to the full text of the Christian Bible (Old and New Testaments).

When I entered seminary (1995), a nice man by the name of Carl Edman gave me a computer which had a mind-blowing (at that time) 1 gigabyte hard drive, which was in a large external enclosure. I remember trying to guess how much the drive would have cost, and found that it was around $1,000 USD.

When I bought this laptop (2000) it came with an 11 gigabyte hard drive, which was later upgraded to a 30 gigabyte drive, for which I paid around $200, I believe.

In June 2003 I bought an iPod which has a 30 gigabyte capacity and fits easily in the palm of my hand, not much larger than my cell phone (a Treo 600, which has more RAM than the average computer had at my college). There is now a 40 gigabyte iPod which is about the same size.

What could anyone possibly need 1 terabyte of space for? Well, at the moment, few will. Then again, few needed 10 gigabytes 10 years ago, and few could have afforded it if they needed it.

I use a significant amount of diskspace for storing computer CDs such as Microsoft Office, which has an annoying tendency to ask me to put the installation disk in whenever I try to access a feature which I hadn’t used before (filters, clip art, etc). So I just copy the entire CD to c:\cd\office\ and install if from there.

Then there are the MP3s. I have a 60 gigabyte external drive where I keep my MP3s, along with a bunch of old files that I really ought to sort through, but really there is very little motivation to clean it out when the time it would take to make sure I don’t delete anything I might need later greatly outweighs the cost of getting a bigger hard drive.

This made me wonder how much space will be required by the next version of Windows (Whistler, scheduled for release in 2007).

I was talking with my friend Tam Ho about Windows diskspace requirements. He wrote that his Windows directory is already at 1.15 gigabytes after 7 days use. (Mine is at 2.5 gigabytes, less than a month after a clean install.)

Windows XP officially requires 1.5 gigabytes of space. Windows 3.1 (circa 1988) required 30 megabytes. Tam wrote:

If we assume that the space requirement of the OS doubles roughly every 3 years, that seems to fit the data. XP came out in 2002... the next version is coming out in '07... that means the next version’s space requirement will be about (1.5gigabytes)x[2^(5/3)] or 4.77 gigabytes.

You heard it here first.... but actually XP was released in 2001, so it’ll probably be closer to 6 gigabytes. I'm going to say 5.5 gigabytes, final answer, and I'm confident it'll be within 10% of that number.

So the game is on. I’m less optimistic than Tam, I think it will be closer to 7, and 10 will be the reality after a little time of actually using the system. The official requirement may be 5.5 gigabytes, but when has Microsoft’s “official” requirement ever been really usable?

Update (2004/02/20) C|Net asks: Is your PC ready for Longhorn?

Posted by TjL at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Head is a sidebar meant to give you some information from a web server. The page purposefully has no design.

Posted by TjL at 01:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

John Smith was the only Protestant to move into a large Catholic neighborhood. On the first Friday of Lent, John was outside grilling a big juicy steak on his grill. Meanwhile, all of his neighbors were eating cold tuna fish for supper.

This went on each Friday of Lent.

On the last Friday of Lent, the neighborhood men got together and decided that something had to be done about John, he was tempting them to eat meat each Friday of Lent, and they couldn't take it anymore. They decided to try and convert John to be a Catholic.

They went over and talked to him and were so happy that he decided to join all of his neighbors and become a Catholic. They took him to Church, and the Priest sprinkled some water over him, and said, "You were born a Baptist, you were raised a Baptist, and now you are a Catholic." The men were so relieved, now their biggest Lenten temptation was resolved.

The next year's Lenten season rolled around. The first Friday of Lent came, and just at supper time, when the neighborhood was setting down to their tuna fish dinner, came the wafting smell of steak cooking on a grill. The neighborhood men could not believe their noses! WHAT WAS GOING ON?

They called each other up and decided to meet over in John's yard to see if he had forgotten it was the first Friday of Lent?

The group arrived just in time to see John standing over his grill with a small pitcher of water. He was sprinkling some water over his steak on the grill, saying, "You were born a cow, you were raised a cow, and now you are a fish."

Posted by TjL at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I had a New Hampshire Congresswoman ask for an aisle seat on the airplane so that her hair wouldn't get messed up by being near the window.

I got a call from a Candidate's Staffer, who wanted to go to Capetown. I started to explain the length of the flight and the passport information. He interrupted me with, "I'm not trying to make you look stupid, but Capetown is in Massachusetts." Without trying to make him look like the stupid one, I calmly explained, "Cape Cod is in Massachusetts, Capetown is in Africa." His response ...(click). ??

A Senior Vermont Congressman called, furious about a Florida package we did. I asked what was wrong with the vacation in Orlando. He said he was expecting an ocean-view room. I tried to explain that is not possible, since Orlando is in the middle of the state. He replied, "Don't lie to me. I looked on the map, and Florida is a very thin state!!!"

I got a call from a Lawmakers Wife who asked, "Is it possible to see England from Canada?" I said, "No." She said, "But they look so close on the map."

An Aide for a Bush cabinet member once called and asked if they could rent a car in Dallas. When I pulled up the reservation, I noticed they only had a 1-hour lay-over in Dallas. When I asked him why he wanted to rent a car, he said, "I heard Dallas was a big airport, and we will need a car to drive between the gates to save time."

An Illinois Congresswoman called last week. She needed to know how it was possible that her flight from Detroit left at 8:20am and got into Chicago at 8:33am. I tried to explain that Michigan was an hour ahead of Illinois, but she could not understand the concept of time zones. Finally, I told her the plane went very fast, and she bought that!

A New York lawmaker called and asked, "Do airlines put your physical description on your bag so they know who's luggage belongs to who? " I said, "No, why do you ask?" She replied, "Well, when I checked in with the airline, they put a tag on my luggage that said (FAT), and I'm overweight, I think that is very rude!" After putting her on hold for a minute while I "looked into it" (I was actually laughing) I came back and explained the city code for Fresno, CA is (FAT), and that the airline was just putting a destination tag on her luggage.

A Senator called and said, "I need to fly to Pepsi-Cola, FL. Do I have to get on one of those little computer planes?" I asked if he meant fly to Pensacola, FL on a commuter plane. He said, "Yeah, whatever!!"

A Senior Senator called and had a question about the documents he needed in order to fly to China. After a lengthy discussion about passports, I reminded him he needed a visa. "Oh no I don't, I've been to China many times and never had to have one of those." I double checked and sure enough, his stay required a visa. When I told him this he said, "Look, I've been to China four times and every time they have accepted my American Express!"

A New Mexico Congressman called to make reservations, "I want to go from Chicago to Rhino, New York" The agent was at a loss for words. Finally, the agent: "Are you sure that's the name of the town?" "Yes, what flights do you have?" replied the man. After some searching, the agent came back with, "I'm sorry, sir, I've looked up every airport code in the country and can't find a Rhino anywhere." The man retorted, "Oh don't be silly! Everyone knows where it is. Check your map!" The agent scoured a map of the state of New York and finally offered, "You don't mean Buffalo, do you?" "That's it! I knew it was a big animal"!!!

Posted by TjL at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For some time now Ethan has been doing little helpful things. He'll carry an old diaper to the trash can (and when you change his diaper he'll say "Whew!" and wave his hand in front of his nose... I think he learned that from me).

Two new cute ones: 1) Tracey coughed (she's fighting a cold) and Ethan went over and brought her a kleenex. 2) You can tell him to bring a diaper and the box of wipes. Then when he brings them, he'll lie down on his back and wait for a diaper change.

Very cute indeed.

Posted by TjL at 04:39 PM | Permalink