Hmm. I want to get my unwarranted Just Adventure bashing out of the way as soon as possible, so I’d better come up with something new to write about.

Erm. How about a link? Everyone loves links.

For programmers (or those aspiring to be one), have a look at The Daily WTF. It’s a daily compenium of hilariously bad code from “professionals”, who we presume are actually paid to write it. The site actually makes a handy learning tool – figure out what’s so horribly wrong with the code displayed, and reward yourself with a good laugh when you work it out. Oh, and it’ll probably make you feel smug and eminently employable, too.

“Do you get paid for this shit?”

Slashdot is a horrible site, but for some reason I still feel compelled to visit it on a daily basis. The only thing worse than reading a story on Slashdot is reading a comment on Slashdot, but for some reason I end up doing that too. Why? I don’t know – probably the same reason I keep buying stuff from the iTunes Music Store, despite it repeatedly shagging me in the face in new and interesting ways. The concept of Slashdot is good, just like iTunes should be good in theory – but the execution, oh man.

I really wouldn’t mind so much if it was a little site run by one guy in his spare time – although there are countless such sites better produced than Slashdot – but this thing is huge. And owned by some big technology firm. But what do we get? Stories full of bollocks, people asking the same stupid questions every week (”how can I organise my books at home” just today!), and the ‘Funny’ comments. Oh, those ‘Funny’ comments. I think I must have broken my funnybone or something.

Their links to positive Linux stories (Linux nearly ready for your nan!) are often good for a laugh, at least. Now that’s funny.

Do they get paid for this shit? The sad answer is yes, they do.

Haven’t had a good rant on here for a while.

Apparently spammers, not content with spamming-up my comments, have now moved on to abusing my email form (now defunct). What fun! This time they’ve concocted an ingenious wheeze for injecting their own headers into the generated emails, allowing them to add their own ‘Cc:’ and ‘Bcc:’ lines with impunity. That allows them to fire emails off to all and sundry – in addition to me, the unchangable ‘To:’ addressee, of course.

This is all possible thanks to the wonders of injection for the PHP mail() function. It’s simple enough: you shove in some magic characters when filling in the form, and suddenly you can write whatever you want in the email headers. Not good.

Why is this still possible? It’s 2006! The first time I came across a problem like this, it was on a MUD. Yes, that fine piece of 80s technology, friend of university procrastinators everywhere. (The only friend, but we won’t go into that.) You could exploit badly written code to inject your own, wreaking all kinds of havok if you chose your mark carefully.

Sound familiar?

Why is the PHP mail() function so stupid? Why is it left to the PHP programmer to prevent this nastiness? Why is it left to any user of any similar function to consider all these possibilities? It’s not reasonable to expect PHP programmers each to duplicate each others’ effort, all to thwart the same idiotic flaw in a built-in function.

I’m sure it’s a simple oversight on the part of the PHP developers – as are most flaws allowing this kind of injection – but hey, it’s not called a rant for nothing. Bloody PHP, and bloody spammers.

So, Microsoft have finally coughed out an update to Internet Exploder, eh? At least, they’ve released a public beta of it. This should be quite an exciting moment – the first update for Internet Explorer for around five years, and probably the first major update since Windows 98.

Well, the interface has been streamlined a bit. Your ability to modify it has certainly been “streamlined” as well; in fact, there are many aspects of the new interface that you can’t move around at all. Considering the flexibility you get in Internet Explorer 6, that’s a bit disappointing.

The two biggest additions to the interface are a search box in the top-right, exactly as you find in Firefox – although Microsoft’s naturally defaults to MSN Search rather than Google, a setting Microsoft are at least wise enough to allow you to change – and a neat little RSS button, almost exactly like, er, Firefox. This button allows you to subscribe to fine RSS feeds, keeping you up-to-date on your favourite sites – even without having Internet Explorer open. It updates its feeds as a Scheduled Task in Windows. What it does with them then is a mystery, I didn’t keep it around long enough to find out.

The other major addition is tabbed browsing. As anyone who’s converted to Firefox knows, tabbed browsing can revolutionise your browsing experience. Microsoft have augmented it with a neat little feature, which bears a remarkable resemblance to an aspect of Mac OS X. At the press of a button, you’re presented with miniature thumbnails of all your open tabs, allowing you to flick to the one you want with ease.

Let’s not forget the Phishing Filter (I’m surprised they didn’t go for “Phishing Philter”), which supposedly warns you if you end up at a dodgy web-site. Not stolen from NetCraft at all, then.

It’s an improvement on Internet Exploder 6, no doubt, but the interface is currently horrible. Not quite as ugly as the default Firefox theme, but getting there. It is also unusably slow on my clockwork computer, so it’s been exorcised. IE6 is all I need, really.

But IE7 is a good step in the right direction, and stealing successful ideas then improving on them has always been Microsoft’s forté.

Energy efficiency = more cash 2 you. Or so the old advert said.

BBC News recently had an article about the ’standby’ button prevalent on many consumer electronics – TVs, hi-fis – and the effect it’s having on energy consumption across the UK. Slashdot, that bastion of great journalism, picked up the story and it got over 700 comments, way above average. Now I couldn’t be bothered reading any of these, but I think that suggests it was a bit of a hot topic. And so it is a hot topic here. The needless waste of energy has always been a bugbear of mine.

Whether it’s an office full of brightly-lit CRT monitors merrily displaying login screens to each other all night and all weekend, or a nation of TVs left on ’standby’ mode – apparently using two-thirds of full power in some cases – it’s just annoying. The government is rightly trying to encourage people to cut down on their energy consumption, not least because they don’t really want to build any more of those nasty, loss-making nuclear power stations. Manufacturers are getting better at cutting ’standby’ energy consumption – but there’s a fly in the energy-saving ointment.

As you will be aware if you read my Luddite rantings, analogue television is going to be turned off in 2010 or so, replaced with its digital cousin, Freeview and digital satellite. In the same government committee meeting as some clever blokey said that “digital TV represents nothing of benefit whatsoever”, it also transpired that “the impact on the UK’s electricity consumption from forcing people to buy set-top boxes for every TV and analogue video recorder in their house is significant”. To the tune of £7 of electricity per set-top box per year, in fact.

Let me introduce BSkyB, who require every customer to keep their digital set-top box switched on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as a condition of their continued subscription. The idea is that Sky may want to squirt a software update down the line once in a blue moon, and the box had better be around to receive it. Let me also introduce Panasonic, whose set-top boxes consume 18 watts on full power – and 17 watts on standby*. I’m sure Panasonic aren’t the only ones with similarly pointless ’standby’ modes for their digital TV equipment.

Not that you can sensibly not use Standby mode on a lot of these devices, anyway. Guess what happens if you disobey the almighty Sky and switch your digibox off at the wall? You have to wait over 30 seconds for it to reboot itself when it comes back on. If you switch a Freeview box off? It forgets what channels it can receive. A Kenwood hi-fi? It comes back on in its flashy in-store ‘demo’ mode. Great.

Hope Tony’s getting those nuclear power stations ready!

* These figures are from memory of reading the tech sheet in the back of the manual, but each is no more than 5 watts out. And the two figures are very, very close.

The iTunes Music Store is a really useful thing to have around. It’s reasonably priced for single tracks, and as long as that’s all you’re after, it’s a great way of ensuring you get hold of a reasonably high-quality copy of your desired track quickly and with the minimum of fuss. No more messing around with dodgy P2P applications only to receive a blippy, dropout-ridden mess time after time!

Of course, it’s not perfect. The fact that you can buy a real, physical CD album for only fractionally more than you can download one from iTunes is a disadvantage, but not a major one. After all, if I was locked in the house and for some reason needed to play Dark Side of the Moon three times backwards to escape, the ability to download it on iTunes would seem quite handy. But that’s the only situation in which I can see myself doing it.

There’s one huge disadvantage though. There is no way to re-download the tracks you have purchased. You have to take care of them after the initial download, backing them up and re-importing them in iTunes as you move from computer to computer. Now here’s the major problem: the tracks are DRM’ed (Digital Rights Management’ed) to stop you naughtily passing them on to your friends. So surely… if some catastrophe befalls your computer, even if you have copies of these magical music files, won’t the same mechanism stop you using them? Aren’t you a bit bummed in the face?

Maybe not. I’m sure there’s some clever “associate my music library with this account” trickery available in iTunes. But I don’t think it’s reasonable, or sensible, to expect the user to keep backups of their music files. Of course, anyone who doesn’t back-up their documents is asking for trouble, but music files? Hardly top of the priority list.

You can freely delete your ripped music files and simply rip them again on your new computer – why not allow iTunes Music Store purchases to be re-downloaded? Buying something digitally is patently not the same as buying a physical item, and as such it is difficult to think of them in the same way. If you lose a CD, you know it’s gone. If you lose a computer file you downloaded, there’s got to be some way to download it again – right? Right? I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this way. But in iTunes’ case, I’d be wrong.

Curse you Apple, curse you.

“For a large fraction of the population, digital terrestrial television represents nothing of benefit whatsoever,” said some clever blokey in parliament.

Yes, but we’re still being forced by the government to switch over in 2009, when the analogue signal is switched off. This will be a bit of an annoyance for me, since the only way I can receive digital television is via satellite. It will be less than convenient to install a satellite dish for every TV in the house (of which there are three).

More importantly to me, do I want to give Rupert Murdoch (owner of Sky, of course) lots of money just so I can watch TV? Here is a hint: no.

And I’m one of those lucky people who actually understand the technical workings of this digital TV malarkey. I can do it with the minimum of head-scratching. Despite this, even I can’t be arsed with the switchover. Analogue television delivers a 625-line colour picture and stereo sound perfectly well and digital TV gives you, er, well, the same thing actually. Except with added MPEG artifacts and a cheery “no satellite signal is being received” message when it rains.

Bloody onward march of technology.

Microsoft may be bastards, but they’ve got one thing right in recent years: MSN Messenger.

All right, so the whole “nudge” thing is kind of annoying, and being able to send massive screen-filling animations to your ‘friends’ is just stupid. But one feature I absolutely love – so much so that I wish it existed on IRC somehow – is the ability to bore your so-called e-friends with what music you’re listening to.

What a great social feature. Everyone suspects their friends are listening to the Spice Girls when nobody else is around, now you can find out if it’s true! Great idea Microsoft.

One of these graphics cards (not pictured because the image has been lost – lame!) was an object of desire for a long time and cost me upwards of £200. The other I bought because I needed something that could decode DVDs in hardware. It cost £30.

One of these cards will only handle 3D graphics trickery and has 8MB of video RAM. The other handles desktop graphics, 3D graphics, DVD decoding and more, and comes with a massive 128MB of video RAM onboard.

One of these cards cannot handle much more than Quake very well (although some nutter got it running Doom 3). The other – well, I have no idea. It supports DirectX 9 in theory, but not in hardware, so in other words any DirectX 9 games will be functional but incredibly slow.

One of these cards has a connector on the top to allow you to marry it to another, identical card, doubling its effective power. The other card would outclass such a combination all by itself.

One card is such a cool customer its chips do not even require a heatsink, despite its high-end status when first released. Modern video cards, of course, require onboard fans, and in some cases, separate power connectors for them.

Which is which? The big one is, as you may have guessed (especially if you enlarge the image), the horribly outmoded Voodoo 2. Only seven years old and already a computing dinosaur. Sniff, sniff. You made Wing Commander Prophecy and all other Glide-centric games look beautiful, man. You’ll be sorely missed.

Its compact friend is the ATI Radeon 9250 – only £30 but it does so much more – and it made me relocate my other PCI cards to make room for its heatsink. Welcome to the new graphical age, liberator.

Is it wrong to be fascinated by one’s own Huz FM feature?

I mean, it’s great! Not the fact it gets displayed on this page – far from it, I knocked that functionality up in no time (even if I have been tweaking it relentlessly ever since ¬ ¬) – but the engine behind it, Audioscrobbler. I don’t think I’ve described it before, so it’s time to get going!

Audioscrobbler, from the user’s perspective, is essentially a plugin you download for the media player of your choice. Random fact for you – I use WinAmp because iTunes is bloody rubbish. Once installed, you choose a username and it diligently reports back to a central server on what kind of subversive music you’ve been listening to, like some kind of secret policeman who never sleeps and never wants a cup of tea.

But here’s the great part! Audioscrobbler uses this listening data to match you up with other people with similar musical tastes. The theory is, although you listen to roughly the same stuff, your music collections won’t be exactly the same – so you basically introduce each other! To new stuff! Stuff you’ll probably like! Over the Internet! It’s magic, I tell you.

Oh, and it doesn’t quite stop there. And this is where Huz FM fascinates me. Clicking on song titles takes me through to Audioscrobbler, where I can find out more stats than you can shake a large stick at about the song itself, the artist, and most importantly who listens to the stuff – how often, and how many people. Apparently I Don’t Like Mondays is just about the only Boomtown Rats song that anyone ever listens to, for instance. Interesting!

It’s great. Sign up today and tell me your username! Oh, and if you have a blog, you can use the RSS service to make your own “Your name here FM!”. What could be better?