I applied to be part of the Fluendo beta of binary-only (as I understand it) GStreamer plugins for closed/proprietary media formats. I know that you can use copies of the Win32 codec dlls with GStreamer and other media players on Linux to be able to play closed formats; many people do, but I’ve never bothered to. This is mostly because it seems like a hack to use the binaries from a different platform.

At HP here in Bristol we have some special taps that provide hot and cold drinking water. It’s always been the case that the cold water is very slow to come from the tap and the hot water has a far more reasonable cup-filling speed.

It appears that there have been moves afoot to remedy this flow-imbalance. Rather than speeding up the cold water, however, the decision seems to have been to dramatically slow down the hot water supply, meaning that it takes ages to get any type of drink now!

I removed Gentoo and installed Ubuntu. Quite a change, and so I thought I’d note down my reasons for doing it.

The reason I decided to change was that I don’t have as much time these days; time to configure things. With Gentoo, I’d generally be tempted to stay on the cutting edge; to have the newest packages before they were stable. These would generally take time to set up and get working correctly. Over the summer and autumn, I’ve had a job rather than being at university and so have had far less time to spend doing this work. Ubuntu chooses packages and options for you, and hopefully take time to ensure the options they choose work together.

I think the thing with holes in IE is that they tend to be fairly nasty. I know there are problems with Firefox, but they seem to be generally more difficult to exploit and often not so severe.

The new security issue which makes me mention this today can be summerised as “visit website, get infected with virus/spyware/bad things” (again). Hold on to your hats, one presumes that a fix will be issued soon so browsing the web using Internet Explorer won’t be a dangerous activity — until the next security problem is found.

With some of their CDs, Sony ship a rootkit — that’s right, one of those things that virus writers use to hide their wrong doings. What’s more, they ship a shoddily written rootkit made by some people called First 4 Internet, whoever they may be.

The kit is intended to protect music on the CD it is supplied with. You can’t play the CD in a Windows PC (Mac and Linux being unaffected, thankfully) without installing a rootkit on your computer.