I’ve come across a site called SiteAdvisor which is the product of a research effort at MIT. It aims to provide a protection from sites that contain spyware and/or are known to send spam emails. This is done by means of a browser plugin — available for both Firefox and IE — which has a green/amber/red safety indicator to inform you about the safety of a site. It tells you both about sites that you visit directly, and it will categorise Google and Yahoo search results, allowing you to avoid the dodgy sites.

**Summary for the lazy:** 2005 wasn't a great year for interesting new music, but there were a few gems in there. I also found out that some artists I'd heard of, but never listened to, are very good.

Also of note is that I seem to have become a grumpy old man in my early 20s.

The Good

Being people who are relatively new, in that they may not have first appeared in 2005, whom I first heard of this year

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.