splee.blog

An article on The Times Online detailed a scientific experiment to quantify peoples ability to use faith or belief to minimize pain.

So… let me just get this straight. Some of the country’s top minds in the field of neuroscience are going to torture people using “non invasive burns” and show them a crucifix and say: “does it hurt a bit less now”? WTF!? Apparently the study is being funded by an american foundation. I should have suspected as much.

I found an Open Source CMS (Content Management System) while searching for something completely different today. It’s called Mambo and it looks very swish.

I’ve installed it as a test site on my local machine to have a play around and I’m not overly impressed so far. It claims to be a CMS that is easy to install and use. While it certainly is easy to install it’s far from easy to use as desired. Documentation is pretty sparse and assumes you know enough about CMS’s to be able to work most of the system out.

I am yet to find any features in my 2 hour trawl through both the front end and the administration back end that extend further than posting single documents and news articles. It’s possible I’m being a bit harsh but this is only 2 hours worth of looking after all.

If you want a funky looking site where you can post news and possibly howto’s, Mambo will do the business. But it is nowhere near as good as Plone for user freindlyness.

The requirements of the software, however, might be enough to get me to persevere in finding a real use for it. It is written in PHP and requires a MySQL database for data storage… which is exactly what most hosting companies offer. I’m yet to find a decent hosting company that offers Zope/Plone hosting to the standard I would like.

I will plough through it and see if I change my mind about the software.

I moved the blog today to a permanent home so that the site doesn’t go down when I switch my PC off. If anything is not working email me (splee@splee.co.uk).

Thanks.

I was browsing Slashdot today and found an interesting article about some MIT professors and their Synthetic Biology.

Reading through the site it looks to me like it’s jumped straight out of the pages of the books I’m currently reading, The Night’s Dawn Trilogy (books 1, 2, and 3) by Peter F. Hamilton

I think it would be amazing if they actually achieve what they’re trying to do. Imagine custom tailored plants or animals that are designed for a specific purpose! The example on slashdot of a seed that grew a treehouse just got me thinking on what sort of usefull applications it could be put to.

Transportation, service drones, real bio-computers… the options are limitless.

I finally bit the bullet today and installed Service Pack 2 for Windows XP on my work machine, mainly in an effort to test it’s compatability with our software or, as Microsoft would have it, our software’s compatability with it.

Needless to say I’m less than impressed. It has quite successfully halved the performance of my machine while revealing no discernable increase in anything else. The main focus of SP2 has been security.

Half of these so called new security features seem to me to be patches for Internet Explorer. “Why are these included in a Windows XP Service Pack” I hear you cry. It is because IE is so tightly integrated with the rest of the OS that it’s impossible to peel the two apart. Therefore a security hole in Internet Explorer is, to all intents and purposes, a security hole in Windows XP.

For me these updates are pointless anyway as I use Firefox. For anyone who doesn’t use Firefox… comiserations. >:D No, seriously, it sounds like MS are stepping up to the plate to add some better security features. I still wouldn’t trust IE for day to day use though. It’s not like they’ve fixed the dodgy DOM or the woeful CSS Standards support.

As for the other Powerful Security Tools and Improved Experiences… all I’ve seen so far has been a Powerful Pain in the Ass and Irritating Non-Experiences.

As for overall security… well… I’ll let you read for yourselves how Microsoft evaluate and advertise their security issues with regards to the main competitor MS seem to be throwing all their money against at the moment, Linux. Enough said.

After reading an article about Firefox and how it is, apparently, no more secure than Internet Explorer I realised how close Microsoft actually are to being superceded by Open Source alternatives to their software.

Firstly the article tries to debunk the claim that Firefox is impregnable and hack-proof. Now, I don’t believe that I’m omnipotent and I also don’t believe that I’ve read every article about Firefox, but I read a lot of news and technology sites every day and I’ve not seen one claim that Firefox is impregnable or anything like it. The only claim I’ve ever seen is that it’s more secure than Internet Explorer, and to be honest that’s not necessarily a massive achievement.

The other thing that stood out miles about this article, besides the obviously rediculous use of facts and figures, was the following quote:

“If you can exploit hundreds of millions of machines running Internet Explorer, why go after the 10 per cent of people who are running Firefox? If I want to do a massive hack, I want people with a similar operating system,” he said. “And I’m not being paid by Microsoft to say that.”

The fact that he had to say that he wasn’t getting paid for it just shows how rare such a comment is without some sort of prodding from MS. This comment is also coming from an employee at a firm who’s servers are Windows Server 2003/IIS 6.0 based based and who’s certifications and solutions seem to be mainly Microsoft oriented.

I’d just like to say that I work with Firefox on my machine at work and love it. My colleagues all use IE and I am constantly having to rid their machines of spyware and malware. Hopefully I’ll be migrating the whole company to Firefox soon and then I’ll see how much it cuts down my support calls. I’m guessing it’ll be time for me to buy a good book.