Neil's News

New Page

2 April 2007

Last week I handed in my MSc dissertation. After a year of working on it, it's great to get that thing off my back. At some ill-defined point this dissertation crossed the line of corporate confidentiality, so I won't be publishing it any time soon. I figure than any corporate secrets are quite safe with the Open University; they have a well-established history of marking my work without reading it. In the off-chance they do read it, I've embedded a one-pixel 'web-bug' in the HTML summary and rigged the software to 'phone home'. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Now that the dissertation is out of the way, I've got more time to get involved with Goolge's community. Starting with this technical talk titled The Use of Nuclear Explosives To Disrupt or Divert Asteroids.

Today I moved from a cubicle to a real office. Nice. Unfortunately my new office mate has a fractally more complex potted plant than I do, so I'll have to upgrade my specimen. Presumably this will lead to a botanical arms race. By the end of the month it will be a jungle in here.

Meanwhile, one of our users was delighted with the support I gave him. So much so that he wants to send me flowers. This job is always entertaining.


On a completely unrelated note, Internet Explorer has for years been generally regarded as a bad application. But the things I've seen recently ... oh my. There's stuff in there you really don't want to be executing. Like this image. Most web browsers will display a photograph I took of Google's pet T-Rex, lurking next to the volleyball court. Whereas IE will execute arbitrary JavaScript commands embedded in the image file. I'll leave it to your imaginations as to why this is a bad thing on web 2.0. Don't use IE. Ever. Not even the latest fully-patched version. Of course I'm preaching to the choir, nobody who visits my site would be using IE.

< Previous | Next >

 
-------------------------------------
Legal yada yada: My views do not necessarily represent those of my employer or my goldfish.