Live8 : G8 : Particip8

Just finished watching the Live8 concert here in the UK. Whilst events of this kind in themselves don’t change anything they can however help to raise awareness. As far as we know humans evolved in Africa so it’s about time we recognised the the importance of the birthplace of humanity and did everything in our power to halt the grotesque suffering that goes on their daily. We’ve all read the statistics and seen the reports 30, 40, 50% of some countries populations with HIV-AIDS whilst we in the west have the drugs and the technology to help, the 21st century, and people still dying of starvation. We all know this should not be, but what can we do? we may be on the brink of something quite momentus, that is politicians actually doing what we elect them for…..listening to the people and acting on our behalf. It remains to be seen if Tony Blair and Gordon Brown can deliver and persuade the others to do the right thing, but I think, if people keep up the pressure on our politicians we may actually start to see a difference in our world.

march past Gleneagles hotel
makepovertyhistory
Live8Live
Live8 from BBC news
march in Edinburgh
g8alternatives
G8blog

Firefox security hole + workaround

Secunia reports a frame-injection vulnerability in Firefox 1.0.3 and
1.0.4. Mozillazine has details, including a comment that you can close the hole (until 1.0.5 is released) by clicking Tools, Options, Advanced, Tabbed Browsing and changing “open links in a new window” to “open links in a new tab in the most recent window”:

A Secunia bulletin also notes that a similar hole has existed in Internet Explorer 5.x and 6.x since June 2004 and has not yet been patched by Microsoft (but there is a workaroud).

Is Firefox still safer than Internet Explorer?

In a recent article Brian Livingston, the editor at WindowsSecrets.com in my opinion concluded a very convincing …Yes. In the article he details the number of security holes in each browser and the time they were left unpatched. There are some pretty convincing statistics from Scanit NV, an international security company.

IE suffered from unpatched security holes for 359 days in 2004

Attacks on IE weaknesses circulated “in the wild” for 200 of those days

Mozilla and Firefox patched all vulnerabilities before hacker code circulated

Whilst no one would suggest that Firefox is bug and security hole free it’s clear that whilst Firefox security holes are generally fixed within days in Internet Expolorer these fixes can take weeks and leave users vulnerable for much longer.

panorama

Like many people I have been taking multiple photographs for years. In the old days it was a case of trying to line up the prints and sticking them together to get a panorama. Sometimes this worked OK but mostly it was clumsy. Today with digital cameras the whole thing is very simple now and there are a buch of ways to stitch images together. One of the best image ‘stichers’ I’ve come across is autoStich. This is a very simple, easy to use free program and more importantly, it works. In fact I had a set of images from the Isle of Skye I’d been unable to stitch, but autostitch managed it in seconds. But how do you display a panoramic image in a blog? There are a number of ways you could do this. You could for instance use zoomify and I’ve uploaded a small test image. Or, you could use a java applet to pan the image in a small window such as PTViewer3.1.2 by Helmut Dersch. Below is an example of a great WP plugin from skriker which uses the PTViewer applet. This is extremely easy to implement in a few seconds, and is easy to customise. on the Ochils above Tillicoultry

Firefox Extensions

Firefox is gaining in popularity all the time and the number of extensions available is vast. I thought I’d write about the extensions I either have used or find most usefull. The first and most valuable IMHO has to be the web developer toolbar by Chris Pendrick. The list of things you can do with this is huge, it’s a must have for any developer or web author. The rest I’ll list below (tooltips give desriptions):-

  • secure password generator
  • tiny URL creator
  • view source with
  • feed view
  • fireFTP
  • IE view
  • web developer toolbar