Toms View of the World

It seems that in a hair-brained attempt to prevent spam reaching it’s users, Verizon is now blocking all email which didn’t originate at a US domain! See
Aunty Spam’s report for more details.

Here’s a vaguely interesting story for those who are still interested in "classic" computers - the Commodore name has
changed hands again

Now, I’ve yet to post on the subject of the tragic events which occured over Christmas in Asia. Clearly my thoughts are with the families who’ve been affected by this disaster, and the sheer scale of the events which unfolded is beyond beleif - scenes more reminiscent of a Hollywood movie than a news report. That is not to bellitle the impact that these events have had - but to try to understand the scale of the disaster.

The BBC has now provided a How Can I Help page which lists many of the organisations who are collecting money to aid the relief efforts currently underway, including the "umbrella" organisation http://www.dec.org.uk who are collecting on behalf of many well-known organisations (including Oxfam, the Red Cross, and Action Aid) - the donation can be done on-line or through a simple voice-prompt telephone system (it took about 2 minutes for me).

As the death toll continues to climb, I wonder how many lives will have been lost in this disaster - and hope that with the support of the world, those people who have survived can start the long process of rebuilding their lives, homes and businesses.

Richard just sent me this link… Unix Errors - or how to get Unix systems to tell you things… very geeky humour I’m afraid…

So this is christmas, and what have you done,
another year over, a new one just begun
So this is christmas, I hope you have fun,
The near and the dear ones, The old and the young
And so happy christmas, And a happy new year,
Lets hope it?s a good one, Without any fear

from "Happy Christmas, War is Over" by John Lennon

Just so I’m not accused of siding too much for Firefox over IE - some guy from Microsoft posted this on his blog - How Can I trust Firefox?

In this article he makes some good points about trusting the code, and digitial signatures - and there’s nothing I can say in rebuttal that hasn’t already been said in the comments on his post!

Now, I use Firefox for my normal browsing (’cos of integrated RSS plugin, Tabbed browsing, popup blocking, adblock and many other things that were missing in IE (and in some cases still are) and of course the fact that it renders sites better) - however the very old and repeatedly patched code in IE (remember, IE’s about box - and this is IE6 on XP-SP2 - the latest version) says "Based on NCSA Mosiac" (I actually remember Mosaic back in around 1994), and Netscape v1 walked all over it back then!

However, no-one has yet reported a security hole in firefox where simply loading an image from a webserver can install an activeX control…

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The perfect quote to sum up my attitude to such things… From Sanderton on the Tivo Community Forum
"Never use enough technology when too much is available