Curiouser and Curiouser!

The buzzing sound of death.

This is a bootstrap posting.  I've been suffering from severe posters block which wasn't helped by my hard disk falling prey to the buzzing sound of death on Sunday and losing two weeks worth of work & email.

Given that this is the second of those drives to fail inside 12 months I shall not be using Toshiba drives again in future.  Fortunately Dell came through this time and delivered a correct replacement drive the next day (I can't relate the tale of the previous replacement, it's too painful).

What M$crosoft can do with IE

Microsoft goes to rehab?. Following up on my righteous indignation of last Friday, CNet gets some props for trying to get MSoft to comment more officially on the status of IE updates.

Given that the author of the quote was a security guy, one might think that security updates will require Longhorn, but that the statement can't be generalized beyond that. CNet quotes a MS rep:

"There will be continued innovation and improvement"

Yeah, continuing where they left off in 2001. How can we convince Microsoft to acknowledge IE's mismatch with standards and commit to a course of action for getting in synch?

In the long run, the Mozilla  public bug database, where one can actually be heard with regard to feature requests and issues,  could be a major factor. 

A final note on this issue, without the blogging world, I doubt CNet would have picked up this tidbit.
[Surf*Mind*Musings]

On the basis of the original article I decided to take a better look at Mozilla and installed the new Firebird release.  For reasons I find hard to explain I found Firebird a much nicer browser than vanilla Moz and could even see myself using it as my every day browser if two problems could be solved:

1. When I click a link in another application I want Firebird to open it in a new tab automatically
2. I want to be able to edit Radio postings using WYSIWYG mode

With these conditions satisfied I am happy for M$crosoft to stick IE where the sun don't shine and good luck to them!

If I haven't responded to you.

By the way, if anyone has emailed me recently and not had a reply in the length of time they normally expect from me please resend it.  As I mentioned in an earlier post I had a disk fail on Sunday and have lost email back to about May 14th.

Apologies to anyone so affected.

Scary numbers from SpamNet

I just registered for CloudMarks SpamNet service today.  I've been using the beta service for a while now and found it to be an excellent, non-intrusive, solution to the spam problem.   The price is only $1.99 a month for the first year which is just about within my present means so I did it rather than wade through spam again.

Backing this up was the stats: SpamNet has stopped 13,548 messages from hitting my inbox!