You know those Flash banner ads? The ones that feature silhouettes of dancing girls hawking mortgage refinancing? Or popups that play audio? Or the classier but mildly bandwidth-hogging corporate videos? While I appreciate that advertising is paying for content creation, it doesn’t erase the fact that a lot of Flash content is really annoying- and it can measurably delay pageload times on my crappy home DSL connection.

But then a colleague at the University turned me on to ClickToFlash, a Safari plugin that not only automatically disables the loading of flash content, it comes with this added little bonus: being able to load H.264 content from YouTube that is normally only sent to iPhone users, while us poor non-mobile Luddites are stuck with much crappier video quality. But no more, thanks to this handy plugin. I’ve been using this thing for a couple of weeks now and love it. If you’re a Safari user, install this bad boy without delay!

K.C. Green, tellin’ it like it is.

I don’t know about you, but it astounds me that you still have to set up an Exchange account through the Windows control panel instead of through Outlook. It’s not that it’s difficult, but it’s needlessly opaque, especially since users expect to go through Outlook, which is, after all, their mail application. I suppose I shouldn’t complain—job security and all that—but it’s baffling.

For the last few weeks I’ve been baffled by Safari complaining that this site was a malware host. The most puzzling aspect of the whole ordeal was that the Safari/Google malware warning referenced the IP address 74.222.134.170, and not 208.97.175.192, where it actually resides. A direct
Google malware query on the domain came back clean, too, so it didn’t seem, on the face of it, that my webserver had been compromised.

A perceptive fellow on the Google Webmasters forum noticed the following bit of fun in my source code that looked like this:

Thinking it was a result of an injection exploit like this person found, I went over all my WP files (plus my theme directory) with a fine-toothed comb, but found nothing. A further bit of digging turned up other Wordpress users who were encountering the exact same problem. The iframe code was inserted directly into posts, but by what means, nobody seems to be sure.

I will—shamefully—admit that both my WordPress admin and FTP passwords were pretty weak, and could have been brute-forced pretty easily. They’re much stronger now, and I’ve updated to WordPress 2.8, and the three posts here that contained the offending code have been cleaned. I haven’t seen any new malicious insertions since taking those steps, but I remain suspicious. If you see anything even remotely weird in the next couple of weeks here, let me know.

Web 2.0, HTML 5, and CSS 4 are all very well and good, but all these highfalutin newfangled languages all share one common, glaring failure: no explicit blink tag tag support. Similarly disappointing is the utter lack of any further development of this noble bit of markup—and <blink> has been around for something upwards of a decade!.

To rectify this latter outrageous deficiency, and drive acceptance of the former, I propose the following expansion of <blink> functionality:

Element: <blink>
Syntax: <blink start rate color perchar>

Note: <blink> does not support the style or class attributes, as it is commonly agreed and understood that if you are using the <blink> tag, you have neither.

One can quibble about the exact birthdate of the Web, but it is surely inarguable that today is the 20th anniversary of itsconception. The Web has brought us an unprecedented wealth of instant information and fantastic treasures like Amazon, Flickr, blogs, clever Flash animation, and YouTube. Of course, it’s also responsible for the proliferation of horrors like swap.avi, Conservapedia, Dragonball Z/Star Trek crossover slash fiction, 4chan, and YouTube comments.

So thank you, Mr. Berners-Lee. And fuck you, too.