Yup. It hit me. Blaster, that is.

I was running an update of my firewall, and as part of the test to make sure everything is working properly, the firewall shuts itself off for about 1 second. In that 1 second Blaster got in. The firewall – which came back on immediately – said “Do you want to allow msblast.exe to access the internet?” I said “NO!!!!!!”, which effectively removed Blaster’s teeth.

So I now have a GREAT deal of respect for Zone Alarm. I had no idea it was doing such a good job. Getting Blaster the Hell of my PC will be much easier than the many horror stories I have heard have led me to believe. If it can’t access the int0rw3b it can’t do much damage.

On the other hand, I have nothing but contempt for the idjits at Microsoft who allowed the release of this Swiss cheese operating system.

News reports say M$ is spending millions to hunt down the people who write these viruses, while doing little to patch their product unless people complain. This reminds me of a standard sanity test: You walk into a room and see that a faucet is on and a sink is overflowing onto the floor. Do you (a) run to shut off the faucet, or (b) run to grab a mop? Microsoft is (c) running for the person who turned on the faucet.

Getting rid of the person who wrote the virus doesn’t alter the fact that the virus has already been written. The law does not prevent; it punishes.

Dear Microsoft: You are responsible for everyone who releases a virus which affects you software. That fact that it is vulnerable is YOUR FAULT. The fact that you released a product with HUNDREDS OF KNOWN VULNERABILITIES which cost users HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR is contemptible beyond redemption.

Dear Microsoft: I use your product, which I paid for, and that makes me your GOD. As your GOD, I command you to, in the next 24 hours, fix everything that is wrong with every one of your products, and do not release a single line of code to the public until everything you do is 100% perfect. Your opinions, wishes, livelihood and health on this matter simply are not important.

And as for all you Mac and *nix users laughing in your sleeves: Shaddap.

Minor changes to es.org: Spun off the adventure game to its own subdomain . Combined all photo links into one (Flash 6 plug-in required).

Earlier today I stood outside in a torrential downpour. For about half an hour. It was wonderful.

Do not leave this page. There is nothing wrong with your browser. There is nothing wrong with this website. I am in the middle of a massive re-design, and I figured What The Heck, I will do everything out in plain sight. Be patient; it will be worth the wait.

By the by, X-Men 2: X-Men United rocks. Go see it. Now.

For one of the projects at work I dove into the DOMXML capabilities of PHP. DOMXML is a close-to-w3c-standards way of manipulating XML in PHP. Or it is now that Modwest has updated their version of PHP to 4.2.1. It went like this: I sent an email on Monday saying “Any plans to upgrade etc. etc. ?” And they said “Yup. In the next couple of weeks.” and then they said “Done” and I said:

$fName = $root ->get_elements_by_tagname("name");

…and it was good.

So: My next project is to redo the admin section of es.o to reflect the new powers at my disposal, and maybe post a short tutorial on using DOMXML, because documentation for the thing is practically non-existent.

In other news, yesterday I picked up a library card at the newly-reopened downtown branch of the Grand Rapids Public Library.

Let the masses rejoice; reading is cheap again. My current borrow is In Search of the Perfect Language by Umberto Eco.

I….have COMMENTS!!!!!

And nothing to say.

More later.

later…

As I was saying, es.o now has commenting enabled for the individual blog posts. If you click on the title of a post (i.e. “IT WORKS!!!!!!!!![x]”), that will take you to the individual post page, where you may comment on my comments to your heart’s content.

I built the commenting feature using a combination of XML, XSLT, and PHP using the DOMXML capabilities, for which there is little if any documentation, so I pretty much had to make it up as I went along.

Right now I only allow plain text to be added in comments, although URLs will automagically be turned into links…provided they start with “http://” or “www.”. Perhaps once the migraine clears up I will add some simple markup options, a la VBScript – [i] for italics, [b] for bold, and the like.

So there you have it. Right now my brain is full to bursting, so I am going to turn on the television, which will turn my intellect into oatmeal, which will leak out of my ears, thus relieving the headache.

Yeah, you heard me. Let’s all say it together this time:

Internet Explorer 5 is the New Netscape 4!!!!!!!!!

What would have been a three week build of a static site is instead a 5+ week build of a static site. Thousands of client dollars WASTED on an old and out-of-date browser based on antiquated technology. IE5. Perpetrator of the Padding Bug, the Egregious Box Model Hack, the Traveling Float/Margin Bug, among others.

I got started in this business during that single day in 1999 when IE4 and Netscape 4 were on even footing. At 9am the next day IE started to pull ahead, and (AOL paleo-reactionaries aside) Netscape 4 is now fast on its way to an unmarked grave. So now is the time to pick the next weakest link and start in with the Death of a Thousand Cuts.

IE5. New NS4. Particularly IE5 on the MAC, which though it has “Practically the best standards support of any mainstream browser” has specific bugs which make it impossible to write clean stylesheets. The fact that it INTERPRETS the code correctly does by no means suggest that it DISPLAYS the output correctly. It doesn’t.

There is a well-known IE6/PC bug when applying floats, that horizontal margins tend to be doubled. Spec a 10px margin to the left of a left-floated DIV tag, and IE6 will give you 20px. Sucks, but easily compensated for with a little math and a single alternate line of code.

Float a bunch of DIV tags in IE5/MAC and apply a 10px bottom margin to each. Force them to wrap around something like e.g. an image. Suddenly, the fourth DIV tag has doubled it’s bottom margin, turning an elegant grid into an unfinished tangram! And no global styleshete changes will alter the behavior!!!1!$@1!

So the solution becomes, target that one DIV tag with an egregious ajacent style selector, like div.container+div+div+div+div. Those of you who speak CSS will understand this. Those who don’t … just take for granted that IT WORKS!!!!

Reload the page and…beautiful. The DIV has been cowed.

But…but…there is another DIV tag, one row down, one column over…

20. Pixel. Bottom. Margin.

Everything below it: U.G.L.Y. You Ain’t Got No Alibi.

So we add another rule: div.container+div+div+div+div+div+div+div. Kick that sucker back in line. Works. But now…one down, one over. You guessed it. 20 pixels.

You know what? Fuck it. Fuck you, IE5 on the PC for not displaying dashed borders, and Fuck You and Everyone Who Looks Like You, IE5 on the Mac, for the Traveling Float/Margin Bug.

The days of putting stylesheet pearls before browser swine are OVER!

So join me, O my brothers and sisters, and scream it unto the heavens:

Down With IE5!!! Death to IE5. As Was Netscape 4, So Now Is IE5!!!!! IE5 is the New Netscape 4!!!!

There. I feel better.