R.I.P. Derek

Derek the rat died last night. He'd been suffering with pneumonia since Tuesday and was, slowly, recovering. I had been planning on taking him to the emergency vet today to get their opinion. Liz checked on him at 3am and he seemed fine, but when she checked at 6am he was dead. We buried him on some waste land at the allotment. Here are some pictures that don't even begin to show how lovely he was:

Lazing about:

Hansel and Derek peeking out of their nest:

Looking for treats:

We'll miss you Derek. :(

Spiderman

Watch this and read the english subtitles, it's one of the funniest things I've seen in years :)

Windows Registry Editor

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem to be possible to create a new key with a default value of a specific type using RegEdit. When you create a new key it just makes it without asking you anything, the key is there waiting to be named. But once a value has been created its type cannot be modified, so the default value is always of type REG_SZ. Back on Windows NT when it was possible to use REGEDT32 you were asked what type to give the default value when generating new keys, but as far as I can tell there is absolutely no way to do it on the new regedit.

It is still possible to do though, if you don't use regedit. If you create your own .reg file you can specify a different data type:

This will import and it works properly. It just doesn't seem to be possible to do the same through RegEdit. Seems a bit shit to me.

Coffee

This is the worse coffee I've ever tasted. My tastebuds are insulted by it.

IE7, Not Much Improvement

Well IE7 beta is available for download from TechNet. I played with it earlier today and decided it was a bit shit. They've gone for the overly fluffy user interface they've lately become obsessed with, such as that of Windows Media Player, and so it took me some time to just to find the tools menu so I could adjust my internet settings. I was also alarmed to be asked "do you want to send Microsoft information about every link you click?" Um, no, not really thanks. Once I'd got past the missing menus and the scary privacy issue I instantly viewed my blog in it and was both surprised and not surprised at the same time.

First of all they've removed the CSS bug which I make use of to detect IE and show a "Get Firefox" logo:

Previously Internet explorer seemed to think there was some sort of object in the DOM that came above HTML, and so would actually render the above CSS even though, technically, it is completely invalid and should be ignored. Now however they seem to have addressed the issue, thus making it harder to detect the big bag of shite they call IE...

The disappointment came when I saw that they've changed IE's implementation of the box model ... again. It now renders the menu on the right of the page several pixels too high, although it does finally seem to render the grey title box all the way across as you would expect. So some improvement, but not much.

One new feature they have finally included which IE has been in dire need of for aeons is tabbed browsing, although I didn't like the look of it, but that's probably just because I'm more used to Firefox.

Next I tried to use Fujitsu's corporate Intranet and was told that the version of Netscape I was using was not compatible with this version of the Intranet and that I needed to upgrade to Internet Explorer 4 or newer, at which point I gave up. I dread to think whether the Intranet was reading the client headers wrong or whether Internet Explorer is claiming to be Netscape now ... I just chose to uninstall; which comes with its own set of problems. They hide it in the Add/Remove Programs control panel as a "Windows Update", despite the fact that I downloaded the exe and installed it from scratch myself. That's not an update, that's a fully fledged app in my opinion.

So anyway there you have it. I wasn't impressed and won't be leaving Firefox for IE anywhere in the near future. Incidentally, Firefox 1.5 is out and I've been using that on my work laptop. I can't claim to like the new-look Options dialog, but everything else seems fine with it.

Do You Need To Overpay For Your Meds?

Spam's getting more entertaining:

Nothing like you need it!

Can God Be Caricatured?

BBC News - Muhammad cartoon row intensifies

A thought provoking article. I can't help but wonder whether there would have been a similar outcry if similarly scathing pictures of the Christian God had been published. Perhaps this is just a Muslim over-reaction, but then I'm sure that the more happy clappy Christians would go ballistic over a picture of their god in some derogatory cartoon. Personally I believe strongly that the whole world deserves the right to freedom of speech and therefore believe that the newspaper has every right to print the caricatures.

But...

Just because I have the right to call an ugly person "ugly", or a fat person "fatty", does not mean I should necessarily exercise the right to do so. The paper might have the right to print the cartoons, but they must have known full well what would happen when they printed them. It's no different to the kid in the playground in a school who repeatedly takes the piss out of the weedy kid, and provokes other kids to do so too. They have the right to do so, but that doesn't mean it is right for them to do so.

This argument is backed up especially by the fact that the French were so quick to wade in on the whole argument. Considering their recent track record in sub-cultural-differing-opinion matters I can't help but feel there is an element of bullying taking place here. For the sake of decency the pictures shouldn't be printed.

Ugh, I feel like the poop

I've got the dreaded man-flu, it started on Sunday. I thought I had a hangover as I had one or two beers on Saturday night, but then I realised that beer doesn't make the back of your nose swell up so much that you can't even swallow properly anymore. I kept it under control yesterday with a potent cocktail of Ibuprofen and Paracetamol (you can safely take them at the same time and they are VERY effective) plus some Strepsils Plus which contain a minor local anaesthetic. I didn't think they would work at first, but then my tongue went numb.

Glad to see that my last blog inspired both Saad and Burt to pick up their blogging tools once again :)

I Must Be A Masochist

Why the hell did I think that implementing a binary tree in vb script would be a good idea? Why would I even think that?

No-one blogs anymore :(

I've been feeling bad about not updating this here blog much, but then I had a look at some of the blogs I commonly read and they're no better:

My last blog: 5 days ago.

Saad: 1 month, 18 days ago.

Burt: 3 months, 23 days ago.

Liz: 5 months, 10 days ago.

So I'm by no means the worst ;) It's hard keeping it up to date now that I'm working, it's difficult to find the time to update it and it's hard to find things to update it with. What's new? Well, I'm working and I'm tired. Not exactly riveting is it? Ah well.