02.12.05
Another Week Gone
Well, you certainly get what you pay for… although our 8Mb service has been officially active for about 3 weeks now, for almost a week out of that (several separate occasions, not a one continuous week) we’ve had connection problems and speed issues…. but it’s free, and when it does work it’s much faster than a crappy old 1Mbit…. pah 
Recently in the news there’s been talk of NTL having plans to launch a 100Mbit service sometime in the not-too-distant future, using their nation-wide fibreoptic network. BT and AOL have also recently upgraded their 1Mb customers to 2Mb for free, so it’s good to see some progress in the UK broadband market. Hopefully sometime this year we’ll also see the launch of ADSL2, with speeds of up to 20Mb!
In security news, some guys at work came across an article about specially-formed URLs that use alternative letters to the traditional alphabet to fool the user into thinking they’re on a different site. The URL in the given example uses an “a” from the cyrillic alphabet, which looks practically identical to a normal “a”. So don’t go clicking on URLs from any e-mails you receive claiming to be from your bank/paypal/whoever! Actually these urls didn’t seem to work in IE… probably because it just can’t handle the funny character codes.
The team over at Mozilla working on the Sunbird project have recently released the first official release. I’ve been looking for ages for a decent open-source alternative to the Outlook calendar, and because Sunbird is based on the Gecko engine (as is Firefox and Thunderbird) there’ll be plugins and custom skins galore to provide all sorts of additional functionality. One of the best functions already built in to Sunbird is the ability to subscribe and publish to public calendars, such as those over at iCalShare.com. Sure, this isn’t a new idea or anything, especially for Mac-heads, but it’s cool.
I’ve also started work on some of my New Years determinations… last week I found out there’s a language centre just down the road that does classes for over 30 different languages (including Welsh and Norwegian) for a very reasonable price! Unfortunately the classes all start around September and run through to the following May/June, so I’ll have to wait a few months before I can start. Also, I’m participating with some guys from work in a charity event on Monday to raise money for the British Heart Foundation. It’s only a short relay, but i’ll just start with a small event then work my way up to bigger stuff.
Finally, a story about how monkeys use their hard-earned bananas. Those dirty little monkeys.