Category: Software and Programming

Does it just seem that way, or did the appearance of Mozilla’s image blocking feature coincide with a decision by Internet advertisers to make every single gooddamn king-sized annoying ad with Flash?

Perhaps it was just the zeitgeist, or the appearence of Flash 6, but I wouldn’t rule that out. Web advertising loves the cutting edge – it needs it to dodge banner-blocking technology.

Some people just deleted Flash. Phil Ringnalda linked to a CSS2 solution you can use with Mozilla: add style rules to your userStyle.css file that hide embed tags of a certain size common for ads.

The user style sheet trick didn’t work for me on the first couple of sites I tried, though, probably because all their ads aren’t really Flash, but IFRAMEs with external source files (on advertising servers).

Killing off all the IFRAMEs on a page is trivial with a bookmarklet, and cleans up ads wonderfully. The problem is it’s not automatic – you need to click the bookmarklet, which means the ads have to annoy you enough for you to bother clicking the bookmarklet.

You could probably do this in a user stylesheet too – apply the style rules to IFRAME tags rather then EMBED tags.

Yesterday my girlfriend got us two network cards and a cable, so I could hook up our computers and let her share my ADSL internet connection, instead of the painfully slow modem.

So I spent pretty much the whole night setting it up. Part of my problems were jumping the gun and installing opaque proxy software (Wingate, especially) before getting networking to work properly between the two machines. However, near dawn, I found an exhaustive site telling me how to easily and simply set up Internet Connection Sharing, using nothing but Windows itself, and there was much joy.

This was cut short in the morning, when my girlfriend discovered that she couldn’t use her Hotmail account. Or connect to her Bank’s online service. Apparently, ICS doesn’t work properly with HTTPS connections.

So I spent some time looking for solutions. They are fairly sparse online, although some people have noticed the problem, and one guy has a solution which only requires a small proxy server application to be installed…

However, if I’ve learned anything last night, it’s not to rush off and install new software before exhausting the full capabilities of my OS. A lot of Windows software, I feel, was written to solve problems that troubled old versions of the OS, and which magically disappeared in newer versions.

One site pointed me at this
laconic snippet of Windows 2000 Documentation, which describes how Windows 2k itself can work as a proxy. There’s more on that in this Windows 2000 tips page.

I’m eager to try this out tonight, but first – a gaming session. With Jake, who I owe an article already…

I got an email today from someone who tried to use my RSS news feed script – he was getting a PHP error which I just fixed the script to avoid. So I put my fixed code up on the site.

Then I stumbled across Rev Jim’s feedParser – wonder how it stacks up to the code I’m using, which I took from Jonah. Perhaps I should switch to using that?

Of related interest, LiveJournal is now also an RSS/Syndication Aggregator. Maybe my LJ friends will add me now, if I beg. Interestingly, the comments hint that Neil Gaiman’s blog might be syndicatable…