Diary: May 2008

Uninstalling McAfee under Vista

My Dell arrived with McAfee, but it turns out it's a bit of a pain to uninstall. The standard steps leave it listed under Windows Security Center, saying something along the lines of "McAfee VirusScan reports that it is running". This then causes problems when trying to install other anti-virus software.

So, this is a quick and boring entry for the benefit of Google. Here's how to get rid of McAfee:

  1. Uninstall McAfee under Control Panel -> Uninstall a program and reboot
  2. Go to service.mcafee.com and follow the instructions for MCRE - download, run and reboot when prompted ...

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Barcelona

Leela and I disappeared off to Barcelona this week, and had much fun doing the usual touristy things.

We went up and down Las Ramblas several times, took the Bus Turistic (or the "Tourist Bus", for those who aren't all that with the Spanish), saw several buildings by Gaudi (like Casa Mila and Sagrada Familia), went into some modern art museums, visited the science museum, walked through the Barri Gotic, didn't get pick-pocketed or mugged once, and had particularly excellent ice creams at Port Vell. Although they forecast rain, the skies were clear and the sun was out ...

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Obscure Bugs Revisited: IE, HTTPS and Plugins

So, I had a fun little problem yesterday; a Flash SWF wasn't appearing on an HTTPS page on IE. It was fine on HTTP, and fine in other browsers, but HTTPS just wasn't doing it; the flash plugin was just showing the awesomely helpful "Movie not loaded" message. Cue much confusion, investigation.

Turns out that IE takes the caching headers on HTTPS requests a little too seriously. The following headers were set on the SWF:

Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

Why does this break it? Well, it's down to how IE and plugins work.

First, IE downloads your ...

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