Latest diary entries

Ramblings about cats, games and miscellanea.

Let's move!

I don't regularly comment on matters of politics, but I shall today. For some reason I was surprised when I heard that the 42 day detention bill had passed in the commons. Diane Abbott's speech is a perfect example of why it should have failed - you know something's up when a Labour MP stands with senior ministers from the tories and lib dems in saying the security services don't need it, that the similar legislation was already defeated two years ago and that it's just about strengthening the PM's position. I couldn't see ...

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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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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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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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On laptops, and resisting the 360

Today was a significant day for two reasons. Firstly the Dell engineer came out to fix my laptop, and secondly the game went on sale.

Lets talk about Dell first. The chap who came over was very nice, took my laptop to pieces - literally, unscrewed everything - replaced the speakers, and the motherboard while he was at it. Turned it back on, and everything's working perfectly - I can hear sound! Hurrah!

I'm actually very happy with the laptop now; sure, it runs Vista, but that's nothing a quick reinstall won't fix. Thanks to everyone who has taken ...

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