Friday 28 January 2005

New Location

Not for the blog, for me

After three and a half years living with my parents after graduation, I finally have my own flat. Well, I say my own - I'm renting. I could just barely afford to buy something around here, but only by completely bankrupting myself. It's furnished so I don't have that to worry about.

So far going OK but I'm back on the old modem again - my ADSL won't be connected until next Friday. I'd forgotten how slow this is! Actually I'm getting better connection speeds than ever before with a modem (got 52kbps yesterday) but it's still terrible.

I would have ordered the DSL before moving, but for some reason best known to themselves, BT decided to give me a different number from the previous occupants', which didn't appear in the DSL providers' databases until Tuesday.

Like most things in my life, I prevaricated for ages then sorted itself out pretty quickly. I was fairly happy living with my parents until recently. I think the trip to Seattle and environs in September, followed by a certain amount of independent living when my parents or my sister were away (pet-sitting in the latter case), plus a few weeks off before Christmas, reminded me a) that I could live independently and b) that I actually wanted to - I was going a little stir-crazy over Christmas.

It helped that I knew this flat was going to become free. The couple who lived here before are good friends of mine - indeed, it was their wedding I attended in Toppenish, WA back in September. I've known David since secondary school. He's now gone out to Bangladesh for Ph.D. fieldwork. By taking over the flat (new tenancy) I've saved myself the hassle of finding a place, the landlady's found a tenant easily, and we've both saved agent fees.

A lot of stuff is still in boxes - I only took last Friday off work, before moving in on Saturday - but it's getting unpacked slowly. As and when I can be bothered, mostly!

Reported Vulnerabilities in Pocket IE

It's not too surprising that Pocket IE suffers from some of the same flaws as the desktop Internet Explorer - it shares a certain amount of the same code.

One 'fix' that has made it into Pocket IE - at least for Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition - that didn't in the end go into XP SP2 is patent-related. Yup, the Eolas patent workaround - if the page contains any scripted ActiveX controls, it pops up a dialog reading 'Press OK to continue loading this page.' Pretty annoying.