I used my father-in-law’s laptop recently. I had installed Firefox on it for him when he bought it, and I was happy to see it was still the default browser. I thought it was a little odd that it opened new windows by default instead of new tabs, and then I had a terrible suspicion and checked “Help -> About Firefox” and discovered to some dismay that he was still running Firefox 1.0.7.

Needless to say I installed an up-to-date version immediately. I wonder how many other people might have no clue that their applications are incredibly out of date. I also wonder why his security software (virus scanner/firewall) wouldn’t warn him about such an important aspect of system security.

Today I installed GnuPG and Enigmail and started signing my email correspondence. I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, because I firmly believe that digital signing is the only long-term solution to spam. I don’t think that PGP signing will by itself solve the problem, without an additional web-of-trust UI for easily verifying public keys, but at least now if you want to, you can verify that an email that purports to be from me is actually from me.

My public key is available here.

I’ve been having problems playing CDs on Windows: if I have Windows Media Player running and I switch (audio) CDs, WMP never recognizes that the CD has changed. I couldn’t figure out what was going on; I even upgraded WMP to the latest beta (which, it turns out, I intensely dislike), but that didn’t solve the problem. (more…)