Shame on you, Toshiba

A big thumbs down to Toshiba for their negligent decision to not offer any refunds to people who trusted them enough in the last couple of years to buy one of their HD DVD players.

We sell America for the ruble!

I’ve been copping a spate of Cyrillic spam in the last few weeks, which my mailfilter has been happily dumping into the garbage, where it belongs. Here’s a recent example:

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Stupid browser, V7

I’d like you to hover your mouse pointer over the mugshot on the left. What does the tooltip text say?

1. Ivan’s blog posts
2. You are using a stupid browser

If it’s the former, congratulations on using a smart browser. If it’s the latter, then I know you’re using Internet Explorer, even though you might be on the latest version.

From the HTML 4.01 Specification, Objects, Images, and Applets:

“The alt attribute specifies alternate text that is rendered when the image cannot be displayed (see below for information on how to specify alternate text ). User agents must render alternate text when they cannot support images, they cannot support a certain image type or when they are configured not to display images.”

So, is anyone else other than Microsoft confused by this? It seems pretty simple to me: Your browser will either show the image or the alt text, but never both.

Advice is now chargeable

Even though I specialise in software development, people regularly ask me for advice on a whole range of computer-related issues. Hardware upgrades, home networks, virus removal. Anything to do with computers, really.

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The strawberry meth hoax

A few days ago I got one of those “this is not a joke, warn the kids” chainmails from someone who should have known better than to just blindly and carelessly forward this type of rubbish:

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