Category — entertainment

Initially I thought P3P policies might be quite useful. A nice way to see how a site promises to use my data and I could even configure my browser to treat my privacy settings accordingly.

It was a nice thought at least. Unfortunately the reality is somewhat different. The only browser that seems to even support P3P privacy policies is Internet Explorer. When I say “support”, what I actually mean is, make a complete hash of.

It appears that if you want to use cookies on a third party domain, in an iframe or a image tag for instance, in IE you need to have a P3P policy defined.

Okay, no problem we’ll set ours up. Unfortunately the site I was working on has terms and conditions that state that they can use users data for pretty much anything. Initially IE didn’t appear to have a problem with the policy stating this. The third party cookies worked a treat, but for some insane reason Microsoft in their wisdom decided to turn all first party cookies into session cookies. Which meant the whole system wouldn’t function.

This ain’t news‘ lead developer Mark discovered that Facebook are using a very strange P3P policy, that only contained “CP=HONK”. As we could find no reference to this anywhere we discovered through trial and error that you can put any gibberish in, and IE lets all first party and third party cookies work fine!

So in essence, the only browser that supports P3P policies is IE, and to get round them just put in some Lorem Ipsum. Now that’s a security model.

I went to Jodrell Bank obervatory today with a couple of my friends. We took some snap shots which are available here.

Check out my last fm station!

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Well eventually my Freeview PVR unit did arrive from Dabs, I have to admit for £65 I’m very impressed. I was a little disappointed at first that I couldn’t record from both tuners at the same time, but a quick google search and I discovered that I could simply flash the unit and wahey dual tuner recording. Very impressive. If you want to find out more information on flashing the unit check out this site.

On other news I’ve been playing with Google domain tools for about a week now and again I’m very impressed. I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and change the MX records on alolal.org to point to gmail. So now all my mail is managed by gmail. I’m noticing the google peeps making updates as I’m using it. I wonder what they’ll come up with next?

I’m definitely an advocate of Internet shopping, however if anyone ever wants to purchase any technical gear I can certainly recommend not going to Dabs. One description for them that certainly springs to mind is an utter shower of sh*te. I placed an order for a dual tuner free view PVR unit from them on the 23rd January. I’ve still not received it. It is apparently with the couriers who are saying they can’t find my address and that I need to take it up with Dabs. Well contacting Dabs is nigh on impossible. I’ve emailed them with no responses. They don’t publish their phone numbers, I managed to find one from the couriers, but that just gave me an automated response, I used there live support system and was told to email them again. To say the least I’m a little peed off. Grrrr…. I just hope that this PVR unit is worth the wait!

Aren’t hangovers great? Well I don’t actually have one, but Janet does. We went out with all the scout leaders for our group meal. We went up to the Woodheys in Marple Bridge. I must say they accommodated us very well. They cornered off a whole section of the restaurant for us. The food was great. I had onion soup to start, rib-eye steak for the main and apple crumble for dessert yummy! Of course we had a couple of drinks too! Afterwards we made a visit to the Bamboo Club in Hazel Grove. For all of you who haven’t experienced the Bamboo you’ve certainly been missing a rare treat. It has sticky floors, and is populated with a very entertaining group of people. We met our next door neighbor there, which now means the last two times I’ve been there I’ve met him there. Leading me to believe he goes there a little too often!

Anyway, it’s scout camp next weekend, and we (the leaders) are going to be camping outside. Hopefully it’ll be below 0 and we will get our polar bear badge… I’m so cool!

Well I’m back from London. Had an excellent time acting like a tourist. We went on the Eye, visited Buckingham Palace, went to see a show etc. etc. I managed to take loads of photos. The hotels were superb, Janets job has its perks! I’m too tired to think of anything more meeningful to write.

Hope you all had an excellent Christmas. Mine was okay. As is usual it was a bit of an anticlimax. Although my pressies were very exciting. I got a solio charger from Janet and a lovely Berghaus jacket from my parents. My mum was well impressed with her portable radio.

I ate so much food that I thought I was going to explode! It was all very very tasty, especially my favorite… pigs in blankets! I’m looking forward to our trip to big London town now. We go on Thursday.

Well, yet again my Ipod was playing up. This time it was clicking away, failing to play sometimes and failing to sync. Then it began showing the exclamation mark error. I thought it was probably a dead hard drive. Tried the usual restore and formatting it from Linux to no avail. I noticed a few sites recomending I knock it about and give it a slap. So I placed it in one hand and hit it on the back with my other. Nice and hard, and lone behold it worked! Seems to be working just fine now. Crazy.

Well… it’s good… just it’s not that good. All the good action scenes are seen in the trailers, and the deep storyline everyone refers to, well it’s just not that deep. In fact it’s kind of a bit poor. Having said that my tea was nice!