Windows Metafile vulnerability

Oliver Brown
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Ooooh, I just read on Wikipedia about a vulnerability in how Windows reads WMF files.

The reason why I find this so interesting is because apparently the vulnerability exists versions of Windows all the way back to 3.0! Doesn’t that mean that a serious bug that allows malicious code to be executed has actually existed for 15 years without being exploited? That has to be some sort of record.

Civilization IV rocks

Oliver Brown
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I bought Julia Civilization IV for Christmas. It’s something I wanted myself but my computer only just reaches the minimum specs. But we installed it anyway and on the lowest settings it does run (although it runs “fine” it’s really unstable after about half an hour and prone to crashing).

If you don’t know, Civilization is a game where you control a civilization from ancient stone age times through to the near future (the last technology you develop allows travel to Alpha Centauri). This version adds a lot to the basic idea though. The biggest addition is religion. It was always going to be a touchy subject but since religion has had a huge impact on Civilization they couldn’t ignore it forever. All the religions in the game are basically handled the same, the only differences being what you need to do to found them. The fact that you can found them can cause events that are vaguely blasphemous (like founding both Buddhism and Christianity in London) but this is really no worse than warfare between two countries that never fought each other in the real world.

I can’t really describe all the coolness here but anyone remotely interested in the genre should go out and buy this game.

Happy New Year

Oliver Brown
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Happy New Year!

I have an interview

Oliver Brown
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Woohoo, I have an interview.

Before they offered me a face-to-face interview they wanted to do a telephone interview first. This consisted of a series of technical questions I really wasn’t prepared for (“What’s the difference between an inner join and an outer join in SQL?”, “What are the restrictions on cookies?”, “What do the HTTP status codes 302 and 303 mean?”).

But since they offered me the interview I guess I did quite well :)

(On an unrelated note, “Woohoo” is not in the Google spellchecker database but “Whoop” is….)

jobs, interviews, web developer, PHP developer

Comment spam 2

Oliver Brown
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Oooh, I’m now getting between ten and twenty spam comments a day. They’re all obviously from the same source but all for different sites, from different names and different IP addresses. They still all have a very obvious form and content so the spam filter in Wordpress is catching them. One final odd part, they’re all on the same post too…

How inconsiderate

Oliver Brown
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Me and a friend of mine came up with an idea a while ago for a new website. Basically it would document really annoying things people do in a semi-anonymous way.

The motivation came mainly from people being completely unable to park their car properly. The most distinctive is one I unfortunately I have no evidence of. There was a minibus parked in a disabled parking space. Fair enough; it was probably carrying old people. The bad part is it was so badly parked that it actually blocked four parking spaces!

Anyway here’s a couple of pictures of some rather bad parking (not quite enough space to fit a car in there). It’s tough to know who to blame since we don’t know who parked first, but that white van seems quite far from the white line to the right. This may become a regular thing… just search Technorati for inconsiderate :)

Silly server

Oliver Brown
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I recently applied for a job and they wanted some URLs of examples of my work. At the same time my server went down :( But it’s up again now obviously.

Timesplitters Future Perfect

Oliver Brown
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I just got the new (well it’s not that new now) Timesplitters game for the PS2, and wow is it cool.

It’s sort of a cross between Timesplitters 2, Halo and the Goldeneye sequel on the N64 (Perfect Dark?). Think Timesplitters 2 but add the ability to get into vehicles and separate grenades and deployable guns. The graphics are improved and are less cartoony but the whacky sense of humour is still there - whenever you kill a monkey it shouts “Chimpicide!”.

Happy December :)

Oliver Brown
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Not much to say except, yay, it’s December.