"Microsoft's .Net Framework Assistant" is installed in your Firefox Browser without your consent as part of Microsoft's .Net framework. It's installed via Windows Update, so its installation can't be easily blocked. It can't be uninstalled (they made it intentionally very hard) and looking at Microsoft's track record, there's absolutely no reason to trust that it's secure. Also, it transfers information about software on your computer to third party servers, again without your consent.

That I think, fits the definition of spyware.

Fortunately, there's a way to uninstall it from your machine as long as you have administrative privileges. I found a good recipe here. Basically you have to edit the registry key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\extensions

and delete the key named {20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}. At which point, after a browser restart, the extension will be gone.

Unfortunately, Microsoft also takes the liberty to modify your preferences to add the .NET framwork's version to your browser's referrer. To fix this, type about:config into your browser's URL bar, then type "microsoft" into the search box, right-click on the key "general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet" and click "reset". That's it, you're done.

This means that GeoDjango will be part of Django 1.0! This is another great addition to this fabulous framework. It changes and extends Django's ORM so that it supports GIS types in multiple databases. Of course, that primarily means support for OpenGIS types in MySQL and PostgreSQL and querying them via Django's ORM.

Now, if they'd finally land aggregation support, I'd be totally happy with Django 1.0!

I've been using 64-bit systems exclusively for a while now (Windows XP x64 for daily work and Windows Vista x64 as my gaming system), but Apple made the braindead decision to let iTunes v7.7's iPhone 64-bit support only run on Windows Vista. Well, unfortunately, all my business data is on Windows XP and there's no way that I'll downgrade to 32-bit and loose support for my 4GB RAM.

Turns out, there's really no technical reason for not having iPhone support on Windows XP 64, unless you have a phobia of editing MSI files with Orca. Here's an excellent write-up.

Brian Rosner posted this update in the Django users group. This means that Django just made a big step forward!

This PHP RFC contains a proposal for closures, lambda functions and callables in PHP. Looking at the rest of PHP, the syntax seems to be in the same style, with a new reserved word "use".

The RFC has been accepted and the code is in PHP's trunk. Well, it was about time, right?

Of course, PHP will still helpfully truncate your 64-bit database id columns by converting them into floating point numbers, if you're using a PHP version compiled on a 32-bit system, but of course not on a 64-bit system, because it wouldn't be PHP if it behaved the same on two random computers. But now you will be able to do that with real up-to-date, all-the-hype scripting language style in PHP 6.0 ;-).

I didn't touch my newsreader in a while and promptly I missed quite a bit of interesting things. Here are the most important:

Django

Large file uploads: Revision 7814 finally lands the patch from ticket 2070 and finally allows Django to handle arbitrarily-sized file-uploads.

Ruby's security vulnerabilities

Man, I'm late to that particular party, but some serious vulnerabilities have been found in the main Ruby interpreter. Unfortunately it seems that the official maintainers messed up as well and only 3^rd-party patches are available right now, because there's no known stable release code in the codebase that a quick patch release could be based off.

I think the most important lesson that can be learned from this, as Simon Willison points out, is that you need to keep release tags around in your SCM system, but also that you should never blindly trust any part of a system. At least it makes me wonder what surprises lurk in the Java VM or CPython.

Diablo III

Has been announced. Userfriendly pretty much hits the nail on the head.

I just watched a presentation about the impressive JavaScript support in Netbeans 6.1.

I have to say that I'm really impressed with it. There's a project (the Ajax Toolkit Framework) in Eclipse incubation that promises to provide pretty much the same capabilities for Eclipse, but it's not there yet. ActiveState's Komodo has some good support, but it's not really free (there's a free version without debugging support).

The only problem left now is that Netbeans' is missing a widely advertised Python plug-in, so I don't know if good Python support is available, but if it is, then it would be enough reason to leave Eclipse+Pydev behind. I'll try JPyDbg and see if I get anywhere.

It's here! I was going to post the second part of my qmail recipes series on this weblog today, but the post got so long that I decided to publish it as an article. It's much easier to read that way. Enjoy!

I packed up some of the code that I wrote to customize my site. It can be downloaded on my plug-ins page. The first two plug-ins available are:

• maurusnet_geoip_amazon

  A plug-in that helps to embed Amazon partner links into your site by using MaxMind's GeoIP database to find the right Amazon site (country-wise) for your user.

• maurusnet_archive_widget

  A plug-in that makes WordPress' default "Archives" sidebar widget more accessible by putting it in a <form>-tag and making it work if JavaScript is disabled. You can see this plug-in in action right next to this post under "Archives"

I hope you find these helpful. If you use them, feel free to drop me a line, or a comment on the plug-in's page. I'd appreciate it.

Also, don't forget that the sourcecode of my bookmark search engine is also available on its help page

I finally made the time to update I'm sorry, but PHP sucks. This part of my site gets by far the most traffic and I found it important to update it to reflect all the changes that have occurred since I originally wrote it in 2006. I also created a new sub-section on programming languages where I'll write down trivia about Java and Python and other programming languages that I use daily, concentrating on weaknesses and bugs that are less-known, but can become highly volatile for a project.

Of course, I don't have nearly as much material on Java and Python like I had on PHP, but you never know, perhaps I'll even receive a few suggestions :-).