Rest in Peace, Murph

Last week we learned of some bad news. A person among our ranks left us, and not in the occasional way of posting a long rants about how we suck, but in a much worse way. Murph (Steven Jagaczewski, 21) has died. Frst was the first one who found out, and brought it to our attention. At first, none of us believed it; we thought it was some sort of sick joke. However, after UberJumper, and a few others sorted through all the log files, we came to a very sad conclusion, he's gone forever.

Personally, I could not believe it, I was expecting him to sign on all of a sudden, and ridicule us for thinking he died. That moment never came. And here I am, as alive as he should be. Murph was never mean to me, we had a few direct conversations, and he always made me laugh. When I was feeling down, I would head to the forums, and it was often a post of his, that would help cheer me up. When I first went on IRC, he was the same, often making me smile. So Murph, here's to you, you were a great man, and a good friend and will be greatly missed.

Here is a video by WildCard done as a tribute to Murph.

Windows beef

Many of you have heard about Windows OS's security weaknesses, mainly from the internet. Microsoft has been getting better on that front, however one thing I resently came across somehow didn't suprise me, as other OS's can do it as well, but not with the ease in which I did it in windows.

I forgot my desktop's password. The desktop uses XP Home edition, at no time during the setup process does it ask for an administrator password. As such, to erase my user password all I had to do was login to the unprotected Administrator account, go to the user accounts control panel, select my account, and hit Reset Account Passwords. That was it. MS was a bit smarter with my MCE installer, it did ask for a password for the admin account.

Even though It normally won't ask for a password, you should still set a password for the Admin account.

The Browsers strike back

Many of you use an different brower than IE, From firefox to Opera to Safari (No uber, Maxthon isn't really a different browser) For different reasons, security, dislike of MS, features, standards compliance etc.

Recently, Opera became free, which started a wave of people moving to that browser. A new browser came out, based on Firefox, but with some added APIs for doing things such as blogging, Flock adds to the fray.

But the leader of the revolution is Firefox, now with an estimated 11% world market share (greater in some areas, lower in others, duh), it takes the largest chunck of market away from IE.

Today may be an important day for Firefox users, according to Neowin, Firefox version 1.5 will be comming out sometime today.

Version 1.5 adds new features and improvements such as: Faster page rendering, instant Back/Forward (Opera has had this for a while), a Clear Private Data feature (again, already seen in Opera) and a new binary update system that will not have you download a complete installer just to upgrade your version of the browser. There are a few rendering engine enhancements as well (Support for SVG, Canvas, CSS3 Columns, Javascript 1.6)

I recomend you take a look, or upgrade if you already use Firefox, but if you still use IE, you should consider getting a different browser.

(for the times you NEED IE, Firefox has this nice new plugin called IE Tab, It lets you use the IE renderer in a firefox tab at will.)