Well I hoped for the underdog — even if it makes Michigan’s Tom Brady lose to Michigan State University(ishes) Plaxico Burress who actually broke down in tears after the game in his interview. It was a great game. I didn’t see it being close. I didn’t see the Giants winning. Congratulations to them. That should put spygate to rest too so that we need not hear more about it.

The most interesting things to me?

1. How lame that the NFL insists on running a play with one second left when the Patriots were willing to concede. They need to adjust the rule book for that situation to permit a coach to finish it under that circumstance.

2. A regular guy, 185 pounds, 5′ 09″ was the MVP in my book had the Patriots won. Their goto receiver was a normal sized guy, Mr. Welker — and he is a Mister after that gutsy performance. Of course then “they” name Manning when it should have been a defensive player in a defensive game.

3. Speaking of marketing … the NFL has a page on the Superbowl??

4. Best Ad Series? Probably Bud Light or Coke. It was a toss up. The auto ads were uninspired and boring.

5. Godaddy.com sells you to their site. Up until now Danica has avoided the overly sexist advertising pushed by Bob over at Godaddy. Unlike Amanda (I’m really too skinny but who cares) Beard and What’s her Name — I have fake everything but I can wrestle, Danika has remained above that garbage … until this ad. Oh well, I guess money talks.

Congratulations the the Giants.

I had some concerns for them late in the game when a lot of their defensive players were hitting the deck with cramps and such, and I wondered if they were out of gas. They kept bouncing back like a team of energizer bunnies.

One little side note for me: I am currently working on a site called cool-off.com. That site markets misting systems including large fans with misting heads in them. Often you see them in big sporting events in humid arenas, including in the Superbowl (they also make misting systems for everything from residential decks to industrial facilities). The television cameras often show the players sitting in front of the cooling fans on the sidelines trying to stay cool. What fascinates me the most is the fact that the mist is apparently vaporized within inches of the nozzle and so you never get wet with this type of cooling system. I don’t know that this particular company provided them for this event, but I guess my selective perception is heightened at present and so I notice them. What does your selective perception bring to the fore front for you when you see a game of this magnitude?

I knew I wasn’t the only one! News.com.au reports that the proportion of Australians using Mozilla Firefox to surf the web is among the highest in the world, according to internet trend research. The article goes on to say that almost one in three web users in the Oceania region – 31 per cent – were using Firefox, compared to 28 per cent in Europe and 21 per cent in the US.

Those are pretty interesting statistics, and I must admit that I was surprised at the comparatively low utilisation amongst US users. Any thoughts as to why?

Check out the full story: Australians embrace open source browser. The article has attracted some emotive comments on the News.com.au site, so it’s pretty clear that folks (I would guess a fair chunk of web developers) are still very passionate about their browser of choice!

It is very interesting to see a graphical explanation of when each browser came into existence, and what other browsers are in use at the same time period. It is also a very nice example of a presentation. Have a look for yourself at his graphical browser time-line.

Sometimes something in life is just funny. Today I went to register my new lenses, a set of “transitions lenses” that tint in UV rays. So what was so funny? I couldn’t read the captcha they presented me with my fancy new glasses!

This is my second set of transitions lenses. I had a pair of glasses approximately four years ago that had them and I came to really like them. They have three major drawbacks:

• They don’t zero tint even indoors — this has absolutely no effect on me, I can see fine, but people look at you and think, hmmm, wearing “rose” colored glasses (of course it isn’t rose in my particular case, but it is a very minor tint almost always).
• They don’t darken when you are in your automobile because the auto glass filters the UV rays. If you have a convertible, no problem, otherwise you need to either roll down the window and hang your head out (it’s cold here today, and bright because of all the snow cover) which isn’t necessarily the best way to stay focused on the road, or you need to take them off and hold them out the window — scared for your life that you may drop them at any second and plus you can no longer see the road because you took your glasses off, duh!
• You have to wait a minute after going to darker environs for the glasses to un-tint. This is the one everybody always talks about at the eye doctors office, but to me is the least significant. Heck, they’re all steamed up from coming out of the cold weather anyway, and even in sunglasses you can see in most light conditions.

So why transitions? Well because I was tired of alternating between losing my clip-on’s and or not having them with me when I needed them. The same would be true if I had a pair of sunglasses (with or without contacts). So this way I have them on and I am good to go. I hope I like them because they were darned expensive glasses (progressive bi-focals, lighter lenses, with transitions and anti-glare coating) and insurance will only help with the cost (AND I DO MEAN HELP) once a year. I save up and buy one eye’s worth in one year and the other in the next year and then I pay the other third. So I cannot do it again for two years.

Over on Om Malik’s Blog, he says that Matt has raised a fair amount of money in his current business venture to further develop wordpress.com (the hosted version of his blogging software) and the related aspects of that business.

As you know we here at htmlfixit dot com are huge fans of wordpress. I don’t personally know either Om or Matt — and probably never will, but I hope that growth doesn’t spoil the open source product I love.

Secunia have reported that more flaws were found in Redhat Linux (633) than in Windows (123), but even a blind man can see it is nowhere near a fair comparison.

Redhat is made up of the core operating system, and thousands of third party applications that people can choose to install. (or not). 99% of the 633 security flaws found in Redhat Linux were in the third party applications, only 1% were in the core OS.

Windows however, only had 123 bugs, but 96% of them were in the core operating system. Since 3rd party apps are not supplied or supported by Microsoft however, all of their bugs did not get added to the total as they did in Redhat’s case.

Does anyone else think that this is perhaps not a fair comparison? I can tell you one thing, I’d rather have a core OS with 1% of 633 flaws (6.33), than one with 96% of 123 flaws 118.08. The OS results could just have easily been put “Windows had 118.08 more OS security flaws than Redhat Linux.”

With regards to Firefox, they also seem to be counting flaws that Mozilla have found themselves. We know they are not doing the same for IE, because Microsoft don’t announce flaws they find themselves. Again, not really a fair comparison.

Interesting however, is the patching statistics for IE and Firefox.

Out of eight zero-day bugs reported for Firefox in 2007, five have been patched, three of those in just over a week. Out of 10 zero-day IE bugs, only three were patched and the shortest patch time was 85 days.

(taken from here)

Microsoft’s best patch result was 85 days to release and only 3 out of 10 flaws patched, verses 5 out of 8 and just over a week for Firefox.

Statistics are all good and interesting, but taken in the wrong light, can paint a picture that is dangerously incorrect.

I have been frustrated for a bit trying to get mail merge to work in Open Office from OpenOffice.org. I read the help files, and tried very hard to figure out where I was going wrong.

I could get the file to generate with the mail merge wizard. However, it would say sending 0 of however many I was sending. It would work for a long time and give no data back. Apparently the emails just vaporized without getting sent. I finally decided that the writer program had to somehow know what account to send off of. I finally found it (though I still have not found it in the help file):

You go to tools > options > openOffice.org writer (expand with plus/minus sign) > Mail Merge Email and configure your outgoing mail server there. After doing that, you can test your connection and if it works, you are in business. There are only two steps to the test and you will get green check marks.

I was on oOo 2.0 and I got many of them back because of a missing date header it appears. I will update to 2.3.1 which is the current stable release and give it another go to see if that does better.