Breaking records is usually a good thing, but not in the case of Windows. New data indicates that it now takes only 4 minutes for a Windows XP SP1 machine to be compromised by a remote exploit (Virus/Trojan/Worm etc). The tests included both Linux and Mac desktop machines, but only the Windows box’s were compromised.

The only questions are: “Is anybody really surprised” and “does anyone still believe Microsoft’s claim that Windows is really more secure?”

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In an interesting twist, AOL have just released a beta browser that can use either the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, or Internet Explorer’s engine. It’s certainly a novel idea, but I can’t help wondering if they are creating a browser that will suffer from IE security flaws, and then in addition any that show up in the Mozilla code.

My personal opinion at this point, is that I’ll stick with Firefox and my choice of a dozen or so extensions, if for not other reason then that I’m happy with what I have and can’t see any benefit in the extra complexity. That and I have still not forgiven AOL for the hundreds of “join AOL” CD’s I’ve received over the years. 🙂

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SCO, the company that anyone into free software hates, has suffered something of a hack attack. Somebody has made their unofficial motto official by cracking their website and replacing their banner logo with an improved version containing the words “SCO, We own all your code. Pay us all your money”. I doubt the perpetrators were real Linux geeks, had they been, it would no doubt have read “All your code are belong to us” (if you don’t understand that don’t worry about it, some of you will.)

I don’t approve of any form of unauthorised cracking, however I find myself unable to shed any tears for the once great UNIX company that has become nothing but a litigation company trying to use lawyers to reap in money from companies like IBM that support Linux.

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This clip will take a selection of data contained in a comma separated file (without quotes) and reorder those fields in a random fashion.

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It is often necessary to replace the & character with the entity & to get validated (x)html. This clip will replace all appropriate ampersands excluding those that are part of defined character entities.
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This regex loop will remove all lines that contain only numbers on them. There is a quirk so that it won’t work correctly on one pass, so I loop it to get it to work correctly.

; by don at htmlfixit.com
; removes all numbers on a line
; for some reason the regex doesn't
; work right, so I repeat to
; get all instances -- odd but
; sometimes it goes that way
:Loop
^!Replace "^\d+\n" >> "" ATIWRS
^!IfError END
^!Jump 1
^!GoTo Loop

Sample input:

this
that
12
567
a324
-you
15
x374

Sample output:

this
that
a324
-you
x374

Keywords: regex, regular expression, remove, numbers, line, loop, repeat

I regularly have to create target splits for a five kilometer (5K or 5,000 Meter) race. This clip creates even mile splits based upon a target finish time. (more…)