Whoever came up with the ‘Only The Best’ variation of the CoolWebSearch spyware needs to be shot. (Here’s some info on it from PCHell.com, and here’s the SpywareInfo thread on it.) I’ve been trying to remove this monstrosity from a computer here at the office, and it’s been insanely difficult… partly because it regenerates itself and uses completely random names for its files, and partly because some of the files it generates have names which vaguely resemble those of Windows components.

Compared to this junk, Gator and its ilk seem like knights in shining armor. At least they make it possible to remove their software without going through hoops…

Do yourself a favor, everyone: if you haven’t already done so, please stop using Internet Explorer as your primary browser, and go grab Firefox or Netscape 7.1 instead. You won’t regret it.

ISMS: the Institute of Silly and Meaningless Sayings is a collection of malapropisms, spoonerisms, mixed metaphors, misuses of foreign phrases, and other such linguistic manglings that fans of wordplay should thoroughly enjoy. (via J-Walk Blog)

To everyone who’s gotten infected with W32.Beagle.W and happens to have my e-mail address somewhere on your hard disk:

Will anything ever convince you to stop opening random e-mail attachments from strangers, no matter how enticing they may seem? I mean, this one doesn’t even spoof the e-mail addresses of actual friends, like some of the previous versions; I’d think this one would be easier to spot as a fake…

Really… you’d think people would have just an iota of sense after the last twenty-something incarnations of the virus, wouldn’t you?

Yet another columnist– this time, Scott Granneman, writing for SecurityFocus– claims that now is a good time to dump Internet Explorer. The alternatives just keep looking better and better…

Firefox and Thunderbird users, go grab the Charamel theme. This may be one of the nicest, most elegant-looking user interfaces I’ve seen in a while.

Now if only there was a version for the Mozilla suite (and its close cousin Netscape 7)…

Grr! Another reason that more people need to stop using Internet Explorer: it can’t even interpret “width: 100%” right all the time.

I encountered this particular bug in one of my own web design projects today; in one of my pages, a table with the aforementioned width was contained within a fluidly-sized DIV that didn’t span the full window. Any sane browser would size the table to fill the DIV, but not Internet Explorer… no, it sizes the table to take up the full width of the window. Gah! And even worse, the fix suggested at the link above doesn’t work for all page layouts; I couldn’t get it to work with the particular way I had the sidebar set up on the site in question (which is still in the testing phase and hasn’t been rolled out, for the curious).

At least in the layout I was having difficulty with, the problem wasn’t unique to tables, either; even a paragraph with a style of “width: 100%” would flow over into the sidebar!

And people wonder why IE is such a headache for web designers these days…

Why you should dump Internet Explorer. I did so several years back, and other than having to fire it up for the occasional site designed by a completely clueless designer, I honestly haven’t missed it… suffice it to say, there’s a reason I often refer to it by the nickname “Internet Exploiter”. Oh, and it doesn’t help that its support for web standards is the worst I’ve seen since Netscape 4.7.

The author of the article linked above is an MCSE, so he’s not your typical Microsoft-basher… honestly, it’s really worth reading and considering.

(via Lockergnome)

Mozilla’s Firefox browser is now at version 0.9. Grab it today… and grab some of the recently-updated extensions while you’re at it.

It’s taken some getting used to, but the new Winstripe theme has started to grow on me, though it does have its flaws… however, those who want to go back to the old theme are still in luck, as it’s available via Mozilla Update.

In the same vein as the Nickelback song mashup I linked on my blog a month ago… here’s proof that all Linkin Park songs sound exactly the same. (via this comment thread on Fark)

Thanks to Kat, I now am amongst the few, the proud, the Gmail account holders… Username’s the same as always (that’s codeman38 at gmail dot com, for the record), if you feel like spamming me with pointless ramblings. 🙂