I was stunned when I read this description of some malware that's installed through one of IE's security holes. All it requires is an out-of-date IE and visiting a specific site that includes popup ads. I'm surprised at the complexity of the backend part of the attack as well. Specifically targetting banking sites and gathering passwords in an organized fashion.

I think that it's time for the banking industry to start thinking about these problems seriously, since the fraud that results almost always ends up in their laps. It would be good to see banks improving the security of their systems and their users by promoting the use of Firefox..

Paul Boutin asks Are the Browser Wars Back?

I've made more progress on the Pango front. Pango can now render all the text I throw at it, which is a good sign. I've having some troubles with some of the various text properties that Mozilla implements. These include word-spacing, letter-spacing and text-align: justify.

In Mozilla's current code when it encounters any of these properties it lays out the text a character at a time (not that I didn't say a glyph at a time here.) I know that there are better ways that we can do this and maybe even make things a little faster. For example, when doing letter-spacing Mozilla actually jumps down to the font code and gets per-character metrics for every character that's rendered. I'm sure we can do that more efficiently. I think there are also selection-related optimizations we can make. We'll see, though.

I also need to build some interfaces for finding clusters for the cursor code in Mozilla code, similar to what the SUNCTL code does now.

Rain clouds above a low stratus layer

It was gray and rainy yesterday, so I took the opportunity to do a little flying. I hadn't flown under IFR since my exam, so this was my first "solo" flight under IFR. There was a nice low stratus layer that went from about 1000 feet to 2000 feet. I flew out of Bedford, did an VOR approach into Lawerence and went back and did the ILS into Bedford. Approaches went pretty well and I handled the workload by myself without problems. I even took a few moments to snap some pictures since the air was so smooth.

I was amazed by the contrast between the gray misty day down below and breaking out of the clouds above into bright sunlight and blue sky above. A very nice way to end the week.

Pango changes are in CVS. On to Mozilla now. (It's been a long time since I've checked into the gnome cvs repository.)

Brendan's entry about the recent W3C meeting he attended is worth reading. So are the responses.

Another iteration of the pango patch for owen to look at today. His suggestions were good and make the interfaces a good bit cleaner. Writing in the gtk/gnome coding style again feels weird. I still can't get over all the vertical whitespace that's carelessly wasted with braces. I mean, we could be doing so much more with all that whitespace. Think of the kids!

Lost somewhere over northern New York

OK, maybe not really lost. Just flying over the clouds. Today I took my instrument check ride, and passed. This means that instead of only being allowed to fly in very small planes in good weather, I can now fly very small planes in reasonably good weather. I'm looking forward to the first time that I can take a trip somewhere and use it. In my instrument training, I've had the chance to see some beautiful cloud formations from above.

On another note I've been slowing working on the Pango changes for custom encodings. There's been one iteration of the patch so far and I've got most of Owen's requested changes done to that patch. Once that's done I can go and work on the Mozilla side of the equation.