... the Flash ad contains code to open a popup that leads to a very different destination -- it's what I assume is an affiliate link that attempts to download and install ErrorSafe on your computer (link is to Symantec's description of it).

This, of course, would be totally against any ad company's guidelines. Masquerading as a banner ad, but discreetly opening a popup -- and not only that, but to what people consider malware -- is totally against any ad company's guidelines. So how did it get through?

Simple -- the ad actually contacts its website in the background, and the site returns a response code that tells it whether to display the popup or not - 'popup=1'. My guess is that kpremium.com returned 'popup=0' while the ad company were testing the ad for conformance to guidelines, and then they turned it back on once it was out in the wild.

I've had the media center PC for over a year now and its changed the way we watch TV dramatically. But the other day I found something new. I always knew the media center could backup recorded TV to a DVD but I was surprised how the media center laid the DVD out. I fully expected the shows to run back to back with no DVD menu, but what I found was that the media center put a really cool media center themed menu into the DVD. I was really surprised and really happy that after all this time I can still be amazed at how cool the media center is.

I've had a couple of questions by email that I should answer (note I've paraphrased some of these):

What fonts should I use for my HTML Media Center application and can I use Flash?  The SDK is where to go for design guidelines for HTML applications (the short answer is to use a sans serif font).  Yes, Flash can be used in HTML Media Center applications - Napster and MSN Music both use Flash.

How can I add an application to the Start Menu?  You can't.  Well OK, you can, but we recommend that only OEMs use this functionality as there is a limit to how many applications can appear on the start menu and adding a new app will stomp on existing applications.  If you intend to distribute your application you shouldn't do this, but if you really want to know, the details are in the SDK here.

I've seen the Media Center software for sale online is it OK to buy it?  I'm no lawyer so I'm not going to comment on this.  Media Center is an OEM product and only available with new PCs is the official answer though.

Found this neat thing called Canvas. It’s a meta-theme, or maybe a CMS for Wordpress. Cool stuff anyhow, you should check it out.

I bought a Microsoft vx-6000 because it promised to do 1.3 megapixel video. Well... it does do 640x480 at 30fps it does 800x600 at up to 15, and 1280x1024 at 15. So this is not the cheap build it my slef HD Cam I was hoping for. Still a cool camera, and not bad for $99, but I have seen better cameras, that have less noise, and offer IR-LED's for low light.

• Use of EE segments and conditionals to reduce the number of templates required. The bulk of the site content runs through 3 templates.
• EE integration with the Monoslideshow tool for the Flash animation on the home page. This integration allows the church to update that Flash piece by simply posting a new EE entry consisting of a new image and the descriptive text. Christ Memorial can use the EE publish and expire dates to ensure that event-related promotions appear and disappear from the site at the right time.
• Rotating header images are implemented using another EE weblog, each image being one entry and the presentation set to random.

I'm a pretty big fan of the new startup Riya, if you haven't seen it, it's a social networking web application that uses facial recognition software to create the social links. Basically you upload your photo's and the application detects the faces and you give each face a name, it's pretty cool, if not a little scary.

Anyway they recently announced that they were expanding the searching so that you could upload a picture of something and you would get back search results related to your picture. I think this is fantastic, I'm really surprised that Google with all their PHD's haven't come out with something similar.

I'm also annoyed that Microsoft haven't added anything innovative like this to the searching in vista, imagine being able to search your hard drive for something like 'joe' but then maybe something like 'joe outside' or 'TV', sure some of the inputs might not be textual but I'm sure that wouldn't be a major issue. We know that MS has some of this technology from it's research department, I remember watching a channel 9 interview, one of the researchers showed this DirectX application that had facial recognition and the ability to know if it was outside or inside, I guess this stuff ended up in the big black hole between research and production.

Well I hope Riya can continue to innovate and keep ahead of everyone else and please Riya think about creating an IFilter pulgin for the windows search system. I just keep thinking about how cool it would be to search my hard drive for specific items in a picture.

I just added a new piece of FeedFlare to my feed (if you’re not subscribed, get to it!) called “Take My Survey.”

What? Why?

Like you may have guessed, clicking this link will take you to a survey (hosted by the lovely SurveyMonkey) containing some questions about you, my much-appreciated reader.

There are really no good reasons I’m doing this, other than “I could” and “it would be interesting to know a little bit about my readers.”

Usually, this kind of survey is used to gather information useful to potential advertisers — and that’s why Rick created it (see below). But I don’t have any advertisers (or any potential advertisers, that I know of) so this is just for fun.

The cool thing

Anyway, the cool thing about this FeedFlare add-on is that Rick Klau — our VP of Business Development; not an engineer — created it from scratch with (almost) no help. The FeedFlare platform allows anyone (yes, even Rick *wink*) to create something truly useful and valuable — something that isn’t just “neat” but actually informative from a business point of view.

And if that isn’t cool, I don’t know what is.

I don’t know about you, but I have no creativity. Ask my friends and family. Well this program is pretty exciting because its so easy to use. I’ve often thought about mocking up something in 3D. Say a home improvement project or something. I’ve used several 3D design tools and [...]

“RocketDockis a smoothly animated, alpha-blended application launcher that is similar to ObjectDock. RocketDock renders quickly like MobyDock, has the visual sharpness of Y’z Dock, and the stability that neither seem to possess.”

I like it. Very straightforward and elegant.

Hamachi : Stay ConnectedHamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking (VPN) application.

In other words Hamachi is a program that allows you to arrange multiple computers into their own secure network just as if they were connected by a physical network cable.

Reminds me of the old Nullsoft WASTE thing. So this is for creating a [...]