Hacking for Christ

Out Of Hospital

You'll be pleased to know that I got out of hospital at 2pm or so today, and am recovering well. They did a hemihepatectomy, removing the right (larger) half of my liver - Couinaud segments 5, 6, 7 and 8. This was a success; my liver function is now normal and, over the next couple of months, the remaining half will grow in size and capacity up to 90-95% of the original. The scar across my stomach is slightly less than a foot long, and there's a 4 inch vertical section up the centre as well. The Wikipedia article calls it a Caine or "Mercedes Benz" incision, which isn't far from the truth. I might take a photo when I get a chance.

So I'm back in the position of having no known cancer in my body. Of course, I've been here several times before :-) Thank you to all those of you who were praying for me. God is sovereign (in all adjectival senses).

I opened my Bible during recovery and it fell open at the following section (not that I recommend that as a general method of deciding what parts to read):

But now thus says the LORD,
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
"Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the LORD your God,
The Holy One of Israel, your Saviour."

-- Isaiah 43:1-3 (ESV)

Also, if one's own Wikipedia entry acquires a "notability" tag (although this was rather quickly dismissed last time), is it permitted to perform the necessary expansion oneself? I thought that was rather frowned upon. If it is something that's not done, then if anyone else wants to have a go, please feel free :-)

IE 8 Passes Acid 2

Which is great. But I wonder what, if any, interesting new things layout hackers or Dean Edwards can work out about the internals of IE from the list of touched files in the IE Blog blogpost?

CVS Checkin Comment Creativity

jruderman has been getting creative with CVS checkin comments, following in my footsteps.

By happy coincidence, here's my latest bit of CVS Poetry, eight months in the making and just finished today.

You Need To Sneak Up On It...

Ad seen at the bottom of a blog entry:

Let our Free OS X Screen Saver deliver the latest security alerts and commentary to your desktop when you're not at your system.

That sounds like a really great time to receive them...

Operation Date Confirmed

(For those just catching up, I put together a Cancer Timeline a couple of weeks ago.)

After various bureaucratic difficulties, the date for the operation on my liver has been confirmed for Friday 21st December at 2pm. I go in to the Cromwell Hospital, south-west London, on Friday morning. The expected recovery time is 7-10 days so I hope to be out in time for New Year.

I'm still not certain exactly what they are removing - could be anywhere between 1/8th and 1/2 of my liver. I still haven't had a chance to chat with my surgeon. However, God willing, the rest should take over the job both in size and function within a few months.

Once I'm done, all I'll need is an operation to the left front of my body and I'll be able to take my shirt off and say "Hey, kids, God made me in two halves" :-)

Gerv Status 2007-12-07

Last Two Weeks

• Publicised directed giving program in Bugzilla community
• Replied to various licensing questions
• Continued work on revised and updated licence policy, to bring document in line with current practice
• Attempted to sort out argument regarding mozilla.test.multimedia

Next Two Weeks

• Finish licence policy revision
• Operation (almost certainly)

SANS Top 20 Security Vulnerabilities

SANS have released their "Top 20 security vulnerabilities" for 2007.

Users who are allowed by their employers to browse the Internet have become a source of major security risk for their organizations. A few years back securing servers and services was seen as the primary task for securing an organization. Today it is equally important, perhaps even more important, to prevent users having their computers compromised via malicious web pages or other client-targeting attacks.

Quite right. 9 days (rather than 286 days) should be looking pretty good to a lot of companies right now.

The SANS article does have a section on browsers. It says the following about Firefox:

Mozilla Firefox is the second most popular web browser after Internet Explorer. It also has a fair share of vulnerabilities. In 2007, it has released several updates to address publicly disclosed vulnerabilities. Similarly to Internet Explorer, unpatched or older versions of Firefox contain multiple vulnerabilities that can lead to memory corruption, spoofing and execution of arbitrary scripts or code. ...

Yes, but how many people are actually using old versions of Firefox (as opposed to old versions of IE)? According to Secunia, only 5% of Firefox users, as opposed to 10% of IE users. Actually, I'm amazed the IE number is that high. Most Windows PCs I come across are very out of date with patches. Firefox, on the other hand, doesn't give you a choice.

They lay into IE about Active X, and then list 10 things you should or could do to mitigate the risk. The last one?

Consider using other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox that do not support ActiveX technology.

Oops...

Not a good day for the Green Party of the UK...

(Is there a better way in the GIMP to draw an ellipse than to do selection subtraction with the circle selection tool and then do a flood fill?)

30-second Usability Analysis

Here are two websites: getfirefox.com and playogg.org. Open each of them in a new tab and compare their presentation styles.

They are both aimed at the same audience - the non-technical computer user. Could you tell that just by looking at getfirefox.com? What about playogg.org? Both of them have the ultimate goal of trying to persuade this user to install software. Which is more likely to succeed?

This post is not just finger-pointing; if playogg.org want my help, I'll gladly give it. But I would have thought that just sitting down, looking at the page and thinking "if my mum arrived here, what would she think?" would lead to a load of improvements without a word from me or anyone else.