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After Microsoft pushed the Windows Genuine Advantage Notification (hereafter refered to as WGAN) tool out using Windows Update a lot of people cried out in despair. While I actually sympathize with Microsoft for trying to protect their intellectual property, there were several things that didn't quite sound right:

• Microsoft originally assured the press that the tool could easily be uninstalled, but this was clearly not the case.
• Without mentioning it in any documentation WGAN send information about you and your computer to Microsoft once a day.
• Microsoft itself states in the user-agreement that WGAN is beta software. Forcing users to install beta software doesn't sound like anything a qualityminded software company would do. The fact that many people has received false notifications underscores this fact.
• The description of Automatic Update clearly states that it only installs high-priority updates crucial for the security of your computer, but this is clearly not how anyone would describe WGAN.

Luckily, I have set Automatic Update to notify me before installing any updates, and I always select custom install so I can review the updates prior to installing them. This made me able to unselect WGAN for installation. Therefore my laptop is still free from spyware and beta software. I strongly advice everyone to do the same.

If however, you were one of the unlucky ones to get this piece of deceitful software on your system, I have the cure for you. Firewallleaktester.com has made a utility called RemoveWGA which helps you remove the update from your system.

In my earlier days (before I switched from Opera to Firefox, now I use the AdBlock Plus Firefox extension to block ads) I used to surf the web with Flash disabled. I was actually quite shocked to notice how many websites that just didn't display anything when read though a browser without Flash support. This might be fixed by what I am about to discuss here, but it's not my main point.

Have you ever tried validating a page with Flash in it? Chances are it didn't validate. Even Adobes official material on how to embed Flash encourages use of the <embed> tag, which is not a valid tag in any of the W3C specs for markup languages on the web. It's a Netscape invention, and it actually took quite some time until the Mozilla-based browsers managed to support the <object> tag in a satisfactory fashion. Frustrated with this fact, I started Googling, and this opened up a can of worms, as Internet Explorer didn't fully support the <object> tag in a standard-conforming way either...

All I really wanted was a way that...

• Was completely valid (X)HTML.
• Sent the user to the Flash download center if the Flash plugin is missing or out of date.
• Did not require JavaScript running in the browser in order to display the Flash. More and more people (mostly geeks) actually surf with JavaScript disabled.
• Didn't use the IE-specific conditional construct <!--[if !IE]> <--> (I don't like browser-specific coding, even if it doesn't break the standard).

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This is a webdesigners dream... Haven't you wished there was a way to quickly test a page in different versions of IE? If you've tried, you probably know that installing Internet Explorer will overwrite any verion currently installed. One install at a time. Bah humbug!

The rescue comes in the form of IE standalone distributions from evolt.org. Just download (I tried the 9x version under Windows XP), unzip, doubleclick iexplore.exe and off you go! Note that the about dialog will display the version of your current system IE install, so there's no way of knowing which IE you're running without remembering which version you launched or looking at the HTTP headers.

Imagine my relief when I discovered this page works nice in both IE 5.5 and 5.0 (though a slight menu anomaly on the latter).

Update: Thanks to Yousif Al Saif at TredoSoft there is now an installer that installs IE 3.0-6.0 side by side on your computer! Recommended.

I ended up doing a total overhaul of my homepage. I switched from PHP-Update to Serendipity, from a minimalistic design to something a bit more juicy and finally from Norwegian to English. Quite a lot of changes and I hope to do even more improvements over time. Everything is imported from the old blog, and a couple of things are still left hanging such as categories and the bio page. They'll come, have patience.