It’s 11PM on a Saturday night. Where am I: out-drinking, watching a film, or having a quiet night with my girlfriend? None of the above. I’m fecking studying.

Exams: I hate you with a passion so intense it could make Julia Roberts good looking.

According to Microsoft, IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation of Internet Explorer. The reason? “Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1. Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS” (emphasis is mine).

Now call me crazy, but Mozilla and Opera have managed to create vastly superior browsers to IE on the same OS (transparent PNG support, support for a slew of standards, faster rendering, etc). So obviously that reason is bullshit.

So what could the real reason be? Perhaps they want to push their next OS (Longhorn) on the back of, in part at least, the new version of IE that will be included. At the moment, I sure as hell don’t want it. The freedom-crippling components, sorry, DRM software are off-putting enough.

The truth is that there are vastly superior browsers to Internet Explorer already available, it’s (slowly) losing market share, and Microsoft are getting desperate. Good luck to them, but I hope the general public wake up and get a decent browser first.

Today, it started. Exams: the scourge of any self-respecting student. My first exam was today and it did not go well. So I’m going to get my head into the books for the next few exams (I have 9 in total). Ah, the joys of studying until your eyes twitch.

This, of course, means that I’ll have less time to devote to this corner of my life. Updates will be sporadic to non-existant until the 13th or so. I have a little gap in between exams that I’ll try to make some serious updates in. However, I’ve been prepared for a dry spell for quite some time. Living on my desktop is file full of quick ideas for posts, should the need arise to fill some space. Expect quite a few entries from that over the next few weeks.

Anyway, I have to get some sleep now. Another exam tomorrow: Information Management, AKA databases, web design, professional issues and HCI. Hooray for the hideous mish-mash that is computing!

So, you’ve listened to all your music enough to be able to reproduce every word, identify every instrument (make and model) used and wonder if there’s anything left for you? Well, of course. Try some new music from the BBC live sessions. it’s basically tonnes of new bands playing songs, live. I especially recommend JetPlane Landing, Biffy Clyro and Bis.

Now, while they’re all real media files only available for streaming, I’m sure certain elements among you can figure out how to download them using a program like StreamBox. Actually, forget I said anything about that program. Dodgy stuff. Yep, forget.

I’ve finally gotten around to updating the Archives code. Now when you look at a specific month (for example, March 2003), you’ll get a list of entries and descriptions, rather than a list of days.

This makes it a million times easier to find old items, since you don’t have to trawl through every single day in the archives to find something. It used to take roughly 30N/2 to find entry N. It now takes N/2. Just a slight improvement, then.