Doubt's Log

BadTrans-B tops virus charts. "We've gone past the point where Outlook improvements will do much good because most viruses that come out now have their own SMTP engine"

The  Microsoft Personal Security Advisor now works with Windows XP.

From the Microsoft New Speech Dictionary:
"Knowledge Base" -(1)(n) - Microsoft's best attempt to provide technical information on the inner workings of its products, usually in response to a problem and its fix.

So sad and sooo true.

Recording some thoughts in response to "The DOJ abdicates its ethical responsibility" on advogato.

First the individual bullet points

1. This needs to be qualified with "under the law". The author implicitly assumes that microsoft is only good at threatening other companies with having control of windows. I think he needs to demonstrate where the settlement doesn't curtail Microsoft's threat power. Oem prices are fixed and have to be published, middleware uninstallable, protocols licensable under RAND, etc.
2. Integration is good buissness, tech and featurewise, but no gaureentee that you will be successfull in the next market. And if all the integration work is covered by RAND licecensing then the competitor can do the same work, or even better.
3. Buissness "Inovation" like the .com era, and free software? and which technical innovation can't you sell or download on the market, webrowsers like opera, or media players like real's, or mabye you are talking about AIM and ICQ? To overcome a dominant player, you need to be better then the dominate player in a way that matters to the end consumer. Sometime MSFT can do it, sometimes they can't, but when either side does, the end custimer wins.
4. Faulty assumption that for some set of products the domination comes solely through monpolist power. And again, what part of the power are you concerned with that the settlement doesn't cover.
5. This would be the first behavioral remedy I've seen with some bite. It's too early to judge the authors asertion.

Closing paragraph problems: The DOJ got alot of stuff overturned in the appeals court, with even the appeals court saying that even if they hadn't thrown away anything that the breakup wasn't appropriate. Then there is the question of the more clearly defined tying standard, which the DOJ didn't think it could meet. The AOL case seems to want to take a crack at it though.

Charles Wiltgen: A .NET primer for Mac users. [Hack the Planet]

A good primer on what this whole .NET thing is.

An radio update broke me again. I applied my code fix again.
If the userland folks can't take the fix... mabye they can teach me a way to automatically apply it when they break me?

Malcolm Gladwell is gave a talk today titled, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference". I'm finally getting a chance to watch it now.

He is starting out with a story from his book about suicides in macronesia in male teens. There is actually a trend of this there. Ideas that spread like a virus. Another example is about the coke sickness in beligium, which on further evidence had nothing to do with coke. Hysterical epidemics.

There are negative and positive ones. We had an extreamly quick adoption of seatbelts. It happend over 4 years. Normally this type of thing takes 30 years. We had a seat belt wearing epidemic.

Marketing is the attempt to stimulate or simulate the epidemics.

These things spread person to person, not mass media. Uptalk and fainting are the example he gives. He doesn't think that there is a form of immunization. Further Americans right now are probably more resistance then most to mass media. He also has a notion of a connector, people who are extra high socializers.

Tiny changes (which can't be pre-predicted) make a big difference. Direct Mail example. Big Bird was the tiny change that made Seasame Street work.

Next book will be about panic versus choking. In failure you can go to intellectual choking, while panic is going all emotion. It's about dealing with causes vrs environment.

Sesame Street chapter was written so that he could hang out with them. In the 70s there was better writting for the show, full of adult jokes that required an almost encylopedic knowledge of culture.

Industry says ho-hum to Netscape lawsuit. High-tech industry lobbyists issue a collective yawn after Netscape files suit against Microsoft. Even Sun--a company full of rabid Microsoft bashers--is mum. [CNET News.com]

Another day, another lawsuit. It's hard for me to sympathize with netscape when I made my decision in broswers based on the features. I remember a guy from netscape speaking at my college. In my memory he spoke slowly full of remorse.  He went into detail with all the things that had gone wrong. Falling behind on features, not building netscape to be embeded in other apps, the inability to keep up in the distribution arms race.

I guess there is some good news in the browser market. For the first time in a while some of my friends are considering mozila again, they like the tabs (like from excel).  The normal ie browser isn't getting much attention internally anymore, but the internet is integrating more and more. I'm starting to wonder how long the web itself will last as we know it, when html pages stops being the dominant metaphor.

SXSW award finalists. Nicely designed sites.  [Scripting News]

There is hours worth of stuff to explore off of this page.

There is now a KB Article on some of the stuff I tested for windows XP.

Monday is a great Get Shit Done day. My dev box is back and working, my builds are building, my inbox is getting cleaned, etc.

Thing to try to get done:

• Watch last fridays ntdev brownbag talk.
• Listen to harrow report
• Cleanout Inbox
• 2 hours of spec work
• 3 hours of dev work (xml config file for stress app)
• Fix todays stress break (test app issue)

The register mentioned that: A survey of US network TV news last year indicated that a third of all broadcast 'news' stories were promotional features for the owners' other products. They were, as we saw with the Time front-page splash for the new iMac, thinly-disguised

While I don't disagree that they exist, 1/3 sounds too high. A quick search on google didn't come up with a reference.

For Jd: Start-> Help and Support -> Send your Feedback to Microsoft.

Legend of the Rangers debuts Saturday [Sci-Fi Storm: Sci-Fi Storm: Your Source for Sci-Fi News]

Are you ready for some BAB5!

Upcomming at work is career planning. One of the companies biggest issues discovered by exit interviews (and the months later followup) is a sense of career development. To address this they insitiuted a formal career discussion with one's manager. The whole thing has got me in a reflective mood.

In high school, I always fiddled with things. I got a kick out of installing the latest linux kernel and intresting software packages I found, but I never got into modifing them, or building anything intresting with them. I was intrested in stringing together the schools novell servers and unix lab. In college I never really got involved with the many cool projects that were going on arround me, I just took on administrative type supporting positions. I did however play with Beos and got intrested in metadata and what be's filesystem did with 'em. Post college I ended up working for a big software company in a test development position. On the side there, I wrote one or two tools that had a few months of popularity before becomming obsolete. The one thing that has consistanly made my day was having a user use my code, and even better, suggest improvements.

In my job this turns out to be a pretty rare ocurance, and I haven't yet pull enough willpower together to do something outside of work. Mabye my real career goal needs to be based around that. In the short term a position that tends to lend itself to my code getting used externally coupled with customer feedback.

BloodWake arrived at the company store today. I haven't sat down and played it yet (too busy playing with Radio so far), but Mathias and Ben are checking it out. So far they don't like the controls and Ben had a gripe about the water physics realism, but overall they seem hooked on the game play.

1. There is no such thing as a local only interface (and don't forget that the firewall still will not save you)
2. The Usual don't be a multiplier (DDOS), don't trust the server, don't trust the client, don't trust the RFC, etc....
3. Heap Overflows know em, love em
4. Change the timings in the attacks you use for testing (Example above X ms but below Y ms)

Commentary: Palm's fading presence. In the last year, the company has slipped from its dominance in the PDA market--bad news for Palm and its customers. [CNET News.com]

Palm sounds screwed. I guess the "hardware will catch up" + features mentality wins again.

Kimbro Staken reports trouble with Radio 8. I'm going to get right on it. One of the things on my post-ship list is to write a file-system upstream driver. Anyone who does WebDAV uploads is going to need this. If I get the time I'll try to write it today.

This would be the last step I need to make me happy with Radio. Currently I'm trying to use the backup feature to make this stuff work, and it's not happy.

Ok... I think I've finally survived the upgrade process to Radio 8. Time to kick the tires.

• Presenting the photos has a nifty transition between photo sets
• Good photo croping modes
• Book Creator

Adding an editor to the html editor list in Internet Explorer

1. Open regedit, go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, find the key ".htm"
2. Expand the ".htm" key and find the key "OpenWithList"
3. Create a new key under "OpenWithList" named after the editor you wish to add, in this example "vi.exe"
4. Close things back to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and find the key "applications"
5. Create a new subkey under "applications" with the same name from above. Ex "vi.exe"
6. Create a new subkey under the key created in the last step called shell.
7. Create a new subkey under shell called edit.
8. Create a new subkey under edit called command.
9. Change the default value under the key command to the full path to your editor in quotes plus "%1" (with the quotes) Ex: "c:\vi\vi.exe" "%1"

Changing the view for view source in Internet Explorer

1. Open regedit, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
2. Expand the key "Software"
3. Expand the key "Microsoft "
4. Expand the key "Internet Explorer"
5. Create key "View Source Editor" under "Internet Explorer"
6. Create key "Editor Name" under "View Source Editor"
7. Change the default value of key "Editor Name" to something named after the view you wish to use, in this example "vi.exe"
8. Close things up and expand HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
9. Expand the key "applications"
10. Create a new subkey under "applications" with the same name from above. Ex "vi.exe"
11. Create a new subkey under the key created in the last step called shell.
12. Create a new subkey under shell called open.
13. Create a new subkey under edit called command.
14. Change the default value under the key command to the full path to your editor in quotes plus "%1" (with the quotes) Ex: "c:\vi\vi.exe" "%1"