Author: doubtr

Safari on Windows: Seeing the ugly beast

On By doubtrIn Intresting, Software - Technical, TechLeave a comment

My first reaction to the news was, ah so that’s how they will allow people to develop and test their apps for the iphone. Then we loaded it up on a test box and I had three reactions. First: Why does the window frame look like crap? Second: Why is all their web page text so fuzzy to the point I felt sick? Third: How the heck does one open a new tab? It seems to be the pattern that whenever apple ships software for windows it looks much uglier then a default hello world message box type app. Hopefully they will someday improve upon their porting kit and make something that doesn’t look so awful. I can also understand apple’s hostility to windows, if I had to use/test apps that looked like that all day I would be hostile too. 🙂
Oh and a couple more quick usage notes:

  • The back button on my mouse doesn’t do anything in Safari
  • Not having an edge of the window to use for resizing is pretty annoying
  • I can’t find any way to add wikipedia to the search box
  • If you don’t have any binary legacy support to worry about, why are you going 32bit only? Get the extension market used to 64 bit now before it becomes a legacy hassle.
  • Drag and drop customization of the UI elements is pretty cool
  • CFNetwork.dll? This could be fun to play with…

Overall, this has a serious case of portcitus, when your app looks or acts lame because you are more focused on a compatible source tree and exact rending with the other platforms then taking advantage of the platform you are porting to.

Update: Oh yeah… and do some security testing 🙂

Google decides to be evil

On By doubtrIn Microsoft, Software - Religious, VistaLeave a comment

According to a number of articles like this one, Google is the source of an antitrust complaint against Windows Vista because of a change of the default implementation of Desktop file search. In Windows XP, when you searched for files it would do a actual, go scan your harddrive search, and at the end of the search you got an option to turn on indexing to make your search faster. This would search anvista indexingd make notes about your harddrive in advance so that the requested search became much faster. I’m guessing that it was off by default in XP because it wasn’t really optimized for a desktop both in performance, the type of data it indexed about the files and it wasn’t something people did a whole lot so it wasn’t worth the weight on the system. Enter Vista and the world has changed, indexing is the standard approach to search on the desktop as demonstrated by the improved indexers shipped in MacOSX, Google desktop and MSN one. So the good old xp indexer gets a lot of attention, a nice upgrade, some very nice usability improvements and, Oh yeah, the indexer is now on by the default instead of just for power users. Well, that last step is one step too far according to Google.

According to the article they are worried about interactions between their indexer and the vista one. While a lot of people, on digg at least, are calling BS. It is especially weird to me since a number of applications that I’m running these days are busy indexing the harddrive. The photo gallery software and all three music applications are going at it. They manage to coexist in vista, what’s wrong with Google’s indexer? This sounds like a technical limitation in their product they wish to use to harm vista’s indexer.

They have plenty of business reasons for such a desire, they used XP’s deficiencies in this area as a big reason to get people use the Google toolbar (which includes their desktop indexer). This is important to them because it has all sorts of tie backs to Google services where they make money. It was a good gig, the MSN team developed and did the same thing. The Vista indexer doesn’t have any such ties, but now people have lost a huge reason to install the Google toolbar (and the MSN toolbar for that matter). So they have a business problem, and from their complaint a minor technical problem. Business model problems don’t make good complaints to the DOJ, but maybe they could make hay with their technical issue. Unfortunately most techies would predictably call BS if they heard the complaint (I guess that’s why it was a confidential complaint) which leads back to the premise, It appears that Google has unabashedly decided to be evil.

On the other hand, indexers are programs that are not just running all the time, but constantly trying to do work. Smart applications attempt to do more and more stuff when the user wouldn’t notice, such as checking for and downloading updates or pre-creating image thumbnails so they don’t have to be generated at run time. On a logical level there is some theoretical maximum to how much time a computer has for such background tasks. Google seems to be implying that there is not enough room for anyone but them. Even in this worse case, this is something that a years worth of Moore’s law will fix faster then any legal remedy. Oh and I should point out it has been years since the first of this generation of indexers were downloaded and used on computers.

It’s going to be interesting to see the arguments on the other side of this one.

Disclosure: I work in windows networking, I don’t have anything to do with the indexer technologies except complain about how slow the early versions of it in pre-reset longhorn were.

Cleaning up a minor security argument

On By doubtrIn Ideas, Microsoft, Tech1 Comment

I saw a slashdot article this morning about Apple releasing more vuln fixes. In the comment section, discussion broke into the usual “why do people think Macs are safer then Windows” arguements. The two major points of “it has less of a market” and “it’s just more secure” went back and forth. I happen to think both are an oversimplification of the subject.

Vuln finding is a function people of going after whatever is currently easiest. Many attackers have broaden their horizons to other platforms once Windows became significantly more secure and harden against attack. Oracle was the next major target and Apple might be the one after. I admit that I love the irony of the switch after both companies choose to market on how they must be more secure since people weren’t finding vulns in them.

Exploits on the other hand is based on the business case these days. The vulns are available but Windows didn’t have the magnitude of the problem it did until there was a profit motive to create bot networks.

So to put it together, vulns found help you tell about the security of an area, exploiting tells you about how profitable a particular OS is to attack. The corollary of this rule is that as a random host you are as profitable as the OS, as a specific host with specific data or rights you are as valuable to attack as that data or rights. The result being that if your data is valuable is doesn’t matter that there are few exploits for your box when there are plenty of vulns.

7 Hills of Kirkland

On By doubtrIn Biking, Journal, SeattleLeave a comment

Today I did the 7 11 Hills of Kirkland, which involves 4,600 ft of climbing over 58 miles. Since I got another broken spoke 25 miles into the Saturday CTS training series ride and had gotten new wheels to fix it the same day, this was a bit of a make up session. Aside from mileage I was glad to see that the climbing was close to what the RAMROD training series ride did this weekend. Previously I’ve never ridden Seminary Hill had not gone up Winery Hill, so it was nice to get some exposure to both of those forms of torture. Favorite Hill was Norway Hill, least favorite was Novelty Hill (long, busy street and I had to go to the bathroom bad). Second least favorite was Old Redmond Road Hill, where I was getting passed a bit. I’m still getting some thigh cramps at different points, but nothing near as bad as one of the last rides I did. One guy was on the ground and in pain at the bottom of Winery road from painful thighs. I had a twinge going up the steep part, but no real need for compensation till the last climb of education hill, and I did allot better then the previous RAMROD training series ride that I had to abort by climbing the Snoqualmie parkway hill.

Pop Quiz!

On By doubtrIn Microsoft, Software - Technical, Vista2 Comments

Which day did I move Vista Media Center from my very powerful 64 bit main box to a mostly dedicated 32 bit box?

Popfly looks damn cool

On By doubtrIn Intresting, Microsoft1 Comment

Go watch the screencast about Microsoft Popfly. It’s a mashup builder using Silverlight. It looks awsome and the screencast includes using World of Warcraft data to build a Mashup Site.

Warning for my readers

On By doubtrIn FunLeave a comment

If you buy frozen blueberries at Costco, do NOT and I repeat do NOT cut open the bag on the dotted lines if you want to be able to reseal it later.

Back in the rides

On By doubtrIn Biking, JournalLeave a comment

Last night I finally got back into the tues/thursday rides with Per’s Eastside Tours. While Thompson hill kicked my butt and caused me to drag a good chunk of the rest of the way, it was a fun ride. It’s always a great feeling to power the way back up East Lake Sammamish to finish up the ride. This time I was able to maintain a 20 mph pace following someone, but others who had been training longer were up to 24 mph. I have also been reasonable good at getting to the cascade training series rides too. While the CTS ride this weekend is one of my favorites heading down from Renton to the Tacoma Tidal Flats, I’m planning on the more challenging RAMROD training series ride. I might be up for a hike or shorter hide on Sunday, but I imagine that most people will be involved with family.

Cascade Cycle Calandar

On By doubtrIn Biking, IntrestingLeave a comment

One little peice of code I wrote a while back is a cascade cycle daily ride ICS file that can be used with Outlook 2007, Windows Calandar (in vista) and ICal (untested). Now that we are back into riding season I expect to start getting more use from it. Also since vista and office 2007 are out, maybe some other people might get some use from it too. It attempts to estimate how long the ride will be based on the speed and the estimated legth, but it’s only a guess. Enjoy.

Get together my thoughts on OOXML/ODF

On By doubtrIn Microsoft, Software - Religious, Tech2 Comments

An attempt to respond to the latest thing I’ve read and stake out my feelings on ODF/OOXML.

From what I understand of the market, you have a number of (free) add-on ODF plugins for Microsoft Office. This means that the simple requirement being able to read and write the format will be satisfied to the level of quality of the plugins and the ability of the interoperable aspects of the ODF standard to handle office semantics. I feel that the blogoshpere has made it clear that the only way ODF will be able to handle the body of existing office documents (Bugs and features) at full fidelity is for there to be a large number of extensions that would render ODF something not ODF anymore, especially from the standpoint of other ODF implementations. It might be in the vaguely “right” looking container, but it would not be interoperable. Any movement in this space would (rightly?) be branded Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

I believe it is clear that users want something like OpenXML. We’ve seen that previous movements in this direction by office in the 2003 products are never used because of the loss of fidelity. I’m just not going to migrate my spreadsheets to ODF format if my formulas are going to break, and that is the type of user complaints that you will start to get when you tell your customers you must move over. If you don’t get how complex this type of thing gets, you should start reading Raymond Chen’s blog. It is quite obvious how hostile the ODF crowd appears to be to backwards comparability with the amount of hoopla generated around supporting the 1900 excel/lotus 123 date issues in OOXML.

Could all the the technical issues been worked out in ODF? Maybe. I think the hostile environment, the time required to work on modifications to ODF in an open way and the timeline for the politics and government mandates pretty much precluded that option for the short term. On the brightside, ODF folks can take the out there and free OOXML spec and decide how they want to absorb it for future versions of ODF. Thus somday the promised nirvana of ODF being the native interoperable format of all office suites that it’s supporters want might be realized. In the here and now, there is a pretty cool creative energy that both formats competing right now has created. In an attempt to score points in some insane “Who is Right” contest both sides are pointing out the flaws in the other, and the pragmatists will pick up the real stuff and just make thier stuff better. This is a good thing no matter how ugly the process is to get there.

In the background of this debate, It appears that their are two camps in the world when it comes to this stuff, purists who believe that future technology should be clean slates not marred with the real world and those who muck around in the complex world of user demand and prior work. I have to admit out of college I was very much in favor of the purist view of the world. This little debate is making me realize that I’ve now firmly landed in the other camp. The purist typically ends in the worst hacks and/or low adoption. There are a lot of people out there who use software and just don’t care about the religious battles. It doesn’t matter what your standard is or how you architected the code is, if it doesn’t solve the user’s needs.  Put simply, users are more important then you or I and placing requirements down that are tangential to their needs is just a speedbump for them to roll over. The coders who love and support these users are going to have to help carry forward whatever hack someone came up with to get around the artificial speedbump. The sooner one grok’s this concept the better the world might be.

If ODF solves a user’s needs, they will use it, if OOXML solves it better it will be used regardless of which of them have ISO certification. There is already ECMA certification and good IP promises for OOXML. (The inability to use without IP considerations a file embded in either format is a red herring). It appears that Microsoft is supportive of having OOXML ISO certified, which sounds great to me. If there are considerations unrelated to ODF then they should be fixed, but the notion of which sausage factory produced the 1.0 spec or that you can’t have both formats be standards seems silly to me. Both are too new on the scene to have proven that they are going to be the end all. If anything, office via market share and caring about backwards compatability has a huge leg up.

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but nothing to do with office.