K-Squared Ramblings

Microsoft Dinner

RT @ThisIsTrue: Humor: If Microsoft Invented the TV Dinner. #

Word, Fire, Borg and Spam

• RT @ThisIsTrue: AMAZING false-color NASA satellite pic of the damage caused by LA’s #StationFire. #
• Hah! Today’s flashback post is about the time I dreamed I auditioned for Borg: The Musical. (Sadly, I didn’t record any details.) #

Tech

• Odd: the Weather Channel #Android app is 3 times the size of Sherpa. What did they do, forget to compress the graphics? #
• Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of disks on the freeway. Or a pigeon w/a datacard. #
• Realized while writing “Go to Help…” that it would be easy to make a very unfortunate typo. #
• WTF? MS Word 2007 *still* has no keyboard shortcut for Find Next…and it’s not listed in the Customize Keyboard dialog! #
• Aha! It’s called “RepeatFind” even though the button is “Find Next” and DOES have keys…Shift+F4 & Ctrl+Alt+Y??? Standard is F3 or Ctrl+G! #
• Saw a good typo on a tech forum: Windows XP “Service Park 2″ #

Spam Silliness

• RT @lol_spam: Spam subject: “I have Salvia! Join me ” – I misread this as “saliva”…and almost did a spit-take (really!) #
• I don’t want *more* spam, but a wider variety would be nice. The funny stuff is mostly sex, drugs & watches w/occasional acaí. #

Reinstalling Windows, etc.

• Taking the opportunity to do a clean Windows installation (i.e. old box died). Downside: reinstalling a bazillion apps & updates. #
• Hmm. Firefox spellcheck underlines Hiro but is perfectly OK with Nakamura. #
• Ah, a clean desktop! Only 2 icons: Recycle Bin and my rebuild to-do list. #
• RT @rzazueta Also – PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE refrain from building sites all in Flash! Treat Flash like you treat images – enhancement. #sbbuzz #

Microsoft Stores, Sherpa, and Political BS

• Huh. Still not sure what the point of a Microsoft retail store is going to be, but they’re opening in Mission Viejo. #
• Why do some people feel the need to make $#!7 up to enhance political messages? Don’t they know it undermines their position when exposed? #

Sherpa for Android

• Trying out Sherpa. It thinks I’m still in San Diego. And local search turns up several places that have been closed for years. #
• Sherpa also has lots of miscategorized stuff. It’s a Grind as groceries instead of coffee? #
• Wow…Sherpa lists the “Irvine Meadows Amphitheater.” Where are they getting their data? #

Double Tap & Windows 7 Priorities

• This double-tap to unlock feature is probably good for not hitting numbers with your face while talking, but it’s a pain for phone menus #
• Um, yeah, that’s what I most want from an OS: “Microsoft also plans to offer [Windows 7] in an easier-to-open box.” #

WordMess

Must remember: No pasting from MS Word into WordPress. It’s faster to paste plain text and redo formatting than clean up Word’s mess. #

Installing IE8 RC1 — Or Trying

• Installed IE8 RC1. Installer crashed, and I ended up with IE7…even though I’d been running the IE8 beta before. #
• IE8 installer crashes system. New HW checks out. Bad RAM may have screwed something up before I replaced it. Time for System Restore. *grr* #
• Wow, System Restore is taking a lot longer this time. Maybe it’s actually working? (Or maybe safe mode just makes it slower?) #
• I can’t remember how many times I’ve rebooted this computer today. (And no, safe mode didn’t solve it) #
• Finally got IE8 RC1 installed by telling it not to install updates immediately. The Malicious Software Scan was crashing the system. WTF? #
• Now that I’ve FINALLY got IE8 RC1 running, a cursory check of websites I maintain shows no glaring problems. *whew!* #

Updates, Linking In, Inbox Cleanup

• Arg. Still can’t update Office. Wonder if it’s the IE8 beta. Time to download patches manually, I guess. #
• Hey, a Farscape podcast linked to my post on the trip to see Gigi Edgley fire twirling! #
• Serious stab at cleaning up inbox: 550+ messages down to 320. Also first stab at updating/syncing contacts (so many out of date entries) #

Alphabet Soup: XP SP and EV SSL XSS!

Sorry for the lack of updates this past week. I was just way too busy prepping for our move this weekend.

A couple of interesting news bits I noticed when I got into work this morning:

It looks like I’ve been lucky with installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. I’ve had no problems with the one machine I installed it on. According to Information Week, a lot of people are having serious problems with SP3, including BSOD on AMD-based systems.

Also, NetCraft has a screenshot of a PayPal page with both the green bar of an Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificate and a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. It’s a step or two beyond the standard lock icon, but there are still limits to what an EV cert can tell you. Unfortunately PayPal and others are really trying to drum “green bar = safe” into people’s heads.

Hazards of DRM on Music (or video, or any other media)

Mark Pilgrim, in The Day the Music Died, points out what happens when DRM meets market failure.

On August 31, Microsoft will turn off the servers that validate their “PlaysForSure” DRM system (this predates the system they use for the Zune). This means that anyone who has bought music that uses PlaysForSure will not be able to transfer it when they upgrade or replace their computer, or get a new music player.

It won’t be an instantaneous death like DIVX was, or like a subscription system, because it doesn’t phone home whenever you try to play a track. But it’ll be a lot faster than simple technological obsolescence. I can still play my old VHS tapes until my VCR breaks down (and then I could probably still get it fixed if I really wanted to), even though I don’t think I’ve seen a pre-recorded tape in a store in years.

This is also why I prefer to check Amazon’s MP3 store first, before going onto the iTunes Music Store, and then prefer DRM-free iTunes Plus to standard iTunes tracks. Given their current position, Apple isn’t likely to get rid of iTunes anytime soon, but if they ever did, I’d be in the same boat as people who purchased PlaysForSure tracks. (Though I’m hoping they’ll move the entire catalog away from DRM long before that happens.) Whereas since Amazon’s tracks are plain, ordinary MP3s, they could abandon the business tomorrow and I’d still be able to play the tracks for as long as I can find software that plays MP3s.

(via ma.tt)

Sci-Tech Links

Scientists have built a computer model of the Neanderthal vocal tract based on fossils, and have simulated the kinds of sounds they could have produced. Ever since I read Robert J. Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax novels, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that there were two distinct human species, living side by side, for perhaps thousands of years. What happened to them? Did our ancestors kill them off, or interbreed with them? Did they fail to adapt to a changing climate? (via Slashdot)

On a related note, it seems that Expelled, the anti-science propaganda film that actually invokes Godwin’s Law by claiming that “believing” evolution leads to Nazis, opens this weekend. I’m curious to see how badly they misrepresent things (it’s always best to look for yourself, instead of just taking other people at their word—that’s the whole idea behind science, after all), but I can’t bring myself to support them by actually giving them money. Meanwhile, Expelled Exposed is interesting reading.

Somewhat(!) less controversial, InformationWeek reports that Windows XP SP3 may be out as soon as next week. This reminds me: I really should look up some reviews of Vista SP1 and see if it’s improved matters any.

Still in software, dria.org explains why the AwesomeBar is awesome. That’s the nickname given to the new address bar in Firefox 3, which lets you search your browser history as you type. It’s the reason I never went back to Firefox 2 after trying out one of the later FX3 betas, and why I’ve installed Fx3b5 on two more machines. The Opera 9.5 previews have a similar feature, but Firefox’s implementation is better visually. It’s easier to spot the page you want, and over time, it learns which pages you visit more often. It’s so much faster to type a word or two than to hunt through the bookmarks menu. (via Asa Dotzler)

[Edit] I forgot to include IEEE’s article on how copyright law applies to websites, What Can You (Legally) Take From the Web?

Finally, ***Dave relates an incredibly cool story of going to see Avenue Q and what happened after the show. I had no idea that (at least in New York), the “Give Me Your Money” segment was actually collecting for a charity.

Web News: Acid3 and IE8

Two items of interest today: First, the Web Standards Project has announced the completion of the Acid3 Test. Like Acid2, it’s specifically designed to test features that are in the specs, but that have incomplete, buggy, or nonexistant support in current web browsers. Acid2 focused primarily on CSS, and Acid3 focuses more on scripting.

Also, Microsoft has come to their senses and announced that IE8, when encountering a web page that says it was developed for standards, will actually treat it that way instead of treating it as a page that was designed for IE7. This is a much saner approach to the version targeting scheme, which as previously announced would have (depending on developer response) either frozen IE in place or forced us to go through the same process all over again next time.

Yahoo vs. Microsoft

Okay, I really have been out of it the last few days. I hadn’t heard that Microsoft was planning a hostile takeover of Yahoo!.

I have to agree with this Google blog post: this would be bad. Yahoo! seems to “get it” (where “it” is an open Internet) much better than Microsoft does.

Actually, it reminds me a little of Disney vs. Pixar in the past decade. Pixar, in adddition to mastering computer animation, had a great sense of story—something which Disney lost track of in the mid-1990s. They saw Pixar’s movies doing better than their own, and while they were still getting a cut, they didn’t understand why they did better. They thought it was the 3D animation, when really, it was the fact that they were churning out forgettable animated films like that cattle movie whose name escapes me, while Pixar was doing Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.

Actually, the only way I can see a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo! being good for anyone but Microsoft would be if it went down like the Disney-Pixar merger, and the Yahoo! people ended up in charge of web services. Not that I expect it to be likely, and even if they were, I’m sure the higher-ups would cripple them. I get the impression that sort of thing is going on with the IE team as it is.

Rumbling toward IE8

My feed reader is filling up with commentary on Microsoft’s proposal to lock web pages to specific rendering engines (funny how it doesn’t sound quite so forward thinking when you put it like that). Rather than link to a lot of them, I’ll just link to Opera Watch’s post which collects quotes from various standards & browser people.

The IE7/IE6 ratio on this site is still holding above 1 for the month (yay!) at 33.6% to 28.3%.

Also interesting: last week we got our first visit from Internet Explorer 8. Just one visit to Katie’s analysis of Wolfram & Hart’s work comp liability, but it loaded the relevant images, styles, etc., so it looks like an actual browser visit (and not some bot using a fake UA, like the spambot that keeps trying to post comments as Firefox 9). More importantly, it actually came from an IP address that’s assigned to Microsoft and resolves to a microsoft.com hostname, so I think it’s the real deal.

IE8 will pass Acid2

Okay, this will mean nothing to most people out there, but to web developers, particularly those who use standards-based design to maximize compatibility with different browsers, this is monumental.

An internal build of Internet Explorer 8 has passed Acid2.

The Acid2 test was released in April 2005 to test a number of pieces of the HTML and CSS standards that, at the time, no modern browser handled according to spec. The purpose of the test was to prod browser developers into improving their products, and to do so consistently, so that developers would have more tools available for cross-browser sites.

At the time, Microsoft dismissed its its importance entirely. Even though they were working on rendering improvements for IE7, they stated that Acid2 was not one of their goals. Meanwhile Opera and Firefox were both in the wrong phase of their development cycles to make sweeping changes, so Safari jumped on it and became the first browser to pass. (Every once in a while I see someone say Opera was the first, and I have to wonder where they were.) Opera followed with version 9, and the Firefox 3 betas pass it as well.

With Gecko (Firefox), WebKit (Safari), Opera and IE accounting for the four biggest web browsers and the most popular minor browsers (Flock, Camino, Shiira, etc., plus IE shells like Maxthon), this shows unprecedented convergence among clients. It will be much easier to develop a cross-browser website that runs on IE8, Firefox 3, Opera 9+ and Safari 3+.

There are, of course, many aspects of the specs that aren’t covered by Acid2. And there are emerging standards like HTML5 and CSS3. And there are plenty of other bugs, quirks, and extensions among various browsers (IE’s bizarre concept of having layout, for instance, trips up all kinds of weird issues). And then there’s waiting for IE8 to be released, and moving people up from IE7, not to mention all the people we still have to move up from IE6. Full benefit is probably at least 3 or 4 years away. *sigh*

(via WaSP Buzz)