Recently in Microsoft Category

I just re-read this blog post on Vista security as it was linked from the Vista SP1 RTM announcement and had a thought....

• Internet Geeks: Linux and mac are so much more secure than windows! Look at how few vulnerabilities there are for them!
  
• Microsoft and Friends: Those OSs only have a few percent of the market share, so they aren't targeted hardly as much, so of course there are less! Our OS is dominant so it's a much bigger target you silly little linux nerds!
  

And now with Vista....

• Microsoft and Friends: Vista is so much more secure than XP! Look at how few vulnerabilities there are for it!
  
• Internet Geeks: [...]
  

So should the Linux geeks response to the security in Vista be the same as it was from Microsoft about market share? A lot of the tech news and podcasts I read and listen to note that Vista doesn't seem to have the market penetration that it should have (a few of the TWiT podcasts have pointed out that the number of Vista users doesn't match anywhere near what it should compared to the number of new computers produced).

Anyway, just a thought....

Being a new Mac user and a computer user of 15-ish years, I figured I'd list some of the things that were not the garden of eden utopia that the idea of a mac sometimes is. Where possible, I've included my solutions or findings. Anyone out there in the lazyweb who has ideas to address anything, feel free to chime in.

• Working in the big Dilbertesque corporate world I get to deal with outlook and exchange, and speaking as someone who doesn't have to deal with the administration side of the Microsoft Exchange server side of thing, I have to say that Outlook and Exchange seems to work fairly well. Email works OK though way too heavyweight (and not nearly as well as my precious and fantastically fast and efficient Mutt or as I heard recently, sylpheed), shared calendar is nice, and a global addressbook makes things all happy and good. Of course, I have a horrendous situation myself at the new location where I'm working downtown, but when I was on the north shore it was all good.

  On the PC I used Outlook 2003 (nice) and recently Outlook 2007 (slower, but had better search and more glitter). Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac has Entourage which is a really horrible looking port in my opinion and seemed to lack the Exchange-over-HTTP protocol that I need to access my mail. I haven't gotten my paws on Office 2008 for Mac yet to see how that is. Mail.app (the built in mail client) looks and acts fairly standard for a GUI mail app, and supports exchange, but not over HTTP.

  My solution for this so far has been to run my working version of Outlook 2007 from the PC under VMWare Fusion in Unity mode (and waiting for Office 2008 for the Mac).

• BitTorrents (taking a 180 degree deviation from corporate work stuff).... I love uTorrent and of the Mac Torrent clients I've tried, none compares. The "official" Bittorrent client is ok, and missing some of features I like from the windows version. Also I'm scared of the corporateness of the company now they are legit. Tinfoil hat firmly in place. Transmission isn't bad interface wide, and seemed really slow to do downloading. Turns out that apparently it's banned by a bunch of trackers. Today I found BitRocket which has a nice UI, seems to do about 80% of what I like, and actually downloads files. Anyone know what the canonical OS/X bittorrent app is?

• Simple things like keyboard shortcuts. I really miss hitting WindowsKey+L to lock my screen. There are some really hacky solutions out there (IE: a wonderfully horrible solution of a shortcut of ctrl-f8 ctrl-shift-f8 or something like that), but the closest I've found is enabling the "show status in menu" option from the keychain access tool. Simple huh? Still just a mouse click, though not quite as easy as WindowsKey+L. Option number 3 is a screensaver hotcorner... doesn't feel quite right to me.

• I discovered that all funky-odd-craptastic random systems problems don't go away as soon as you move away from the Redmond giant. While trying to get the screensaver hot corner to work i found that my screensaver didn't seem to be engaging. In fact, it wasn't coming on at all. Reboot (lesson learned from the past)... same issue. OK, muck around for an hour or so. No luck. OK, reboot again. Works perfectly now.

  *sigh*

• An iTunes music library with 44,000 items loads just as slowly on a dual core 2.2Ghz, 2G of RAM Mac as a dual core 1.8Ghz, 1.5G of RAM Acer :)

• Having a built in terminal is great... however, when the backspace/delete key when SSHing into servers isn't 100% the same, and the terminal type isn't 100% the same as with say, the defacto Windows terminal program Putty, it is annoying. Not toe-chopped-off annoying, more one-mosquito-somewhere-in-the-bedroom-as-you-try-to-sleep annoying. Just not used to BSD I guess.

• Along with the Terminal twitchings, I really want quickputty for OS/X. Anyone? Please? Yes, I can save 40 odd sets of Terminal config files and access them from a folder on the dock... it's just not the same (or as quick and easy). Ironically, I can use the quickputty install in my VMWware machine to accomplish this if I want to do all my terminal work within the windows VM.
  

I'm sure most of these things are fixed by either just getting used to the new environment or finding the "right" tool for the job which I'm sure the mac-people know, and us windows/linux folks just don't know the right question to ask. I'll be back tomorrow or the next day with what's nice and better living in the Mac world.

As I said I just got an iPod, so now I have to deal with managing the music for it in my particular situation. I have the following going on at home right now:

• A fileserver with approximately 140G of mp3s all nicely tagged via MusicBrainz's tools and organized nicely into directories (ie: music player independant). All music is stored there.
  
• Laptop from work. "Daily" music is stored here, podcasts are downloaded for playing at work, and when I download my radio show during the day at work, I load it onto my mp3 player from here.
  
• Windows workstation with headphones. Minimal music management is done here, this is a gaming and accounting box.
  
• Linux workstation, hooked up to speakers. Music playing is done here, music management (basically rating songs and creating playlists) is done in Rhythmbox. No podcasts here.
  

I've never had a decent mp3 player before, the one I have now has 256mb of space, so not a lot of daily changes are made.

Anyway, music management on the iPod is supposed to be done through iTunes which is a nice application, however it has a few downfalls.

You can only sync your iPod on one computer.

Bah. Unless there's a trick around it, when you sync an iPod to a computer, and then take it to another one and try to sync it, it tells you the device is new and anything on it will be nuked off. Say if I were to sync music for the gym on it at home, then try to put the radio show or something new on it at work. No fun at all.

Except that the new iPods don't work under Linux thanks to Apple encrypting stuff. It's already been broken, but hasn't made it's way into any released products.

What I was hoping to do was to sync things like my radio show and podcasts via the laptop, and load up the music under Linux. Looks like that won't work, at least for now :(

My solution in the meantime....

I'm copying 141G of music onto my work laptop, in the theory that it moves from work to home and back. Inconvenient however as I don't want to have to pull out the laptop each time I add some new music. Of course, the laptop doesn't have that big a hard drive, so I'm mounting it on the laptop and adding all the music in it to the iTunes library. So in theory it'll just show up as "can't find file" when I'm not at home.

This will let me get everything I need, for now. I'm hoping that I can, in theory, manage songs via Linux when I get there.

Anyone have better ideas? It comes down to:

• Can't sync an iPod on more than one computer with iTunes.
  
• iTunes doesn't run (well) on Linux (last time I checked) and isn't what I want to use under Linux anyway.
  
• Can't manage an iPod from Linux
  

Anyone have anything similar? Any better ideas?

I recently got a (legit even!) copy of Windows Vista and decided to check it out slowly. When I got my new system I got dual hard drives, and the second one hasn't really been used yet, so I can install a new OS and migrate over at whatever pace I need to without losing hard drive space, or having to go "all or nothing".

I don't want to focus on the boring stuff, benchmarks, screenshots of the install, all stuff you can find in pretty much any Vista review out there. Instead I want to focus on how using Vista affects me as a user. I'm a geek so I know about stuff, but honestly, I really want to just use the computer to get stuff done (in my case mostly game play and graphics / photography / photoshop work).

So here we go.

Read on for the geekiness.

Theory #2
My second theory is even better, dual tin-foil I think. I think that the Zune might have been nothing more than an experiment to see how pervasive you could make DRM in peoples lives.

When the first few proof of concept applications for Microsoft Vista came out the concept of DRM, or Digital Rights Management was put out in a very "soft" way. It was clear that DRM was an integral part of the OS design, and very reasonable sounding examples of use were shown. A doctor ensuring that only his patient could read the files he sends, a Realtor ensuring that his contract is only valid for a set number of days, and so on.

Most people in the open source community see DRM as having far more potential for evil. However, the common person probably doesn't have the same opinions.... I see the Zune as Microsoft putting out a feeler to see just how people will react to DRM in their daily lives. If the Zune, or it's DRM anyway, isn't recieved too poorly, then that's the sign that they can push a little bit more, then a little bit more...

OK, you can take the tinfoil hat off now, I think I'm done :)

Microsoft released their iPod competitor the Zune, or at least that's what everything things it is. I have two theories (conspiracy theories of course, full tin-foil hat engaged) about what the nefarious plans for the Zune really are however, and they both include the fact that the Zune was never meant to be a serious competitor in the iPod space.

Theory #1
Part of the deal that Microsoft struck to get their Zune store up and running was to pay universal music $1 for every unit sold. Not only is that a bit offensive to me, as it basically is saying that anyone who buys a Zune is going to pirate music, so Universal is going to get it's shake, but it also presents potential problems to Apple.

Because the record industry has now seen that it can get manufacturers of MP3 players to pay on a per unit basis as well as taking a cut from the online music sales, they will no doubt pursue this avenue when their contracts with Apple need re-negotiation. Why accept butter on only one side of the bread when you can have two? Aren't these the same guys who tried (unsuccessfully) to get Apple to raise the prices of songs in the iTunes Music Store from $0.99 to $2.99 or so for newer releases, and create a sliding scale of "new music costs more"?

What's to say that Microsoft was looking at what it would take to compete with the iPod and the iTunes Music Store and found that the only way they could license music was to give the record companies a cut of each unit sold. Obviously they'd know that by doing this that a precedent would be set for the next time that this happened. I'm willing to guess that they are well aware of the slim margins that you get on not only the hardware sales but the online music store as well (I've heard that apple barely gets more than a few cents out of each $.99 purchase, and from experience I know that selling hardware sucks, and I doubt that a huge amount of an iPod sale is profit).

Wouldn't you see this as a chink in the Apple monopoly of music players? Force Apple to get less profit by convincing the people that Apple deals with that they need more of a cut on hardware?

I'm just sayin'...

Argh, I hate being a geek sometimes. When I see a computer belonging to a relative that's in such bad shape and instead of just leaving it alone I have to volunteer to "fix it up and make it better", leaving me to be here at the computer at 9 at night on a Sunday running virus scan after virus scan on an old and busted laptop.

This laptop is in bad shape. Going to download programs like HijackThis.exe or AVG result in popups and being redirected to other "search" sites. The computer is slow as a dog, and while it's not the newest of hardware (and AMD XP1700 or so), it's not supposed to be that slow. There are all sorts of odd exe's running in the task manager that re-appear after you kill them and after I installed TeaTimer, a tool to prevent malicious processes from doing nasty things, I simply got popup after popup after popup of "do you want xxx process to [add|change|remove] xxx?" After hitting the 'don't prompt me again' button I basically got a constant barrage of the little information windows telling me that xxx process was blocked from doing [something nasty].

Honestly the computer needs to be nuked and repaved, but it's not mine and I don't know how much important data is actually on there, so I really would rather not risk deleting the family fortune accidently.

I really wish there was a "do everything / clean everything" disk or program out there. I've run spybot search & destroy few times, adaware, and have downloaded and used Hiren's Boot CD and MiniPE to run scanners, cleaners, and the like. Way to much work in my opinion.

What I'd love to see is a CD or DVD image that you boot up with, it goes into it's own environment, then downloads the latest adware and virus definitions, then auto-scans and auto-heals / deletes all the badness. Also it would have to delete all the nasty files, even after running multiple anti virus and anti adware programs I still had a bunch of oddly named .exe files in the c:\ root.

Would be a huge boom for places like FutureShop where they charge $75 to de-virus your computer. Though they probably have their own version of this already come to think of it.

Things that I'm doing now to make the whole process easier:

• Always always always run in Safe Mode or under a different environment (ie: a boot CD).
  
• Scan everything two or three times, rebooting in between. Then reboot and scan some more.
  
• Don't depend on just one scanning tool.... grab both adware and spybot s&d, get AVG and norton and fprot, just to be sure.
  
• Don't forget to update virus definitions from the start.
  
• Clear out the recycle bin, and IE cache at the start, this'll make sure that there's a) less files to check for the anti-spyware and anti-virus programs, but it'll nuke any nasties that are living in there from the get-go.
  
• If it looks suspicious throw the filename into google, more than likely you'll end up on a page like this telling you if the file is nasty or not.
  
• Update to the latest service pack and hotfixes. Not sure if this is best to do before or you've done your scanning and cleaning, I'd wager after. No sense in patching a computer that's half hooped already.
  
• A defrag certainly can't hurt, might even give a little extra boost of speed.
  

And when you're done and getting the computer ready to send back to it's owner:

• Ensure that everything is up to date and the firewall is turned on.
  
• Enable auto update.
  
• Use an alternative browser, possibly with an IE skin. Or update to IE7 if they insist on using IE. Make sure that the new browser is set as the default one.
  
• If they're using outlook / outlook express... well, I'm not sure if these still need help to prevent viruses. I'd probably say install Thunderbird, set up the adaptive spam filters, and show them how to set a message as spam/non-spam.
  
• If they're anything like my uncle-in-law they have a wide variety of what I like to refer to as "crap" installed on their system. Random file viewers, etc. Go through them (potentially even with the computer owner :) and ask them if they actually use the program. If not, get rid of it, it's just safer/cleaner that way.
  

Depending on the users use and experience with computers, converting their system to something like Ubuntu Linux might be possible. Your average user who only surfs and emails probably would do well with something like this. Of course, the sort of people who let themselves get infected with nasties aren't generally the type of people who are linux people.....

Anyone know where I can get a magic CD like that by the way?

Interesting insight in Paul Thurrott's latest Vista article. Paul is someone who I've often had resentment for, simply because of his (apparent) steadfast love of Microsoft and all things Bill. Turns out that he's a bit more fair and balanced than that, and I apologize for the misgivings I had for him. Of course, maybe I just like him cause he's bashing MS :) Basically it sounds like he's sick of apolagizing for microsoft. He points out that Vista has gone through far more turmoil than it should have, has gained and lost features in the process (WinFS anyone?) and seems to be lifting features from Apple and Linux, not the other way around.

Shame on you, Microsoft. Shame on you, but not just for not doing better. We expect you to copy Apple, just as Apple (and Linux) in its turn copies you. But we do not and should not expect to be promised the world, only to be given a warmed over copy of Mac OS X Tiger in return. Windows Vista is a disappointment. There is no way to sugarcoat that very real truth.

He also addresses one of the HUGE warts I saw in the last build I installed.... the User Account Protection. Think of it as what MacOS does when you need to install an application into the system directory, or how you don't actually create a root account in Ubuntu, but instead are asked for your user password when you do a "system" type operation. The last Vista build basically pops up (yet another) badly worded dialog box asking you to say 'yes' because something is accessing a system file. This is good right? When spyware installs itself into c:\windows\system32 you'll see that keygen.exe is doing something naughty and say no, right? Yes and no. Seems that Vista pops this up for almost anything. Changing the wallpaper and doing such innocuous operations. I can very easily see people simply clicking "Yes" all the time because they do it so much. The beauty of the MacOS way of doing this exact same thing is that you hardly ever see the dialog, so when it's there you know that something is going on. In my year or so with a powerbook I can count the number of times I saw this on two hands, and this was mostly for installing Apple or (ironically) Microsoft software :) It's good to see that even the hard core microsofties are not so hardcore that they ignore the warts that seem to be more and more apparent all the time, and the now hugely obvious "hype hype hype" campaigns that have been there since the Windows 95 days (remember trying to make the choice between Windows 95 and OS/2 anyone?), and have been going on for a couple of years now by Microsoft. Anyway, it's a great article, go read it.

Well, microsoft released Local.live.com which is a competitor for google maps. I took a quick look and the birds eye view (of selected areas) is nice, except that the areas that are shown are very small and you can't really scroll that far. Oh well, takes lots of time to get that low level photos of the country I guess. The next thing I did was put in a couple of addresses and was happy so see that they don't jump into the old and ugly mapquest interface for directions. Sadly, the new solution, while less ugly by far, is how you say.... "inaccurate". First of all, I put in my home address in Mission, BC, Canada to Vancouver, BC. "Start address not found". Ok, put in just "mission, bc, canada". Still no go. Next step was a different starting place, Seattle. This gave me better results. Well, kinda. Apparently the system thinks that "Vancouver, BC, Canada" is the same as Vancouver Oregon. Lets just say it's nice to see the update, looking forward to them going outside the US, and I think I'm going to keep trusting Google to get me where I'm going :)

Hey, does anyone Know the Rules for Windows Media Player 10 and the "Return to Previous Playlist" feature? If you have a playlist set up and you click on an mp3 file or video file, sometimes it loads up and gives you a 'click previous to return to your previous playlist' in the playlist, which is nice. It returns me to exactly where I was before, so if I'm in the middle of my morning 4 hour Howard Stern fix, or a long audio book, I can listen to another song win WMP and not lose where I was. However, this doesn't always work. Sometimes links will open a new song/video with the 'return to playlist' there, sometimes it doesn't. Anyone know what the rules are for this, or if there are any? I'm getting to the point that it's so random that I have to be careful opening any media link at all, which is a piss off. The question of why the hell am I using WMP at all is a separate question completely :)