Brandon LeBlanc over at the Windows Team blog has posted a nice overview of when the final Windows 7 “RTM bits” will be available through various channels.
There’s also a note in there confirming speculation that a Family Pack offering for installation on up to 3 PCs is in the works.
I’ve seen a lot of tweets the last couple days about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates (or “Skip” Gates). Lots of my friends have expressed outrage and derided the police offices who investigated the break-in report and eventually arrested Gates.
I’ve not been so quick to do so. Yesterday I read the official police report, which has since been pulled from the link I had (if I find it again I’ll link it here). I’ve also read the Washington Post interview with Gates after the arrest.
Now, a bit of background about where I’m coming from. Three years ago my house was broken into. I came home to find the door wide open and a window that had been taken apart. I called the local police who told me to wait outside, and an officer arrived moments later. He proceeded to enter the house to make sure the perpetrator wasn’t still inside. This was his job, and I felt nervous for him… someone could be in there with a weapon. I’ve long empathized with law enforcements officers. Every day they’re at risk, and I don’t know how I’d deal with the fear that even a routine traffic stop could end in disaster.
Not long before that I was home sick and locked myself out of the house when retrieving something from my car. I had to climb in through a small window that was open on the front of the house, and I was nervous that somebody would see me and think I was breaking in. Part of me wished someone had. It would’ve made me feel greatly at ease to know that my neighbors or passersby on the street were looking out for me. Instead, nobody saw, or cared enough to follow up on it. Just the same as when my house was actually broken into a few months later.
So as I read the story about Gates, I found absolutely no fault with the neighbor who reported to the police that two men appeared to be forcing their way into Gates’ home. Then when I read about the police officers who arrived and went to investigate the house, I completely understand them being on edge. They have to be prepared for the worst, that’s their job and how they stay alive.
The police report says that Gates initially refused to provide identification, and accused the police officer of being a racist for investigating the report. On this count I absolutely 100% disagree with Gates. The police officer was doing his job. In the WP interview, Gates says:
“I was thinking, this is ridiculous, but I’m going to show him my ID, and this guy is going to get out of my house,” Gates said. “This guy had this whole narrative in his head. Black guy breaking and entering.”
So Gates basically says that he assumes any police officer doing his job is a racist. He then says:
“I said ‘Who are you? I want your name and badge number.’ I got angry.”
But why? Again, the officer was doing his job and was trying to leave, and Gates gets angry? Why? I would have been thankful. They investigated an earnest report, found that nothing was wrong, and were ready to leave. But instead he got angry. Angry about what? About them investigating a reported break-in?
I just don’t get it. Up until this point I believe the police acted appropriately, and that Gates had no reason to get angry. The officer left the house and Gates followed him outside yelling at him.
At this point, the group of police officers he was antagonizing decided to arrest him for disorderly conduct. I’ll agree that this was probably unnecessary, and the fact that the charges have been dropped supports that. But I believe police officers often arrest and detain people for antagonizing them or a crowd. Anyone who is doing that is probably trying to get arrested.
However, I’m still at a loss for where race factored in on the side of the police. Does Gates think that if a black police officer had arrived, he wouldn’t have approached the house and asked for identification? Does he think that if he’d been white the police officer would have just told the neighbor to go about her business and not investigate the report?
It seems to me that the only place in this story where race factors in is in Gates’ rather bigoted assumption (which he explained in his remarks above) that the white police officer must be a racist, and that an appropriate thing to do would be to try and provoke him.
Maybe if some eyewitness accounts come out that dispute the police report, or if someone can find some shred of evidence that this officer has any history of racial bias, then I’ll start to understand the outrage. At this point, I feel like I must be missing something… or are we really that insecure about race issues these days?
What do you think? Is there some part of the story I’m missing?
If you’re following any tech news today at all, you’ve probably heard about the hacking of Twitter’s Google Apps account. Some have suggested that this is some kind of “wake-up call for cloud computing.”
Twitter responded and said not to blame Google or cloud computing in general.
I agree… mostly. In my opinion, this isn’t a problem with storing your documents on a hosted “cloud” service like Google Apps. It is, however, a problem with not enforcing (at the corporate level) the same kind of security requirements that have become common for on-premises document storage. That means password complexity requirements, regular password expirations, and very very strict account retrieval options (if you allow such an option at all).
Does Google allow Google Apps customers to enforce such restrictions? Actually, I can’t tell. I went to the Google Apps site and looked around and couldn’t find any indication, even in their Security FAQ page. I even did a search for “password” on the Google Apps Premier site, and got no results! (same for words like ”security” – hmm). Maybe someone should tell them to switch to Bing for searching their site ;)
A web search on Bing or Google returns this story, which seems to indicate Google does or at one time said it would support such restrictions. But I don’t see any other sites mentioning it, nor any indication from Google itself. If they don’t offer that ability, they certainly should!
But as Twitter said, this was really a failure on their part, not Google’s. On the bright side, hopefully all of the attention they’re getting will result in others fixing these kind of problems before they suffer the same fate.
I’m confused. AT&T wants me to pay $599 for a 16GB iPhone 3GS. $599!?! I’ve been an AT&T subscriber for about 3 years now. I always pay on time. I first signed up with a BlackJack. Then less then a year after that, I bought an iPhone at full price on its launch day. Then last year I upgraded to a 3G as soon as I found a store with one in stock.
Now I’m aware that most 3G users aren’t getting the discounted $199/$299 pricing that new subscribers are getting. Though apparently some people are getting that deal. Most others are paying $399/$499 depending on the model. But $599/$699? That’s ludicrous.
What’s more, I actually bought another iPhone 3G from the AT&T store at FULL PRICE in February, after my original iPhone 3G was stolen. Apparently, even though I paid full price, they extended my contract and upgrade eligilibility from that point in February. I asked very specifically, and was told by the AT&T store staffer, that replacing my iPhone 3G at full price would not affect my upgrade eligibility.
Well, apparently that’s not true. Even though I paid the full $399 price for an 8GB replacement phone, I’m now listed as not eligible to upgrade until 7/15/2010. Seriously. If I’d been told that buying that full price replacement would extend my contract and upgrade term, I obviously wouldn’t have done it, and would’ve just bought one on eBay or Craiglist. In retrospect, I probably should’ve done that anyway.
So this afternoon I spent a good 20 minutes going over this with a customer service rep who insisted that I had never bought an iPhone 3G last summer and that I “upgraded” to the 3G from an original iPhone in February at an Apple Store. The account summary she forwarded me indicates an upgrade and new contract in February but doesn’t indicate what I “upgraded” from or where I did it, so I think she was just making that up.
I told her I wouldn’t care about the contract being renewed if she could just fix my upgrade eligibility, since it should be based on the last time I got a discount on a phone, not the last time I paid full price for a replacement. She said this couldn’t be done, and refused to transfer me to anybody else.
The best she could tell me was that I needed to take any paperwork I had to the AT&T store in Bellevue and try to convince them to fix it for me. This means rummaging through boxes (since I just moved) to hopefully find at least the receipt for the new phone, and taking at least an hour out of my time, with very little promise of actually achieving anything.
I’m going to try that tonight or tomorrow. If they can’t help me, I may have to go take a look at the Pre.
I put up the start of a description page on BrandonTools.com for Twilver. I started with a list of what’s currently implement, what I plan to implement soon, and future feature ideas.
At this point , having it locked to the 3.0 developer preview of Silverlight actually seems to work as an automatic filter to keep the initial testing group nice and small 
Perhaps in the next few days as I get more functionality enabled in it, I will set up a forum on BrandonTools.com and try to recruit a few more testers to try it out and report bugs + suggestions.
If you want to keep up to date on its progress, just watch this space, or follow me on Twitter!
I had some questions in the comments about how I built Twilver, so here’s a quick overview of how the app works. Of course this is still “prototype” territory so it could change entirely in the future, especially if you have better ideas!
Anyway, the current build works like this:
First, you browse to Twilver.Cloudapp.net which is an Azure ASP .NET page hosting the Twilver Silverlight 3.0 control. The control checks to see if it has a cached access token, and since it’s your first visit, it does not. It then redirects the hosting web page to Twitter and makes a call via the OAuth API. Then you log into Twitter directly so only they see your credentials, and they give back an authorized token to my ASP .NET service on Azure, via the OAuth callback registration.
After that my service exchanges the auth token for an Access Token and Access Secret, which are provided by Twitter and don’t expire unless the user goes to Twitter and revoke’s my app’s authorization.
The web page passes the Access Token and Secret to the Silverlight control, which stores them in local isolated storage. Then when the Silverlight control wants to make a request to Twitter, it calls into my proxy WCF service running on the Azure server. This is necessary (I think), because Twitter doesn’t register their API for cross-domain access by Silverlight and Flash. So Silverlight prevents me from making a direct cross-domain call. My proxy service is a very, very simple WCF wrapper around the Twitter API. Building this in Visual Studio was dead simple.
In the future I could change it so that the access token and secret aren’t stored in the Silverlight local storage, but instead are stored by my service in the Azure storage service. For now, having the control do the caching seemed simplest, as it means my service is stateless and doesn’t track anything at all about users. I may want to change that any way in the future, though, so that I could offer features like roaming settings and such.
So that’s what I put together this weekend. Any feedback or suggestions would be more than appreciated!
Update: As of 5/28 I ported Twilver to run on Silverlight 2.0. I’m in the process of refining that port, and creating a Windows Gadget (for Vista + Win7) that hosts it on your desktop or sidebar. I’ll make further posts with more info about that.
If you follow me on Twitter, or read my earlier post about Twitter clients, you might have figured out that I’m not exactly thrilled about the state of Twitter clients on Windows. I’ve also long been itching to see what all the hype with Windows Azure and Silverlight was about, and to try and wrap my head around XAML. So a few days ago I decided to check out the Silverlight walkthroughs and installed the Azure and Silverlight 3.0 Beta SDKs. Since then I’ve been busy (well, mostly yesterday and today)…
So there’s my first Silverlight + Azure app, running standalone thanks to Silverlight 3.0’s new out-of-browser support. Of course the UI and feature set are very early at this point. But I’m pretty happy with what I was able to get working in such a short time. Especially since I spent several hours just figuring out how to deal with Twitter’s OAuth authentication API.
Unfortunately there isn’t an end-user friendly version of the Silverlight 3.0 Beta (you have to get it via the SDK), as it is targeted at developers only. So that means it’s not very convenient to share this with potential testers. In the meantime I may look at putting up a Silverlight 2.0 version (confined to a browser window) for people to look at. I have no idea what the Silverlight 3.0 timeline is like, but now I have reason to hope it gets released soon =)
I plan to work pretty aggressively on matching feature parity with the popular clients, like Witty and Tweetie, and then start working on some other ideas I’ve had. My very first goal, though, is to get the basic functionality available in a lightweight, attractive client UI. Right now the Windows offerings are either horrendous resource hogs (Witty), or butt ugly (all the Adobe AIR apps, like Seesmic Desktop). The Mac client situation seems quite a bit better, and that just makes the Windows situation bug me even more. Hopefully I can help change that. And since Silverlight is cross-platform, I may be able to win over some Mac users as well
Oh yeah, the name I’ve been using for the project is Twilver. This is likely just a placeholder until I decide on something I like better… I was originally going to call it Twilight, but apparently that name has already been claimed.
Hope you’re all enjoying the Windows 7 RC!
This week we published an update to the Federated Search Implementer’s Guide. This update includes some new information as well as some corrections to the original document. Most crucially, the original document erroneously indicated that the URL template contained an attribute called “format” – when it was referring to the “type” attribute. So if you followed the guide exactly, your OSDX file wouldn’t work properly with Windows 7 (or anybody else following the OpenSearch spec).
This update also includes additions such as information about providing “collection” templates to display results without the user entering a query, details about URL protocol support, and more.
Link: Windows 7 Federated Search Provider Implementer’s Guide
Fellow Windows blogger and guy-named-Brandon, Brandon LeBlanc, posted an update outlining the timeline for official availability of the Windows 7 Release Candidate. We’ve all been working very hard on this for a long, long time now. I’m really looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks!
Just wanted to post a heads-up to interested parties, the stub page on MSDN for IOpenSearchSource and its one method have been replaced by the draft documentation.
The new page roughly sums up its use and purpose:
A client-side OpenSearch data source that sits in between the Microsoft Windows OpenSearch provider and the external data source. With a search connector (a .searchconnector-ms file), Windows Explorer calls your implementation with the query parameters. Your implementation returns results formatted in RSS or Atom format. That allows your implementation to provide custom authentication UI and connect to the data source using its proprietary API.
More details at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd378289(VS.85).aspx
Unfortunately we still don’t have any details on how you actually hook up an implementation of this. The doc / SDK folks are working on this but it’s part of a larger effort that’s taking a bit of time. In the meantime I’m going to see if I can post an example here or on CodePlex. Most likely I’ll be posting a detailed .NET example followed by a simpler C++ version.
If you have questions about whether this API may end up being useful to you, let me know, and hopefully I can help clarify what is or isn’t possible.