I’m trying very hard to keep up with all the news, but it seems to be endless. Let’s see what we have so far.
Governor Sarah Palin…
1) Was a member of (and still supports) the Alaska Independence Party, which believes that Alaska’s statehood is “illegal” and its admission the United States was made possible by “occupational troops.”
2) Opposes sex education and supports abstinence-until-marriage education. The same education that failed her pregnant unwed teenage daughter. The same education that has had disastrous effects in sub-Saharan Africa and has cost countless lives.
3) Cut funding for a group that helps teen mothers (like her daughter).
4) Sat in at a Jews For Jesus sermon two weeks ago, sponsored by her church, where the speaker said that anti-Israeli terrorism was “God’s Judgement.”
5) Was vetted over the course of almost an entire day for the position as McCain’s running mate.
6) Hired a lobbyist with ties to Jack Abramoff, and was for Ted Stevens before she was against him.
7) Thinks an oil pipeline is “God’s will”.
8 ) Has no experience with lawmaking or national government, but has misrepresented her experience with the national guard.
9) As mayor, increased government expenditures by 33%, and increased taxes collected by the city by 38%.
10) Is an alarming example of the kind of judgment that McCain and his people would exercise when choosing a Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense.
#11 Oh dear. Just after I published this, another story broke. Palin claimed last week to be a “reformer” who worked to end the “abuses of earmark spending in Congress.” And yet, as governor she proposed 31 earmarks totaling $197 million – more, per person, than any other state.
To paraphrase a bit from Andrew Sullivan’s blog:
What her selection reveals about McCain is that he is a risk-taker who makes snap decisions “from the gut.” He liked Palin. She looked like a maverick and a bit like himself. He didn’t invest the time or resources to look into her deeply. This isn’t about Palin’s readiness to be president, it’s about McCain’s readiness to be president. His first real executive decision, and he made it a shallow, incompetent, and reckless one.
Opera begins smear campaign against IE 8
There’s an article over at everybody’s favorite internet tabloid The Register about IE 8’s decision to default to Compatibility View (that is, IE 7 emulation) for INTRAnet sites. The article lambastes the IE team for “breaking its promise to embrace web standards.”
You might be wondering, “Why does the author of this article care about intranet sites defaulting to Compatibility View? Doesn’t that make the most sense as it will prevent companies from having unending compatibility problems with IE 8’s new rendering engine, on their sites that were written for IE 6 and which haven’t been updated in years?”
I think the answer is quite simple: The author doesn’t care. So why publish the article?
Because Hakon Lie is the CTO of Opera Software, creators of the very unpopular IE and Firefox competitor of the same name.
Yes, Opera, well known as a band of immature cry babies, are now attempting to smear the IE 8 release with sensationalist “articles” posing as news, and blatant lies about the product.
Lies? Oh yes, like the one about web pages being unable to opt-out of the “broken page icon” that lets users switch to compatibility view for a page. The truth is that the IE blog and release documentation for Beta 2 has made it very clear that websites can control whether or not that icon is displayed (see the bit about the “IE=EmulateIE8” tag). They can also control whether they get the IE 8 engine in an intranet context.
That means that if you’re building a new intranet site and you want to target IE 8’s new more strict standards-mode engine, you just need to add one little header tag in order to override the Compatibility View default. Of course, this little propaganda piece makes no mention of that.
And why would it? It’s written by the cry baby CTO of a failing competitor, not an actual, you know, journalist.
Picked a new laptop!
So after writing about the new laptop choices I was considering, I decided yesterday afternoon to drive around and look at which laptop models were available at local computer/electronics stores. Best Buy and Circuit City didn’t have anything of interest to me. They seem to stock only mid-size or large laptops, and they’re largely outdated models with very few choices available in terms of variation within a model.
I did get to look at the Dell M1330 at Best Buy, but I’ve seen those around work, so holding and typing on that is something I’d already gotten to do. Now, I tend to be a slightly impulsive buyer, and if they’d have a well-spec’d model I may have purchased it. Instead I left. I looked at Lenovo’s website to see if any retailers carried their machines. They only one with any local stores that I could find was Office Depot, and from their website it looks like they don’t stock any of the interesting models. Not terribly surprising, but unfortunate.
Then I remembered Fry’s, the west coast technology haven just a few miles south on 405. Their website said they had the Sony TZ, the itty bitty 11″ screen model with a slow ULV processor. What the heck, I figured, I had some spare time and might as well go see what the thing looks like in-person.
Well, I walked around their laptop selection which is largely similar to Best Buy’s, though a bit larger (unfortunately no Dells, though). I didn’t see the TZ in the spot I remembered passing by it a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t find it anywhere else. But on one of the corners I saw something their website hadn’t listed, something which had just arrived very recently.
It was a Sony Z series. Much like the one pictured below, and much like the one I’m typing on now =)
I liked it immediately. I do wish the very back of it were a little thinner. It certainly is no Macbook Air, and in fact the shape is a lot like the XPS M1330 (wedge-shaped and thinner than my old Macbook at the front, but thicker at the back). However, it is very light, about 3.4 lbs – almost as light as the Air. And it’s small. It has a 13.1″ screen at 16:9, giving it a noticeably smaller footprint than the usual 13.3″ 16:10 laptops like the XPS. And it’s pretty nice looking too. Not quite as clean as the Mac offerings, but very nice. And the LED screen is razor thin.
In addition to liking the laptop in person, I also liked what I had read about its battery life, something Sony seems to generally accel at, and something which the Air and other super thin laptops seem to sacrifice quite a bit on. More than that, it offers great battery life and it’s a powerhouse. That’s why it needs to be a bit thicker than some of the other options I considered, but I decided it was worth the small trade-off.
The model I picked up has a 2.4Ghz CPU and 3GB of memory, and a 250GB hard drive. It has two video adapters… the on-chip Intel X4500HD, and an Nvidia 9300 discrete GPU with 128MB of memory. The idea behind enabling both options is that the X4500 chip provides better battery life, while the 9300 offers a better gaming / 3D experience. There’s a switch above the function keys that slides between a “stamina” and a “speed” setting. Among other things, it switches the active video adapter. It wasn’t really something that sold me on the machine, but it is pretty damn sweet.
In my impatience, I sacrificed some of the options I could have tweaked if I’d ordered online. They are:
1) 4GB of memory instead of 3GB
2) A 7200RPM 200GB hard drive instead of the 250GB 5400RPM drive
3) A higher resolution screen (1600×900 instead of 1366×768)
I would have paid a little bit more for those options, and I would have to wait a couple weeks to actually get it. The 7200RPM drive is a tough choice. The 5400RPM drive is slower, but a bit larger and I believe less likely to drain my battery. The RAM isn’t much of an issue. 3GB is plenty for what I do on my laptop, and I can easily upgrade it on my own.
SSD wasn’t really an option given how much Sony charges for it. I would have been very close to if not into the $3000 territory with just a measily 64GB drive. They do offer a 128GB option, which is actually two 64GB ultra-performance SSDs in RAID 0. Those for whom money is not a factor must really enjoy that option.
The real kicker though is the screen. Looking at it in the store it seemed like this screen was a fine choice. And truthfully it is a great screen. But more resolution is always nice, especially in the vertical dimension which is where this screen feels the most cramped.
Before I agreed to buy it I asked about the return policy at Fry’s. The woman selling it to me told me I had 15 days to bring it back. She also said there is usually at 15% restocking fee, but that if I brought it back within the 15 day period they would not charge me that fee. I accepted that this assurance included the risk that she’d either pretend later that she didn’t tell me this, or that she didn’t really have the authority to make such a promise. But at least I had some leverage in the matter now, and I can be pretty stubborn about such things, so I decided to bring it home to try it out.
In the interest of keeping this post from going on forever, I’ll save the rest of my impressions for another day. Perhaps by then I’ll have come to a decision about keeping this guy. So far I am leaning in that direction.
Picking a new laptop
As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m planning to buy a new laptop very soon. The timing seems to be about right, with a bunch of new machines become available in the next week or two. Unfortunately, I’m having a really hard time deciding what I want.
Right now I’m using a black Macbook, Core 2 Duo 2.0Ghz, 2GB memory, with an Intel GMA 945 video chip.
What I’m looking for in something new is:
- Smaller and lighter.
- Same screen size if possible, but higher resolution is a plus.
- Better video adapter (an X3100 or better). It don’t play games on my laptop generally, but the 945 is pretty old these days and Intel’s support for it seems to be waning.
I’d like to avoid buying something slower. And battery life should be at least as good as my Macbook originally was (the battery has long since started to wear after ~20 months of use).
I’d like an SSD if at all possible, otherwise a 7200RPM drive. And something sturdy and solid like my Macbook. Stylish is a nice plus too. I’d also like to be able to have it before my upcoming trip to Italy, which means having it by the second week in September.
Here’s what I’m looking at and my current assessments:
1) Lenovo X301. Really thin, really fast, good battery. Unfortunately real specifics aren’t up on Lenovo’s site quite yet, and availability of the SSD models sounds like it won’t be until sometime in September, which might mean later than I’d like. Not much pricing info yet, except that it will be expensive.
2) Dell Latitude E4300. Slick design. Not that thin though, barely smaller than my Macbook it looks like. Lighter, though. SSD seems to be limited to 64GB, but it’s an “ultra performance” SSD. No pricing / availability details yet sadly.
3) Voodoo Envy 133. Crazy thin, but uses the slower Macbook Air line of CPUs, and the battery doesn’t sound especially impressive (3+ hours at best they say). Also ordering one of these things seems a bit complicated. Appealing device though.
4) Sony Z series. These are interesting, and appealing in that I can order one right now. On the other hand, they’re pricey and not as small as the Lenovo or Envy.
5) Sony TZ series. These are tiny, with a screen that might be too small for me. Sadly they aren’t even terribly thin, but they are very very light. And battery life is impressive. Unfortunately that is largely due to the use of a ULV processor (Ultra Low Voltage… ie, ultra slow). Fry’s seems to have one of these, and it looks pretty nice. But it’s the performance (especially since the one at Fry’s isn’t an SSD model) that worries me here. Actually, since it only has a GMA 945/950 video chip, I can basically rule this one out.
6) Dell XPS M1330. I’m really tempted to order one of these given the deals that Dell is running right now (they’re having a “weekend sale” apparently). More on this one below.
The Macbook Air also gets some consideration, as does the incredibly light Dell E4200. But the Air has a lot of limitations, and is very pricey especially with the SSD which is all I’d really consider. I’m also not that big a fan of the silver look. Supposedly Apple is going to rev all their laptop lines soon, but I’m growing impatient (and increasingly annoyed with Apple, see prior post).
The XPS M1330 seems like the best hardware bang-for-the-buck right now. It looks like I can get a 2.5Ghz T9300 chip, 4GB memory, a 128GB SSD, DVD burner, 128MB Geforce 8400 graphics, and some kind of Creative sound chip option, all for $1824 and have it in barely more than a week.
Strangely, it won’t let me choose to just use the on-chip X3100 graphics, or the built-in Intel HD sound device. If I go through a different entrypoint I can choose those things, but the cost is higher! $1948, in fact. Very strange. The more expensive one does have a wireless N adapter instead of G, but it won’t let me change that. Anyway, I think I’d actually prefer the Intel chips just because their drivers tend to be more reliable and use less power. But I don’t want to pay more for them!
The downsides of the XPS seem to be that it’s a tiny bit heavier. Only very slightly lighter than my Macbook. I’m also concerned that the quality / sturdiness won’t be at the same level as the Latitude or Lenovo models. And I don’t think it’s as stylish.
The 1.8Ghz Macbook Air is kind of tempting too, but that 64GB disk just isn’t going to be big enough with 2-3 OSes, and wiping out Leopard feels a bit risky. On a pure PC I might scrape by with a 64GB drive, but the Air really needs a 128GB disk to be a really viable option. It is awfully small / light though.
Sigh… I wish there were an easy answer here.
Get A Mac ads jump the shark
These may have been kind of cute or clever in the past, misleading as they were. But now they’re just plain obnoxious.
When I bought my new car last year there was a car salesman at one dealership who only seemed concerned with what other options I was looking at. He tried to tell me that I shouldn’t buy an Audi because they’re unreliable. And so were BMWs. His friend had one and a wheel fell off. The engines “explode” sometimes he said.
And you know what? Maybe he really did have a friend who had a wheel fall off somehow, maybe he left a dealership or a mechanic and they’d forgotten to properly reattach one of them. I know he didn’t like it when I mentioned I’d heard a similar story years ago from a friend with the brand of car he was trying to sell me. I also know there were a tiny handful of people who did have problems with the old BMW M3 engines breaking on them (“exploding” being a technically correct, but incredibly misleading characterization). Years ago I saw a website devoted entirely to people who’d experienced the problem. There were about 60 of them, who all posted various pictured of their damaged engines for all to see.
There’s also a site like that for TTs. And one for Mercedes SLs.
The thing is, he was never going to convince me that Audis were “unreliable” since I’d already owned 3 of them – each of which worked magnificently, and the ownership experience was always a great one. Of course, I never miss any scheduled maintenance and always have any warning lights checked out immediately, which I’m sure greatly reduced the chances I’d have a problem. He told me, “Well you must be lucky.” I nearly told him to shove it.
What I really wanted to know when I went there was why I should buy the car he was trying to sell me. Not why the other ones I told him I liked were bad choices. It’s strange, but John Hodgeman is starting to remind me of that guy, which is funny because he plays the role of the PC. But he’s really the only one of the two that even talks in the ads anymore, and he’s always going on about problems “he” has running Vista that I have never seen on any of my machines.
Just like that salesman, these ads are having the opposite of the intended effect on me. You see, I’m planning to buy a new laptop in the next month or two. I was waiting to hear what Apple is going to release. But Dell’s recent announcements have had me start to seriously consider their new machines, like the new Latitude models – and I’ve seen some really nice lightweight Lenovo models recently as well. So I’ve been torn… do I replace my trusty Macbook with another Mac? Or do I save money and get a better system from Dell or Lenovo?
Watching these latest Mac ads is actually pushing me even more toward the latter.
How my team and I fit into Windows 7
As you probably heard (if you’re reading this blog), Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan recently launched the Windows 7 Engineering Team Blog.
This afternoon Steven made his second post on the blog, discussing the Windows 7 engineering organization. He describes the rough dimensions of the various feature teams, including a pretty complete list of the teams and an idea of their approximate size (ballpark estimate being 40 developers, 40 testers, and 20 PMs).
If you look at his list you can spot my team, which goes by the name Find and Organize. So who are we? Well, as you might guess and Steven describes, we own the end-to-end Search features of Windows (the “find”) as well as the browsing and data management experience (the “organize”). We often abbreviate this as “FnO” and many people pronounce it as “fff-no” (rhymes with “snow”), though I am not one of them.
Some examples of things we own:
- The Windows Search indexer
- The indexing configuration UI and the built-in filters / handlers
- The Windows Explorer UI, including things like:
- The navigation pane
- Address / Breadcrumb bar
- Search box
- Window frame
- The Filesystem data source
- The default Shell View (DefView), default Context Menu (DefCM), etc.
- The Explorer data source APIs (IShellFolder and friends)
- Known folders and APIs (”Documents” and such), recycle bin, shortcuts
- The common file dialogs
- Some shared ownership of certain Windows “common controls”
- Search in the Start menu
Whew, I often forget just how much stuff we own. And my feature isn’t even on the list! 🙂 Oh yeah, did I mention we also owned the entire Windows Search 4.0 release?
We also aren’t the only team that “owns” the Explorer. The Core User Experience team owns other pieces of Explorer like the taskbar and the rest of the Start menu. You’ll often hear people from both teams refer to themselves as the “shell team,” or others refer to both teams collectively by that name.
So who makes up the FnO team? Well, as I said, there are quite a few of us. I’m certainly not the only one of us who blogs or has an online presence:
Jonas Barklund has a blog, he’s a developer whose focus is generally on query parsing.
Thayn Moore has a blog and is also a developer, and works on a bunch of stuff including, among other things, mail indexing.
Ben Karas has a blog and is a lead developer for most of the explorer UI.
Paolo Marcucci is a PM who doesn’t seem to blog these days, but posts on Channel 9 a lot.
I’m sure there are others I don’t know about. So if you work on my team and have a blog, let me know.
As for me, well, you know where my blog is. As for what I do every day… we’ll talk more about that soon enough.
Update: I saw a comment on Channel 9 ask about how we function with 40 developers on one team. Well, the truth is these “feature teams” are actually divided into smaller teams that focus on closely related components. So no, there isn’t really one manager with 40 developers reporting directly to him or her.
NYT says passwords, OpenID suck
Randall Stross, the same guy who recently said Microsoft should abandon Windows, says on the NY Times site that passwords aren’t good because they’re vulnerable to spoofing attacks, and that they should be replaced by “information cards.” Well, he’s got a point here, and many companies and services already use non-password authentication mechanisms. Microsoft uses them for lots of the services used by employees – so why not for consumers too?
Well, for one, it’s not exactly a user-friendly system yet. Maybe that will change soon, who knows. It isn’t the only way to address the problem of spoofing, though. My bank’s website makes use of a “site key” (an image tied to a string that I associated with that image) with the goal of assuring me that I’m at a real Bank Of America login page and not some spoofer. It may not be foolproof, but it’s a lot better than nothing (assuming the user would notice its absence, which is another issue entirely).
Anyway, what bugged me more about this article was the way it ragged on OpenID. Randall seems to think that OpenID’s only purpose is “single sign-on,” and explains that it works like Microsoft’ Live ID in that you only need one set of credentials.
But that’s not quite true. Many people like OpenID not for having a single password but simply for a single username (or “identity”). Some sites may trust an OpenID source to verify your credentials and have that be good enough for them. Others may impose their own passwords or security restrictions. And what’s stopping an OpenID identity provider from using a certificate-based or other non-password authentication mechanism? As far as I can tell, nothing.
Another advantage OpenID has is that my credentials don’t need to be shared with everybody. If I want to create an account on Zooomr, I can login to my WordPress account and have it verify my identity to Zooomr. Since I’ve never heard of Zooomr, I like this approach, because they never get my password. Only WordPress does. They verify it, and then tell Zooomr, “Yup, he is who he says he is.”
I have to admit that I’ve never taken the time to really learn the nitty gritty details about OpenID, but I find it to be a very interesting concept. I’ve also been very interested in OAuth lately and been meaning to dig more into how that works. Heck, I don’t even know if it is related to OpenID in any way.
So what do you think of OpenID? Is it a fad and a distraction from better advances, as Stross seems to suggest? Or do you think it’s the future of identity on the web?
Flash and Java, I’m looking at you.
You may have heard about the paper released at this week’s Black Hat conference, describing limitations in Windows’ memory protection schemes like ASLR, DEP, etc. The paper is well-written, very detailed, and I’ve no reason to doubt that it’s pretty accurate. Some points it makes are things that teams at Microsoft are already aware of and working to remedy (such as DEP not being enabled for IE, for example).
But reading the paper made it very clear that the most exploitable targets these days aren’t even web browsers, they’re plug-ins like Flash and Java. The article points out how the Java run-time (“JVM”) was made DEP-compatible with the ingenious change to make all of the memory it allocates be marked as executable. So yeah, it works with DEP by making DEP irrelevant. Hilarious. And sad.
Flash is still not ASLR or DEP compatible. We’re rapidly approaching two years from the release of Vista. They’ve had way longer than that to prepare to take advantage of these very helpful security features. Yet here we are in August 2008 and the most prevalent and successful browser add-ins do virtually nothing to ensure that they aren’t abused by attackers.
Now, to be fair, the attackers also mention .NET as a possible attack vector. In fact, what they describe is pretty clever. But that’s the thing, at least they had to be clever. With Flash and Java they don’t, as those add-ins make no attempt to be secure. And if you want to make a bet about which of those three (Flash, JVM, .NET) has its issues fixed first, I know where I’m putting my money.
In traditional Microsoft fashion, this year’s interns have put together a video about Microsoft… in this case, telling the story of a spy trying to find all our Win7 secrets 🙂
Somebody posted the video to YouTube, which you can find here.
Random trivia: The building that this takes place in is my building, building 86. There’s a joke or two in there about the maze-like design of the first floor of building 86 – or what is affectionately known as “Bunker 86” by many of its inhabitants. The building itself used to be part of the SafeCo campus purchased by Microsoft in recent years, which is why it doesn’t conform to any of Microsoft’s usual natural-light-maximizing layouts.
OpenSearch spec status
In addition to the aforementioned e-mailing, I also spent a little of the weekend on some personal projects, and did some poking around at the OpenSearch discussion group.
I was curious about the fact that OpenSearch 1.1 has been stuck in “Draft 3” status for well over a year now. Apparently my prodding has provoked Dewitt Clinton, who originally developed and maintained the spec, to set up a Google Code project to solidify OpenSearch 1.1 and to have a place for future contributions to be sent. Cool stuff!