The world has spoken
In an act of rarely seen internet unity, they cried “09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0″.
What does it mean? Those numbers stand for freedom.
Advice: Don’t sign up for Napster
Without knowing how hard it is to leave…
Months and months ago I stopped using Napster To Go. Urge is just infinitely better. Yet until today I was still paying for it. I was frustrated to find that there’s no way to cancel online, despite the fact that I signed up over the web. Personally, I think there should be a law requiring that companies permit you to cancel a subscription via the same mechanism by which they lured you into it. They accept subscriptions online, 24-hours-a-day. They accept cancellations over the phone, during their east coast business hours.
After several attempts to call and cancel, I finally got through to a real person after being on hold (and my tolerance for static-filled country music was at its end when she picked up). The actual cancellation process wasn’t as bad as some of those AOL horror stories. She did insist on offering me a free month even after I complained about the cancellation process when she asked what I didn’t like about the service. Sigh…
The other thing that bothered me a great deal is that my credit card address changed last summer. I never once updated my information with Napster. But unlike some other services which e-mailed me and said I’d need to update my information to continue service, Napster has sent something each month since the move to the effect, “We noticed your billing information seems to have changed. Normally this would prevent us from charging you. But we think you might be trying to escape our service without sitting on hold for the required period of time, so we charged your card anyway, sucker.”
Okay, maybe it wasn’t worded quite like that. But that’s pretty much how I read it. Maybe I’m just oversensitive to these things, or just too damn lazy. Either way, be careful what you sign up for. Leaving is rarely as easy as joining.
Some big news out of Mix07 today. Silverlight itself had been announced a week or two ago. Now they’ve gone and announced the next version of it already (Silverlight 1.1) which will includes the CLR for the Mac (and possibly other platforms? Or perhaps they’ll come later). This is pretty huge, and I wonder what it will mean for projects like Mono. A new beta of Silverlight 1.0 was made available, as well as the Mac-CLR-supporting 1.1 alpha build. Release notes for both are here.
Another interesting announcement is that Windows Live will be offering a new serivce which reportedly offers 4GB of storage to Silverlight developers to host applications and media (videos, etc). Joshua Allen’s post seems to suggest that this is a Windows Live Platform initiative. That could be big, and I can’t wait to see how it comes together.
More:
WebWare keynote coverage
Channel 9 video on the cross-platform CLR
Silverlight.net
Farewell Dane
Last week, Dane Glasgow announced that he was leaving Microsoft. Recently, Dane has been the General Manager for the Live Search team. I first met Dane at the Search Champs “v2” event back in April of 2005, around the time that Desktop Search was first released at Microsoft. We were treated to a dinner hosted by MSN, and Dane was one of three that evening to suggest that I send in a resume. A few shorts months later, and I joined the WDS team, which fell under Dane’s pervue at the time. Having worked (indirectly) for Dane for over a year, I can say with great confidence that Microsoft is losing one of its finest.
Dane’s “official” farewell party was on Thursday, and included the presentation of a custom-embroidered T-shirt that dozens who’d had the pleasure to work with Dane signed beforehand. If you are looking to have some customized shirts done for a special event then I highly recommend theclothingpeople.com. Of course, a few stragglers had a bit more of a challenge scribbling their autographs…
It was great working with you Dane. Best of luck “out there.”
Debunking third-world myths
I’ve been a bit of a slacker blogger lately, but not without good reason. One of several things taking up my time is Tusubira – the non-profit organization that I’ve been working with for a while now, and the related trip to Uganda that I’ll be taking at the end of this summer.
Why do I bring this up? Well, fellow MS blogger Sanaz Ahari made a post earlier this month linking to a video I’d not seen before, with some incredibly interesting data about the distribution of wealth, health, and technology over the last 30 or so years between and within countries from all around the world. It’s not the shortest video ever, and if you’re used to watching 30 second news blurbs you might not get much out of this as it’s a bit longer than your average NBC world news segment. But the data presented is so compelling, and the presentation so engaging, that I had to share it.
Sometimes index corruption or other problems with Windows Search cannot be fixed by the “Rebuild Index” option in the control panel. One troubleshooting option you can try is to tell the indexer to reset the indexer to its out-of-the-box default setup.
For WDS 3.0 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 (click here to download Windows 7 in Aus):
- Open Regedit.exe
- Expand the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE node
- Navigate to SOFTWARE \ MICROSOFT \ WINDOWS SEARCH
- On the right-hand side of the screen, you should see a REG_SZ value named “SetupCompletedSuccessfully” which normally is set to a value of “1”.
- Double-click on the value and change it to 0.
- Restart the Windows Search service (either using the Services control panel, or the command line “net stop wsearch” followed by “net start wsearch”)
This will result in a rebuild of your index and will also reset your crawl scopes (folders to be indexed). It may also reset certain Indexing-related settings.
Jon Stewart, thank you
I just watched last night’s episode of The Daily Show, and an amazing thing happened. You see, I’m used to watching interviews about national and international topics covered with the reporting aptitude of a fifth grader. The questions asked and topics broached are so incredibly forseeable. So rarely does it seem that today’s news media really takes advantage of the opportunities they’re given to provide meaningful discourse – or to strike a chord that really hits home and sticks with me after I’ve gone off and resumed my day-to-day tasks.
Last night Jon Stewart interviewed Ali Allawi, former Minister of Defense in Iraq. Most of the discussion was about his book, with the usual Jon Stewart comic interjections. At the end of the interview, Stewart did something I did not expect. He made a connection that I had totally, completely missed.
He described what most of our country is going through: grieving, mourning, and trying to cope with the tragedy that occured this week at Virginia Tech. He asked Allawi what it is like to live in a country where tragic, senseless massacres happen almost every day. My heart sank. A shiver shot down my spine. 230 people died yesterday from similar attacks. Two hundred and thirty. In one day.
A hundred thoughts raced through my head. Will Iraqi news agencies investigate the backgrounds of the perpetrators? Will they analyze their psyches? Their motivations? Their upbringing? Will there be profiles of the victims? Will there be Iraqis reading through them, cursing the heavens, as I did two days ago? Will anyone ask, “How could something like this happen?”
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t know how to end the violence in Iraq. I’m not assigning blame for that violence to us or anyone else. As for the 230 dead, and the question of how and why something like that can happen in the twenty-first century… I have no answer to that question either. That shouldn’t stop each and every one of us from asking it.
Today, Evil has a face
32 people died yesterday, for no reason. People die every day, but not like this. Some die of old age, disease, or terrible accidents. Others give their lives fighting for something, be it their country, their family, or the pursuit of justice. Some lives are taken for evil purposes… jealousy, revenge, fear, hate.
As I read the descriptions of the victims, somehow this feels worse. A 20-year-old English major from a prep school like mine. A 35-year-old German instructor. A 22-year-old who worked at Camp Big Heart, directing a music and dance program for children and adults with special needs. A 45-year-old science professor conducting biomechanics research related to cerebral palsy. A 19-year-old animal lover who worked at a veterinarian’s office. A freshman Air Force cadet with a promising future. A 76-year-old researcher, born in Romania with a long list of achievements and worldly experience, who reportedly blocked the doorway so students could flee the attack through windows. A 51-year-old Indian-born lecturer with two daughters who mentored 75 undergraduate students. A 22-year-old graduate student who had been vice president of the Arts Society at Lafayette and had been on the cross-country and track teams, and in drama club in high school. A 26-year-old teacher from Puerto Rico who love salsa dancing. A 19-year-old air force brat who was just getting used to Virginia Tech’s large campus.
I don’t understand how such a monstrous thing can happen. Frankly, I don’t think I want to understand. This kid killed himself after taking all those lives senselessly. Why? If he was just going to end up dead in the end, what purpose did it serve to rob all of us of those 32 innocent lives?
What scares me, though, is that I have no idea how it could be fixed. I’m not even sure it can be. Did the parents have something to do with it? Was he even conscious of what he was doing? Was it planned? Drug-induced? Or are some people just “broken?”
Short Vacation
I spent the last week vacationing with family in Pensacola, Florida. Why Pensacola? Well, a lot of my family lives there, in no small part because of the naval base. My grandfather was an Admiral, with the distinction of having been one of few to achieve such rank out of ROTC (via Cornell). Back in the early nineties, my uncle commanded the Blue Angels, flying the #1 F/A-18 Hornet that led the elite air squad after his tour in Desert Storm. It had been about two years since I’d visited Pensacola, but in my mind it’s hard to believe it had been so long.
What is difficult to believe was the weather. I boarded the plane bound for Houston (my only stop en route) in 70 degree whether, carrying my jacket on my arm and enjoying the Spring sunshine. When I finally arrived in Florida, I found myself shivering in the ~45 degree rainy climate, hoping the cold grey would soon turn to bright warmth. It finally did, the day I left.
Still, it was a relaxing respite from the craziness of work and all of my side projects (Start++, Uganda, some semblance of an active social life, my new MMO addiction, and more). Of course, now that I’m home I need to catch up on e-mail all the happenings I missed… making for a not entirely costless respite.
There were many things I wanted to blog about while on vacation, but I resisted the temptation to spend too much time glued to my Vista-powered Macbook. I’ll try to catch up on some of those this weekend, as I strive to aptly prioritize my catch-up efforts. Speaking of which, if you sent me an e-mail or posted a comment and I haven’t responded – it’s entirely possible that I wasn’t ignoring you, but rather just haven’t gotten to it yet.
UAC to the rescue!
Windows Vista’s new User Account Control is already earning its keep! New attacks were reported this weekend that take advantage of a vulnerability in how Windows handles animated mouse cursors. A patch is due out tomorrow (apparently it’s been pushed up from an original April 10th release date). The patch will address the issue on XP and on Vista. Yes, the vulnerability exists on Vista. And yet, most Vista users are protected from these attacks already.
That is, assuming they have UAC enabled and are using IE7. On Windows Vista with UAC enabled, Internet Explorer runs in “Protected Mode” which successfully protects you from all known web-based attacks that use this vulnerability. How does it do that? Basically, “Protected Mode” runs IE in a “sandbox” of sorts, and doesn’t allow it to access anything but its own files and registry keys. If an attacker can successfully inject code into your web browser, and the browser is running in Protected Mode (also known as the “low” UAC integrity level) – that code is prevented from doing any harm.
To all the UAC naysayers – this is certainly only the first of many examples proving its value (especially it’s use in IE’s Protected Mode).