home links tools blog about
home

« March 2006 | Main | May 2006 »

April 14, 2006

Bad, Bad, Bad...

Bad.

I'm minding my own business... pull up a browser to do some research on a particularly nasty javascript error, find a few possibilities, then a few minutes later realize that there's some kind of POP UP on my machine from FF:

Bad2

It appears that this is legit. Which just leaves me scratching my head.

1) How long do you think it will be before scum suckers (i.e. spyware creators/pimps) manage to create a web page that looks EXACTLY the same, only to get absent minded people to a) click Download and Install Now  and then, b) ALLOW the installation to take place despite security warnings (since they think it's just a service patch for FF... ).
2) Given that this 'feature' (to push popups like this) exists burried deep within the bowels of FF, any guesses on whether it would be a juicy exploit for other cretins down the road?

Honestly, WHAT were they thinking?

UPDATE: In addition to the comments, please see my follow up post (which helps clear up how I think this could be used for an 'exploit').

Posted on April 14, 2006 | | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Repeat After Me...

Repeat after me:
"I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more."

Try it again:
"I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more."

And yet, again:
"I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more."

States Eyeball taxation of iTunes and other Internet Downloads.

My state already charges sales tax on the download of digital media (and it chaps my butt to see it show up in my statements).

I like this snippet from the article linked above:

NTU's Sepp also argues that digital downloads are already being taxed. He says that anyone connecting to the Internet through dial-up, DSL or a cable modem is already paying telecommunications taxes; anyone with an iPod paid sales taxes on it; companies offering downloads are paying property taxes; their stockholders are paying dividend or capital gain taxes; their employees are paying income taxes.

Seriously, when do we decide we've had enough and decide to dump all of the tea into the harbor?

Posted on April 14, 2006 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 13, 2006

Saweet

Sorry, but this is just excellent news:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/04/13/442772.aspx

Yeayyy. This will make working with the Provider Model that much better.

Posted on April 13, 2006 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

SRS Book Reviews

A Re-Heated RepeatableRead (posted here in it's entirety for convenience):

                    I recently did some book reviews for the ASP Alliance (which will be throwing up a SQL Server Reporting Services portal in the near future).

The reviews are for (links are to the reviews):
Hitchhiker's Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services
and
The Rational Guide to SQL Server Reporting Services

The reviews were easy to do as both books are excellent in their own spheres. Honestly, if you could only ever own two SRS books these would be excellent choices.

Posted on April 13, 2006 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Visual Studio Extensibility: Guided Tour

Yeaaay.

One of the cool things about Evangelism is seeing some of your past efforts go into things like MSDN for use by the rest of the world.

A big project that I did for 3 Leaf a few months ago has finally made it to MSDN. The whole project focused on providing a tangible way for developers to get their feet wet and get a decent grip on how to Extend Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Team System. It was a fun project (though LONELY at times digging through reams of docs...), and it's finally now ready for consumption on MSDN.

Link: Extensibility Guided Tour

Vsip

(Note, you'll likely want to browse that in IE if you want the navigation to work - whatever nav tree thingy they're using on MSDN just doesn't work with FF.)

As you can see from the Screen Cap of the nav-tree above, there's quite a bit of content there. None of it is too in depth, just a few steps above and beyond a really global 'hello world' approach that helps introduce Extensibility, discusses some of the underlying concepts and benefits, and provides work-able samples to help devs get their feet wet. It includes info on three different ways to extend VS 2005 (Macros, Add-ins, and VSPackages) and also covers some rudiments of VSTS extensibility... along with a couple of pointers on how to deploy changes and the likes.

Posted on April 13, 2006 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

HP 3210 Perf Boost

I've gone off a few times on my blog already about how
1) Great my HP 3210 printer is.
2) Horrible the software/drivers for it are.

I've got it attached to my router as a network printer, and that just makes it terribly spiffy. What hasn't been spiffy is hitting WIN+E to bring up explorer, and watching it wait literally 1+ minute sometimes with that STOOPID little 'finding' mouse cursor waggling back and forth.

The true culprit: HP's Nasty Print Manager Stuff.

So with a recent Refresh I've been testing some things, and have gotten the printer working just as I need it to, without all the extra bloat.  (Seriously, if you run it at it's default level you get no less than 6 services running on your machine that take up about 28+ MB of RAM - which is sooo unacceptable that I wouldn't have bought the printer had I known that (though it prints/slices/dices sooooo well)).

Anyhow, here's all I want out of my printer:
1) To be able to Print.
2) To be able to slap something into the scanner once or twice / week and then scan it from my laptop.

If that's all'z you want (and don't care about the PictBridge goodies and other crud) then:
1) Start | Run.  Type services.msc.
2) Find the Pml Driver HPZ12 service.
3) Double click, set Startup type to Disabled.
4) Click OK.

Problem solved. All that other crap is gone and you're left with 3 services (still too many) that gobble up about 5 MB (not bad).

Also, when looking for what PML stood for, i found the following link, which may be of benefit for anyone else looking to tame their HP beasts...

IMMEDIATE UPDATE: Wait... I just remembered, I also used SysInternal's AutoRuns to find and remove the HPfsched service out of my startup process. It's just some nasty service that thinks it has to be hogging CPU/RAM all the time just in case HP decides to update your drivers.

Posted on April 13, 2006 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 10, 2006

Funny Biz

I love tricksy DNS Stuff.

I found this site today while looking for info on how to configure LCS to allow web access:
http://thesource.ofallevil.com/uk/office/livecomm/prodinfo/publicim.mspx

The content looks suprisingly similar to the official MS content:
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/office/livecomm/prodinfo/publicim.mspx

In fact, the root of the site looks pretty similar to it's mirrored counterpart:
Evil   vs   Real

Problem is, this isn't simple DNS funny business. (I figured that this was just a case of someone buying a domain name, and pointing the addy's at MS' properties, but as I was chatting online about it with Carson, he checked the names/whois. The contact info for the whois is pretty funny:

Of All Evil
  Hades
  Hell, on Earth
  CA

(California, no less)
)

Anywho... this site reminded me of a site I bumped into a few years ago, that returned 127.0.0.1 as the addy - which was pretty trippy when you clicked on a link to http://www.someevilsite.com - as it would thump your local box....

Posted on April 10, 2006 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

SQL Server Everywhere Edition

Hmmm.

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/letter.mspx

Funny that. I recently worked on a PPC app, and noticed that VS 2005 had full-blown support for SQLMobile Databases. I remembered thinking that it would be _kinda_ cool to fiddle with that mobile engine to see if there wasn't some cool way to expose it for desktop apps.

Looks like that's exactly where MS is going with it.

Access, thy days are numbered.

Here's a well-done FAQ that helps answer some questions about SQL Everywhere.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out... (overall, I'm thinking that this looks like a really level-headed release that will provide lots of good use for non-enterprisey type applications.)

Posted on April 10, 2006 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 07, 2006

Sproc Unit Testing in SQL Server

How to implement unit-testing for sproc changes in SQL Server - a re-heated RepeatableRead. [Read more...]

Posted on April 07, 2006 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

« Previous