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April 30, 2007

Patently Obvious?

The supreme court has finally weighed in on some of the 'dumb' that we've been seeing in the headlines surrounding patent protection:

The results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws. Were it otherwise, patents might stifle rather than promote the progress of useful arts. The Circuit first erred in holding that courts and patent examiners should look only to the problem the patentee was trying to solve. Second, the appeals court erred in assuming that a person of ordinary skill in the art attempting to solve a problem will be led only to those prior art elements designed to solve the same problem...  (Justice Kennedy)

The only worry, of course, is that we'll now be leaving it up to Lawers (and Judges) to determine what "Ordinary" means.

Posted on April 30, 2007 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 25, 2007

Random Thoughts on Vista, Mac, and Longhorn

I’m sure I’ll get flamed, but there’s really little doubt in my mind but that Vista is just a big publicly released beta at this point. And I think that many of the complaints being blogged or logged out there go a lot deeper than people just being resistant to change. Technically competent people that I interact with are constantly leveraging well-thought-out complaints against Microsoft's new 'flagship' operating system.

My biggest beef
There are soooo many perf issues still to be ironed out. I tried using it in for some IIS7 and Server Core demos during a recent roadshow, and just couldn’t – the perf was noticeably laggy/unacceptable. I switched to XP on the same hardware, and had absolutely NO problems. (That and my Vista install was pristine – very few extra installed progs whereas my XP install is months old with lots of gunk/crap hanging off the side.)

Jumping Ship? Maybe...
At this time I’m seriously contemplating OS X or Ubuntu as my next OS at this point. As it stands, I’ll need to end up using a VM if I full-blown switch to Vista… so I really do toy with the notion of just switching platforms for my desktop (where I’ll still need to use VMs to get everything done).

Apple makes me drool, what is the world coming to?
And speaking of virtualizaton: Parallels is actually pretty damned enticing if you’ve seen it in person. In fact, after seeing it I’m actually pissed at MS about Vista. Apple is showing some real innovation when it comes to leveraging virtualization – making it so bloody transparent to non-techies that it’s sickening. (And this is from the company that stubbornly clung to one mouse button forever.)

With Vista I’m left with a bunch of programs (from Microsoft) that won’t work and Flip-3D. I guess I’m also safe from the fear of being tempted to somehow subvert DRM on my machine – something that has really kept me awake some nights. NOT.

If it weren't for Longhorn....
Although, all of my complaining aside, I’m really thinking of running Longhorn as my new desktop OS. It’s bloody performant, and even the April CTP builds I’ve been playing with are pretty damned stable. Plus, when I’m using it I get the feeling that there’s really been some serious development under the covers and that I’m not just looking at lipstick on a pig (a sentiment, which while I’m sure it’s unfair is never-the-less what I think of every time I use Vista).

Here's hoping that the Beta 3 release of Longhorn pwns. (I think it's slated to drop today?)

Posted on April 25, 2007 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

The Visual Studio SDK

So, what's Mikeey doing to keep himself occupied of late? Well, other than the Longhorn Roadshow (which has been a hoot), I'm busily working on a bunch of stuff focused around Visual Studio Extensibility.

Keep tabs on my efforts here: www.vssdk.com.  

Posted on April 25, 2007 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 18, 2007

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

Say that three times, real fast. Or not. Either way, it's coming. I just wish we could get a Beta 2 or a CTP of that SP - that would make it all that much better: Virtual Server 2005 SP1 April CTP.

Honestly MS, stop the insanity. Why the hell can't we call it Virtual Server 2006? That's when it shipped.

Grrr.

Posted on April 18, 2007 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

April 13, 2007

Happy Friday the 13th

Vista still causes me no end of grief. It looks spectacular. But, silly me, I need to print on a regular basis - that, and I've become completely attached to having 3 monitors. With Vista both of those 'issues' just aren't addressable at this point.

So I dual boot, and spend almost all of my time in XP. But every day I think of upgrading. It's just that I need to get work done most days - and therefore don't have the hours it would take to upgrade.

But I digress...

Tonight I needed to drop to Vista an proof some demos that I'll be presenting next week. Everything worked fine.

Only, imagine my surprise when I booted back to XP - and somehow my machine had been re-re-re-re-compensated for Congress' wonderful decision to make Daylight savings time 'magically' occur a few weeks earlier this year. Honestly, I was kind of pissed to see that I'd somehow managed to spend an extra hour on Vista than I had thought... (just for a second).

Then, after waiting to see if the problem would magically correct itself, I decided to manually set the clock back an hour. Only, in my world it was actually 11:30 PM and XP thought it was Saturday (12:30 AM) not Friday. So toggling the hour back one notch and clicking OK was a BAD idea. Instead of reverting back to 11:30 PM on Friday, I suddenly told my machine that it was 11:30 AM on Saturday.

Of course, all of my nightly scheduled tasks freaked out. I can just imagine it sayying: "Holy bleep!!!! Time warp... somehow the scheduler just missed a whole day... quick! quick! quick! do something before Mike finds out and freaks out!!!"

Sigh, about 5 minutes later I got my machine back, and the clock correctly set. No idea what happens the next time I dual boot into Vista and back...

Posted on April 13, 2007 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

April 12, 2007

Circumventing the Server of Origin Policy

In security circles you're branded as pure evil if you talk about circumventing the Server of Origin Policy that helps protect JavaScript interaction from being hijacked by hax0rs. Frankly, that's with good reason - in the vast majority of cases.

But still, when I have something like blog.angrypets.com and want to be able to let it tie in to something like statusupdates.angrypets.com (via the XmlHttpRequest Object) it would sure be nice to just have my JS directly load/connect to statusupdates.angrypets.com. (As a case in point, blog.angrypets.com is hosted as a TypePad blog - so it's not like I can wire up a server-side proxy of an WS goodness that might be exposed on statusupdates.angrypets.com. Not to mention that just 'blindly' proffering proxies in that manner can also get you in to a HEAP of trouble when it comes to security.)

What we need is a SAFE way to trust external domains for direct linking. I think a killer way to do it would be to put a servers.trusted file right in the root of your site (i.e. on par with robots.txt and favicon.ico). This servers.trusted file would simply provide a list of trusted endpoints that could be deemed trusted by the site owner in terms of 'circumventing' the domain of origin policy. That way www.angrypets.com could be trusted to work with just plain ol' angrypets.com or scripts.angrypets.com, and so on. It could also be trusted to interact with other sites that I own, like common.overachiver.net, and so on. Likewise, if you trusted a service proffered by Google or MSN, you could 'link' there as well (if that floated your boat).

And as for any worries that hackers might somehow 'poison' your sites by overwriting this file: if they're able to modify a file at the root of your site then your last concern is the possibility of XSS via XHR injection.

Of course, to implement this 'change' would take a miracle - as all browser vendors out there would need to implement a standard way of permitting their JS runtimes to check for the existence of a .trusted file, parse it, and then 'trust' the specified endpoints.  So, it's sadly likely to never happen.

Posted on April 12, 2007 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

April 10, 2007

Windows Live ID - Huh?

 Honestly, Windows Live ID can BITE me. I signed up with a different passport to the Visual Studio Industry Partner Program (VSIP) a while back for a project I'm working on. But that's not my 'normal' so called 'Live ID' (you know, 'passport' but with 3 layers of extra crap and gunk added to it - along with more lipstick marketing) - you know, my 'normal' Live ID, the one that's bound to my MSDN Subscription, and the one that is bound to my Connect account?

Here's what's got my panties in a wad (click on the image for a non-scrunched version):

And yeah, I've clicked "Try Again (suckaah)" 2x now. (For the record: The definition of Insanity is trying the same thing over and over - expecting different results).

I'm sorry, but this is sooooooo pathetic. I can't log out of my 'Passport' account???

Pffbbbbttttt.

Posted on April 10, 2007 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

April 04, 2007

Warning: Heavy Docs and Ice Cream Sandwiches don't Mix

I think Ice Cream Sammiches [sic] are my new favorite. And I should know: It's only 11AM and I've already had 4 today. (Hey, they come in big boxes...) 

Only, I'm working on a new project where I'm sooo deep in a bunch of the driest docs you've seen in your life. Here's a sample/snippet:

The IDebugProperty2::EnumChildren method should be implemented next. The debug engine (DE) calls this method to get a list of local variables and arguments by passing IDebugProperty2::EnumChildren a guidFilter argument of guidFilterLocalsPlusArgs. IDebugProperty2::EnumChildren calls IDebugMethodField::EnumArguments and IDebugMethodField::EnumLocals, combining the results in a single enumeration. See Displaying Locals for more details.

That's just one tiny paragraph - and I'm working through pages and pages of the stuff. To be fair, these docs are actually pretty decent - if you know what they're talking about. But go read that paragraph, and tell me that your head doesn't start to spin a bit.

Now imagine trying that while going through a sugar crash. 

Hey, I know... I'll give myself another 'energy boost' by eating 2 more....  

Posted on April 04, 2007 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)