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January 23, 2007

Great Article on Vista and Windows DRM

There's lots of talk floating around out on teh intarweb about Microsoft's nefarious goals with Vista and DRM. With a company as big as MS, it's easy to suspect some sort of evil conspiracy.

I don't buy into that line of thinking, but I'm definitely NOT happy with the direction MS has taken in regards to DRM, but I finally found an article that does a good job of explaining some of the reasoning behind MS' move, and doesn't end with something stupid like: "switch to linux"...

Frankly, this article is insanely well written - and just a solid piece of journalism. It presents a very fair, and unbiased approach to the whole endeavor, and doesn't shy away from the good, the bad, or the ugly - the agenda seems more motivated by making information available than some personal grudge or bias/agenda.

Go see for yourself: Vista and More: Piecing Together Microsoft's DRM Puzzle.

In related news, I found that article by way of a bit of a 'showdown'... which you may be interested in:

10 reasons not to get Vista
10 reasons you should get Vista

In terms of pure punditry, the first article does a better job of arguing it's case, while the second comes up a bit short. (I'd add things like Vista's better use of physical RAM, Ready-Boost, Parental Controls, and performance monitoring and indexing.)

Posted on January 23, 2007 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 25, 2006

My Vote for worst documentation this year

One of my favorite jokes:

A Helicopter Tour of Seattle ran into trouble one day as incredibly thick fog made it impossible for the pilots to see anything. Eventually, the pilots had to slow to a crawl, to avoid flying in to anything. Finally the helicopter arrived at a large office building. People in the building rushed to the windows to see a helicopter hovering outside in the fog.

Then one of the pilots got an idea: on a piece of paper, in big letters, he wrote: "Where are we?"

Some people in the building rushed to a desk, scribbled something down, then ran back to the window - holding up a big sign. "You are in a Helicopter!" read the sign.

The pilot gave the office-workers a nice smile and a big 'thumbs up' and turned the helicopter a few degrees to the left and began to fly into the fog.

Within 20 minutes the helicopter arrived safely back at the airport without any mis-hap. Stunned, one of the passengers asked: "How in the world were you able to figure out how to get back to the airport from that idiotic response?"

"Oh, that was simple," said the pilot. "The answer was technically correct, but totally useless - which meant we were at the Microsoft Campus. Once I had that figured out, it was just a question of flying back to base... "

In that spirit, I was looking for some validation that a dedicated SQL Server box should have its "Memory Usage" option set to System cache instead of Programs.

Googling for specifics on this one actually turned out a bit harder than I would have anticipated. (Seriously, details on what each option does to the underlying system would be great to have...)

Then I found this gem - I've included a screen cap of it in all of its glory just so you won't have to follow the link:

Tell me that's not awesome documentation. Though I think they forgot to tell you how to click on the OK button...  (And don't worry - I checked the links from this page - nothing explained what the POINT of changing these would be.... )

Posted on November 25, 2006 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 09, 2006

ASP.NET 2.0 and IE Conditional Formatting

Internet Explorer's Conditional Formatting is some very cool stuff. Well, conditional formatting is a bit of a mis-nomer - it's actually just conditional comments, leveraged for css styling.

It makes styling documents tons easier, and results in cleaner CSS than a single page with all sorts of CSS Hacks in place. Employed for CSS Styling, Conditional comments let you 1) style a document/site in FF and then account for any abnormalities by providing a specialized Stylesheet for Internet Explorer (even different versions if needed).

Example:

With this main.css is applied to just about everything, but any boogers are sponged-up by a specific IE 6 or IE 7 set of overrides.

The problem though, is how do you do this, if you need to do it in ASP.NET, and also want the location of these stylesheets to be dynamically generated? You could try stuffing an <asp:Literal> control up in your header, but red-squiggles let you know that it's not a cool idea (even though it actually works at run-time):

So.. I spent a few minutes tonight looking at the new Page.Header control - which you get a reference to if you set <header runat="server"> in your markup. But it didn't have any real love - i.e., no methods for injecting comments or other things (though you can change the page's title, inject meta-data, and inject style info/references if you'd like).

So, I just decided to try dynamically creating a Literal control on the server and stuffing it in to the Header's .Controls collection. It worked perfectly.

(Using a GenericHtmlControl might also be an option, but I didn't play around with it long enough to figure out how to get around the fact that it really wants to use tagnames... )

Posted on November 09, 2006 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 06, 2006

Pre-Election Thought

BACKGROUND:
WW2 - I'm a huge history buff - to the point where my kids know that I love watching WW II documentaries, even if they aren't in color.

Cassi - My lovely and talented wife.

Caleb - My 5-year old son, who would rather play Nintendo most of the time than watch one of my 'black and white' WW II documentaries.

Nick - 5-year old 'neighbor kid' who's one of Caleb's best-buds.

----------------------------------------------

Nick (to Cassi): So, are you for the war, or are you for peace?
Cassi: Well, that's a bit of a complicated subject...
Nick: You mean because some people want to go to war with us?
Cassi: That's part of it...
Caleb (interjecting) : Well, it's not like WW II where everything was black and white...

Posted on November 06, 2006 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

September 18, 2006

Instant VB - Code Conversion Bliss

AngryPets.com is kind of... angry some times...
I do a lot of *cough* bitching on my blog.

So, over the next week or so, I'll be doing some posts on what I consider to be some killer solutions and services. These are all services or solutions that I use, and that I just plain love. For the most part, most of these have NOT been actively blogged about ad nauseam (that I know about), though they really deserve it.

Unless otherwise noted, these solutions/services are not:
a) free (i.e. they cost something) - but they're worth it.
b) products that I've been paid (or kick-backed) to blog about. They're simply sweet products that I feel deserve some major kudos. (Hopefully that will make up for some of the bitching...)

Code Conversion. It's teh SuX0r.
When I'm not bitching about software 'sins' or ranting about the end of the world, I have to pay the bills. Happily I do that by engaging in something I absolutely love: technical evangelism. But, while I love solving hard problems and then 'showing' devs how to do that in their own environment, I typically find myself needing to convert lots of code for demos, keynotes, hands-on labs, sample-apps, articles, and other projects.

To be honest, code conversion sucks. It's not at ALL glamorous. And while there always seems to be a number of problems to solve when converting code,  they're always PESKY problems that I hate dealing with.

My kids, on the other hand, love code conversion. That's because, every time they hear swearing come out of my office, they get $$$. And code conversion makes me curse like a drunken pirate bereft of Rum.

Instant VB - Conversion Software that pwns
Enter Instant VB. It's from the fine folks at Tangible Software Solutions. It slices, it dices, and it does a wicked-good job of converting C# to VB.NET. (Instant C#, a separate product, converts VB.NET to C#).  The interface is insanely simple to use, and code conversion takes place very quickly.

Better yet, the conversion is actually REALLY good. In the past I've a number of other converters to 'help' me with the conversion process, but they all invariable choked on basic syntax issues such as some forms of casting, use of the ternary operator, unwiring delegates/event-handlers, and using Generics. Instant VB plows through all of those 'issues' without a single hitch.

The product is awesome. It lets you convert:
- Snippets
- Projects
- Folders
- and ASP.NET snippets

It's very easy to use, and provides you with a number of spiffy options, and the interface is very intuitive.

The product costs $179, but I found that not only did it pay for itself quickly, but the product actually made me money. See, I had budgeted about a day for my normal C# to VB.NET 'slug-fest' on a recent project where I had a Solution with 5 projects. With Instant VB, I was able to convert the entire solution in a matter of minutes.

I did run in to one small glitch in my '5-project' solution conversion, but that's just because VB.NET can be asinine at times. You see, if you implement an interface in VB.NET, you have to explicitly mention that member xyz specifically implements interface.member. (It's not enough that the friggin' signatures are the EXACT same and would cause any other compiler to throw an error if you actually had two members with the exact same signature. Lamest of all? VB.NET's Intellisense doesn't believe that "Implements" is a word - so you have to type it in all by yourself if you don't let Intellisense stub-out the initial implementation code for you.)

(And spare me the "this guy is dissing on VB.NET and doesn't know crap" replies/flames/comments. I'm not dissing the intelligence of VB.NET users, or bitching about the language - just complaining about something that is obviously amiss (or the IDE would at least treat "Implements" as a key word).)

Anyhow, Instant VB DOES handle those implementation issues - within the same project, but not across projects. (I had a 'base' library that defined the interface, and 'consuming' projects (using a Plug-in architecture) that implemented the interface.) That said, without having to pause and complain to anyone who would listen about how dumb VB.NET was being (my wife can be soooo unsympathetic some times), the whole conversion process was the hands-down easiest thing I've ever done in my life.

Heck, I, um, found myself converting old projects just for the heck of it.

Moral of the story: If you spend ANY time at all doing code conversion, Tangible Software Solutions has the solution for you. They're very responsive to customer inquiries, and their tool flat-out rocks. I can't recommend it enough. And I'm not the only one...

Though I should mention that my kids aren't all that happy about Instant VB though...

Posted on September 18, 2006 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Is VS 2005 Trying to tell me something?

So, in the course of testing various bits of ReverseDOS functionality, I was looking to see if a specific 'spam' term was enabled in one of my various ReverseDOS.config files laying about... 3 weeks ago.

Ever since then, for some reason, it's ALWAYS the 'term' that VS 2005 shows by default in the IDE up in the 'search terms' drop down.

See for yourself:

Frankly, I've just kind of gotten used to it. Like some sort of perverted subliminal ad. But I'm worried that I'll become so used to it that I'll include it in a screen cap for a client some day. And people will REALLLLY wonder abouot me then. ("Um, Blake, what's up with this guy? programming, and um, that? I don't get it? Can you even search the web from Visual Studio?.... did we do a background check before we signed him on?")

Oh, I've TRIED adding subsequent search terms, but this one particular term seems to be VS' favorite - I just can't get it to go away. No matter WHAT I've searched for since, this term always, um,  rises to the top.

Posted on September 18, 2006 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

July 19, 2006

Faster than a speeding Pharaoh?

What's faster than a speeding superman and more powerful than 10k atom bombs?
More importantly, what happened when it slammed into the earth?

Go read, and find out. (Hint: It invloves King Tutankamun.)

Observations:
1) Mommy!
2) Seems to me that this could have very well CREATED the Sahara (and in the too-much-info dept, I have to say that 'Sahara' in Arabic in my mind everytime I say it out loud - it just sounds soo much cooler: is Saaharaa (the desert - so yes, 'Sahara desert' is a tautology... ))
3) Um... seems like that one of these thumping the earth, or even something 'pidly' like the Tungusa event of 1908 would raise the ambient temperature of the earth for QUITE a while.

UPDATE: Ooohh! Ohhh Oooooh! there's a video simulation link at the bottom of that page.

Posted on July 19, 2006 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

July 04, 2006

Happy 4th of July!

And just in case the Associated Foreign Press is watching, they can kiss my American butt.

Seriously, if that article were written by Americans about how 'silly' those Frenchies got during Bastille Day... there would be an international uproar about American insensitivities. What right do they have to call my love of my flag an 'epidemic'?

Seriously, what's their problem? I've been in France on Bastille day and watched the parades - I even cheered with genuine enthusiasm for the French. Likewise, I was present for the 700th anniversary of Switzerland, and didn't begrudge their fireworks and celebrations one bit, in fact I marveled that a nation with so much ethnic diversity could remain so strong for so many years. Heck, just yesterday I was listening to Mongolian music celebrating the Altai mountains, and had to wipe away a tear because of how powerfully the voices I was listening to portrayed such a love for their own homeland.

So why is it so bad for me and my family and neighbors to love our homeland and our flag? I won't claim that America is perfect, or that it doesn't have its problems - it does. But anyone with a pulse also knows that one of its biggest problems right now is that people can't get here fast enough. People the world over still flock here for a chance at making their dreams come true. So how can it be that bad?

Stated differently: I don't begrudge anyone else the right to feel good about their heritage, their country, and their people's contributions to the world, so I sure as hell wish people would afford me the same right.

Posted on July 04, 2006 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

June 29, 2006

Root Kitting Hypervisors

Sorry, but this is just KILLER:

100% undetectable mal-ware

How? Simple: by putting the root kit into the Hypervisor. This particular exploit takes advantage of AMD's virtualization technology - no mention of whether or not Intel's Virtualization Technology (VT) will be susceptible to similar attacks - though I would suppose it could be.

And what's a hypervisor for those that don't know? Simple: traditionally an OS sits 'above' your hardware - and 'below' your applications - building a 'stable' platform where you can run your software on various, different, inter-communicating pieces of hardware (quite an accomplishment when you think about it). Problem is: most OSes demand 100% control of the hardware. Hypervisors are just another abstraction between the Hardware and any OSes loaded on to the computer - and it just so happens that they're uniquely suited to allowing multiple operating systems to 'control' the hardware - making it possible for multiple OSes to run simultaneously. In fact, because the abstraction/virtualization in the Hypervisor is so spiffy, the OSes you're running can all think they've got 100% control of their underlying hardware (and they do - a specialized, virtual, set of hardware dedicated just for them).

So, as you can see - sticking a rootkit BELOW the OS is just a brilliant idea. Of course, I'd be pissed if it happened to me, but it's just a KILLER idea.

Posted on June 29, 2006 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 29, 2006

Mikeey's Vista Review

Stuff that doesn't suck:
Parental Controls. They're exactly what you'd like them to be. Not only can you specify times when a user is allowed on the machine, but you can specify generic web-type settings, or get medieval and completely specify allowed/disallowed sites as you'd like.

Parental_small

More importantly, you can specify which native WINDOWS components the user can interact with (like the control panel, etc.), and you can grant/revoke access to certain programs. Honestly, it's perfect.

Performance Diagnostics. Finally, I've got an easy, logical way to see disk activity. This alone makes me very tempted to switch to Vista TODAY.

Performance_small

And, more importantly than just showing me nice graphs - I can now easily see what's got hooks/etc into various files. Kind of like building in extra goodness of the type that's typically associated with SysInternal's utilities. It's also nice that perfmon and all of its goodness is right there as well.

Reliability Diagnostics. There's also a spiffy new interface that reports on any failures - nice.

Reliability_small

'In Place Navigation.' I'm sure MS has their own term for this, but whatever the name, I like. At any point in your current path (as displayed in explorer) you can 'branch' in to a completely new location. VERY sweet.

Inplacenav_small

(For example, in the screen cap above, I can immediately 'branch' or navigate to any root directories off of my J drive. Not the best invention EVAR, but very helpful, and something I'll likely use. (It takes a bit of time to get used to, but can be pretty useful.)

Startups: More goodness in the spirit of SysInternal's utilities (i.e. Autoruns) that will help you keep tabs on evil installers. (No not ad/spyware - but crud like iTunes and other crap that feels it needs to start up 5-12 MB of 'services' each time your box starts.)

Startups_small

Very Cool.

Add Remove Windows Components: By now you've hopefully heard that MS will let you upgrade your Vista 'version' by paying an upgrade fee online - and then just turning on what features you need/come bundled with your 'purchased' version.

Addremove_small

What I like about it, however, is that it makes it easy to see what's installed or not - no more clicking that bleepin' details > details > details button - it's all exposed in a simple-to-use treeview control now.

Not Sucky, Not So Hot Either:
Aero Glass: Yawn. Check out all of the screen caps up until this point. Yeah, Aero-Glass is cool - it's pretty spiffy, and YES it's much more than merely making the borders of your windows transparent. Only, it's really just nothing more than making the borders of your windows transparent - with some very impressive hardware rendering. Which is my big beef - the hardware requirements. There just isn't enough 'candy' there to justify the absurd hardware requirements. Hopefully we'll see some other coolness come out the UI, or I'm going to consider it a MAJOR disappointment (as much as I like what's there).

Flip 3D: Mega Yawn. I'd seen images of windows in 3D from various reviews of Vista - and somehow figured that we could 'stash' or 'minimize' them off to the side in a semi-3D mode - kind of like what you CAN do with WPF (Avalon). But no. After seriously hunting around and pecking at various ways to even get Flip 3D to work, I seriously underwhelmed when I got it to work. What's it do? Simple: Instead of hitting ALT+TAB to cycle through your windows, Flip 3D lets you WIN+TAB through your windows, but shows them as thumbnails 'stacked' in a so-called 3D manner.
Flip3d

Big YAWN. I mean, cool, I guess. But I hope this isn't one of the things that's been holding Vista up. (And from the TINY bit I've seen, I'm thinking I could get VERY similar 'candy' from a *gasp* Mac - but much LESS hardware. Seriously... I don't GET the 256 MB graphics card requirement - for what, some killer shading? hrrmmmmpppph.)

The Ugly / Sucky:
User Access Control. This stuff just plain sucks. It really feels like a great big hack, and I'm surprised more people in the security community aren't crying foul. (Maybe the fact that they're not means I don't know what I'm talking about - but I can guarantee you that you'll hate this 'functionality' too).

Uac1_small

So, you're playing around with Vista - checking out new functionality - all of a sudden the entire screen dims, and a pop up demands your attention. Something currently in operation has crossed a trust boundary - would you like it to continue?

Not only do I think this is dumb (most people using the machine won't know what's going on - they're trying to 'get' to a part of their computer, see something, or install software that they would like to have work - so they're GOING to just click YES. Security problem with spyware/malware and luring NOT solved.

And this thing is SERIOUSLY annoying. While looking at the Task Manager's processes tab, I clicked the 'show processes from all users' option - the screen dimmed, everything stopped. Did I want to proceed? Um Sure.

My favorite part was when Vista booted up - something was trying to run, did I want to let it continue?

Uacfirewall_small

Um, yeah. I think I'll let that one fly. (But hey, thanks for the alert on something attempting to run what might POSSIBLY be a malicious program.) Overall, as to the UAC thing, it's analogous to the fact that I'm a terror risk. See, whenever I fly anywhere since 9/11, it turns out that in 1972 there was a male with the last name of Campbell born, who apparently MIGHT have ties to terrorism. Because _I_ am male, was born in 1972, and have the last name of Campbell - I can no longer check in online - I have to do it at the counter, in order to keep everyone on the flight SAFE. (In other words, it's a pathetic use of smoke and mirrors that doesn't do a damned thing.)

Other Factors:
Despite my major contention with the effectiveness, AND the annoyance of the User Access controls, and my lack of fanfare over aero-glass, I was pretty impressed by the overall beta. Installation was NICE - and almost all of my hardware was automatically detected. Performance was excellent - fast enough that I found myself thinking I could switch to using this BETA as a primary platform. And, yeah, the Aero Glass stuff is cool - just nothing huge. In other words, I've heard analysts and (I believe) MS spokespeople talk about how Vista will be the next big revolution in computing - the biggest revolution since Windows 95. Well, from everything I saw, I've got to say that I must be missing something. What I saw was a very NICE upgrade, maybe even a nice bit of evolution - but nothing revolutionary.

All that said, I'm totally willing to give it a chance - and I'm currently thinking really hard of making the switch to Vista as my primary platform - it's snappy, better to look at than XP, and has some cool new gizmos - and I've only scratched the surface. And it's definitely NOT a failure (other than that UAC crap), just not something that I would have had to expect to wait 3+ years for - that's all.

Posted on May 29, 2006 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

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