It is definitely a stay-at-home and drink-hot-chocolate kind of day here in San Francisco. And I’m totally okay with that. Now if only I could get the 64-bit Windows installation disk to recognize my SATA controller, life would be good. I’m not a fan of Linux for desktop usage yet (I’ve tried it about once a year for 4+ years now) but I might be pushed in that direction, ironically, because of better hardware compatibility. This might be easier if I had a non-USB floppy drive, but I’m not inclined to go out in this weather just to get one.
Category Archives: Microsoft
Windows AntiSpyware
To download the new Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) software you need to verify that you’re a customer “running genuine Microsoft Windows.” I’m pretty sure mine is legit, at least the guy on Market street said it was. Of course on the confirmation page, it seems you can get by their million-dollar verification system by choosing “No, do not validate Windows at this time, but take me to the download.” Hat tip: Robert Scoble.
Fixing Explorer Restart
Since my tragedy the other day I’ve been pretty busy working on things. My laptop was fine after the reboot, but the desktop was badly broken. It would start up just fine but once it started Explorer (the desktop, start bar, etc) would restart once every 3 seconds or so. I finally got it working, so I thought I would outline my steps here for the sake of anyone else who may have had a similar problem.
- First I wanted to stop the explorer restarts and so I hit ctrl+alt+delete and went to the task manager. Then I played a game of computer whack-a-mole. If you click on the constantly respawning explorer.exe task and end the process before it kills itself, it’ll stop restarting. Luckily my desktop isn’t too fast so I was able to catch it.
- At this point I decided that something must have gone wrong with the update, possible because the computer was on an old version of XP (SP1 or earlier) so the best remedy would probably be updating again. Unfortunately Internet Explorer wouldn’t run. I was able to start up Firefox through the task manager by going
File > New task (Run...)and navigating to Firefox.exe on my hard drive but though it ran You can’t use Windows Update on Firefox, so I was still out of luck. - While in the Run file dialog I noticed that my Samba network shares were mounted, so I could get files onto the desktop that way.
- I happened to have a copy of the downloadable Service Pack 2 file (270 MB) from Microsoft that’s much better than the network install thing. I honestly don’t remember what hoops I jumped through on their download site to get this or I would point you there. It’s a great thing to have on a CD.
- I copied that file to the Linux server and then using the Run dialog to open it from the mapped network drive on the desktop.
- I used task manager to shut down everything non-essential that was running in the background.
- The service pack installer ran. It came down to the reboot time and I crossed my fingers. When Windows finally restarted everything worked fine again.
There was probably a better way to do this, but this is just the path I took.
Also see these instructions for disabling automatic reboots but leaving automatic updating.
Bizarre Windows Behavior
So I’m sitting in bed on the Powerbook doing some editing. My music stops and I look up just in time to hear the Windows-shutting-down noise and see my main desktop turning off. My first thought is something is wrong with the power, which is why the desktop would be acting funny but the PC laptop is just fine. I was going to turn the music off anyway so I keep working. Then beeps and noises start coming from my laptop. The laptop (which has never had problems, even with SP2) looks like it’s shutting down too. I get to my desk in time to see it close the unsaved documents I was working on and start rebooting. It totally ignored the dialogs that were popping up, I couldn’t click or stop anything. Totally helpless. Now I’m in panic mode. Did one of the computers get infected with some new virus and they’re going to keep rebooting? Is some joker on our wifi network messing around? I quickly go to my router status page from my Mac and see just the normal clients are connected. I check the logs on the router and there’s no unusual activity. By this time the desktop PC has rebooted and I decide to log in to see what happens. It boots up normally at first, but then everything starts blinking and explorer.exe seems to be stopping and starting every 3 seconds. The laptop just came back up, so I login to that. A little icon pops up in the taskbar telling me a security update has been installed that required rebooting my computer.
THANK YOU MICROSOFT! I didn’t need those hours of work anyway. I feel so much safer now because I don’t have to worry about evil crackers getting to my data because I can be certain that you will mess it up first. God. There goes my weekend.
I just ctrl+alt+deleted out of the desktop because it was getting painful to watch. The laptop seems fine but I’m so disgusted I don’t even want to touch it. Just earlier this evening I was reading Scoble and thinking MS had some pretty decent stuff in the pipeline I could see myself buying, like the OQO. Not anymore.
The desktop started the login screensaver, but now appears to be totally frozen. I’m just going to turn it and the laptop off. I can see in the morning if maybe this was a virus/worm pretending to be a security update. This weekend will be spent getting valuable data off NTFS partitions and reformatting hard drives. Thinking back I’ve been a user of Microsoft software for about 75% of my life, I grew up with it. Now I’ve grown out of it.
I’m actually kind of sad. Yes it’s 4 AM. Yes I’m going to have to recreate the lost work. Yes I save, and thankfully it looks like I only lost about fifteen hundred words.
Update: Scoble apologizes. He reminds people to save often, personally I hadn’t really left the computer, I was just about 6 feet away. It’s a laptop so I never worry about power outages, it’s highly locked down and hasn’t crashed in at least a year. I wasn’t using Word 2003, even though I own it, most of the work was in open XHTML/PHP documents and a bit in a browser window on my local wiki. I can live with the fact that a hard drive might crash, or lightning may strike, or any number of extraordinary circumstances might cause me to lose data. I can’t reconcile that it was due to a feature of an operating system, a feature I was told to turn on to stay safe, and a feature that bugs you when it isn’t activated. I trusted the computer because of the improvements to stability Microsoft had made in XP and SP2. Trust like that is slow to build and easy to break.
UI Is Hard
Why Are Good User Interfaces So Hard to Make? By Microsoft in 1999. Why does MSDN still use frames?
News.com Leads Blog Communication
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen all year. Check out the HTML of this article I linked a few days ago. Notice anything at the top?
<link rel="pingback" href="http://tb.news.com/p2t.cgi/2100-1032-5368454" />
Houston, we have Pingback support! Let’s dig deeper:
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">
<rdf:Description
rdf:about="http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5368454.html"
dc:title="Microsoft flip-flop may signal blog clog"
dc:identifier="http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5368454.html" />
trackback:ping="http://tb.news.com/tb.cgi/2100-1032-5368454"
</rdf:RDF>
Ugly as sin, but that’s trackback. It gets better…
A little URI hacking takes us to this page which lists all trackbacks and pingbacks the article recieved. How cool is that?
It’s my understanding that even though they’ve had the trackback autodiscovery code for a while they’ve been recieving mostly pingbacks, which makes sense given that it’s more fully and elegantly automatic. It would be cool if they could add support for the nascent rel="trackback" discovery method and save themselves the trouble of the RDF hack. Hopefully spammers won’t exploit their trackback server too soon and they can support legacy systems that don’t implement Pingback yet.
The implications of this are fairly large. News.com is obviously bootstrapping code that will involve their readers with the blog conversation surrounding their articles. How long for other sites to catch up? Will they plug into Technorati or Pubsub next? As far as I know this is the first major media organization to implement Trackback and Pingback. The team at News.com should be commended for their effort and leadership in this area.
WordPress on CNET
WordPress and the plugin I blogged about the other day are mentioned in the News.com article Microsoft flip-flop may signal blog clog. I believe this is the first time WP has been mentioned by them. Thanks to Son for writing in about this.
The Memos
Memos from 1972 made in Microsoft Word, incredible. The superscript feature always bugged me too.
Embittered Generals
“We are “embittered generals”, and we are a threat for the W3C and the people working for the W3C. We are trashing years of W3C evangelism for our own glory. We are also accused of playing, unconsciously, for Microsoft.” Interesting read for anyone concerned about where the web is going next. I’ve been called many things before, but never “dangerous.”
Microsoft Redesigns
The new Microsoft Corporation site actually looks decent. Highly optimized markup. There’s gotta be a good story behind this, it’s a complete reversal for Microsoft. Scoble? Hat tip: Doug. Be sure to read the comments.
Death of Windows?
I just tried to run Windows Update, and got a message explaining ActiveX to me and these instructions:
To view and download updates for your computer, Windows Update should be listed as a Trusted Site in Internet Explorer.
To add Windows Update to the trusted sites zone:
- On the Tools menu in Internet Explorer, click Internet Options.
- Click the Security tab.
- Click the Trusted Sites icon, and then click Sites...
- Uncheck the “require server verification” checkbox.
- Make sure the following URLs are listed in the Web Sites list box:
- http://*.windowsupdate.microsoft.com
- http://*.windowsupdate.com
Note: If you need to add a URL to the Web Sites list and the Add button is disabled, contact your system administrator.
What a usability nightmare! Perhaps this degraded user experience in the name of “security” will open the market for systems built on a foundation of security wrapped in an enjoyable and easy-to-use interface.
The Saint WP
A Windows/Apache/MySQL/PHP distribution offers WordPress as their first plugin. Is it just me or do all of these things come out of Germany?
Tantek’s New Digs
Tantek gives notice to Microsoft, and will be at Technorati. I got to talk a good amount tonight with Kevin Marks and David Sifry. Technorati has had some growing pains lately, but I can finally understand why they’re expanding so rapidly: Dave is an incredibly charasmatic ambassador for their genuinely interesting technology. Add in a good team, and it’s a recipe for success.
Putting Linux on the Desktop
Red Hat goes after the corporate desktop. The key is standardized hardware in corporate enviroments. Windows is excellent at working with any dang thing you plug into it, or the dang thing coming with a CD with Windows drivers.
Does Time Change All?
Microsoft Research on web searching: Does Time Change All?
Microsoft Expression
Microsoft Expression, a free vector image tool for Macs and PCs. Hat tip: Cheryl Wise.
Notes: Between the Stylesheets
Here is a collection of some notes I took at the Between the Stylesheets panel, complete with linky goodness. Update: Tantek’s post.
- Eric Meyer – Netscape Communications, Meyerweb, Devedge
- Tantek Çelik – Box model hack, Microsoft employee, Favelets
- Jeffrey Zeldman – No introduction needed
Jeffrey: The thing about CSS, it’s hard to understand unless you first think about markup. It’s hard to rethink the way you approach X/HTML. There’s so much to do that it seems strange to think about HTML, but in fact it’s important. We now have the chance to party like it’s 1993, we have the chance to write it like it was meant. We (designers) could do that until browsers became compliant. Saves Bandwidth. Work is now more accessible. Continue reading Notes: Between the Stylesheets
Retiring Microsoft Executive
A retiring Microsoft executive said some pretty interesting things in his farewell letter. It sounds like not everyone is oblivious in the Evil Empire.
“Microsoft must survive and prosper by learning from the open-source software movement and by borrowing from and improving its techniques. Open-source software is as large and powerful a wave as the Internet was, and is rapidly accreting into a legitimate alternative to Windows. It can and should be harnessed.” Simply fighting open source through “litigation and proprietary protocols” is a strategy for failure, Stutz said.
“Microsoft is in agreement with much of the position that David has of the future. But Microsoft believes that breakthroughs will come mostly through commercial software companies, like Microsoft,” a company spokeswoman said.
I’m glad she said “like Microsoft” to clear things up, for a moment there I thought she might be talking about Oracle, Sun, or IBM.
NT Stands for…
Just saw this interesting snippet:
During a trip to Microsoft’s Redmond campus this week, I had the opportunity to meet with Mark Lucovsky, one of the original architects of Windows NT. We had a long discussion about NT’s development and evolution; one of the more fascinating tidbits he revealed was that NT doesn’t, in fact, stand for New Technology, as documented in books such as “Showstoppers” and “Inside Windows NT” (Microsoft Press, 1992). Instead, the name comes from the earliest days of the product’s development, when Microsoft designed NT to use the Intel i860, a RISC processor. In those days, Intel’s chip was behind schedule, so Microsoft had to use an i860 emulator called the N10. NT was so named because it worked on the “N-Ten.”