My Windows toolbelt

These are the things I install on every single frickin' Windows box I build (and yes, I know, but you're wrong, that won't work for me):

Flash
Java
Firefox (with del.icio.us and Googlepedia)
Google and Wikipedia search providers for IE7
Process Explorer

Note that Process Explorer is not quite as much of an absolute requirement on Vista as it is on XP/2k, thanks to the new Resource Monitor, which is hiding behind an innocuous button on Vista's Task Manager Performance tab. Also, cool new thing from Russinovich is Process Monitor, but I'm still very comfortable with PE and so only check out PM from time to time.

Also - this is a good toolbox list.

Buffy Buffy Buffy! (Season 8!)

With the first several episodes written by Joss himself!

It's a comic book....

From http://dir.yahoo.com/thespark/7987/buffy-revamped

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fans can be called many things -- vocal, prolific, perhaps even rabid -- but they're seldom described as "patient." In the four long years since the last episode of the show's seven-season run, they've had to satisfy their Buffy cravings by poring over old episodes, dressing up at conventions, playing along with a variety of games, and slaking their thirst with Buffy-related books and comics. Many have found diversions in Joss Whedon's other projects like "Angel" and "Firefly." But since the closing line of the Buffy TV finale -- "What are we going to do now?" -- many fans have been dying to know exactly that: What happens next for Buffy and the Scooby Gang? Some inspired followers have even taken matters into their own hands, creating their own fan films and dozens of scripts for a would-be eighth season. But now, finally, the wait is over for an official Season Eight, and the Buffyverse is no longer confined to the special effects budget of a minor TV network. The canonical Season Eight takes place on the pages of Dark Horse Comics, with Joss Whedon himself writing the first few issues/episodes.

No-No by a landslide!

No-No is in the lead in early returns... but it'll be another day or three before final results from people who mailed 'em today come in.

But I don't see anyway it turns out different from No-No, not with 29% of registered voters' ballots already counted.

And man, the tunnel sure got stomped. 30-70! Ouch! Guess we'll have a new mayor next time around. Bye Greg.... Peter Stienbrueck for mayor!

(In case you're completely baffled - which should apply to anyone reading this who does not live in Seattle - I'm talking about Seattle's special election on replacing the Alaska Way Viaduct with a new viaduct, a tunnel, or none of the above.)

"2.0"

It’s been a long time since there was a true generation gap, perhaps 50 years—you have to go back to the early years of rock and roll, when old people still talked about “jungle rhythms.” Everything associated with that music and its greasy, shaggy culture felt baffling and divisive, from the crude slang to the dirty thoughts it was rumored to trigger in little girls. That musical divide has all but disappeared. But in the past ten years, a new set of values has sneaked in to take its place, erecting another barrier between young and old. And as it did in the fifties, the older generation has responded with a disgusted, dismissive squawk. It goes something like this:

Ok, I've only read the first page of this article.
But I already have to chuckle to myself. Y'know what we're going to call this generation? Something like "Youth 2.0"
Kinda fits, what with all our political movements being neo (-conservative, -populist, -lithic) these days.
Neo's just fancy talk for 2.0.

Bruce Sterling is so right - Web 2.1

(sigh) The grim realizations this brings me.... You know what? In ten years, I'm gonna be walking around with my googlemapping spimedetecting iPhone clone, dumping scraps of geolocative video into my socially-networking personality cult... I can smell that already.

[...]

Those *&&%$$ blogger revolutionaries! They're worse than the 90s dot-com boomers! They're more disruptive. They're violently disruptive. They are not just kiting stocks, they are really tearing into the fabric of reality.

What a thing to see.

Go read the whole thing.

One way to fix a video problem in Ubuntu

So, now that the Vista betas are over, I gave my home test PC a break from monthly (or sometimes weekly) reinstalls of Microsoft's latest, and installed Ubuntu. Ah, what a relief! It all just worked!

I even pointedly told some Microsofties how much less painful Ubuntu was to install and run.

All was good for weeks, until... all of a sudden, my machine would only display at 800x600 or 640x480! And the cursor was on the wrong place onscreen - it was offset by about 2" from the place the clicks would actually register. So, no good. And I get enough trolling google and RTFM'ing in my day job, I don't need more of that from my home PC.

So I put the Vista install DVD in the drive, and rebooted - but missed hitting the key to boot from DVD.

And what do you know, Ubuntu healed itself!

I guess it was scared of being replaced....

Instant Netflix!

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Firefox 2 RC3 & Vista RC2 UAC - "launch Firefox when install finishes" runs in administrator's context

Small problem with Firefox vs. Vista's User Account Control. This is not really a bug but I still think Firefox could design around it. Firefox is probably not the only application that might have to worry about this.

So - you're running Vista as a regular, non-admin user.

You go to install Firefox. You're prompted to provide an administrator's credentials. You do.

Now the Firefox installation process is executing in the admin account's context. All good so far. Then the installation finishes, the dialog boxays "installation complete!" and presents a "Finish" button to click. But there's that little checkbox - launch Firefox. If that checkbox is checked, and you click Finish, Firefox will indeed launch and run just fine - as a process in the admin account's context. Which means that everything you do that gets stored in your Firefox user profile - or if you download files to the default location of the desktop - it is actually going into the admin account's profile, or the files are going onto the admin account's desktop - not your desktop!

So, just don't launch Firefox right away after installing it as an admin user. Just close out the installer, then launch Firefox the old-fashioned way: by clicking on its icon.

If I had the time, I'd make this a clearer explanation. If this doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry about it.

So - if Firefox wanted to design around it (really we're talking about modifying the installer, not the underlying app) maybe work out how to have the installer not launch the first run of Firefox using the admin account context but rather go back to the original user account.

Or - hey, wait, why does Firefox need admin rights to install in the first place? Shouldn't it just be able to install as a user-land app? (Or do I have Vista confused with *nix again?)

If I wasn't so lazy, I'd uninstall Firefox then try reinstalling it again without providing admin rights, just to see what would happen. Or I'd google for it.

But nah, I'm done now. Elbow and send....

Laszlo gets some

Some good news in Laszlo-land from CNET.

Laszlo lands $8 million to expand applications

Laszlo Systems on Wednesday is expected to announce that it has raised a series C round of $8 million, led by WI Harper. Altogether, it has raised over $26 million. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company, which makes tools for building interactive Web applications, said it intends to use the funding to invest in marketing, expand its partnership program, and develop Web applications.

Congrats!

Testing before updating corporate client software

How many more times do we have to read one of these "virus definition update breaks things" stories without saying to ourselves "pshew, it wasn't [our brand of AV]."

I'm increasingly wary of simply trusting vendor QA to ensure that we won't have problems caused by automated AV definition updates. And as we have more components of the system (firewall, antispyware, who knows what's next) that follow similar auto-updating, that particular problem will only become worse.

(The same issue applies with system, application, and middleware patches and updates.)

Now, what we should NOT do is stop updating virus definitions (or stop patching & updating systems, applications, and middleware). That's foolhardy: the risk of remaining unpatched against known security exploits, or unable to detect the latest viruses, or living with bugs that have already been fixed is a known Very Bad Thing.

What we need to do is make it safe to update definitions (and patch, and update) frequently.

At a minimum, we should with every definition set install it and do a full scan of a baseline machine and verify that nothing was detected as a virus. The definitions do not go out until that test is passed. (This rule may be bypassed if there is a current SIRT event that the updated defs would mitigate.)

It should be achievable to have a test suite of basic functionality for the desktop image. We already have many of the necessary pieces throughout the broader ECC group, and elsewhere in IS. Assembling them into a manual test plan (v1) is quite achievable. Automating some parts of the test plan (v2) should also be achievable - especially if we assign the task of executing the manual test plan every time there is an environment change to someone with scripting skills (or teach someone who knows how to code in general how to use a scripting tool); you can bet they'll be scripting away by the 3rd runthrough of the manual test plan. However complete automation seems improbable for v2, focus on automating the most annoying parts to execute manually, and add in any easy timesaving automation too.

In a utopic world we would be able to install the defs onto a fleet of vm's, all loaded with those applications that have sufficient business criticality to justify packaging them and setting up an automated test script, run the vm's through the script, and again stop the updates from going out to production if we get failures.

(That utopic capability would of course be used EVERY time we had a baseline change, not just for virus definitions.)