/bill's House O Insomnia : News

Windows Mobile 7.0 Delayed

William — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:39:00 GMT

At first glance, the announcement that Windows Mobile 7.0 will be delayed is pretty frustrating. MS has been in the mobile phone game for a while now and it's really hard to argue that Apple didn't get it right with the iPhone. So why can't someone with Microsoft's power get it right a little quicker? One of the main things I would guess is hardware - Windows Mobile is rolled out onto a lot of different devices and that complicates things greatly. With that said though, it's not as disappointing as it may seem. Perhaps the biggest frustration with Windows Mobile has been the browser and as the article states, there's going to be a better one released well in advance of 7.0. The flashy screen that's responsive and easy to navigate is the other big issue and there are already several providers coming out with UI's that rival the iPhone. 6.1 was far from perfect but did a decent job bridging the gap and well, if both of those issues are addressed in a timely manner, it'll go really far into mitigating any frustration related to the postponement of 7.0. Truth is, when 7.0 comes out, it needs to make a Huge splash. It doesn't need to just be good, it needs to be great. And it needs to be visibly better than anything iPhone. Being that MS can't afford to get that wrong, it's understandable (yet no less disappointing) that they are taking the 'better safe than sorry' strategy.

Using Facebook to launch a Botnet army

William — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 17:07:41 GMT

Wired has a piece talking about how easy this would be to do. It's not entirely speculative since researchers built such a beast. I think the hype is a bit much though. The argument they make could be made for any mechanism that can get people to install software on their own computers. But unlike most other means, such an attack seems really easy to countermeasures. It wouldn't take long to figure it out and Facebook could easily send out a notice telling you to uninstall it. Much like human viruses, computer viruses and botnets are only really effective if they are allowed to exist in the infected host for a period of time, at least long enough to spread in the case of viruses, or long enough to be used in the case of botnets. I'm not so naive to think that some Facebook users aren't all that computer savvy, but overall I think it's a demographic that's fairly sophisticated. And they talk to each other a lot. Even if every facebook users downloaded the app (something really hard to fathom), it seems it would be pretty easy to eradicate. The more popular and more pernicious the bots, the more buzz there would be. That's not to say they don't raise some good points and that Facebook shouldn't try to prevent such things from happening, but it seems like it's only worrisome in the theoretical sense.

Rescuing the Hubble

William — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:54:15 GMT

Kudos to the Boston Globe for providing such high quality and just kick a55 pics of the mission to repair the Hubble telescope.

Utter Coolness compliments of Roku

William — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:01:14 GMT

My first Roku Soundbridge joined the family back in 2005. As far as wireless media players go, it was a bit pricey. But it looked really cool and I got it through a special offer making it a lot more reasonable. The form factor and styling was the main thing I attributed the cost to, but I quickly learned that it was all the cool features that were responsible for the cost. That was pretty much the case with each Roku product I've owned, they looked really cool and had all sorts of unanticipated goodness brimming throughout. With Windows Home Server, an XBox 360 as an extender and a few Media Center pc's in the house, it's been a while since I looked at any Roku products, mainly b/c I just didn't really need them - one network media player is usually plenty, let alone several. But when I saw Endgadget's latest post on the sheer coolness of Roku, it made me realize what I was missing.

So at first glance, it looked like Roku came up with a streaming media player which served up content from Netflix. I always found Netflix's pre-addressed envelopes a really nice touch - and a convenient one at that. But Every time I've signed up for Netflix, it ended up being a waste of money b/c I don't typically get around to watching many movies in any given month. So I've signed up a few times only to cancel my account b/c of lack of use (Kim and I just can't seem to let go of paying for movie rental late fees ;-) ). After the third or fourth time, i just sort of gave up on the whole thing. By the second sentence in this paragraph, I realized it's time to rethink that policy - and go enable my subscription.

Roku is a truly innovative company with nothing but cool products, but it looks like they might have just raised their own bar.

The Associated Press' Double Standard

William — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:46:00 GMT

Exhibit A

Whether it's legal, illegal, moral, immoral or whatever, it's not a good idea to post stuff on the internet if you don't want people using it without your approval. The main reason is that if someone does use it against your wishes, it's really hard to detect in most cases. By the time you do, it could have been indexed and copied so many times your head would spin. On top of it, attempts at making people take things down usually end up backfiring. Like many bloggers, I've personally found my posts on other people's blogs where they are taking credit for it. It used to annoy me. Then I got ot the point that I figured it's not worth fighting b/c it would require a lot of ongoing energy. My way of dealing with it is usually to create variable names or comments that are self referencing - so basically I give myself the link back. If I wrote something though that I wanted to control, it would not be posted on my blog.

Personally, since I make my living selling intellectual property, I have a tremendous amount of respect to other people's IP. On the other hand, the doctrine of Fair Use is necessary and life without it would not be good. It seems too often there are two extremes that people operate in. On the one hand, if it's on your site, no matter how much legal verbiage you surround it with, they act as though they can take it and do with it what they please. On the other hand, you have folks that post stuff that people reference which clearly falls under the domain of Fair Use and they start making all sorts of noises about it.

If I can digress for a minute. Most of us will require the services of a lawyer at some point or another. When a relative dies, when you buy a house, when you for a corporation etc, you'll typically want to enlist the services of an attorney. On the other hand, most run of the mill folks only have limited dealings with an attorney (cost alone prohibits using a lawyer frequently). I"ve had to use a laywer for a few different things in life but in each case, I needed on for different tasks. I don't ask the guy who did my house closing to run a patent search for me. So I, do not have "a lawyer". That brings me to my little rant point.... "You'll be hearing from my lawyer". Whenver I hear this (I've only heard it twice in reference to something I did, but I've heard people in line at the Verizon store say that twice, and have heard people threaten it on other occassions to random people"), I always think "WTF Ever". To have "my lawyer" typically means that you keep him on retainer. Very few people have enough legal dealings to warrant keeping a lawyer on retainer for indefinite periods of time. So when I hear that, It warrants only a chuckle. Even if you really do have a lawyer, you just sound stupid making such threats. If you are really going to get a lawyer involved, just do it. And whatever you do, don't send ridiculous absurd threatening emails where you threaten frivolous litigation where you mention your big city lawyer over and over again, especially when you don't have a lawyer, lied about everything in your email and don't have the money or grounds to file litigation. You'll just make a fool out of yourself.

Ok, anyway... I think you ought to play it one way or the other, but you can't have it both ways. In order for a site like http://www.snappedshot.com/ to do what they do (Criticize and point out inaccuracies with photo journalism), they really need to show the images at hand. They don't charge money and they aren't presenting it as their own. But if they just referred to the photos at hand, it would really diminish the effect. If they linked to the image, several problems would present themselves as well. But for the Associated Press to say he has no right to do this, and then go and snake "Kristins" photos, that's pretty shameless. Clearly they have a legal department and he doesn't. So they thought they'd just bully him around with their big city lawyers (unlike unemployed nuts who can't live without borrowing money from people and not paying them back). When they needed some images for their story though, they had no problem swiping them. And they were definitely under copyright so they engaged in sheer hypocrisy by doing this.

The Microsoft® Windows Mobile Line of Business Solution Accelerator 2008!

William — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:04:00 GMT

Rob Tiffany has got the details... .

The main features include:

Intelligent resolution awareness
Synchronization Services
Windows Communication Foundations "Store and Forward"
MapPoint
LINQ
Custom Controls
Managed Stored Procedures and Triggers
Notifications and Online Help
Language Switching and Localization

Some of these (WCF, Synchronization Services) are a lot more thrilling than others but all in all it's a great step forward. With that said, I think MS really needs to work on a few things. When the iPhones first came out, I was lucky enough to have one sent to me. I liked it but didn't go gaga over it. After two days, I decided to sell it. I think UI wise, it was far ahead of a typical SmartPhone although the PocketPC edition phones gave it a lot better run for the money. But I know that my opinion is not typical. In fact, most iPhone users who have used or use Windows Mobile are really adamant about the superiority of the UI and usability. I think some of that is b/c they are comparing a 500.00 phone with a much cheaper one in many cases but across the board, the iPhone does probably have the advantage. Having started to toy with the iPhone SDK, I have to admit it's fairly easy to pick up (nowhere near as easy as the Compact Framework) so once more applications come out for it, it will make it all the more attractive to mainstream users. I have a lot of faith in Microsoft though and nothing would please me more than for Windows Mobile 7.0 to work so well that my obnoxious iPhone owning friends will have to pipe down about the greatness of the iPhone. The accelerator however, is definitely a step in the right direction.

Interesting Mac iBook story

William — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 21:16:00 GMT

Every time I hear about the TSA, I become more and more convinced that if Darwin's theory is correct, the TSA will cease to exist before long. The latest 'can they really be this stupid?' incident has to do with a Mac Airbook. At first I started thinking along the lines of a corollary to Chris William's 'Grandma Theory'. Maybe the TSA officers weren't dumb and clueless, maybe they were just older and technologically illiterate. But that can't be the case here b/c they clearly know enough about technology to know what a hard drive is and what ports are. They knew enough to think there's something fishy about a computer without a disk drive and ports. That made me start to envision a Cliff Clavenesque know-it-all who is a self-proclaimed computer whiz - trying to look smart in front of his/her peers. It's kind of hard for me to imagine that a TSA agent, unless they just started (and his comments indicate more than one TSA agent was involved), hasn't come across an iBook by now. At a minimum you'd think they would have come across some really thin/small computer that wouldn't have had a disk drive in it.

"I'm standing, watching my laptop on the table, listening to security clucking just behind me," Nygard recalls of the situation. "'There's no drive," one says. 'And no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive should be,' she continues."

Assuming the reports are true and accurate , this would be hysterical if these people weren't 'protecting' our country (and at ridiculously high union wages). My personal experience with TSA is a lot different. While they are often strange, bitter and/or incompetent, they don't seem technologically clueless. I have a travel bag that I keep my Ultra-mobile, my Zune, Phone, Headphones, USB Hub, a trackball and a few other misc items in. It always causes them to run it through the machine a few times (even when I pull just about everything out). But usually, after they see what all the stuff is individually, they either make some gadget geek joke or ask about one of the items (the most common one is asking if my Zune is 'the new iPod').

I'd just close the hole...

William — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 02:15:00 GMT

There are often times that I read something, typically involving a lawsuit, that I'm shocked people push. Often they are so embarassing, I'd probably pay extortion money to keep the crap quiet if someone threatened to go public about something I did. But instead of trying to keep it quiet and just fixing it, they involve lawyers and threats. NewsFlash - threatening bloggers and web sites backfires. I can say unequivocally, if I was the one that created something this widely used, that brough in this much money and had such a glaring security flaw , I would just fix it quietly. I wouldn't want my name associated with something this moronic and sloppy. I'd be paying bribes to the owner of HowardForums to have him keep it quiet, not threatening him and attracting attention. Actually, I'd do neither. I'd thank him for helping me create a more secure system (then I'd fall on my sword in ritual suicide b/c Gawd this is embarassing)

Is this legal?

William — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Bruce Schneier has a new article on a program that Sears is installing on people's computers.

Money quote: "If a kid with a scary hacker name did this sort of thing, he'd be arrested. But this is Sears, so who knows what will happen to them. But what should happen is that the anti-spyware companies should treat this as the malware it is, and not ignore it because it's done by a Fortune 500 company."

The downside to copy and paste

William — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 05:01:01 GMT

As much time as I spend on computers, it's really hard to imagine life without the Clipboard. Copy/Cut/Paste is such a handy feature I couldn't begin to calculate how much time and effort it's saved me. However, it's definitely caused me some problems. Mainly in cases where I've been filling in boilerplate information in templates, I've copied and pasted stuff I shouldn't, or forgotten to replace stuff. Two times in particular come to mind but personally, when it comes to client material or stuff that I'm going to publish, I've sworn off copy/paste completely. It's too easy to use a template from scratch (and ensuring beforehand the template is as empty as possible and uses consistent terms I can search for at the end to ensure I've removed them all). In one case, I had material on the clipboard that didnt' belong there. In the other, I was copying and pasting over an existing document and didn't replace everything correctly, after all it 'looked right'. I ended up with a lot of egg on my face in both cases and it made such an impression, I've fundamentally changed how I work with boilerplate stuff.

I was reading this today and just cringed because I've been there myself. The stuff I screwed up was not anywhere near this important and didn't cause as much damage as this does, but man, it's an easy thing to do until you get burned:

Anyone with a computer probably has cut and pasted sentences or paragraphs while using a word-processing program. The shortcut can save time and simplify a tedious project.

However, when a police officer uses the same technique on a report, it can get messy. Or worse, illegal.

Critics of the practice call cutting and pasting police reports "dangerous" and say it puts the integrity of law enforcement at risk. Others say the technique can be used effectively in certain situations, such as using one report as a template for another and maintaining accuracy.

The issue resurfaced in East Contra Costa earlier this month when a Pittsburg police officer testified in court that he cut and pasted one portion of a witness account onto another in a felony hit-and-run case.

The revelation came three years after two former Pittsburg police officers were convicted of intentionally falsifying drug arrest reports dozens of times in a similar manner. After their termination and six-month home detention, and an internal and independent review, the police chief instituted a new report-writing program that includes software preventing officers from using some cut-and-paste techniques.

"It's a shortcut and I shouldn't have done it," Officer Daniel Pratt said in his recent testimony, before apologizing on the stand.

Read the rest here

The site does require registration - so feel free to use the BugMeNot credentials: UserName: joemail@gmail.com Password: 4joemail

The Bill of Rights in 2007

William — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 03:31:21 GMT

So often when I hear talking heads pontificate about constitutional issues, I hear two basic sides. The first is the strict constructionist interpretation where they claim the constitution is clear as day hence end of discussion. On the other side you have the 'living constitution' side that often acts like anything that is inconsistent with their agenda should just be interpreted away. Whichever side one buys in to, it's hard to argue that rapid technological advances don't really complicate many legal issues. Orrin Kerr examines the United States vs King.

In short, a contractor in Saudi Arabia was connected to a military network. While doing routine patrols of the network, an analyst found some porn and happened to notice a folder named Pedophilia. That prompted him to look further and as it turns out, the folder was accurately labeled. King was arrested and charged. His defense was that the search was illegal. Personally, all normal legal issues aside, i think he should be thrown in jail for being a sick SOB and stupid enough to plug a computer with highly illegal material on it into a military network. It's not like that's material you bring to work to show your buddies and you'd have to know that a military network is likely to be subject to a higher degree of scrutiny than your average office. I know, there are tons of examples of amazing security lapses and incompetence on govt networks, but counting on the fact security might currently be lax is really foolish b/c just b/c it's lax now, who's the say that the next network guy they hire won't be competent? Having experience on two military installations, from what I saw, security was very tight. So much so, that our standard operating policy was "Don't do anything on that network that you wouldn't be ok with if it showed up on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper." And for God's sake, if you're doing something illegal (as well as something that you can rest assured will seriously anger just about any sane human being on Earth), why would you use the naming conventions he did?

All that aside, the case is mighty interesting and such issues are only going to become more and more frequent.

Another major data breach

William — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 06:24:11 GMT

Although this time the incompetence and sloppiness wasn't the Veteran's Administration. In each of the stories of this sort that I remember, the data turns up a few weeks later, is blamed on some small and innocent mistake and all kinds of assurances are given that no one actually saw the data. That line of crap is a lot easier to pull when you're talking about a password protected laptop than an unencrypted, password free CD so they may have a little trouble trying to push the line that the data was never viewed by anyone.

This is going to be particularly bad b/c even if the original cd is recovered, who's to say it wasn't copied? Normally, I guess I'm cynical enough to really doubt assurances of the "No one saw anything sensitive" variety but in this case, I couldn't believe such an excuse no matter how hard I tried.

I've been told before that 'common sense' largely depends on where you sit. Certain things for instance might be 'common sense' to a doctor that would never dawn on someone in another profession. And that's pretty much the line of argument I'm hearing from various commenters - to a lay person, encrypting data and password protecting it isn't necessarily common sense. Not working for the English Govt I can't really say I know from personal experience, but my guess is that at some point in the day, when every one of the people involved came into work, they logged onto their computer. So it's hard to fathom them not at least appreciating the value of password protecting things. Even so, I don't think the 'layman' defense will work here. There have been too many high profile data breaches, hacks, screw ups etc to not know that personal data you're working with should be secured.

Again, I don't know what the English political climate is like right now, but if this were the US..... and it was a private company that did this... there'd be a bunch of crotchety old senators dragging the heads of the company up to Capital Hill and making them testify under oath as to what happened. There would be a lot of finger wagging and Monday morning quarterbacking. But when the govt screws up, well, mistakes happen, no one is perfect and no harm no foul. If English politicians are anywhere near the headline whores that their US Counterparts are, then they'd no doubt be flogging the daylights out of a private company if they were responsible. But won't have a lot to say other than the obligatory condemnations. Screw ups of this magnitude, affecting this many people, that could have been prevented so easily really shouldn't happen. You shouldn't have access to that sort of data unless you prove you know how to handle it and follow agreed upon headlines (we can argue about what 'know how to handle it means' all day, but at a minimum, I think we can all agree that it should be encrypted and password protected, that access to even export this information should be restricted to a small and accountable group of people, and that any packaging and delivery be recorded and tracked from start to finish).

Hopefully nothing comes of this and the CD turns up under a stack of papers in the mailroom or something. And hopefully the people responsible will be spending the holidays in the unemployment office.

If Google were evil...

William — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:03:02 GMT

This isn't the first time I've read someone hypothesizing about the ramifications of Google going evil (or being owned by the government) but it's a lot of food for thought

Silverlight Tour

William — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 18:36:15 GMT

I've been too busy flying back and forth between the coasts to doing anything cool and non-work related. The bigger bummer is I'm going to miss Shawn Wildermuth's Silverlight Tour . If you are going to be in Atlanta next week, Registration is still open for the Silverlight Workshop 9-17 through 9-19. Maybe if I buy Shawn a new XBox 360 he can make me a video tape ;-)

Rootkits anyone?

William — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:13:13 GMT

Since I was a youngster, I've always been a fan of Sony stuff. I'm old enough to have spent a few years alive before CD's came out. I was still a little guy when I got my first Sony Portable CD player. Even though there were only a few CDs available at the time (The Firm - Mean Business, Pink Floyd - The Wall, The Miami Vice Soundtrack, some Robert Plant CD and a few others were all that was available). There was a huge battery pack that made it really clunky for mobile use, but you could hook it into your home stereo or you could use self-amplified speakers like the Bose 101s which is what I opted for.

When I got a little older, I remember our first Trinitron, a tradition we kept for a while. I try to avoid TV as much as possible, but even today I have a Sony TV to play video games and watch movies on.

The PlayStation was absolutely freaking awesome, as was the PS 2. The PSP I recently purchased is quickly becoming one of my favorite gadgets.

The first cool MP3 player I had was a Sony Memory clip, which had the coolest form factor of just about any gadget I've had before or after.

One of my favorite Laptops has been my first Vaio.

For much of my life, I've had a long running love affair with Sony products.

But this is just freaking pathetic. Even more so in my opinion b/c I have two vaults. The biometrics stuff is a nice touch but not something I honestly get too excited over, but it was a small factor in picking them up. You really need to read the article itself to appreciate how lame it is. Hearing a corporate executive whine about how their heart was in the right place with something like this is just plain sad. If this didn't just happen, it'd be one thing. But for godzsake it was practically yesterday this just happened.

From a manufacturing and R&D point of view, Sony rocks. They have great quality and good products. But they are making so many stupid stupid mistakes, it's hard to fathom some times. I really hope this is the last such screw up.

Tracking Wikipedia 'edits'

William — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:58:00 GMT

If you use Wikipedia much, you have no doubt come across a page that has been vandalized. While vandalism is in the eye of the beholder to some extent, there are clear rules there and I've seen many posts that clearly violate the rules - no question about it.

A graduate student named Virgil Griffith wrote the Wikiedia Edit ScannerA> which tracks edits and compares them to the IP Addresses. Before it's over I'm sure a whole bunch of people are going to have egg on their faces, but for now, looks like New York Times owns the hall of shame for now . This is a cool project and looks like Mr Griffith is on track to make a heck of a career for himself before he even leaves school.

Theory matters after all...

William — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 03:53:00 GMT

There are many discussions developers have with each other that always make for interesting discussions. One of the best ones is "How much does a Computer Science degree matter?" If you argue that it's really important, you'll invariably have your argument countered with anecdotes of 'some idiot who was totally Ivorty Tower" and examples of people who were self taught and complete bad asses.

I definitely know many many examples of the latter. I'm pretty skeptical about the former which I'll get to in a minute. I don't consider myself a bad ass or guru in any sense, but I've had a pretty successful career and been able to excel in every job I've held. I'm kind of a hybrid though b/c I have taken 30 credit hours of CS even though most of what I know is self taught. However had I not had the education that I did, I know there's more than a few subjects I would have had a lot more trouble with. Outside of the formal education, there's a lot of vicarious learning thrust upon you while taking college courses and at least in my case, I'm pretty sure a good bit of my success is attributable directly to my education. I work/have worked with more than a few folks though who had little or no formal CS education and are far better developers than I am. Experience and learning are ultimately what matter and at the end of the day, if you learn to create effective classes for instance, it doesn't much matter if you learned to creat them in a class room or at work. Ultimately, the reason this always makes for such a good discussion is precisely because there are so many excellent examples to support either side of the argument.

One thing I hear a lot though are people that criticize people that 'think they are still in college', 'all theory' 'too much textbook' or 'ivory tower'. I have yet to meet or work with someone who's so well educated that they are poor at development. Like most things, I think good theory makes good practice. What I have come across however is posers who hide behind big words. In every single case where I've been told someone is 'all theory' and had the opportunity to work with this person, what I've found is that they aren't all theory at all. They are all 'use words and phrases they don't understand to compensate for their disturbing level of ignorance'. In most cases, these folks learned just enough to sound like they know what they are talking about (to others that aren't familiar with the theory they claim to espouse). A few notable examples come to mind, in most cases, I've run into and/or heard from friends about this more times than I care to remember:

Tonight though, I was flipping through Wired and came across an article which proves that without a firm command of theory, you're going to be in over your head in some cases. Even cooler than the article is the source code they posted with it . I'm not very familiar with the .jpg file format, but this article really got me thinking. I mean, I would never have even thought to look for such things. The code isn't really all that complex, but understanding what it's doing and why is something you aren't just going to figure out on your own. At least I know I wouldn't. Not surprising, Neal Krawetz the guy who performed this analysis has a Ph.D in Computer Science. Read the article, look at the source code, hit his web site - seems to me this is true Ivory Tower stuff and it's pretty darned impressive if you ask me.

The coolest campaign ad ever

William — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 02:11:00 GMT

Ok, so it's probably not real and it's been done before. But it's still really *** cool...(read more)

Dumbest lawsuit Microsoft ever faced

William — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 02:05:00 GMT

This is a big claim on my part, but if this isn't the dumbest lawsuit Microsoft has ever faced , it's got to be a contender. In the lawsuit, Crooker argues that Internet Explorer was set to delete his browsing history after five days, but the software...(read more)

Famous Last Words

William — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 00:32:00 GMT

I have very little to goof on Bill Gates about, but he's being Mighty brave with challenges like this .

On the one hand, I really admire his approach and smack talking.

"We made it way harder for guys to do exploits," said Mr. Gates. "The number [of exploits] will be way less because we've done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn't done any of those things."

In another portion of the interview, he added, "Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine."

Mr. Gates appears to be referring to the Month of Apple Bugs project intended to highlight a new Apple security issue every day during January of 2007. Said project has stirred the hornet's nest of whether or not Macs are more secure than Windows machines, despite the lack of Mac viruses in the wild.

On the other, this seems like a really really big order to fill. All I can say is I'm cheering for the team and sure hope he's right.