This afternoon, I’ve been using the new version of Opera (v9.62) and I like it a lot. It’s fast and uses less memory than the other browsers. I like its clean, classy look. I love its ability to tile the tabs so you can see them side by side.

Opera’s ability to tile your tabs with a single click is cool

I also like the ability to save a session when you want to (although Chrome and IE 8 save your sessions automatically). I like the flexibility of its panels and the ability to place the panel where you want (left side, right side or floating). I like the handy Notes feature.

But I’ve opted to keep Chrome as the default for one small (but important) reason: the “Send Link” button on the Bookmarks toolbar that invokes Outlook.

Something that annoyed me about IE 7 was that Microsoft removed the Mail button from the toolbar and forced you to take an extra step, clicking File | Send in order to email a link. This is something that I do many times a day, so those extra clicks add up.

 
Google won my heart with a simple “Send Link” button on the toolbar

If anyone out there knows how to add such a button to Opera, please let me know.

Okay, I feel guilty about it. I know I’m a traitor. I really, really like IE 8. I like it better than Chrome in most ways. But … a few days ago, I got a message saying I needed to update Adobe Flash to the latest version. I did – and ever since, I can’t play Flash on IE 8.

I tried all the suggestions that Ed Bott gives on his blog on this subject. I checked to ensure that Flash was enabled for all sites. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling Flash. Each time I reinstall, it appears to be successful and the movie on the Adobe Flash site plays – but nothing on other sites will. That means I can’t watch YouTube videos, Fox News videos, etc.

 
This is what I get when I try to play a Flash video in IE 8 after the update.

When I try, I get a page telling me that I need to install Flash, as if the sites don’t recognize that it’s there at all.

 
Here’s that same video in Chrome. It also works in Firefox and Opera.

That got old fast. When a friend sends me email links to videos, I don’t want to have to cut and paste them into another browser to be able to see them. So I decided to change my default to something other than IE, for the first time in many years.

the updated Flash works fine in Chrome, Firefox and Opera. After considering each of them, I decided to set Chrome as my default browser. I like it better than the others for several reasons: I like the “one stop shopping” combination address/search box. I like the fact that there is a tab to open a new tab (instead of having to click File | New Tab as in Firefox). I also like that Chrome automatically transported my Links/Favorites toolbar from IE 8. None of the other browsers did that.

 
Chrome brought my links/favorites bar over from IE automatically.

I did just download the latest upgrade to Opera, and will be trying it out, so I might switch again. One thing’s for sure: until Flash is fixed, IE won’t be set as my default (although I’ll still use it for browsing other sites).

Ever get tired of looking at the vendor’s logo and name on the System properties page in Vista? You know, that’s the one you get when you click the System applet in Control Panel, or right click Computer in the Start menu and select Properties.

Well, I did. I figured after all the upgrading parts and swapping out cards and adding hard drives and so forth that I’ve done, I ought to get the credit for building the thing.

  
My new and improved System Info section, with my own name and picture instead of Dell’s (click to enlarge)

To find out how I did it, see the Question Corner in the October 30 edition of VistaNews at www.vistanews.com (check the archives if that edition is no longer on the front page).

Well, we thought we had a fully functioning main Media Center PC again. Turns out we were wrong. Last Thursday night, we discovered that we had a dead tuner. We hadn’t realized it before because Thursday was the first time we had it set to record two programs at the same time. One of them recorded and one didn’t.

The problem: a cheap, unreliable tuner card
We started messing around with it and found that one of the tuners just wasn’t functioning. You couldn’t watch Live TV while recording, etc. I had noticed during setup that, for some reason, it had two different brands of tuners. One was a Hauppauge and the other was a ViXS. The Hauppauge was working fine; the ViXS wasn’t. Hauppauge is a very well known tuner brand and there were two Hauppauge tuners in the old HP digital entertainment center. I had never heard of ViXS before.

I started researching the problem on the web and found that quite a few other people had experienced the same thing with the ViXS tuner, on HP machines, on Gateway machines and on home-built machines. I suppose HP was trying to save money by making the second tuner a ViXS but I’d have gladly paid an extra $50 or whatever it cost them to give me two good tuners.

The solution: a good tuner card – that doesn’t fit
We tried everything we could think of, uninstalling and reinstalling the tuner, changing configurations, etc. Still no luck. Yeah, the machine is under warranty and I could have called HP. But I knew they would probably have (1) sent me another ViXS tuner (which I really didn’t want after all my reading about it), or (2) had me send the computer back (and I REALLY didn’t want to be without the media center for who knows how long).

I decided to take the old Media Center apart (the one whose power supply flamed out) and try salvaging one of its tuner cards. The tuners were on the opposite side of the case from the PS, so I figured they might still work. Unfortunately, a visit to the Hauppauge web site indicated that they were legacy cards for which there were no Vista drivers available. 

So I picked up a new Hauppauge HVR-1600 at Fry’s the next day. This was the same model that was working fine as the primary tuner alongside the dead ViXS. But due to being in a hurry, I didn’t open the case first to check out the available expansion slots. Of course there would be an empty PCI slot, right?

Wrong. Saturday morning my son came over to help me with the “surgery” (or actually, with prepping the patient, since the part that I really needed help with was getting the computer down from its shelf above the TV). When we opened the case, we found that the first Hauppauge tuner was using one of the two PCI slots and the sound card was using the other. Back to the drawing board. The rest of the available slots were PCIe

The choices: swap the tuner card or swap the sound card
I obviously had two choices: I could take the HVR-1600 back and try to find an HVR-1800, which comes in PCIe. I knew Fry’s didn’t have the latter because I’d looked at all their tuners the day before. The other option was to get a new PCIe sound card, freeing up the second PCI slot for the HVR-1600. We decided to keep our options open. We put the 1600 back in its box and took it with us, and went by Best Buy to see if they had an 1800. Not hardly. The only tuners they had were the USB stick type. At that point, I decided I really didn’t want to spend the whole morning running around to different stores and probably not finding what I wanted, so we went ahead and got a Soundblaster X-Fi Extreme Audio PCIe sound card, came back home, switched out the sound cards and put in the new tuner card, and closed up the patient.

Victory, and one more setback
We reattached all the cables and cords, fired it up and – hurray! Both tuners worked. We tested several programs and all was well. Kris left to pursue whatever post adolescent males pursue on Saturday evenings (post adolescent girls?). Tom and I settled down to watch TV.

The new sound card sounded fine … and then it didn’t. We found some of our recorded shows and some of the live TV channels (but not all of either) had garbled sound. What in the world was wrong now?

Well, Tom had been playing around with the sound settings and some other settings, so we thought (hoped) that was the problem, but subsequent tweaking of the settings didn’t help. But something had obviously happened somewhere along the way to cause the problem. We decided to try doing a system restore to before the problem occurred. We had a restore point just before we installed the sound card drivers, so we rolled back to that, installed the drivers again, and all was well – again. And it’s been working fine ever since.

Postscript

Before you write and tell me I’m stupid for not opening the case before I went out and bought the tuner card, yeah, I know. But I was pressed for time and made a bad bet that there would be a free PCI slot. It would have been nice if the product documentation had told me the number of each type of expansion slots, but none of the documents had that info or a diagram (including the “Upgrade and Service Manual”). And before you write and tell me that I could have bought the HVR-1800 online, for less than it would have cost in a store, I know that, too. But we wanted to get the thing fixed ASAP.

At any rate, all’s well that ends well and I think (fingers crossed) we now have all the problems ironed out. I still love the machine itself; it’s fast as a supersonic jet. If anyone out there wants a dead ViXS tuner, let me know before the trash goes out. :)

We’re having fun with the new Media Center. We’ve been using Vista’s Media Center on the kitchen computer and my primary desktop for quite a while, but they don’t get the kind of heavy use as a PVR that the main Media Center attached to the widescreen TV gets. So we’re learning more about the changes that Vista has brought to that functionality.

Due to the fact that we’re currently (temporarily, pending the purchase of a new HD TV) using a scan converter to connect the computer’s VGA output to the old TV’s S-video input, the picture is not super sharp. This doesn’t really show up when watching TV/movies but it does make it more difficult to read the text when using it as a computer. Thus we like to do a lot of the management tasks via remote desktop.

My primary workstation, on which I did most of my early experimenting with Vista MC, runs Vista Ultimate and I could manage it remotely via Remote Desktop Connection. A problem we ran into almost immediately with the new main Media Center is that it runs Vista Home Premium. That’s okay for most purposes, but Home Premium lacks a feature that we really wanted: remote desktop services (the Home editions have the desktop client, but don’t act as RDC hosts).

Tom came up with the solution to that problem. It cost thirty bucks, but was well worth it. We had to buy VNC (which is free for Windows 2000 and XP, but the free version doesn’t work with Vista). Now we can remotely connect to the MCPC’s desktop to manage it, as shown below:

 
New MCPC’s desktop accessed via VNC

If you have the same problem with Vista Home Premium, you can download VNC at http://www.realvnc.com/ . The client (VNC Viewer) is free so you can install it on as many of your computers as you want.

P.S. If you like the cool wallpaper that I put on the MCPC, head over to www.digitalblasphemy.com – they have lots of amazing backgrounds, including many that are designed for two or three monitors., some designed for HDTV, some that are animated, and even some made for iPhones, Zones, Blackberries and other mobile devices.  Some are free, but for a small fee ($15 for 90 days or $25 for a year) you can access to hundreds of fantastic wallpapers. Check it out if you haven’t already.

In the October 14 edition of WXPnews (www.wxpnews.com, see Archives), I said a sad goodbye to our Windows XP based Media Center PC, which has been a faithful companion for about three and a half years. The HP digital entertainment center (http://www.build-your-own-computers.com/hp-z556-review.html) died a sudden and tragic death, and we decided that, rather than try to repair it, we would treat ourselves to a new Vista-based Media Center.

It arrived last Friday, and my son and I spent all day Saturday getting it set up. First we attached it to a monitor to get Vista configured, and that was a snap. Next came the job of getting it hooked up to the TV and home theater system. That proved to be a bit more of a challenge.

First we hooked up the cable to the MCPC. That's a no brainer, since we have resisted the urging of our cable company to upgrade to digital. We have a three way splitter/amplifier to which the coax from the wall attaches. One length runs to my primary Dell XPS workstation on my desk across the room. The other two go into the MCPC's two tuners. Easy. (If/when we do take the plunge and upgrade to digital cable or FiOS TV, things will get complicated - and expensive - as we'll have to have a set-top box for each of those three connections. And that means having to attach IR sensors to the set-top boxes in order for the Media Center remote to work with them. And ... but that's another post for another day).

Here's the first problem we had to deal with on Saturday: our TV is an "HD Ready" Sony rear projection behemoth that was state of the art in its day - but unfortunately, its day was about eight years ago. Technology has moved on. The picture is still remarkably good and that's the reason we've held onto it for so long. We'd like to hold onto it for another couple of months; the plan is to take advantage of anticipated electronics price cuts this Christmas season caused by the economic situation and find a good deal on a flat panel HD TV then.

But that's then, and this is now. Our most immediate issue was how to get the video out from the MCPC to the TV. With the old Media Center, that was easy. There was an S-video output on its video card that we connected to the S-vid port on the TV. But this MCPC doesn't live in the past, and S-vid is soooo five years ago, don'tcha know? 

The video card has outputs for VGA, DVI and HDMI. The TV has inputs for coax, composite, S-video and component connectors. And never the twain shall meet. At least, not without taking a roundabout route.

We had actually come up against this problem once before, when we connected a little HP Slimline Media Center to our bedroom TV. We solved it by buying a converter box from AverMedia that takes a VGA input and outputs it to S-video. Not a high quality connection, to be sure, but at least a way to get some sort of video from the PC to the TV. We appropriated that box (we find that we don't use the bedroom MCPC much at all, maybe once every couple of months, so it won't be badly missed and that computer can be repurposed to do something else) and used it to connect the new Media Center.

Sure enough, the picture quality was not what we'd have liked. TV and movies actually look okay, but when running the Vista desktop, it leaves a lot to be desired. Text is soft and hard to read. We figured there must be a better way. We trekked off to Fry's, and found something that looked promising: a DVI to component adapter. It was expensive: $40 for a two inch long adapter - but my reasoning was that it was worth it if it improved the picture quality.

Well, it didn't. In fact, with it connected, there was no picture at all. Turns out the adapter is only made for certain ATI video cards, and the MCPC has an Nvidia card. So I'll be making the trip back to Fry's this week to return it. Meanwhile, we're stuck with the VGA to S-video connection for now. Some tweaking made it better, and it's acceptable for watching TV, which is the main thing we want to do with it anyway. I have little call to read my email or surf the web on the widescreen TV.

Our next chore was to get the MCPC's sound to go through the Sony 5.1 home theater system. The sound card has an optical out jack and the home theater receiver has an optical in jack so that should have been easy. But by now I know that nothing is ever simple. No sound at all. We tried playing with all the settings, on both the computer and the receiver, but no joy.

I entertained the idea of buying a new set of speakers for the MCPC, but really didn't want to resort to that when I have a perfectly good (and great sounding) sound system already sitting there. In sorting through my big box of various cables, adapters, etc., I came across a mini stereo to dual RCA cable. Hmmm ... the mini stereo plug would fit the speaker out jack on the computer and the red and white RCA plugs would fit the composite input jacks on the receiver. Unfortunately, the cable I had was only about three feet long and wouldn't reach from the computer to the receiver. Not to be deterred, we moved the PC as close we could (without disconnecting all its other cables) and then my son held the receiver up so that the cable reached. Lo and behold, we suddenly had beautiful sound coming out the home theater speakers.

That meant another trip to Fry's, to find a longer version of the cable. We quickly found one that was 12 feet long and also of much higher quality. We brought it back and got everything wired up (this involves one person holding the receiver part way out of the entertainment center while the other threads the wires through a hole in the back and then fishing them out from between the back of the massive piece of furniture and the wall so as to run them up to the back of the MCPC - a task that requires some interesting bodily contortions at times). We attached the external hard drives we'd been using with the old computer, set Media Center to look there, and all our previously recorded programs showed up. Hurray!

It took another fifteen minutes to clean up the mess: all the packaging that the computer had come in, the 50 or so different cables and converters and adapters and such that I had collected over the years and had pulled out of their boxes when I was looking for solutions to the connection problems, and getting the furniture and other items that had been pulled out back in place. But now I have a new working Media Center PC with a decent picture and great sound and we can once again record our favorite programs on a single computer in the media room, instead of having to record them on different MCPCs around the house and watch them by attaching the laptop to the TV (by stringing an S-video cable across the floor) and accessing them across the network.

As a reward for reading this far, here are some photos of the new MCPC. As you can see, the form factor is not designed for the living room as the old one was, so we had to take a regular small tower and turn it on its side. It works fine though (just be sure you put the side with the vent facing up and don't cover the vents).

The Blu-Ray drive works fine vertically (most optical drives are now designed to work either way) and unless you look closely, you don't really notice that it's sideways.

Of course, this saga is far from over. Now that we have the Blu-Ray player built in, we're pretty much obligated to get a TV that will take advantage of it. And getting that HDTV will create a whole new set of requirements: we'll want to upgrade to digital cable or FiOS TV, which means getting the IR sensors to work with the MCPC, along with whatever other technological curve balls are waiting for us when we start that project.

Everyone knows that virtualization technology can save you money by consolidating multiple virtual machines on a fewer number of physical machines. But what about using VMs to isolate machines for security purposes - not in the server room, but on your desktop? It's an idea that's been around for quite a while, but some users are just catching on to the advantages.

Back last February, Mark Burnett did an interesting blog post on how he uses separate VMs for email/IM, web browsing and downloading, financial transactions and "adventurous" or risky Internet activities. It's called 10 Ways to Add to my Paranoia.

One thing Mark didn't mention is that for the average computer user, it's a practice that could get pretty expensive. After all, assuming you're using Windows, you're required to buy licenses for all those operating systems on those VMs (as well as some of the application software, depending on what you're running). That might not be an issue for those with MSDN subscriptions and/or plenty of extra cash to spare, but running each application or set of apps in its own VM may cost too much - and be too technically complex - to serve as a solution for the typical home user, and those extra licenses could add considerably to the cost of doing business if implemented on company desktops.

Nonetheless, some companies are exploring the benefits of desktop virtualization. For example, a more secured VM might be run on top of the more open host OS, to be used for sensitive business operations.

Although virtualization does add complexity, which can create new security issues, it also provides us with more options. VMs are not, in themselves, a cure-all for desktop security, but virtualization can be an important part of your security strategy.

Excellent part one of a three part TechNet article by Jesper Johansson that revisits each of the 10 "immutable laws of security" first proposed by Scott Culp over eight years ago and considered by many to be a definitive work on the foundations of IT security. Parts 2 and 3 will be out in the November and December issues of TechNet Magazine. Read Part 1 here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc895640.aspx 

Strangely, as of today (October 4) I am unable to access the page with IE 8. When I try to do so, I get redirected as shown below:

The page it takes me to is

http://technet.microsoft.com/Message-Error.htm?aspxerrorpath=/en-us/magazine/cc895640.aspx

However, I can get to the TechNet Magazine page, using the same URL shown above the graphic, with both Firefox and Chrome. Weird. I'll do some investigating of that problem later today. This is just a heads-up that if you're using IE 8 and the URL doesn't work, try another browser.

Meanwhile, this first installment of the article addresses the first 3 laws:

1. If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your computer anymore,
2. If a bad guy can alter the OS on your computer, it's not your computer anymore, and
3. If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.

What Jesper does is examine how well these laws, written almost a decade ago, hold up in light of today's technology and new security mechanisms. As he points out, even such basics as the definition of an OS have changed over the years as operating systems have grown more complex. He also does a good job of explaining why you must look beyond the surface to accurately answer the question of whether a particular law is still valid. This sentence, from his analysis of Law 2, sums that up: "With several of the immutable laws, it is not the act of doing something that means your computer is compromised. The thing that matters only is that someone has the ability to do something."

It's a very interesting read, especially the discussion of Law 3 and physical access in the era of Bitlocker full disk encryption. Be sure to check it out. I'm looking forward to Parts 2 and 3.