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Deb-TechDebra Littlejohn Shinder's Technology & Security Blog 11月24日 Ding, Dong – the Dell is HereI was notified back in October that, as a Windows 7 Launch Party host, I had been automatically entered into a contest and had won a free Dell laptop. I was wary of the initial notification since I get scam email all the time, but after checking with my MVP lead and discovering that it was legit, I was curious to see what I’d won. Well, it was finally delivered yesterday and I’ve been playing with it this morning. It’s an Inspiron 1750 – a honkin’ big thing (much too big to sit on my lap) with a 17 inch monitor, but noticeably lighter than our 17 inch HP “tank.” I like the finish: a glossy piano black cover that’s very classy looking and a nice brushed gray with black keyboard that includes a number pad (as most of the 17 and 18 inchers do, but I’m used to small ultracompacts that don’t).
It has a 2.10 GHz T4300 dual core processor and 4 GB of RAM and came with 64 bit Windows Home Premium installed. It also came with the ugliest Dell wallpaper I’ve ever seen and a slew of software “extras” (i.e., crapware) that I didn’t want. The first thing I did after the setup was change that wallpaper; the second thing was to remove the McAfee Security Suite that started driving me nuts right from the beginning. Thank goodness there are better behaved AV solutions like VIPRE. I haven’t had a chance to run the battery down yet; according to Windows, it has 4 hours and 39 minutes remaining with a 95% charge. If that’s accurate, that’s pretty good battery life for a laptop its size.
It took way too long to get booted up at first, but that’s not because of Windows or the hardware; it’s all those “extras” Dell installed. I’ve been steadily removing them. One thing that I did keep was the one year subscription to LoJack, the anti-theft service. For now, I’ve kept the odd little Mac-like dock at the top of the screen, too. It actually sort of serves the purpose of a separate quick launch bar, something that you can’t do in Windows 7 (you can add the QL bar to the taskbar, but – as far as I’ve been able to tell – there’s no way to detach it and make it its own separate toolbar). You can add your own shortcuts to the dock, so I’ve customized it and I actually like it. Once you cut through the unwanted programs, free trials and so forth, performance is pretty good. Of course, I haven’t yet installed much software of my own, but I think it’s going to be a pretty useable computer. It’s way too big for me to serve as my only laptop. But I can see taking it on trips, along with a smaller machine. I prefer my tiny Sony for carrying around at conferences, in meetings, and so forth. But I often find myself coming back to the hotel at night and having to do more complex work that requires me to research the web while working on a Word document, for instance, and a large screen and better keyboard would definitely be welcome then. All in all, it’s a decent computer. It’s not the one I would have picked for myself, but for the price (which of course is not “nothing” since I’ll have to pay taxes on it, but will end up being about 33% of the retail price of $750, or less than $300), it’s a darn good deal. So – thank you, Microsoft and Dell. 11月8日 Beware of Facebook ScamsFacebook has more than 300 million active users worldwide. That makes it a great resource for social networking – but it also makes it a very attractive target for scammers and hackers. If you're a Facebook user, be aware that a number of exploits have surfaced this past week, attempting to take advantage of the inherent trust that many users exhibit toward email they receive from the social networking service. I received two different attempts to scam me under the guise of Facebook, in my email Inbox. One was pretty obvious to anyone who’s been around the ‘Net for a while. It shows “Facebook” as the sender but a check of the mail headers shows that the Reply To address is somewhere in Germany:
Another clue is that the message was sent to a user account that doesn’t even exist in our domain. Scammers and spammers often do this, using a shotgun approach by sending mail to hundreds or thousands of names at a particular domain and hoping some of them will be legit user accounts. The message itself contains instructions that should immediately make anyone suspicious. It claims that you need to submit a new account agreement to Facebook – by unzipping an attached file and running agreement.exe.
Now if Facebook did decide to require you to agree to new terms, they would almost certainly send you a message with a link to their web site, not an executable file to run. Only the least tech savvy users will fall for this one – but there are quite a few users among that 300 million who are not all that tech savvy. I, of course, immediately scanned the attachment with a virus scanner, and found that it contains a virus called VirTool:Win32/VBInject.gen!CN. Luckily, most anti-virus programs that are up to date will be able to detect it. The second scam attempt was a lot more subtle and thus a lot more dangerous. You're probably used to getting email notifications when your friends comment on your status updates or send you private messages, and you may click on those emails automatically to take you to your FB page. A few days ago, I received several messages that purported to be from Facebook, saying "Caroline sent you a message" (or some other name – I actually received three of these claiming I had messages from three different names).
However, I immediately noticed that the link in these messages was not the usual multi-line URL that begins with www.facebook.com, but instead the domain was www.facebook.montadalitihad.com . Hmmm … . I typed that into a browser that was sandboxed in a virtual machine for just such purposes, and discovered that I got a page that looks like the normal Facebook log in page. Obviously the point of this phishing scam is to get you to type your Facebook username and password in so someone else can use them to hijack your account. Another clue that something’s not quite right is that only a first name is given as the sender of the message; a real Facebook notification generally contains first and last name in the subject line (with just the first name in the body of the message). And another subtle clue is in the disclaimer at the bottom, which says “This message was intended for You.” In a real Facebook message, it says “This message was intended for <your email address>.” These are differences that the typical user is likely not to notice. Even if you’re pretty technically inclined, you might be in a hurry or just not fully paying attention, and click on that link. Watch out for this one if you routinely respond to email notifications from Facebook by using the embedded links. Better yet, just wait until you log onto Facebook in your browser and check your messages then, from within your page. If you aren’t sure whether a message is legit, check your Facebook Inbox. These scam messages, of course, won’t be there. Facebook is a great site, but as with any other Internet technology, it pays to use it carefully.
11月2日 Why “should” software be free?It’s been a busy free weeks. One thing that has occupied way too much of my time: my decision to give Linux one more try. Over the years, I’ve tried installing various distros, from Red Hat to SuSE to Mandrake to Xandros and a few others I can’t remember off-hand. I tried installing on the bare metal, on older computers, on newer computers, in virtual machines. In each and every case, either the OS wouldn’t install at all or it had serious problems (such as inability to display correctly) that resulted in my saying “to heck with this” within a few days. This time, I hung my hopes on Ubuntu 9.10. I’d heard that it was “better” and “easier” and very Windows-like. Maybe this was the Linux that would finally work for me. Well … not. The first few attempts to install in VMware 6.5 failed completely. It went through the installation process but upon reboot, just stuck there and wouldn’t do anything. After paying $99 for VMware 7, I was able to get it to install and get to a desktop and actually click around to some applications. I wasn’t particularly impressed. It seemed functional, but certainly not as elegant as Windows 7 (or, for that matter, OS X). But then, you get what you pay for and I didn’t pay a dime for it. So okay. I messed with it for a couple of days. Even something that’s as simple as a couple of clicks in Windows – installing the VMware tools – requires opening a terminal and using the command line to uncompress a file before you can install it. Sheesh. This morning, I started to play with it again and discovered its Internet connectivity was gone. It had also slowed down to a crawl. No problem; I’ll reboot. That always fixes a general slowdown in Windows (although my Windows machines never just up and lose their connectivity on our gigabit wired Ethernet network). Oops, bad decision. The reboot hung up on the splash screen, and the VMware capture the mouse pointer and held it hostage. Couldn’t shut down or close the VM because when you tried to click something outside the VM, the mouse jumped back into the VM. Now I’m not blaming Ubuntu for that (other than for hanging in the first place). That’s a VMware problem. But it was frustrating. Luckily you can use keyboard shortcuts to end the VM process in Task Manager and kill it without having to do a hard reboot of the whole system. However, this rant isn’t about the stability of the Ubuntu OS. I’m willing to accept that Linux just hates me and thus I have problems with it that others don’t have. I know people who seem to have the same relationship with Windows; everything they try to do results in error messages and mysterious freezes and hangups that don’t occur when someone else performs the same task on the same machine. What this is about is something that I noticed on one of Ubuntu’s intro screens during all this. The sentence that jumped out at me said something like “We believe software should be free.” And I started thinking about the utter absurdity of that statement. It’s fine to believe that people should be able to give away the software they write if they want to. Of course they should. Just as an artist should be able to give away his/her painting, or a lawyer should be able to take on a case pro bono or a doctor should be able to forego billing a patient. It’s your work product. You should be able to do whatever you want with it. But to say software “should” be free implies something entirely different. It says a programmer should not be able to profit from his work (or even recoup the costs incurred in doing it). It’s like saying food should be free – and shame on grocery stores and restaurants for ever making people pay for it. Actually, that makes more sense because food is a basic human necessity, while computer software, despite its seeming ubiquity, is still not essential to life. The problem with working for free is that there are only two groups of people who can do it on a full time basis: those who are already independently wealthy and don’t need any more money, and those who are being supported by someone else (parents, spouses, the government). Otherwise, the “free” work gets done by amateurs who are doing it part time, just for the love of doing it. That sounds all nice and cuddly, but what it translates into is no quality control and no accountability. If I’m injured and bleeding, I prefer to be treated by a full time doctor, not an amateur. If I’m on trial for my life, I want the best attorney money can buy, not the one who dabbles in criminal defense as a hobby, even if he/she doesn’t charge me anything for it. Free software is fine to play around but if I have to depend on it to get my work done, I’ll take commercial software any day. And I’m obviously not alone in that opinion, judging by the fact that even though it’s free, Linux is still way down there in single digits for desktop market share, and currently has less than 15% of the server market (IDC, 2009). Businesses don’t trust “free” and in fact, those varieties of *NIX that are used in business are the ones that come with paid support contracts that make them similar in cost to Windows and Apple products. I know this will make some of my friends who are Linux fans mad, but I’m giving you the perspective of someone who is used to using Windows – which is the perspective of most computer users. Going from Windows to Linux is just not something most people would do if Linux weren’t free. For some, especially in today’s economy, price is what matters most and they’re willing to put up with the increased difficulty to save money. And that’s cool. Everything is a tradeoff and there should be alternatives. It’s when people start trying to turn it into a matter of right and wrong (“software should be free”) that I get annoyed. I could look at Apple’s model and say “software should be free to run on any hardware and not tied to the software vendor’s machines.” But I won’t, because Apple should be able to price their product the way they want. As should everybody else. That’s what “free” is really about.
10月25日 Turn out the lights, the Launch Party’s OverOur Windows 7 party was yesterday, October 22nd, and we had a great time. I was up at 5:00 a.m., getting everything ready. That entailed setting up the Windows 7 Media Center (taking it back to basics so I could demonstrate how to change and personalize things) and getting the food and goodies ready – including creating a “Happy Birth Day to Windows 7” cake.
We had snacks and drinks ready as people started to trickle in, and we nibbled and hung out by the pool for a while until all the guests arrived.
Once everybody got there and we got things rolling, I didn’t have time to take any more pictures, since I was doing the demos. We had a good mix of people who are already using 7 and friends and family members who had never seen it before. First I showed them the cool touch features on the kitchen computer, then I showed them how to organize music, photos and videos and how to watch and record TV on the main Media Center PC, including a short tutorial on how to get free HD (Clear QAM) channels even if you only have basic cable and how you can watch Internet TV even if your Windows 7 computer doesn’t have a TV tuner.
The real hit of the party, though, was the Microsoft Trivia Quiz that I made in PowerPoint. Everybody really got into figuring out the answers to Microsoft and Windows related questions, and with fifty questions, we went through four rounds and handed out prizes (both the prizes that Microsoft sent in the party pack – Windows 7 deck of cards and puzzle – and extra prizes that I got, including 4 GB USB sticks).
To those who didn’t show up: You missed out on all the fun! And to those who were there, thanks for coming and for making our Windows 7 Launch party a big success!
10月13日 Out with the old and in with the new (kitchen computer, that is)We liked our HP IQ 775 TouchSmart kitchen computer but it was an older model and supported only single touch. Now Windows 7 is here and with it, multi-touch. Add to that the fact that we’ve been having intermittent but increasingly frequent video-related crashes recently, and it was time to replace it. When HP made us an offer we couldn’t refuse (several hundred dollars off the regular price) on a new IQ800 series model, we took the plunge. Here’s a visual comparison of the two:
Here’s the new Touchsmart (note the sleek, thin keyboard and the thinness of the whole package:
For a full review of the new TouchSmart, see the October 15 edition of Win7News, at www.win7news.net 10月8日 Why do tech sites perpetuate IT scaremongering?I get a lot of good information from ZDNet and they have many IT journalists I respect and trust. That’s why it concerns me when they seem to be perpetuating “scaremongering” stories that are inaccurate or at least incomplete. Today I received the email shown below, one of ZDNet’s regular newsletters:
If you click on the graphic to enlarge it, you’ll see that it’s dated today (October 8) and you’ll also see a followed link titled “Windows 7 zero-day reported.” Naturally I clicked that one first, to see what this new Windows 7 vulnerability was. Well, happily, there wasn’t one. The link took me to an article that was posted a month ago, about the (by now infamous) SMB2 vulnerability. That article claimed that this was a “flaw in Windows 7” that could allow an attack which would cause a critical system error (BSOD). Well, sort of. Later reports on this vulnerability – and there were many – revealed that although the Windows 7 Release Candidate is affected, the RTM (final code) is not. But that little detail is not in the linked article. So I can’t help but wonder how many people read this and thought that the version of Windows 7 that’s going to hit the shelves October 22 is going to come with this security flaw? I don’t have an issue with ZDNet printing that story on September 8. No one had the full information at that time. But I do think it’s a little irresponsible to send out an Announcement on October 8 that links to that story when there are dozens, maybe hundreds of updates that tell the real story. One more nit to pick here: The linked article notes that the vulnerability also affects Vista, but the ZDNet Announcements newsletter calls it only a “Windows 7 zero-day.” Technically correct, maybe, but completely misleading in that it makes it sound as if this problem was introduced in Windows 7 and is unique to that OS. Whomever let this one get through needs to be a little more careful. I knew when I clicked on it that this was a non-issue for users of the final Windows 7 code, but that doesn’t mean the average reader will.
10月7日 Happy High-Tech HalloweenI thought I’d recycle this old piece that I wrote for Swynk around ten years ago – with a few updates and additions to bring it into the 21st century.
This month brings another traditional holiday celebration, and with it another opportunity for IT pros to ask in puzzlement: "what's a holiday?" Sure, we're vaguely aware that most of our friends and family members who chose different careers have days on which they actually don't work – a concept we find intriguing, if a little frightening. Some of us (this does not include Norm the Neonatal Nerd in the next cubicle, who has "Born to Network" tattooed across his left hand) even have childhood memories of engaging in celebratory activities involving egg-laying rabbits, turkey and dressing dinners, and fat men with white beards wearing red suits. These activities were performed manually, without a shred of electronic data passing across a cable or circuit board. Most of us, though, have repressed those memories and can't imagine doing something that has nothing to do with bits and bytes -- and calling it fun. However, since all those around us are going to be dressing up in strange clothing and gorging on candy all evening a few weeks from now (something we do every day), it seems only fair that we come up with a way for high-tech workers to have a happy Halloween, without giving up our gadgets and gizmos. Thus, we offer here a few suggestions for celebrating: 1. Get a copy of Ghost. No, no, not the movie – the venerable Symantec software package. Create clones of all your Windows machines. Imagine these clones taking over the computer world, replacing the DNA of perfectly good UNIX computers and evil Macs with their own. Even destroying their own ancestors, wiping out all remaining NT workstations and Windows 2000 computers. Slaughtering millions of XP machines and devouring the Vista operating system that spawned them. 2. Pre-order a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. You know you want to. Seven might be determined to make you part of the Collective, but who can deny that it’s mightily attractive? Just look at that beautiful interface and those Borg implants. Just don’t look at the price tag – that might be scary. 3. Having hardware hassles lately? Soundcard suddenly stopped working? Getting memory errors? Intermittent problems with your USB devices? It might be evil spirits at work. But if you're really, really brave, on October 31, at the stroke of midnight, open up the case and venture into the frightening tangle of wires and jutting circuit boards inside, in search of the dreaded Socket Creep. Sometimes add-on cards will slowly rise out of their slots just like the undead rising from the grave. Don't be afraid to take action. Slam them back into the holes where they belong. You'll be glad you did. 4. Find some thick coax cable and make a vampire tap into it. Enjoy the thrill of that first byte. And if you have any idea what I’m talking about, cringe when you realize that means you’re about as old as one of the undead. 5. Go phishing. Who knows what you might catch: celebrities’ passwords, Congressmen’s credit card numbers, the mothers’ maiden names of thousands of ordinary people. You might even get arrested and thrown in jail – another fashionable Halloween tradition. 6. Just stay home and watch the SQL. Bad Halloween movies are always worse the second time around and this is no exception. See an innocent child table get run over by a database engine, because of a corrupt driver who failed to merge (because he was distracted from fantasizing about an OLAP dance and hoping to have a one-to-many relationship). 7. Lock your doors and Windows, and if you must go out, be on the lookout for the Bare Metal Hypervisor. It’s big and bad and it’s planning to take over your network and turn all your operating systems into virtual machines that do its bidding. If you find yourself unable to function from the fear, practicing Xen probably won’t help. 8. Visit an Apple store. Watch all the Pod people wandering about, eyes glazed over, wires dangling from their ears, unable to communicate and oblivious to their surroundings. Hear them chant their mantra: “There’s an app for that.” Watch them mindlessly shell out big bucks for under-powered anorexic laptop computers that look so fragile a strong wind might break them in half. Warning: Don’t feed or try to pet the Leopards and Tigers (and watch out for the Cougars if you happen to look like the “I’m a Mac” guy). 9. Dig up an old copy of SATAN. Sure, it’s ancient technology but hey, the life of a network administrator is already hell anyway, so what do you have to lose? The System Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (http://www.porcupine.org/satan/) may have been superseded by newer, cooler and even scarier security tools, but none of them give you quite that same thrill of living dangerously (although I know people who might argue that using security products from certain vendors does involve selling your soul to the devil). And the number one way for IT professionals to celebrate Halloween: 10. Turn green. Everyone will applaud you for being in step with the latest environmental mandates, and no one will know the real reason for your sickly pallor is that you overindulged in too many (software) suites. 9月24日 Tablet PC finally done right?
Alas, Sony doesn’t seem interested in making that dream a reality. And in fact, they appear to have abandoned the TX model entirely. Now my choices are:
A problem with both of these is that battery life is only 4 hours or so, not nearly enough to get me through a day at a conference. I really would prefer not to have to spend my lunch hour hunting down an outlet to recharge my battery. If you want more powerful specs and better battery life from Sony, at a higher price, you have to go up to a 13.1” screen and 3.3 lbs. Granted, it’s only a bit bigger and heavier than my TX, but I really don’t WANT something a bit bigger. That means that, for the first time in a long time, my next laptop probably won’t be a Sony. What will it be, then? Once again, I’m taking a look at Tablet PCs. The whole touch screen idea has come a long way since I had my Tablet back in 2003. Multi-touch technology has increased the flexibility of Tablets. Handwriting recognition has improved significantly. More applications are now “pen-friendly.” But most of the existing Tablets I see don’t impress me. They’re still too big, too heavy and/or too expensive. Fujitsu makes an 8.9 inch Lifebook (the P1630) that intrigues me. At 2.2 lbs., it’s just about the size and weight I’d like, but costing $1899 with only 1 GB of RAM, a 1.2 GHz processor and an 80 GB 5400 hard drive, it’s way overpriced. Flybook makes an attractive 8.9 inch touchscreen Tablet with a dual core processor and 3 GB of RAM – but its wireless card doesn’t support 802.11N and at $2589, it makes the Fujitsu look inexpensive. Of course, HP and Dell offer Tablets, but none of those have that special something that makes me say “wow, I have to have that.” There’s been plenty of hype recently about a Tablet from Apple. If it does in fact exist, I’m sure it will be very pretty, like other Apple products. I’m also sure I won’t want it, just as I don’t want a (very pretty) iPhone because of all the deal breakers like no SD card slot and no user removable battery and the prohibition on getting applications anywhere except from their own App Store. But this week, I saw something that has all the “wow” factor of an Apple product and it’s from … Microsoft. The Courier is just a prototype at this point, but what a sweet one it is, at least at first glance. It opens like a book with facing multi-touch screens and appears to feature a very jazzed up variation on OneNote. Watch the video here and see if you’re as impressed as I was: Much as I like what I see, I still have questions and concerns. The lack of a keyboard bothers me some; I like the idea of being able to make quick notes in handwriting but for longer blocks of text, I can type much faster than I can handwrite. I’m also wondering if that notebook interface is the whole thing. Will this thing run Windows as the underlying OS? Can I install other applications, like Word and Outlook and my photo editing software? It has wi-fi connectivity, but will it have a built in camera and microphone for video conferencing? Can I plug in a USB keyboard and external monitor? What are the tech specs? Will it be powerful enough to serve as my primary portable computer? I don’t want to have to carry around two different devices (three if you count my smart phone). And if not, is Lots of questions and no answers yet. But I’m still interested. According to all the reports, though, the Courier probably won’t be available for a while. In the meantime, would someone please make a nice, ultra compact, powerful convertible Tablet PC for under $2000? I just might buy it. Until that happens, I’ll stick with the VAIO TXN, which is now running Windows 7 and works pretty nicely.
9月22日 Windows 7 Launch Parties: Great Idea but …The concept of thousands of private launch parties all over the world to kick off the Windows 7 release was a splendid idea. Techie folks who have been running the beta, RC, and RTM can invite their friends over to see the new OS in action. Microsoft supplies party favors and gives the party hosts a licensed copy of Win7 for their trouble. People get together and have fun and Microsoft gets some free publicity. As with so many things, it’s in the execution that things get bogged down and the problem is … outsourcing. Instead of handling it themselves, Microsoft offloaded the launch party organization to House Party, Inc. I knew I was going to have issues with this site when I went to sign up and saw that they were asking for my full date of birth – on a site that did not use encryption. Hello, Identity Thieves! I used a fake birth date but how many people just put their real info out there to be transmitted across a non-secure connection? This morning, I got the email notifying me that I had been chosen as a “finalist” to be a party host. To be confirmed, I had to complete a list of things: Sign in to the HouseParty site and set up a party page, invite 9 guests, upload a headshot of myself and “at least 3 photos of your choice,” post a comment on the party blog and cast a vote in the first party poll. The problems started with item number one. The link to the HouseParty site just gave me an error message. I finally got onto the site the old fashioned way (through its front page) and after waiting minutes for it to load, was able to sign in. However, in the middle of completing the information form, the page timed out and I had to start all over again. Then I got the part where I could invite guests. I looked up and typed in all the email addresses, and when I hit the button, got another timeout message. Couldn’t go back to the previous page. Had to close the browser and once again, start over. I had similarly exasperating experiences when I tried to upload photos, with it taking several tries before it “took.” Finally I have all the requirements completed (I think). I realize the site’s server was probably overloaded from all the Win7 Launch party hosts trying to get in and get everything done (because the notification tells you that in order to be approved, you must be “among the first finalists” to complete the tasks. But if this service isn’t able to handle the load, it should not have taken on the job. It took me more than an hour and a half of my time to do something that should have taken no more than ten or fifteen minutes. Thank goodness I’m the one who is organizing the actual party – not House Party, Inc. Perhaps it will go a little more smoothly than the sign-up process did. LATER: As if the above weren’t annoying enough, I now find that when a guest responds, the House Party site can’t be bothered to tell you in the email notification who it was or what the response was – you’re required to go back to the site to find out (see below):
Grrrr. 9月19日 Please keep your politics out of my Face(book)All of us who aren’t oblivious – or too young or old to care – have opinions about current events and the issues that are in the news every day. Most of us who belong to social networking groups have yielded, on occasion, to the temptation to post a link to a news story about a political issue or personality, to make a comment in a status message about our approval or disapproval of a proposed piece of legislation or a candidate for office, or at the very least, to click the “Like” button when someone else, braver (or more reckless) than we are, posts such a political statement. Some of us have gotten into political arguments with friends of friends, people we don’t know at all and would never have interacted with otherwise, through the magic of the friend feed. And that’s okay. Politics is a part of our lives and for many, it’s an important part. Our beliefs are part of who we are – but (for all but the obsessed) it’s only a part. And it’s important to remember that, especially in an environment that’s as diverse, dynamic and potentially volatile as a social network. This is a “place” where we often mix co-workers (and bosses), clients/customers, family members, old college buddies and miscellaneous people we know or who know us (or think they want to). My social network includes my most intimate and longstanding of relationships, such as my spouse and children and the aunt who remembers when I was in diapers, along with professional colleagues from both IT and law enforcement, and a healthy dose of fellow writers in all genres. It also includes some of my neighbors and local government representatives,a sprinkling of “fans” whom I don’t know but who faithfully follow my career and comprise the audience for the books, articles and blog posts I write, and a few folks who barely know me but whom I admire and am honored to have on my friends list. Some of these relationships, such as those with the people I’ve worked with to try to make our city better, have politics as their very foundation (or at least started that way). Some, such as those with people I met on writing lists or photography forums or those I work with on tech projects, are based on mutual interests that have nothing to do with politics. There are folks I’ve known online for years and gotten along with famously, and then learned by happenstance that they absolutely loath anyone who would vote for the party I usually support (oops; I guess that’s me). There are others with whom I’ve tip-toed around all political issues, assuming for whatever reason that they belonged to the opposite camp, and then discovered to my delight that they had been doing the same with me and that our political beliefs were almost identical. Politics doesn’t just make strange bedfellows; it also makes for strange behavior. They say politics and religion are two of the discussion topics that can destroy a friendship, and for some people, their political stance is their religion. I enjoy a good political debate now and then among friends – when I can be sure I’m with someone who won’t take it personally or make it personal. But occasionally I encounter someone who purports to be my friend but takes every opportunity to make disparaging comments about everything that I believe in, and every subtle or not-so-subtle attempt to respectfully disagree or even to change the subject fails to get the message across that I don’t appreciate having my opinions and beliefs trashed. I am not talking about the occasional exuberant post when your candidate wins or your bill passes. I’m not talking about honest explorations of hot-topic issues with the goal of understanding how those who are different from you formed their opinions. I’m talking about a constant barrage of negativity about the other side. I’m talking about when politics is all you can talk about. Hey, that gets old even when I agree with your politics. And I’m talking about taking your politics to a personal level. You’re probably wondering what inspired this little tirade on this particular day, so I’ll tell you. And I’m sorry if I embarrass someone (though I’m not about to name names) but I consider the behavior completely unacceptable, especially in a semi-public “place” like my Facebook page. Last night my husband and son took me out for a delightful belated birthday dinner. We had a wonderful time. And I posted about it in my status update. This morning, I got up to find a comment from a “friend” – lecturing me about my choice of entree. Informing me that it “wasn’t a good choice if you care about the species” and including a link to some environmentalist propaganda to educate me about the error of my ways. I don’t want to get into the whole eco thing with those reading this. Whether or not you believe in all the tenets of the conservationists (as for me, some I do and some I don’t) isn’t the point. The point is that this was posted on my status update, which is visible to everyone on my friends’ list. It’s like walking up to someone at a dinner party and, in front of everyone she knows, chiding her for what’s on her plate. It’s not the same as taking one aside and making your pitch on behalf of the poor fish in private (which can be done on Facebook via the private message function). It’s not the same as whether or not the bass are being overfished and whether legislation should be passed to protect them. It didn’t do a thing to save the fish I had already eaten. It’s just rude. It’s also counter-productive because it doesn’t win people over to your cause; it makes them resistant to it. Remember the old admonition: “It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.” I realize, though, that there’s another reason this particular comment rubbed me the wrong way. This is a “friend” who has never posted anything on my wall, since sending me a friend request some months ago. I have some other friends who occasionally lecture me on politics but I just shrug it off. Why? Because those people really are my friends. Those are people who wished me a happy birthday on Thursday, who sent me condolences a couple of weeks ago when I posted about two deaths in the family, who sent supportive messages when I posted about Tom’s plane being “lost in the ether,” who click the “like” button when I post photos of my cats or my latest remodeling project. They’re involved in my life, so they’ve earned the right to tell me when they don’t like something I said or did. They don’t stay silent for months and then pop up only to lecture me and try to make me feel bad about what I had for dinner and turn my happy, celebratory mood sour. Their politics may be different from mine, and they may sometimes let me know it, but they don’t throw it in my face. So go ahead and post about politics if something comes up that’s so compelling you feel it’s important to let others know where you stand. I’m not asking you to do otherwise. Just realize that if you want to be someone’s friend, that involves a bit more than just swooping in to criticize when you see that person do something that isn’t politically correct.
9月10日 7 to 7: Upgrading Windows 7 RC to RTMSo you installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate and you’ve been happily running it and have it configured exactly like you want it. You can keep using it until March 2010 (or June if you’re patient enough to put up with the shutdowns every two hours that will start in March), but sooner or later, you’ll have to give it up and go with the final code. You can, of course, just start over from scratch and rebuild your empire manually. There’s a certain satisfaction in doing that – but these days, many of us just don’t have a lot of extra time on our hands, and we would really like to have a way to preserve some or all of the configuration tweaking we’ve done. There are two ways, one of which is officially supported by Microsoft and one of which isn’t. I’ve tried both, on two different Win7 RC machines. I described my experience with the Easy Transfer utility in an August post to the Amazon End User blog. This is the method that Microsoft recommends. You create a .MIG file that holds user data and information about your OS and application settings, do a clean install and then restore the information from the .MIG file. It’s pretty straightforward but it has some drawbacks. It takes quite a bit of time to run the Easy Transfer wizard on the old installation, install the new instance of the OS, install all your applications again and restore all the settings. I also ended up with a corrupted Outlook profile, which may or may not be attributable to the Easy Transfer process. Creating a new profile fixed the problem, but it was a bit of an annoyance. So when I decided to take my Dell XPS from RC to RTM, I thought I’d try the unsupported method. Now, realize that if you go this route, you’re on your own when it comes to troubleshooting problems you have with your new Win7 installation. Since I’m not one who ever calls tech support anyway, that wasn’t an issue for me. I figured the worst that could happen was that it wouldn’t work, and then I’d just wipe it and do a clean install and start over. This method is a true upgrade, which not only preserves your data and settings (without having to take time to restore them) but also keeps your applications intact so you don’t have to reinstall them. If you have lots and lots of apps, or some for which you’ve lost the product keys, this method might be worth a try. Because Microsoft doesn’t want you to upgrade the RC code, the Windows 7 installer detects when you’re running it and doesn’t give you the option to do an upgrade installation (you can do an upgrade if it detects that you’re running Vista SP1 or above). The trick is to fix that prohibition. To do that, you have to first extract the Windows 7 RTM ISO file to a folder. Then follow these steps:
You will now have the option to do an upgrade installation. Select this option. I started the upgrade installation and then went off to do some chores. When I came back a couple of hours later, it was at the point where it asks for the product key. I entered the RTM key and it quickly proceeded through the final stage. I had a tiny scare when, at the end of the installation (after the “preparing your desktop” message), I got a black screen with the mouse pointer fully moveable, but no desktop. I rebooted, logged on, and my desktop loaded normally. My wallpaper, icons, gadgets, etc. were all in place. All of my applications worked flawlessly, including Outlook. I’ve been using it now for a couple of days and have encountered no problems. I can’t promise that the RC to RTM upgrade will go this smoothly for everyone. Again, I stress that it’s a non-supported method. But it seems to have worked like a dream for me, and saved me a good bit of time. For step by step instructions and screenshots on using this method, see http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-upgrade-windows-7-rc-to-rtm/
8月14日 Logictech webcam updateAfter fighting with the Logitech software all morning, I finally uninstalled it. Then I decided to try another program that I already had installed, for doing screen captures. It’s called Debut and it’s free from HCH Software (there is also a paid Pro version that has additional features). Turns out the camera works beautifully with this software, which records in .wmv, .avi, .asf, .mpg, .mov and several other formats. It causes none of the problems that I had with the Logitech program. The video picture quality isn’t quite as good, but I can live with that.
Logitech Webcam and Windows 7: No GoI bought the Logitech Pro 9000 webcam because many reviews say it’s one of the best. My objective was to be able to do short video demos to post to the WXPnews and VistaNews sites. The webcam is attractive and fits nicely on my big monitor, as shown in the photo below.
I first installed the software on the disc that came with the camera. It appeared to install properly and I was able to open the program. There I was, on camera! And a very nice, sharp picture it was, too. I was instantly pleased. I clicked to take a photo. Very nice. Then I made the big mistake. I clicked Record Video. And got the wait cursor. Which did not go away. I had to use Task Manager to shut down the program. Then when I tried to open the program again, no deal. Nothing happens. Click the desktop icon, click the program link in the Start menu, click the program file in Explorer, doesn’t matter. Doesn’t work. Okay, so I thought maybe it’s just the capture software that’s messed up. Maybe the camera will wor Okay, maybe it’s a Windows 7 thing. A reboot revived Messenger, but didn’t fix the Logitech software; it still wouldn’t open. I did some web se arches and found a forum post saying the camera could be made to work in Windows 7 by downloading the latest software from the Logitech site and installing it in Vista SP2 compatibility mode. So I did all that. I had high hopes – but alas, the same thing happened. I could take still photos but as soon as I tried to record, it killed the program dead. Program wouldn’t open again, but the process itself wouldn’t die; I couldn’t end it in Task Manager. It’s such a darn shame, because I really loved the picture quality during the short time that the camera worked. I guess I’ll be giving it to Tom, who’s still running XP, to see if it will work with his system. And I’ll be looking for a webcam really is compatible with Windows 7. 8月11日 My latest blog postsI haven’t been keeping up with the blogging here very well for the last month. That’s because I was invited to blog over on the Amazon EndUser site, so a lot of my blogging energies have been directed there. I’ve posted a number of Windows 7-related informational and how-to articles, so please check it out. And check back here, too, as I’ll still be using this one to post on tech topics that aren’t related to Windows 7. Also be sure to read my newsletters: WXPnews and VistaNews. The latter will be morphing into Win7News sometime this month, and we’ll start focusing in earnest on the new features, migration issues, and how to get the most out of the new OS. We won’t leave Vista users behind, though – we will still continue to address questions about Vista. And don’t forget to look for my articles on the TechRepublic web site. Many of my contributions appear in Jody Gilbert’s “10 Things” section. Some recent examples include:
As always, thanks for reading! 7月21日 HP Tech Support Report, Part 2: The Rest of the StoryAs I recounted in Part 1, last Thursday I spent an hour and a half on the phone with HP Tech Support in an effort to get a video card with a defective fan replaced under the on-site service plan for which we paid $169 when we bought the computer a couple of months ago. The tech was scheduled to come yesterday (Monday, July 20th) between 1300 and 1700. The box with the new video card arrived in the morning. To make it easier for the tech, we lugged the computer, monitor, and input devices into the kitchen and set them up on the big counter. I postponed the errands that I needed to take care of, to stay home and wait for the tech. And wait. And wait. Nobody ever showed up. Nobody called to reschedule. When it was obvious, three hours past the scheduled timeframe, that no one was coming, I gave in. Okay, I’d put the card in myself. Or maybe not. Opening the case was easy. Taking out the old video card was easy. Then I opened up the box that had been delivered that morning and took out the new video card. Umm, there’s a slight discrepancy here. The new card was about twice as large as the old one.
I had read the model number from my original invoice to the tech support person on the phone: Radeon HD 4350. That was the model of the card that I took out of the computer. The new card they sent was a 4850. As is obvious from the photo, it’s not only bigger; it’s a better card. It has a gig of video memory, whereas the original had only 512 MB. I looked both up on the web and the new one costs about $100 more. I would have thought that it was really nice of them to send an upgraded card. Except … it won’t fit in the case. Believe me, I tried. I unbundled the cables to try to move them to make room. I maneuvered it this way and that, trying to coax it into the allotted space. It just wasn’t going to happen. The case isn’t all that small, but the inside is plenty crowded, as you can see in the photo on the right.
So … we have a better video card, but no way to use it in this computer. We did come up with a solution: take one of the (smaller sized) Radeons out of the Dell XPS and put it in the HP, and put this new card in the XPS. Overall, I guess we come out ahead – or at least the Dell does. I’ve already spent at least $400 worth of my time on this (not counting the annoyance of being stuck here waiting for half a day) and I’m not inclined to go through the whole telephone dance all over again. I can’t fault HP’s basic warranty service. They replaced the part – with something better (albeit something better that doesn’t work for the purpose for which it was sent). But after this fiasco, I certainly can’t recommend buying their on-site service plan. Save $169, because apparently you’re going to end up installing the parts yourself anyway. Oh, and another thing: Since Part 1 of this post was published, I’ve gotten a number of messages from readers who told me about their (mostly bad, but some good) experiences with HP tech support. I won’t say my experience was typical, but based on that mail, it certainly wasn’t unique. We still love the systems, but we aren’t very impressed with HP’s customer service. For us, this was an aggravation, though not a huge big deal. For someone else, who only had the one computer and who didn’t know how to install the components and didn’t have another computer sitting around to swap parts with, it would have been much worse.
7月17日 In Search of the Perfect KeyboardSome folks are eagerly awaiting the day when we can do all computer input by simply talking to our computers. I’m not so enthusiastic. I can see where voice input would be handy in certain circumstances (for example, for hands-free computing while driving) but for everyday tasks, I don’t see it being workable. For one thing, the world would be an even noiser place than it already is, if we were all talking to our computers all the time. Whenever I fly, I look around and see half the people in the plane quietly tap, tap, tapping on their laptop keyboards. Can you imagine what a nightmare it would be if they were all talking to their systems? And how do I keep my computer from responding to the voice commands that the guy seated next to me is giving to his computer? Besides, I like keyboards. I like the feel of the keys under my fingers. I like the different sounds made by different ones, from near silence to hearty clacking. I like to “think with my fingers” – content that I compose by dictation isn’t nearly as good. It helps that I’m a fast touch typist – around 90 wpm – so I don’t have to think about the typing itself; I can just let the words flow. But I am always in search of the perfect keyboard. I remember when I got my first ergonomic keyboard back in 1995. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. The wrist and thumb pains I’d been experiencing went away, and I found that after a few days of practice, I could type faster on the “funny looking” keyboard than on a conventional straight one. I’ve been using ergo keyboards ever since. Back in January of this year, I blogged about my latest keyboard find, the Microsoft Laser 6000 wireless.
I’ve been using it on my Dell XPS and I like it a lot, although it has since been superseded by the Laser 7000. As far as I can tell, the main selling point for the latter is the 2.4 GHz frequency with a 30 foot range. I had a nice little inexpensive Microsoft USB keyboard that I was using on the new Core i7. A Comfort Curve 2000, it only cost $20 and has a similar low profile and a good feel, but it had a problem: the colon/semicolon key didn’t work. That was an annoyance (especially when I wanted to send a smiley) but I could live with it. Then the “r” key stopped working. Okay, I might be able to live without a : but not without an r. It was time to order a new keyboard. I thought about getting a new Cpmfort Curve, but was afraid that the old “you get what you pay for” adage would mean that keys would stop working on that one shortly, too. I also thought about getting another Laser 6000, but I wanted to check out some other options. I’ve always wanted one of those completely split keyboards, the kind that allow you to arrange the two sides at whatever angle you want. I’d never bought one because they usually cost around $200 or more. On Amazon, though, I found a Kinesis Freestyle that got good reviews and was only $89. I decided to give it a try, and it arrived a few days ago.
It’s far funnier looking than that first ergo keyboard, but so far, I like it pretty well. It’s nice to be able to adjust the angle of one hand differently from that of the other. It’s larger than I expected, and the keys are a little “clackier” than I prefer but overall it’s a good fit. It took a couple of days of getting used to. At first I kept hitting the Function key instead of the CTRL key, which then changed the UIOJKLM keys into number keys. This is a handy setting because, like a laptop, it doesn’t have a separate number pad. At first I wasn’t sure if that would be a problem, but I’m beginning to miss having the real number pad. Luckily, there are dozens out there for laptops, so I plan to buy a separate USB number pad to go with it. I also somewhat miss a few of the special keys on the Microsoft keyboards that let me open my email program or browser from the keyboard. However, that’s not a big deal. There is a nice little “right click” key that lets you bring up the context menu without using the mouse, as well as Cut, Copy and Paste keys and a Search key that brings up the Windows search box. There are a few browser specific keys, too: Home, Back and Forward. And of course it has the usual Home, End, Page Up, Page Down and arrow keys. Something I like a lot is that there are two Delete keys, one on each side of the keyboard. Which do I like better, then: the Laser 6000 or the Kinesis? That’s hard to say. Since the Kinesis is USB, I don’t have to worry about batteries, and I like that. On the other hand, I can take the Laser 6000 off the desk and put it on my lap, if I want, unconstrained by wires. They’re both good keyboards – but neither one is perfect. So I’ll still be on the lookout for that Perfect Keyboard … and when I do find it, you can be sure I’ll be blogging about it.
HP Tech Support Report, Part 1Since we got the pair of new Core i7 computers at the end of May, we’ve been quite happy with them. Then yesterday, I walked into the room where Tom’s lives (not his office; he remotes into it … don’t ask) and wondered “what’s that awful noise?” It sounded like a 747 taking off – or rather, trying to take off and not quite making it. One of the nicest things about these computers was that they were so quiet, so what in the world was going on? I got down close and listened and it was pretty obviously a fan making the noise. I would normally just open up the case and start troubleshooting – but we had bought an on-site repair service plan with these machines and I wasn’t sure whether opening the case would void the warranty, so I got out the paperwork to start the support process. I also figured it would be a good opportunity to assess HP’s support service. We’ve purchased five HPs over the last couple of years but we’ve never needed to use their support service so I was curious as to how it compared to Dell’s (which we had used a couple of times over the years). The documentation advised to start the process by going to the support web site. Well, I quickly found that there was nothing there for me. There were numerous forums and such but they dealt mainly with software problems. I don’t need help with software problems; I can fix software. This was obviously a hardware problem. So I reluctantly turned to the second step, the support phone number. Reluctantly because I have difficulty hearing over the phone anyway, and I figured first level support was going to be someone with a thick accent, which would make it that much more difficult for me to understand. Of course I had to go through voicemail hell before I could talk to a real person. And this was the especially annoying type, where you have to talk to the damn machine instead of keying in your choices. I always feel like an idiot doing that, especially when the stupid thing can’t understand me. But we got past that and I got a support tech. Yes, he had an accent but (thank goodness) it wasn’t bad and I could understand him pretty well. I only had to ask “Pardon? Could you repeat that?” about five times during the call. Given the length of the call, that really wasn’t as bad as it sounds. And he was very polite, even when I got impatient. We spent about ten minutes with the preliminaries – my name and information, the serial number and product number, the machine’s specs, etc. etc. I explained the problem and offered to turn the machine on so he could hear it over the phone, which I did. He then had me open the case (I have to give kudos to HP here – this was one of the easiest to open cases I’ve encountered in a long time) and identify each of the fans. It was obvious that the sound wasn’t coming from the power supply fan, but the other two fans – main case fan and video card fan – were close together so it was hard to tell which was making the noise. He had me do a pencil test of the video card fan (stopping it) and the sound ceased. Let it go and it spun back up and the sound started again. Yep, that was the culprit. Okay, you’d think from here it should be pretty simple, no? We have a defective video card fan that needs to be replaced. Unfortunately, he then insisted that I turn the computer on and run the system diagnostics to see if there was anything wrong with anything else. So we go through that, and by the time it’s finished (everything passed with flying colors) we’ve been on the phone for an hour. I thought at this point we could wrap it up, but I was mistaken. Now he had to “document all this.” So he stops talking and I’m sitting there on the phone, waiting. After ten minutes or so of silence, I asked “are you still there?” He assures me he is. I ask for a ticket number; my big fear at this point is that we’ll get cut off and I’ll have to go through all this all over again. I feel a little better with a number to reference if that happens. However, the phone systems on both ends prove to be reliable, although every five minutes or so I feel compelled to check and make sure we’re still connected. He always come back with “I’m so sorry it’s taking so long; thank you for your patience.” After we’d been on the phone for an hour and twenty minutes, that patience was wearing thin. He had a problem “finding” the record for my on-site service plan. The Service Plan Certificate they sent has several different numbers on it; we try all of them before finally hitting the right one. At last he tells me he has the documentation done – but he “doesn’t have the authority” to order the new part so now he has to talk to his supervisor. Grrrrr. He goes away again, for about ten minutes. Then a lady comes on the phone, with a thicker accent than the man’s. Oh joy. She goes over everything that the guy told her, apparently, confirming what he had me do. Then she wants me to power up the computer again – huh? What for? I’m starting to get a tiny bit hostile at that point. She tells me she needs to do that to find out what model the video card is. Well, hell, I have that right here on the invoice; I don’t have to power up the computer for that. We get that out of the way and she says okay, they will give me a replacement video card, and “You feel comfortable putting that in yourself, right?” Well, yeah, I’ve put in heaven knows how many video cards in my time, I’ve built entire computers, but my comfort level is not the issue. We paid for an on-site service plan whereby a technician comes and does that for you. I remind her of that. Oh, okay. I guess she forgot. But to her credit, she doesn’t argue, but schedules it for Monday (this happened on Thursday). Dell always came out the same or next day – but I’m not going to quibble. The Plan does say 3 business days. Total time spent on the phone: an hour and thirty-eight minutes. Based on my usual billable rates, it would have been cheaper for me to just order a new video card from NewEgg and install it myself. But it’s the principle of the thing. I’m not bashing HP here. It could have been a lot worse. Everyone was polite and apologetic and they ended up agreeing to give me what I wanted and what we had paid for. They didn’t talk down to me like some phone techs do. They were thorough – way thorough – and made sure to double check every fact, every number that they gave me or I gave them, etc. The process wasn’t as painful as some phone support experiences I’ve had; it was just way too long. If their service wasn’t as prompt as Dell’s, well, we paid hundreds of dollars less than for the same system configuration from Dell, too. Do I still enthusiastically recommend that you buy from HP? I’ll withhold judgment on that, pending the outcome of the service tech’s call on Monday. Stay tuned for Part 2. P.S. Today I got an emailed shipment notification showing that the video card they’re sending has 1 GB of memory. The original card has 512 MB. The model number is the same. Okay, that’s sort of nice; we get double the RAM for our trouble. Er, my trouble. Hmm. I did all the work on this, and Tom gets the new, better video card. Doesn’t seem fair somehow.
7月13日 2010 is hereThe Technical Preview for Office 2010 was officially released today, and I installed it as soon as I got the invitation. This was the fastest and smoothest installation of Microsoft Office that I’ve ever experienced. Installing in a Windows 7 VM on Virtual PC, the initial setup took only a few minutes (as in “less than five”).
Here’s the trick: the programs apparently aren’t really completely installed just because they appear in your Start menu. When I opened Word, a balloon pop-up informed me that the program may appear to be unresponsive while it gets the files it needs. In fact, the virtual application manager will indicate that programs are downloading in the background.
Nonetheless, Word was ready to go in only a minute or two. Having spent many a day waiting half an hour to an hour for some previous versions of Office to install, I found this nothing short of amazing. The best thing about Office 2010, in my opinion, is the new Outlook. Now it has the Ribbon interface, too. I know some folks hate the Ribbon, but I’m a big fan of it. Here’s the Outlook 2010 virtual app:
I especially love the Quick Steps feature which lets me create one click buttons to perform my most common multi-step tasks. For instance, I can click the “To Tom” button to forward the email message I’m in to Tom.
But if you don’t like the Ribbon, you can get rid of it with a quick click of the little “up” arrow in the right top corner.
A handy feature is the Ignore button on the Home tab. This will move both current and future messages in the selected conversation to the Delete folder. So if you really, really don’t care to see any more of that particular thread that’s gotten nasty on one of your email discussion lists, it’s easy to zap it away. Ribbon tabs Here are screenshots of the various Ribbon tabs (click to enlarge):
But here’s the really cool part: now you can customize the Ribbon the way you want it. You can even create your own tabs. Just right click on the Ribbon and select Customize the Ribbon.
This is true for the Ribbon in all the Office applications. You may also notice that the old big round Office Logo button has been replaced by a new, rectangular one (in the same location). Clicking it gets you a redesigned interface for selecting options for the Office application you’re in:
There’s lots more, and I’ll be looking at each of the other Office 2010 applications here in more detail in the days to come, but this should give you a little taste of some of the changes in the new and improved Office.
7月2日 More on Windows VPC/VMwareIn my blog post over on Amazon’s End User Blog, I related some of my experiences with the new version of Virtual PC that supports Windows 7 XP Mode (XPM), and how it compares to VMware Workstation with Unity view. Something that I forgot to mention is that although you can simultaneously run applications from multiple VPC VMs, you can’t start VMware Workstation while a VPC VM is running. If you try, you get the following error message:
And in fact, if you already have a VMware VM running and you click on a VPC application in the Start menu, the VMware VM shuts down and you get that same error message. The VPC virtual application then starts up. So apparently VPC takes precedence over VMware in these scenarios. I guess maybe it has to do with both virtualization technologies not being able to utilize the hardware virtualization components (in this case, Intel VT) at the same time – but I’ll have to check further to verify that. If you simply hibernate the VPC VM(s) – which is what the XPM VM is set to do by default when you click Close – you won’t be able to use VMware. If you set it to prompt you for an action on close and choose Turn Off, then you will be able to open your VMware virtual machines. I learned all this through trial and error, figured it might be useful information for those who have both VMware Workstation and VPC XPM installed. 6月25日 TXT and TPMIntel’s Trusted Execution Technology (TXT, also sometimes abbreviated TET, but not by Intel), was originally known as LeGrande. It’s a hardware implementation designed to protect computers against software-based attacks and enables the creation of separate execution environments called protected partitions. With applications running in separate environments, the memory pools are locked so that they can’t be accessed or written to by other processes. User input is also protected so that users can interact with the applications without risk from other software that may be running. TXT can perform “platform verification,” whereby it confirms at boot-up that a computer has exactly the same configuration it had last time it was booted. It works in conjunction with Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) on Intel vPro platforms. All of this is part of Intel’s Safer Computing Initiative. If you’re interested, you can read about the technical details of TXT here: http://www.intel.com/technology/security/downloads/arch-overview.pdfhttp://www.intel.com/technology/security/downloads/arch-overview.pdf Then what is TPM? A Trusted Platform Module is a hardware chip that can generate and store cryptographic keys and perform authentication of hardware devices. It can be used by TXT and is also used by technologies such as Microsoft’s BitLocker disk encryption. TPM chips are made by a number of different vendors, and many computers now come with a built-in TPM. You may have heard of TPMs in a less than favorable light. The TPM is the component that caused such controversy several years ago, when privacy advocates voiced concerns about the chip assigning a unique identifier to the computer in which it’s installed. Although this helps to protect against online identity theft and make financial transactions over the ‘Net more secure, many were afraid the chip would be used by the software, music and movie industries to enforce copy protection and to eliminate anonymity on the Internet.
6月15日 So You Want to Be My Facebook Friend …I got on the social networking bandwagon a little later than many. On the other hand, many of my friends who use the Internet extensively and have been involved in email discussion lists and the like for a decade or more are still wary of the social networking phenomenon. Like them, I didn’t see the value of it – until I tried it. I thought sites like Facebook and Twitter would end up being big time-wasters. Instead, I found that after joining those sites, my time spent at the computer actually went down. That’s because instead of carrying on dozens of different email conversations to impart the same information to different friends, family members and lists, I could reach many more people with a single post. Well, you could do the same thing with email’s cc: function, you might say. Yes, but not exactly. An email message with copies to a bunch of different people feels impersonal, almost rude. And you don’t want to divulge everyone’s email address to a bunch of strangers, so you have to do something like “undisclosed recipient” or put your own address as the primary “to” address, which makes it even worse – now each recipient knows that he/she is just one in a crowd but has no idea how large that crowd is or who else is in it. But if you see my news as a post on Facebook, you don’t feel slighted. You know that the nature of the forum is such that others are seeing the post, yet you can also feel “special” that you are one of my chosen “friends” with whom I share these messages. The other advantage of SN is that many people just don’t seem to get into the groove of writing email. Yet they will post to the SN sites. I have relatives I’ve come to know much better after “friending” them on FB; these are folks who, before, I might see once a year at a Christmas gathering but I never got an intimate glimpse into their everyday lives as I do in reading their daily posts. It’s also interesting to see who their friends are, and what those friends say in various “wall” threads. It will does give you a different perspective on people. You get more insight into the personalities of co-workers, as well. It’s always a delight to discover that someone you’ve worked with for years on a purely professional basis is a fan of the same obscure musician that you adore, or loves cats as much as you do, or has the same political beliefs as you. Occasionally, you’ll get a big surprise: that “guy” named Jamie with whom you’ve been working for years in the virtual world turns out to be … not a guy at all, or that lady (you assumed) named Pat is actually a Patrick instead of a Patricia. Of course, there’s a darker side to that coin, too. As in the real world, getting to know people better carries risks as well as rewards. You may find out that your favorite online colleague is a fanatical fan of a politician you can’t stand, or thinks all cats should be shot on sight, or believes people of your religious persuasion are all idiots or heathens who are damned for eternity. Worst of all, he/she might even support a rival sports team. :) Social networking is an enabling technology, but it sometimes enables more than you might like. That’s especially true if you’re someone who’s “semi famous.” If you’re a genuine celebrity, I can imagine that it’s even worse. Anytime lots of people know you whom you don’t know, you have to decide on a strategy before you set up a SN account. One option would be to either adopt an “open door” policy and accept all friendships offered (which seems to be what many well known politicians have done, judging by the number of “friends” they have). Another is to protect your privacy and reject all those who you don’t know. The strategy you adopt is important because it will determine, in large part, what types of posts you make. As someone who is by no means famous, but who is well known in certain circles through my writing, I’m never sure what to do when I get a “friend” request from someone I don’t really know. Sometimes the name is vaguely familiar – probably a reader who has emailed me in the past – and other times, I have no idea who the person is. I know from my own experience that when you read a great deal of what a writer has written, you often feel as if you know him/her. I’m flattered that people who read my newsletters, articles, etc. come away from them wanting to be my friend. On the other hand, I feel a little funny having a bunch of folks out there who I don’t know at all, seeing my sometimes semi-personal posts. I know some people who are “friend collectors.” They seek out as many “friends” as possible, sending requests to everyone they know and many people they don’t know. They have thousands of “friends.” It’s almost as if they see it as a contest: who can get the most “friends?” That’s not my goal in using SN. And I’m not sure I want to be part of someone else’s collection. I view my FB site a little differently, as a gathering of people I know at least a little and whom, based on what I know, I like. On the other hand, I don’t want to insult people who like me and feel as if they know me, even though I don’t know them. So I’m asking this: if you want to send me a “friend” request and we don’t have an ongoing relationship, please include a note to let me know a little about yourself and how you know me (VistaNews, TechRepublic columns, Microsoft network, etc.) and why you want to be a FB friend. I’m not looking for a long essay here, or trying to make it an “application process.” I just want to know who I’m letting into my relatively limited circle of folks with whom I share some important and trivial details of my life each day. Thanks!
6月12日 Smartphone connection gets easier with Windows 7Vista’s Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) was a step in the right direction, but I was always having problems with it. Sometimes it would recognize my device and sometimes it wouldn’t. With Windows 7, Microsoft has taken the same tactic as with many of the other applications that were built into Vista: WMDC is not included when you install the operating system but you can download it. However, unlike with Windows Mail, Messenger, etc., you don’t have to go out there and hunt it down. Just plug your device (in my case, my Samsung i910, a.k.a. the Omnia) into a USB port on the Windows 7 machine and – depending on your Windows Update settings – it will automatically download and install both the drivers for the phone and the latest version of the Windows Mobile Device Center. Momentarily, you get the happy news shown below:
Then it opens WMDC and connects to your device. No muss, no fuss.
You can set up the device to synchronize it with your computer, or if you just want to transfer a file (such as photo you took with your cell phone camera) to or from the device, you can connect without setting it up.
You can browse the contents of your device’s built in storage and any memory cards that are inserted, as shown below, using the familiar Windows Explorer interface.
Unfortunately, Explorer’s thumbnail view of folder contents doesn’t seem to work with the files on the phone. You just see a generic icon for jpg files, as you can see below.
Now that would be a useful feature, so I could easily identify which pictures I want to transfer from the phone to my computer. The good news is that if I do know which one I want, I can just drag and drop it from the device to my computer desktop (or vice versa). Of course, if you want to just import them all, that’s a straightforward task.
You can tag them when you import them (for instance, to identify them as photos from the cell phone) and you can even select to automatically rotate vertical photos when they’re imported. How cool is that?
I’ve been using the WMDC in Win 7 for a while now and it has proven to be, so far, more reliable than the same software in Vista (but then so has most everything else). Performance is also faster, but then maybe it’s the new hardware that should get the credit for that. :)
6月11日 My Excellent eSATA AdventureExternal SATA (eSATA) is a great idea that gives you the advantage of USB/IEEE 1394 (convenience) coupled with the advantage of internal SATA (high speed). We were excited to discover that our new Core i7 computers from HP have built in eSATA ports. That makes adding a hard drive a much easier task with no need to open the case. Just plug and play. Or so I hoped. I already happened to have a Western Digital 1 TB bare drive sitting around, still new in its bubble wrap (we had ordered it for another system and then didn’t need it). So after a bit of research, I ordered a ThermalTake Max 4 Active Cooling drive enclosure from Amazon. It wasn’t the least expensive enclosure, but it got very good reviews. It arrived today, and I was eager to get my new drive installed and have another terabyte of storage space at my fingertips. The housing was lighter than it looked in the photos, but appears to be well made. What should have been a five minute task, though, took about twenty because of all the annoying tiny screws that have to be dealt with. First, I made the mistake of removing the screws from the wrong side, exposing the bottom instead of the top of the case because there was lettering on the bottom as well as the top. So, after finally getting the four little screws out, I had to put them back. Getting them lined up correctly was a pain. Then I got the top section off, and there were more screws inside to unscrew; these are the ones that hold the brackets into which the hard drive goes. Took those out and the drive fits easily into the brackets. Then you snap the brackets back into the rails and slide the drive down so that the eSATA connector goes into the socket. No problem there. Now it’s time to put the screws back. Be sure you don’t get the two different types of screws mixed up (the ones that go into the brackets vs. the ones that hold the top of the housing on). They are almost the same, but the two that go in the bracket are slightly longer than the four that go into the housing.
Once I had it all assembled, I plugged in the power cord and plugged in the eSATA cable (which was included with the housing), then plugged the other end of the eSATA cable into my computer and … nothing. Didn’t show up in My Computer, didn’t show up in Disk Manager, no “installing device drivers” message, just … nothing. Okay, maybe you need to reboot since it’s SATA. Nope, that didn’t help either. So I started doing some web research and found that many people who were buying external SATA drives were having the same problem. They said their drives worked fine with the USB connection, but wasn’t recognized with the eSATA connection. Some of them said you need to set the SATA controller to AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) mode in the BIOS. So I rebooted again, went into Setup and switched it from RAID mode to AHCI. Went through the BIOS startup, went through the boot menu, got to the Windows 7 startup “fireflies” screen and then … reboot. The computer was in one of those vicious loops where it keeps rebooting itself before going into the operating system. Well, I also have Vista installed, and Tom suggested I try booting into it. Guess what – it booted into Vista with no problem, and I got a message that it was installing AHCI drivers. And lo and behold, when I opened up Disk Manager, there was the new drive, all 1000 unformatted GB of it. I had to first initialize it, and then I partitioned it into two volumes and quick formatted them in NTFS. Okay, that’s nice, but I have no intention of working in Vista. So I tried booting into Win7 again. No go, same loop. Went back to Setup and changed the SATA controller setting back to RAID. Now I could boot into Win7 with no problem. And now my new partitions were showing up in My Computer. No problem with the drive since, and yes, it’s definitely a good deal faster than USB.
So I don’t know if it’s a glitch in Windows 7 or if it’s an anomaly that’s peculiar to my computer, but all’s well that ends well and I’m glad I kept that old Vista installation in a dual boot configuration. 6月8日 Apple drops iPhone price … Who cares?The big headline today is that Apple is dropping the price of their lowest-end iPhone from $199 to $99. Does anybody really care? Is there anybody out there who didn’t buy an iPhone and will now buy one because it’s $100 cheaper? A $100 one-time cost difference means almost nothing. The obstacle to buying an iPhone, for many who otherwise would, is the ongoing monthly charges. When the iPhone (finally) became capable of 3G speeds last summer, the price of the phone itself went down but the cost of the service went up. The unlimited data plan is $45/month for “corporate” service (if you need to access your company mail server or intranet sites). Unlimited text messages cost another $20 (if you do “pay as you go” for text messages, it costs .20 per message). And all that is on top of the charges for voice service, the least expensive of which is $40/month for 450 minutes. So we’re talking $85/month before all the taxes and fees, or $105 with unlimited texting. Then add about 20% for taxes and fees – now you’re paying $102 to $126/month. And that’s if you don’t do much talking. For more voice minutes, you’ll pay more. When you realize that the TCO is over $1200/year, that $100 off the phone price starts to seem pretty insignificant. If they really wanted to jump start sales, they would lower the cost of the voice/data plans so people could see some real savings over the life of the phone, instead of shaving a little off the phone price.
How NOT to do web advertisingI am at the point where I’m ready to give up on reading my local online newpaper, because of proliferation of maddening, intrusive ads that greet me every time I visit the site. Here’s a screenshot of today’s front page – except that you can only see a small bit of it at the bottom right because a huge black ad pops up to cover most of the left side and then a “page curl” ad obscures the top right. Sometimes these ads have “close” buttons and sometimes you just have to sit there and wait for them to do their thing and go away.
I understand very well that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and I don’t mind GOOD web ads – in fact, I even sometimes click on them and actually read about the products or services they’re hawking. A good ad is one that gets my attention by having a compelling picture or intriguing headline – not one that does it by getting in my face and preventing me from seeing the content I came there to read. |
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I loved the Tablet PC concept from the very beginning, and I bought one of the first generation convertible tablets, a Toshiba running Windows XP Tablet Edition. Overall, it was a decent little computer but it had several drawbacks: it was too heavy and too thick to be used comfortably in that way, and the price was way too high. When I got a new portable, I opted for a regular laptop form factor – a Sony VAIO ultra compact – instead. When I replaced that one, it was with yet another Sony. I’ve often said that if only the VAIO’s screen would rotate and lie down, it would be the perfect portable computer.
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