Tag: microsoft

Categories
Apple Software

Autographed Copy Of Windows Vista

I have iWoz autographed by Steve Wozniak. Do I need to get a signed copy of Vista Ultimate?

If I were to get that, Steve Jobs would need to sign a copy of Leopard or I would have trouble sleeping at night.

[Hat tip: Engadget]
Disclaimer: Affiliate linkage used in Amazon links

Categories
Mozilla

Intimidated By Fire?

Is it just me? Or is someone intimidated by Firebug? Taking a look at the latest IE Developer Toolbar I can’t help but notice the striking similarities to Firebug. It’s not a carbon copy, but there’s a lot of things in there that seem to imitate Firebug.

Regardless of inspiration it’s good for developers who have yet another way to view how their code is interpreted by the browser.

Now how about some decent errors messages to aid in debugging JavaScript?

Categories
Apple Funny Software

David Pogue’s Windows Vista Review

David Pogue’s Vista Review has to be one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve been a fan of his for years, but this has to be one of the funniest things he’s ever done. Being a Mac fan of course I really understood the joke, though Windows people would too if they were honest with themselves. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should. Apparently he upset a few people who didn’t quite get it.

Categories
Programming Software Web Development

xmlHttpReq.overrideMimeType() in IE7

This is just a little note for anyone doing xmlHttp work. I just encountered this situation this morning. As most web developers know IE7 introduces support for the native scriptable XMLHttpRequest object. The big advantage here is that ActiveX is no longer necessary to use ajax applications on IE. One thing I did note is that there is a slight difference in their support for the XMLHttpRequest object. Take the following code:

// Mozilla/Safari/IE7+
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
    xmlHttpReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
    xmlHttpReq.overrideMimeType(‘text/xml’);
}
// IE6-
else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
    xmlHttpReq = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}
xmlHttpReq.open(‘POST’, strURL, true);

That seems to break for me on IE7. A little experimentation shows that it doesn’t support the overrideMimeType() method. A simple fix for this is to simply check before invoking it as follows:

// Mozilla/Safari/IE7+
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
    xmlHttpReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
    if(xmlHttpReq.overrideMimeType){       
        xmlHttpReq.overrideMimeType(‘text/xml’);
    }
}
// IE6-
else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
    xmlHttpReq = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}
xmlHttpReq.open(‘POST’, strURL, true);

This is just FYI for anyone who happens to encounter this error. It’s a simple fix. This somewhat goes without saying, but make sure your request returns from the server as text/xml or you’ll likely still encounter issues.

Categories
Mozilla Web Development

IE7 Testing

I complained a while back about how unlike Firefox or Opera, it’s hard it is to support multiple versions of IE. Microsoft apparently did listen to developer complaints, and came out with a solution.

You can now download a time crippled VirtualPC Image and running IE6 in VirtualPC. It’s available free of charge. The catch is it’s time crippled (though it seems like they will release a new image before that time).

This vastly improves the situation, but I wish they also offered IE7 virtualized, for those who can’t/won’t upgrade at this time (corporate IT policy, etc.). I also think there would be significant benefit to developers to see IE 5.x as available (since we still often have to support it). A VMware version for Linux (and eventually Mac) developers would also be great to see, though I won’t hold my breath on that one.

But regardless, it’s a great move. I just hope they keep coming out with updates to keep the program going. Hooray for solutions!

Categories
Software

Windows Vista Pricing

Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft went a bit over the top with Windows Vista pricing? Looking at the pricing for Windows Vista I’m starting to wonder how “worth while” it really is. It seems when you look at it, you very quickly get pushed to Windows Vista Ultimate (which is super expensive). Wikipedia has a decent rundown on differences between editions and pricing

And of course, if you use a PC who ships the OS in an image format (like IBM/Lenovo among others), the “upgrade” editions only work if you install the previous OS first. Making the task of reinstalling on a system just that much more complicated. I had that drag when upgrading a system from Windows 98SE to Windows XP. That’s right, I had to install Windows 98 on a new drive, before I could install XP! What a mess.

Come on Microsoft… make the pricing more reasonable, or perhaps have some financing options on the site, so it’s more like buying a car.

I just can’t imagine the average end user spending that much cash to have the headache of installing a new OS. So I’d assume this is just an effort to get people to buy new PC’s, rather than upgrade their old ones. I just don’t see average Joe spending hundreds on the nightmare that is OS upgrades. I really don’t see it. From what I’ve seen, most people are fed up with paying for a nightmare experience like that.

Categories
Software

Hibernation Fix

It’s about time we see a fix (KB909095) to one of the most annoying issues I’ve encountered inWindows XP SP2. I first mentioned this bug back in November. They had one of those patches you could call up and request (because it wasn’t fully tested), but it didn’t work to well for me. I’m hoping this will serve me much better.

Categories
Mozilla

Electronic D-Day

Looking at this map, it’s clear November 9, 2004 was D-Day for the open source movement. We can’t stop until Steve Balmer is in a hiding in a bunker under Redmond Washington.

Battle Map

Map by Steven Hilton copied per license in image to ensure availability.

Categories
Mozilla Security Software

Windows Vista

Foreword: This is somewhat of an informal rant, it’s pretty much my notes tinkering in Windows Vista.

Am I the only one who is not very impressed with Windows Vista? Several things so far have just shown to be a complete turnoff:

  • It warns me about everything. Warnings stink, people just ignore them if they happen to often. This will prove to be effective security for about 2 weeks. After that, people will click OK without reading a thing. I got a security warning trying to show processes from all users in the task manager. Why? How can a Microsoft App not trust another Microsoft App? I’m guessing the next step is a CAPTCHA on each dialog.
  • Learning Curves are evil. The new Save dialog isn’t totally evil, but it’s quasi evil. It took me a few seconds to figure out how it works, and still feels really really awkward no matter what method I use to navigate. On a somewhat related note, took a while to find the familiar command prompt (it’s nested deep in the start menu now). Is there a “classic view” for the control panel like there was in XP? This “intuitive” stuff is just extra clicks and a waste of my time.
  • Despite my best effort, I’m still not sure why I’m denied permission to my own Application Data directory. It’s my data!
  • Start menu with scroll bars? Maximizing a folder caused scrollbars! Oh come on, that’s awkward, as if the old design wasn’t bad, now I have to scroll as well? What I’d really like is programs get sorted by category in the Start Menu (tagging) rather than how the publisher thinks they should be. That way you don’t get programs all over the place.
  • Killer feature? This is my biggest complaint. Other than shiny menu’s (which I’m not to fond of) and some new icons (which I do like), I don’t really see much in here that says “this is worth money”… not to mention in many cases you’ll want “Vista Ultimate” (or Vista ‘Take a Loan From The Bank’ Ultimate) if you want some of the features from various different editions they will be offering. If they include them all on 1 media anyway, why not let me pay per extra feature? Rather than these bundles? Perhaps I want some of the mobile and some of the business stuff, but don’t need the kitchen sink, dishwasher, and knit toaster cover.

But is there anything cool besides the icons? Well I tried out the new Parental Controls on a profile, and to my surprise, they don’t just effect IE, but everything including Firefox (because it’s likely sniffing the TCP/IP stack like it should). Of course a very fitting screenshot:

Firefox with Parental Controls

And for those wondering, it does give what seem to be pretty nice HTTP Headers, so it would be possible to sniff and serve up our own pretty error pages to keep a consistent UI if desired. I can’t vouch for the effectiveness of the filter, since I haven’t tested it for what it filters, only how it interacts.

So will I upgrade? I’m really not sure to be honest. I see a few things that make me hesitant:

  1. Will my Thinkpad T43 handle it well? Or will it be sluggish and annoying (I’m running it virtualized right now, hence I said nothing about performance). I know the minimum specs are pretty low, but typically the minimum specs are nothing but a pipe dream, nothing you could use on a daily basis.
  2. I don’t want to pay extra to keep the features I have with XP Pro.
  3. Annoyances fixed… the above is really annoying stuff. Really annoying. I don’t think I’d be able to tolerate warnings all over the place. It’s just to distracting if even simple tasks involve signing wavers and sacrificing your first born child.

Perhaps I’m just fussy, or maybe I’m selfish for wanting an easy to use OS, that doesn’t have an abrasive security policy, is secure without locking me out of my own files or nagging me with warnings, and doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg to upgrade my somewhat new (less than a year old) hardware.

As far as next-generation OS’s go, my initial impression says Mac OS X, and Ubuntu still have a lead over Vista. If Apple can get Windows binaries running from within OS X (virtualized as rumored), that could be a crushing blow to Microsoft.

Hopefully someone at Microsoft is listening.

Categories
Apple Hardware

Microsoft’s Playground

Beautiful tour of Microsoft’s Mac Lab. I think my favorite is the pic of all the Mac Mini’s. Every geek’s dream is to have a hardware collection that vast. I really love how they manage OS versions:

…On each machine we have two volumes: ChangeOS and Mac OS X. The Mac OS X volume is where we install the different versions of the OS. We boot to the ChangeOS volume to free up the Mac OS X volume for modification. When we trigger an automation run we specify the OS version and language. Each machine then reboots to the ChangeOS partition, caches the OS .dmg locally and uses the asr command line tool to restore the image. The tool that does this work is one I wrote (in AppleScript Studio no less!) called Lab Assistant. We have images of the Mac OS from 8.1 all the way up to 10.4.6 in all the languages our products support. …

Very cool stuff. I’d love if they would automate that into a nice little installer, similar to Apple’s new Boot Camp. Very cool stuff indeed.