I predicted that there would be a spike in spam and then a drop in January. The Register is reporting a mysterious drop in fraud and spam. Some speculate a recent earthquake in China knocked out internet connections for major spam servers. But the gradual and steady decline suggests a sudden quake could not be the cause.
Instead I believe the decline is due to the gradual increase of IE7 and Vista installations on home computers. With Windows running on the vast majority of computers the IE7 update will have a significant impact. Today Microsoft is reporting 100 million IE7 installations have been completed. I cannot be certain how well IE7 prevents "zombie" computers compared to IE6, but this may indicate it is having a very positive impact. And it is a fact that when a computer is wiped for a fresh Vista installation it will have a fresh start and hopefully stay clean. As the article states at the end, we must look for ways for sustain this decline. Together we can make that happen. Here are 3 steps you can take to prevent your computer from becoming one of these zombies.
Run the Windows update and get the latest security updates and IE7
Install and run ClamWin AV to clear malicious software from your computer
Configure automatic Windows updates to run weekly
Alternatively, you can wipe your system and install Vista or a fresh install of Windows XP with IE7.
I hit MSDN a lot to look up documentation. Since I typically use Firefox which does not have an MSDN option in the search box I wanted to create another quick way to search MSDN. Below is a bit of Javascript which you can save on 1 line as a bookmark. This is commonly called a bookmarklet. It will prompt you for your search terms and then take you to the results.
I have been building a simple website with some of the web 2.0 signature features like AJAX, RSS, OPML and tagging. It even has an moniker at the bottom indicating it is currently an alpha release. Soon I hope to have it ready for the Beta moniker.
The website works as a social bookmarking system to allow the user to save links from any computer to their LinkMindr account. The focus is on the timeliness of the links with features to give the user access to recently added links. As a part of that focus, RSS feeds are available to access the 20 latest links and links added in the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days. These feeds work well as Live Bookmarks in Firefox. They also work with IE7 but accessing the feeds is a bit clumsy. Below the videos show how LinkMindr works with Firefox.
I would like to get more feedback. To get you started I have created a video demo on YouTube which is shown below. You can also use the other video alternatives: SWF, WMV for higher quality.
Last night was the .NET User Group meeting covering LINQ. Dave Bost did a great job fielding many questions from room full of curious developers. Prior to the meeting I had some concerns about how LINQ may enable developers to start inlining queries into the database directly from a web page code-behind and completely undermine a carefully layered architecture. While that is still possible, just as it is with ADO.NET, I learned that LINQ is not just about hitting the database. It is really more about querying and munging data you already have in memory.
For example, if you have a collection of City objects with over 1000 cities you can create a LINQ reference to it with a query that limits to cities which start with the letter "A". This was one of his examples. And if you were to change the name of a city in the list from Aspen to Brooklyn that city would not be included the next time you iterate over the list. I was surprised to learn that the list is evaluated when it is used. That will surely be an issue which comes up many times as people start using LINQ. Normally a collection is not going to modify itself after it is defined. It is more like you are attaching a function to the datasource which runs each time the value referenced which returns a fresh collection instead of an unchanging static collection. This somehow uses Lambda Expressions. In the least it will be a good piece of trivia to be used as an interview question down the road.
There has been some IE7 bashing on Digg.com lately. Sure it can be fun, but the recent rants were just inaccurate. They were uninformed of the history or IE5, IE5.5, IE6 and the corrections which went into IE7. Some context is necessary here. Just consider that Netscape 4 was dominant when IE6 was released. The Javascript and CSS support in Netscape 4 was horrendous when you compare it to IE6, which stood still for 5 years. Given what we have managed to do with IE6 you have to give the IE6 developers some credit. Understanding the history and the recent changes will help you cope with the changes over the coming years.
I had several tasks I wanted to complete on several of my personal projects which I had on hold while I was busy with other work the past few months. Over the break I was able to squeeze in time between driving around the state for family visits to knock of few of these tasks off my list.
A while back I learned that the next major specification for wireless networking would be ready and products would become available. I see you can now get them, like the RangeMax NEXT Wireless-N Router which you can get from Dell. I am not sure if they are on the shelves at Best Buy or Circuit City yet, but as I continue to plan my home theater I will keep in mind that these components are available because I plan to purchase movies and music online and stream it directly to the home entertainment system.
The new specification, 802.11n, is 10 times faster than the existing standard. It is meant to handle the load of streaming multiple HD signals. The potential load placed on this network will be coming from some non-traditional sources. The home theater system will be sending the movie stream to the LCD display while also sending out the audio to a wireless speaker system. At the same time I could be browsing the web and downloading newly purchased movies and music. The new specification should handle all of that traffic easily.
An insightful opinion piece explains that while we have been laughing at Microsoft for their shortcomings this past year the offers from Apple have also been fairly lackluster. For example, releasing a new iPod with a longer battery life, larger storage and new color selections is about as innovative as Vista including an improved security model. These are the new features we should be expecting and should not find surprising.
There is also the question of how similar Vista is to MacOS X. This is by no accident but there is also nothing that Microsoft and Apple can do. They are constrained by the user interface that the common user will understand and accept. The windowing model is dominant across MacOS X, Windows and Linux (KDE/Gnome) desktops because it works and people expect it. If you want to start pointing fingers, you could suggest that Apple copied X Windows which came from Xerox PARC back in 1973. Apple did not have their visual interface until 1984. Finally in 1992 Microsoft released Windows 3.1. The "sharing of ideas" is rich in the history of these user interfaces.
This is going to get interesting real fast. You can now add content to MSDN documentation with the new MSDN Community Content. It acts partially like a wiki but it does not use wiki syntax. Instead it has a very limited WYSIWYG editor which does not allow for adding links. I attempted to add links to MSDN tutorial pages from the class members page but it would not allow me to add those links.
Last night was the 
An insightful 
