Brennan’s Blog

After a fairly successful year without any viruses, my WinXP laptop finally died the death of a thousand viruses. After two days of repeatedly running AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy I decided to just make the jump to Vista on the laptop. The unrelenting malware was just too much. I have no idea why Microsoft allows registry settings to launch any application at startup or the installation of Browser Helper Objects without notifying me or giving me an easy way to get rid of them. I put off running Vista as my primary system due to occasional issues on my secondary system, but a few annoyances is a little better than a PC overun with ads for online poker matches. I can only hope that Service Pack 1 is out soon. (The extreme optimist in me looks forward to a full .NET runtime and Visual Studio release on MacOS X sometime before 2014.)

(more...)

I just read this quote from a new Slashdot listing.

Many readers sent in word of Microsoft's announcement of the schedule for Vista SP1. The Beskerming blog has a good summary. Up to 15,000 people will get access to a beta of SP1 by the end of September; general release is targeted (not promised in stone) for early 2008. The service pack is said to improve performance and stability, not to add features.

I have to take issue with the last sentence. Performance and stability are features, as is security. Whoever makes the distinction that flashy visual effects and sidebar widgets are features while a responsive user experience is not should have a sit-down with several Vista users. Would you live in a house that exhibited questionable stability? Would you be impressed with a new bathroom in that house if you could not get hot water half of the time?

(more...)

The new computer that I ordered from Dell has been a nightmare. It is a Dimension C521 with an Athlon 64 processor and 4GB of memory. What I got a was a Vista 32 bit installation with Vista Home Premium which cannot run Virtual PC due to licensing limitations. Vista 32 bit can also only address 3GB of memory so the extra 1GB is being ignored completely.

So what is the logical thing to do? I installed Vista 64 bit Ultimate Edition so that I could run Virtual PC with all 4GB of the memory I purchased. That was a mistake. When the Vista 64 bit installation does the final reboot I kept getting the blue screen with a strange error that I learned was due to the BIOS not supporting more than 3GB of memory. The system booted fine under Vista 32 bit because it safely stayed within those bounds. To correct the problem I spent some time chatting with Dell technical support over the issue and eventually they pointed me to a BIOS update for this apparently known issue after sending me a computer with 4GB of memory and an older version of the BIOS which has this problem.

(more...)

Whenever I need to find something, especially when I know it is there somewhere, the Windows search always lets me down. On a Unix system I can simply use the find command to get to the file I want quickly with a very specific search. I want that in Vista. Fortunately they do have Services for Unix on Vista. This includes various packages including the base Unix utilities and Perl. I am downloading it right now.

Once it is in place I can run the following command:

find . -name \*.cs -grep -li foo

That command will then list all of the C# source files which have the string "foo" in them. The command starts in the current directory specified by the initial period and then uses the -name option to filter the search candidates. Finally in runs grep on each file as it looks for a match. It does not require the files to be indexed and it will bypass reading every file it comes across. As I use the Vista search, even with the advance options, I am surprised to see I cannot filter by file extension. Next what I could do is run a command along with the find command.

find . -name \*.cs -grep -li foo -exec Notepad2.exe {} \;

I am not sure what that will do. I will need to have Notepad2.exe in my PATH environment variable which should be easy enough to set. That will open up all results in the text editor. I just better not do it when there are more than a handful of results.

Update: The above command does not work as it does on a more modern Unix system. Instead I had to run the following command:

find . -name \*.cs -exec grep -li foo {} \;

I finally took the jump. I have been running Vista inside of Virtual PC 2007 for short periods just to try out various features, such as IIS7. Since Visual Studio 2005 SP1 for Vista was released I have been tempted to make the jump and I finally did.

I am still just running it inside of Virtual PC since I just plan to use it for development. It performs quite well despite living in a VPC and my Inspiron is only a single core processor. Initially the sound device was not recognized but once I installed the VPC Additions the sound automatically started to work. My main concern was how well TortoiseSVN would integrate with Vista. I have not had a single problem with it. I believe I waited long enough for the early adopters to work out the kinks.

Since I mainly use this environment to run Visual Studio I am sure I will not have any problems. And if I choose to move back to WinXP it is only a matter of firing up my other environment which is now sitting in cold storage.

I have yet to take the full plunge into Vista but I have had a copy running inside of a Virtual PC which I turn on occasionally just to see how it performs after I get fresh updates. Since the beginning the performance under virtualization has been painfully sluggish. A couple of recent changes have provided the much needed speed improvements.

The first change was the release of Virtual PC 2007. I have been running Virtual Server R2 which works fine for hosting my WinXP and Windows Server 2003 instances. I prefer to run Virtual PC now because it does not require logging into the instance via Remote Desktop which causes problems, such as the issues I have had with the clipboard. I have noticed some performance benefits of using Virtual PC over Virtual Server. I also became more interested in a setting for hardware enabled virtualization.

(more...)

A shocking and disappointing story on Digg points to an interview will Bill Gates. He claims that the MacOS X is compromised daily while you would be hard pressed to find a single Vista exploit in a month. This comment is amazing and completely inaccurate given the track record Apple and Microsoft have had the past 7 years. And in just a matter of a few hours there are already nearly 400 comments on this Digg story. In that same timeframe a normally hot story may get 150 comments, so clearly the Microsoft Chairman has struck a sensitive nerve.

(more...)

I read a post by a disgruntled computer user yesterday complaining that the latest Vista features were not exciting or a compelling reason to upgrade. It annoyed me. Now I have not been planning to upgrade to Vista. I can see there are some really "cool" features, but they are really in the "shiny object" camp in my opinion. What I really want people to do is change their attitude about the operating system. It is there to run the applications and that is it. Our expectations have grown to the point that many expect an upgrade to the latest OS release should make your life more fulfilling and exciting. I just want a system which allows me to run my applications and then stay out of the way.

(more...)

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.

1. Run the Windows update and get the latest security updates and IE7
2. Install and run ClamWin AV to clear malicious software from your computer
3. 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.

While Apple and Microsoft continue to play nice for the public, I know they are still fiercely competing to capture as much as the market as possible. And I do not think giving the name Boot Camp to their dual booting software was any coincidence. Apple is in the early stages of going to war with Microsoft. And the subtle jab through the naming of this product reminds me of when IBM released Eclipse years ago to usurp control of the Java market from Sun. Now Eclipse is the most widely used Java development tool. These subtle names show their lasting intensions.

Last year Chris Siebold predicted that the Apple share of the laptop market would spike, and so it did to 12% of the market. A combination of many factors contributed to this dramatic growth, including a switch to Intel chips, ongoing security headaches of the Windows operating system and a convenient feature to boot back into Windows to use that application which still only runs in Windows. I think it is great to see Apple making proper headway to give Microsoft some real competition. Afterall, it was not until Firefox had gained up to 10% of the browser market that Microsoft decided to reform their team for Internet Explorer and finally push out a new release. Sometimes the 800lb gorilla needs a push.

(more...)