Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Beating Internet Explorer into the 21st Century

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I can hardly wait until this is finished enough for the ‘download’ link to be active: IE7, a hack to force IE into behaving like a modern browser.

This is an attempt to make Microsoft Internet Explorer more compliant when it comes to web standards.

Web developers are becoming increasingly frustrated at the lack of convergence of the major browser vendors. We need a level playing field!

CSS is a powerful technology. Many of it’s more advanced features go unused by web developers because of Explorer’s poor support of CSS standards.

IE7 provides support for most of the important CSS enhancements. A full list is available on the compatibility page.

About time someone figured out how to do this, since Microsoft doesn’t seem to want to bother…;)

iTunes: “You’re Gonna Get Yours” by Public Enemy from the album Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987, 4:05).

Even startup pranks are harder in Windows

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There used to be a stupid little prank you could play on unsuspecting Mac users (running System 8 or 9 — if I remember correctly, the required utility wasn’t included in previous systems). Normally, when you were done using the computer, you would choose Special > Shutdown… to turn the computer off. However, apparently too many people had difficulties with that, so Apple started including a small utility that lived in the Apple Menu called Shutdown that would…shut down the computer.

So, if you wanted to annoy someone and had a moment at their Mac when their back was turned, you could copy that Shutdown application from the Apple Menu Items folder into the Startup Items folder. Once that was done, every time they started up their computer, as the system went through the Startup Items, it’d find that program, and shut right down again. Simple, and wonderfully annoying.

Tonight, I found a similar prank for Windows XP in Tech TV’s ‘Best Computer Pranks Ever’, and was fairly amused to see how convoluted the process was to get the same result!

To recap — on the Mac:

  1. Open two windows, [System Drive]:System Folder:Apple Menu Items and [System Drive]:System Folder:Startup Items.
  2. Option-drag Shutdown from Apple Menu Items to Startup Items.

On Windows XP…

  1. Right-click the Start menu.
  2. Select Explore Users.
  3. Navigate to Programs > Startup.
  4. Right-click the file windows and select New > Shortcut.
  5. When the window pops up asking for the location, enter “%windir%system32shutdown.exe -r -t 00“.

On the one hand, it’s “only” five steps versus two, and I could have broken the Mac list into three steps (by splitting the first step into two). But even beyond that, there’s that cute little text string that has to be typed in to get the program to execute correctly.

Okay, yeah. So maybe it’s a good thing that — at least in this one instance — it’s harder to annoy someone under Windows XP than under the Classic Mac OS. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t amuse me, though.

iTunes: “Moon Over Greene County” by Zanes, Dan from the album Natural Born Killers (1993, 2:19).

Tori Amos: Tales of a Librarian

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Tori Amos has a new “greatest hits” collection available at the iTunes Music Store called ‘A Tori Amos Collection — Tales of a Librarian‘. Normally, this wouldn’t be terribly interesting to me, as I already have a very large Tori collection, and therefore wouldn’t have much need for a compilation album. However, this one caught my eye for two reasons.

Firstly, there are two exclusive tracks included only if you purchase the full album through the iTMS: Putting the Damage On (Reconditioned) and Pretty Good Year (Live from Sound Check). Secondly, all of the songs have been ‘reworked’ or ‘reconditioned’, which made me curious.

So far, I’m fairly impressed with what I’ve heard. None of the new versions are entirely new — in fact, on some of them, the changes are so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable, and I was initially starting to wonder if they had simply used ‘reworked’ rather than ‘remastered’ as a term and had just re-issued the original tracks. However, there are some definite changes to the tracks, usually in the form of a few extra instruments here and there, an extra vocal track or harmony line…slight edits and additions that flesh out the tracks a bit more.

One noticeable exception to the rule is the ‘reworked’ version of Professional Widow, which actually appears to be an edit of Armand van Helden’s dance remix of the track!

Overall, it’s not a must-buy for most people, but for a collector or for someone (like me) who gets a kick out of listening to a track’s production, trying to identify how it was all assembled, the collection is definitely worth the download.

iTunes: “Professional Widow (Reworked)” by Amos, Tori from the album A Tori Amos Collection – Tales of a Librarian (2003, 3:47).

Devil Duckie USB Flashdrive!

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Devil Duckie USB Flashdrive

I tell you, if I didn’t already have my iPod (and therefore no need for a flash drive), this would be so tempting!

He may be a representative of the dark side, but it’s hard to resist those tiny horns and cute chubby red body. At 4 1/2 inches long, our stylish and strange Devil Duckie Drive is a High-Speed USB 2.0 (1.1 compatible) personal data storage device for people who are going places.

Once you reach your destination, plug your Devil Duckie Drive in and put him to work. His expressive (and often hypnotic) eyes will blink as he reads and writes your data.

(via MacMinute)

FedEx making The Switch?

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Interesting rumor via MacRumors:

According to one unconfirmed source, Federal Express may be looking to make a significant purchase of Macs to replace their current PCs.

Reportedly, the move is under consideration due to the recent wave of viruses that have swept the PC world.

While Macs are not inherently immune to virus attacks, most viruses have been written on the Windows/PC platform.

Now, this is “one unnamed source”, so it could easily be entirely fictitious, but it’s interesting to think about, at the very least.

As an added bonus, the MacRumors discussion thread for this item has a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than what I’m used to seeing in their forums, and I found this wonderful little point buried within, from MisterMe:

…there is more evidence for ghosts, UFOs, and Big Foot than there is for MacOS X viruses. People have actually reported seeing ghosts, UFOs, and Big Foot.

iTunes: “Thunder Kiss ’65 (Swinging Lovers)” by White Zombie from the album Nightcrawlers: The K.M.F.D.M. Remixes (1992, 4:46).

Avi Rubin vs. Diebold

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Avi Rubin, one of the primary authors of a highly critical look at Diebold’s electronic voting machines, decided to answer some of his critics, put his money where his mouth is, and spend a day as an election judge, working with the very machines about which he had expressed strong security concerns. In his very interesting recap of his day, he admits that some of his concerns may not be as much of a worry as he thought — but others may be far worse.

In our paper, we described how the smartcards used by these machines had no cryptography on them, and we made the widely criticized claim that a teenager in a garage could manufacture smartcards and use them to vote 20 times. I now believe that this particular attack is not a real threat — at least not in the primary I worked today. […] In general, multiple voting attacks during the election are not likely to work in a precinct such as the one where I worked.

[…]

There were also some security issues that I found to be much worse than I expected. […] The security risk I saw was that Diebold had designated which machine would be the zero machine, and at one point, all of the vote tallies were loaded onto that one machine in memory. That would be the perfect point to completely change the tallies. There is no need to attack all of the machines at a precinct if someone could tamper with the zero machine.

[…]

I continue to believe that the Diebold voting machines represent a huge threat to our democracy. I fundamentally believe that we have thrown our trust in the outcome of our elections in the hands of a handful of companies (Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S) who are in a position to control the final outcomes of our elections. I also believe that the outcomes can be changed without any knowledge by election judges or anyone else. Furthermore, meaningful recounts are impossible with these machines.

I also believe that we have great people working in the trenches and on the front lines. These are ordinary people, mostly elderly, who believe in our country and our democracy, and who work their butts off for 16 hours, starting at 6 a.m. to try to keep the mechanics of our elections running smoothly. It is a shame that the e-voting tidal wave has a near hypnotic effect on these judges and almost all voters. I believe that after today’s experience, I am much better equipped to make the arguments against e-voting machines with no voter verifiability, but I also have a great appreciation for how hard it is going to be to fight them, given how much voters and election officials love them.

(via Jason Kottke)

XBox2, G5…and Virtual PC?

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Nick just dropped me a quick note to let me know that I’m showing up on Slashdot again. It seems that word just hit the ‘net that Microsoft has released the SDK for the upcoming XBox2, and said SDK is being distributed running on Apple PowerMac G5 dual-processor machines running a customized NT kernel. This prompted Mr. Muskrat’s comment…

Michael Hanscom almost blew the XBox2 story wide open back in October.

Remember when Microsoft fired that guy because he mentioned that they bought G5s. Too bad he didn’t know anything about why they bought them.

I did wonder a bit about the G5/Xbox2 link back in November, when news first broke that the Xbox2 would likely be running on the G5 chip. At the time, I was idly wondering about the possibility of an Xbox emulator for the Mac (similar to Connectix’ old Virtual Gamestation software that allowed Mac users to run Playstation games on their home computer).

Now, though, the news that the seeded G5’s are running a custom NT kernel has me wondering along different lines.

In February of ’03, Microsoft bought Virtual PC, the PC-emulation software for Macs that allows them to run Windows software inside an emulated PC. They’ve continued to support and update Virtual PC for the Mac, along with releasing Virtual PC for the PC, allowing Windows machines to run multiple virtual machines on one physical box — handy for software testing purposes. Unfortunately, Virtual PC depends on a feature of earlier PowerPC processors that is not present in the G5, so there hasn’t been a version of Virtual PC released yet that will run on Apple’s flagship G5 desktop machines.

Last month, Microsoft announced that a new G5-compatible version of Virtual PC would be released along with Office 2004. Considering that the Xbox2 SDK is apparently running a customized NT kernel that runs on G5 systems, could some of those same customizations be worked into Virtual PC 7, making for a major speed increase, as more of the low-level code would be running natively on the Mac rather than having to pass through an emulator? I don’t really know enough about the innards of how software like this works, so I could be entirely off-base here — the differences between the emulation required for Virtual PC and the customizations needed to get the NT kernel running on the PowerPC processor may have absolutely nothing in common — but it was enough to get me wondering.

Even more interesting, though, would be if someone could leak some form of benchmarks, even rough ones, showing what kind of performance this customized NT kernel was getting on the SDK machines. I’m assuming it must be at least somewhat respectable, as the machines are being used for creating software for the Xbox2 — but how respectable?

And going even more wildly out of the bounds of reality…for years now, there have been rumors of Apple porting the Mac OS to be able to run on Intel-based PCs (realistically, that’s not likely to ever be released publicly, but the technology is there). However, what about going the other direction? What if Microsoft were to take these customizations to their kernel and and eventually supplant Virtual PC with an actual build of Longhorn for the G5, either as a “red box” that would allow you to run Windows applications concurrently with Mac OS X applications (we can already run Mac OS X apps, “Classic” Mac OS apps, Unix command-line apps, and Unix X-11 apps all at the same time as it is), or as a dual-boot option (Which OS would you like to run today)?

Likely? I seriously doubt it. But fun to play with.

And I’d still love to find out just how zippy those G5s are running NT. Wouldn’t it be a fun little tweak if they were running as fast as (or faster, even) than high-end PCs?

An insider’s view of MS Word 6.0

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Microsoft Word for the Mac versions 4 and 5 were my introductions to Word, and in the opinion of myself and many other people, were the pinnacle of Microsoft’s Mac programming.

I had a single 1.4Mb floppy disc on my first Mac (a Mac Classic) that had the MS Word program and every paper I wrote for school that year, and it ran quite happily in the 1Mb of RAM that my lil’ Classic had in it. Word 5, while not that small, was the perfect combination of features and usability, adding useful functions without becoming too much of a memory, space, or speed hog.

Then came Word 6.

Huge. Bloated. A memory hog. Dog-slow. And a truly hideous interface that only a Windows user could love (or even feel at home in).

Things have improved since then, thankfully — Word (and Office) for Mac OS X is actually useable, though I tend not to bother unless I have a really pressing need (such as getting into old archived documents laying around on my system), as the majority of my writing these days is either coding my site in BBEdit or posting via Ecto.

Still, it was quite interesting to find this look at the creation of MS Word 6 from Rick Schaut, one of the people on the team for Word 6.

Shipping a crappy product is a lot like beating your head against the wall.  It really does feel good when you ship a great product as a follow-up, and it really does motivate you to spend some time trying to figure out how not to ship a crappy product again.

Mac Word 6.0 was a crappy product.  And, we spent some time trying to figure out how not to do that again.  In the process, we learned a few things, not the least of which was the meaning of the term “Mac-like.”

(via Scoble)

iTunes: “Homey Don’t Play Dat” by Bonnie ‘n’ Clyde from the album Terminator X and the Valley of the Jeep Beats (1991, 4:12).

Irony, copyright, and site design

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First, read what this gentleman has to say about the appropriation of content from other weblogs:

I was reading Dawnkeyotie’s blog and she links to the story of Tequila Mockingbird and how some young punk wannbe blogger has been stealing her material.

Now I’ll admit to being influenced by other sites, like my About This Site page borrows rather heavily from the About page at Ani Moller’s site, but stealing word for word… Just not cool.

Etiquette is the name of the game… If you want to use text, at least give proper credit, or a trackback if possible.

If you want to steal my life, go ahead, I dare you… I Double Dog Dare You™ Mofo! I may not display a copyright notice, but it’s in the source of every page on this site.

Now, with that firmly in mind, head on over and check out his site design.

Look familiar? It looks awfully familiar to me. Funny, there’s no credit given, and he’s replaced the copyright notice in my code with one of his own, implying that the design work is his.

According to his about page, the last major redesign to his site went live on Monday, Feb. 2nd of 2004. Checking his archives, here’s what we find for the redesign announcement…

You like?

I though I’d lost this new look, but luckily a few files were still on my server so for the last 12 hours I went through everything with the virtual equivalent of a fine tooth comb and cleaned it all up and finally finished what I started some 2 weeks ago.

I think it’s much nicer, but then anything is much nicer than the old b2 default template, so it makes this place my own at last.

Before you ask, yes, it looks a bit unaligned in Internet Explorer, but it looks great in Mozilla Firebird and seeing as that’s the browser I use mostly, get used to it. If I can find a way to realign in IE I will, but until then it’s just cosmetic differences.

Yes — he definitely made this place his own — as long as “his own” is rather loosely defined as “blatantly stolen from someone else”.

Sigh.

The really ridiculous thing about this, though, is that I actually do like the way my design translates to a two-column layout. Considering I occasionally toy with the idea of going back to a two-column design rather than this single-column design, if I used the same base overall look, I’d end up looking nearly exactly how he does now. Would I then have to turn around and give him credit for inspiring some of the design?

Again — oh, the irony.

(Many thanks to Firas for the tip-off.)

Update: All’s well that ends well.