December 2006 - Posts
I owe Rob Howard an apology. A while back just prior to the official launch I tried his BlogMailr service and gave it a less-than-complimentary review. To be fair, the results I got were poor. However, I tried again today and the results were much, much better. My blog post uploaded devoid of surplus formatting and the in-line images appeared just like they should.
Well done, Rob. Sorry I was quick to give you a bad review.
BlogMailr is a service that lets you post to your blog by email. I've tried posting with Outlook 2007 with an HTML format email message containing in-line images and the item posted perfectly to my blog. The way BlogMailr automatically handles images is the killer feature for me (and why I was so disappointed when it didn't work on my first attempt).
People are always telling us to be careful who we trust - never open attachments or download files if they are not from a trusted source. But the trouble is, who do you trust?
You'd think you could trust Microsoft, right? Well, come on a little journey with me and let's see. We begin at Microsoft’s home page for Internet Explorer 7. Follow the download link for IE Add-ons.
Now, at the add-on site, we’re going into the Time Savers category and the Download Manager subcategory.
Here we are. Top of the list, Download Accellerator Plus. It looks like a Microsoft site, smells like a Microsoft site. There is a Microsoft copyright notice at the bottom of the page.
So we should be safe here, right? Microsoft-endorsed downloads for a Microsoft product. Yea! Oh, hang on, better check out some of the reviewers comments. Alarm bells should be ringing by now. But in case you don’t read reviews, I strongly recommend that you do not download this software.
If you did, you could scan the file for viruses before you install it. I did and AVG came up clean. This file looks harmless. Then you’d double-click it to start the installation, and this is what will happen:
IRC/BackDoor.SdBot is a Trojan that attempts to spread using Kazaa, IRC and Windows file shares. It leaves backdoors into your system that can potentially enable a hacker to take control of your system. So, it looks like Microsoft needs to be a lot more careful what software it recommends. Meanwhile, you tell me: who can we trust?
I stole the title of this post from Jeffrey Snover, architect of Windows Powershell. Jeffrey has a post on his blog about the
philosophy of automation and he makes the point that when you solve a problem, you should blog it and share it with the world. I agree wholeheartedly and if you're reading this blog and haven't yet started one yourself, have a look at
my first entry on this blog then make it a New Year's resolution to start your own blog. And it would be interesting if you do decide to start a blog, leave me a comment here or trackback (link) to this article.
If you've seen the wonderful Get Safe Online web site, you may be interested in Get Safe Online (the blog). This useful resource publishes regular information and advice helping you stay safe online and keep up to date with the latest security best practices. Check it out while you're digesting your turkey. It's also a good excuse to try out the new RSS feed capability in Internet Explorer 7 (and, soon, Outlook 2007).
Cross-posted from http://community.tigranetworks.co.uk/blogs/TiGraNetworks
This is a great early Christmas present: the MS Dynamics people have released a new version of the Outlook client so that it is now fully compatible with Office 2007 and Windows Vista. The update can be downloaded here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2006/12/20/v3c-has-been-released.aspx
If you hang out in online communities long enough, you see certain behaviours happening again and again. Many of these behaviours have been documented over the last 40 years or so and are summarised nicely in the paper by Clay Shirkey of the same title.
There is a lovely example going on right now in a group I participate in - the SBS List. Recently, there has been a discussion about whether the group needs moderation and how it has become too noisy and a lot of people who are posting have no idea what they are talking about and so on. People are even blogging about it. Well, group: pay attention. You are behaving exactly as predicted. Go read that paper and be enlightened. I've distilled a few of the interesting nuggets in the rest of this article to whet your appetite, but to really understand the issues, you need to read the paper.
According to Mr. Shirkey, there are some common characteristics of online communities, for example:
- The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases.
- (paraphrasing) Groups tend to devolve from their noble purpose into a variety of 'basic urges' that subvert the original purpose of the group. Group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.
Shirky says there are three basic things that you have to accept about online communities (and if you don't accept them, they will just happen to you anyway):
- You cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
- Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. [The Core Group]. This group will arise and find a way to express itself, even if not explicitly built into the technological framework.
- The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. One person/one vote is a really bad idea if you want to get anything done.
Finally, Shirkey goes on to explore design requirements for online communities. These are the things that are absolute requirements for large, long-lived online communities to work well (or at all). Things that should be taken for granted. I am really condensing these statements heavily so read the paper for more detail. Here we go:
- There must be an identity system ("handles") that is somewhat persistent and has some cost associated with changing identities. Identity is the basic requirement for having a conversation and linking what is being said now to what was said in the past ("who said what, when").
- You have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since."
- You need barriers to participation. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities. It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.
- you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.
Now, I have distilled out a few of the salient/controversial points but they will all make more sense if you go and read Mr. Shirkey's paper. Anyone who participates in, or plans to run an online community should definitely read it, If for no other reason that that it provides a useful platform from which to have the discussion about how a group should be run!
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out how well Yahoo groups fit Shirkey's design criteria and what needs to happen in any one particular community.
I really love this blog - The Daily WTF. It is full of amusing anecdotes that really happened - perversions in information technology so strange that it would be funny if it wasn't sad. It has something of a developer slant but most IT people will apreciate the dilbertesque humour straight from the world of the pointy-haired boss.
Today's post concerns RSA security tags and how they are so much better than writing your password on a post-it note.
One of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, according to Stephen Covey is Sharpening the Saw. This means that to be effective, one has to take time to maintain the tools of the trade. Taking time out from "doing" to hone skills and processes so that in future, we can do the same things more efficiently. A lot of people are so busy "doing" that they forget to stop and sharpen the saw occasionally.
You can see this in action when some new software arrives that does something a bit differently. There will always be people, sometimes not the ones you would expect, who are very resistant to the new way of doing things. These are the people who turn off the fancy new Windows interface and try to make it look like Windows 2000. Susan Bradley has a post about how people dislike IE7 because it is "different" and are actually unistalling it to get back the old look and feel. Uninstalling the new security features, the anti-phishing protection and the tabbed browsing, RSS support, missing out on all those benefits, because they aren't prepared to spend maybe half an hour getting accustomed to the new streamlined interface. Crazy people who refuse to sharpen the saw.
Wearing my software developer cap, I see similar trends with people who refuse to move away from Visual Basic 6, because it is what they know and have always used. They soldier on developing new code in an obsolete development paradigm - code that is obsolete before it is written, because the rest of the world is using .NET and designing their systems to work in the .NET way. What a monumental waste of effort.
I think a lot of small businesses are like that. They are so busy "doing business" that they don't take time to look at how they do business. They need to work on their business instead of in it. They need to take time to look at their processes to see how they can improve their business tools, so that in future they can be more efficient, more flexible and more profitable.
The area I live in, Rhondda Cynon Taff in South Wales, has a particular problem when it comes to sharpening the saw. We are almost bottom of the UK league table when it comes to IT skills. Of course there are exceptions, but by and large, computers are used as electronic typewriters. Basic skills - such as how to make word documents - are lacking. New, easier-to-use technology such as Windows Vista and Office 2007 help to some degree, but more important is a willingness to learn, adpat to change and sharpen the saw.
My company, TiGra Networks, is all about helping people, small businesses in particular, to sharpen their saws. As a small business owner, maybe you have no computer skills and IT systems scare you. Maybe you don't trust IT because you hear stories of huge government IT projects that don't work and get cancelled, wasted large wedges of public money. It doesn't have to be like that. Often, all the technology you need to become more productive is sitting there right on your desk, functioning as an electronic typewriter. If only you knew how to unlock the potential, it would be able to do so much more for you. We have managed IT plans that mean you don't have to know anything about IT to make better use of it - we take care of all the tricky stuff for you. We can also review your computer systems against your business objectives and help you plan for the future. If anything in this post sounds familiar to you, if you have a nagging suspicion that you could be making much better use of information technology, you're probably right! You should be talking to us about sharpening your saw.
TiGra is proud to have re-qualified as a Microsoft Small Business Specialist for 2007. Microsoft UK insists that each company re-qualifies each year. To keep our Small Business Specialist status, Microsoft asked us to provide two customer references to prove we have carried out work to a satisfactory standard and to show ongoing involvement in the small business community, by attending events, training and webcasts. It's not all that difficult for a competent IT person to become a Small Business Specialist, but we hope our customers appreciate that we want to take every opportunity to differentiate ourselves from lesser IT providers. If your IT provider is not a Small Business Specialist, given that it's not too difficult to become one, maybe you shouold be asking yourself why they couldn't be bothered? Do you really want to do business with people who aren't bothered about improving themselves by engaging with the community and demonstrating to their customers that they are doing that?
Cross-posted from http://community.tigranetworks.co.uk/blogs/TiGraNetworks
This cute little demo of Windows Powershell provides a spoken weather forecast. I found this thread on the PowerShell team blog. You simply enter your US zip code or Weather.com city code (eg. UKXX0943) and the script trundles off to Yahoo weather, retrieves an RSS feed containing the weather forecast for your location, then speaks the current conditions and extended forecast for your location using your computer's sound system. Amazing! I'd love to see this done so efficiently in any other shell. There's a challenge for you, Vijay! This example demonstrates the power of working with .Net objects and COM components instead of text.
I modified the code slightly from the original at the Sapien Technologies blog to make the script work with ISA Server when the firewall client is installed – it does this by explicitly telling the WebClient object not to use a proxy server (the firewall client then handles proxy authentication correctly). I also changed the default units to Celsius for European tastes.
Here's the code:
# WeatherReport.ps1
# This script will get the current weather conditions and forecast for the specified
# US zip code or Weather.com location code (eg. UKXX0943)
# from Yahoo weather, and using the SAPI.SPvoice object, speak the information for you.
# [TPL] Original script from http://sapien.eponym.com/blog/_archives/2006/12/7/2549282.html
# [TPL] 2006-12-13 - work around ISA proxy authentication by requesting the web client not
# to use a proxy server (the IS Firewall Client then uses SecureNAT).
# - Changed default units to Celsius for european consumption.
Function Get-Weather($zip=$(Throw("You need to specify a zip code!")),$Unit=$(Throw("Specify F or C for the temperature scale!")))
{
[string]$urlbase="http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss"
#validate temperature scale
if ($Unit -eq "c") {
[string]$scale="Celsius"
$Unit="c"}
else {
[string]$scale="Farenheit"
$Unit="f"}
[string]$url=$urlbase + "?p="+$zip+"&u="+$Unit
#create the text to speech object
$voice=New-Object -com "SAPI.SPVoice"
Write-Host Connecting to $url
#Create .NET Webclient object
$webclient=New-Object "System.Net.WebClient"
$webclient.UseDefaultCredentials=1 #[TPL]
$webclient.Proxy = $webclient.GetEmptyProxy #[TPL] Don't use a proxy (ISA will use SecureNAT)
[xml]$data=$webclient.DownloadString($url)
if ($data.rss.channel.item.Title -eq "City not found") {
Write-Host "Could not find a location for" $zip}
else {
Write-Host $data.rss.channel.item.Title
#Speak the current conditions
[void]$voice.speak("You asked about the weather.")
[void]$voice.Speak($data.rss.channel.item.Title)
[void]$voice.speak("The current condition is")
[void]$voice.speak($data.rss.channel.item.condition.text+"!")
[void]$voice.speak("The current temperature is" +$data.rss.channel.item.condition.temp+"
degrees "+$scale)
#get forecast
for ($i=0; $i -le ($data.rss.channel.item.forecast.length)-1;$i++) {
[void]$voice.speak("The forecast for "+`
$data.rss.channel.item.forecast[$i].date+`
"is, "+$data.rss.channel.item.forecast[$i].text+"with a low of"+`
$data.rss.channel.item.forecast[$i].low+" degrees "+$scale+`
", and a high of"+$data.rss.channel.item.forecast[$i].low+" degrees "+$scale)
}
}
}
$zip=Read-Host "Enter a zip code for your weather query"
Get-Weather $zip "c"
Use Notepad to create a new file and copy & paste the above code into it. Save the file as GetWeather.ps1 (take care that Notepad doesn't add a .txt extension) then in your PowerShell window, CD to the directory where the file is saved and type .\GetWeather.ps1
If it sounds too good to be true, then it is!
I've been receiving emails offering me a download-only version of Office 2007 Enterprise for over 80% discount. Well, if someone is offering me a deal where I save more than I'm paying, then the alarm bells in my head are deafening. Someone, somewhere, is lying. Either the original price was a lie, or the offer is a scam desinged to steal identity or credit card details. David Overton has confirmed this on his blog. How much sense does an 80% discount make before there is even any competition? Not much, really. Plus, the web site changes it's URL on a daily basis, so clearly something fishy is going on.
If you fall for a scam like this, as David points out, the best that will happen if you're very lucky is you get an illegal copy of the software and no license (therefore you wasted your money). It could be much worse.
In Sean Daniel's blog entry on using Windows Vista clients on SBS and he covers adding the SBS SSL certificate so that Vista can connect to Remote Web Workplace (see the very end of the article under Non-joined Vista clients accessing SBS). However, I tripped up because I allowed Vista to select the certificate store automatically (which works fine in Windows XP). However, in Vista, using the automatic option just fails silently. It seems that you have to manually specify that you want to use the "Trusted root certification authorities" store. Sean's article does say that but it is a little ambiguous and if you're used to letting Windows decide automatically, this might trip you up too.
A couple of things that I've found out in the various new product releases that you might find useful...
In Internet Explorer 7, where's the menu bar gone? Some of the menu items are on the Page and Tools button, but not everything. At first, not having a menu bar feels a bit odd. Solution: tap the ALT key and release it, the menu bar pops open. Tap ALT again and it disappears.
Susan Bradley has a tip about minimizing the ribbon in Office 2007.
In Windows XP there was a Run... item on the menu that let you directly start a program or URL by typing in its name. There's no such thing in the Windows Vista start menu. I wanted to start a URL directly and it took me a while to figure out how... but it's right under your nose. Just type the URL into the search box and press enter and Windows Vista will open IE7 right at that page.