Posts

Ever since Mark Russinovich started a Sysinternals blog, I have loved reading the information he posts over there. He’s had a series of posts lately about registry polling by poorly written software. The detail with which he digs in is so simple, but elegant that you can’t help appreciate and know that they know their code-fu. I love their tools, especially Process Explorer and couldn’t imagine troubleshooting on Windows without such awesome freeware. Sorry for gushing, but I’m just constantly amazed at what these guys (Mark & Bryce) do.

I am not too impressed with MSN Video Downloads yet. Why not? I don't have a miniSD card yet for my phone - this is the only reason I am still willing to try it again when I do get the card. The user interface is horrible: There's no feedback for when I click on links. There's a big ugly gray bar at the top that just says "Download Status"...what the heck is that big waste of space? There are links to different services, but I'm not sure how they all tie in together. Under HELP, there is a View All link. View all what? I figured it meant video's, but no it's the help. Were there any other help items to indicate what this was referring to...not really. There's one "View My Music" link, but no view my video's, or TV, or anything else...why not? I thought this was MSN video downloads?! The links are not intuitive - I click on download status and it appears to sign me out. When I've selected download status, there's nothing to indicate that's the page I'm on. Same with the other links. How the hell do I know what I'm doing??! It's just plain damn ugly! When I try to play licensed content that I don't have a license for, it prompted me for a password to some random site - admin.theplatform.com?? Michael Creasy is confused as well. Media Player 10 continually crashed on me and McAfee also seems to think there is some sort of Buffer Overflow in wmplayer.exe::GetProceAddress... Granted we all know how much I like McAfee. At least when Google puts their products out in beta, they usually look good and work well. Who at Microsoft let this thing out the door?? This is how Microsoft works though. They come out with something that doesn’t work too well, but tons of people still use it because of amazing marketing. They figure out what’s wrong with, fix a lot of things, but it’s still fundamentally flawed. Nevertheless “product” snags the majority of marketshare due to several factors. I have no doubt that MSN Video Downloads will be great at some point, but man does it suck right now. ...

Speaking of Scoble, let me just re-iterate how much I love my Audiovox SMT5600, commonly known as the Scoblephone. Although I don’t have a miniSD card (yet…it’s on order as of 2 hours ago) I threw a few mp3’s onto my phone this evening before I went rollerblading in the beautiful Chicago weather. I slapped in the headset and I not only had some good tunes to blade to, but I was ready to take an all-important call at any second without missing a step…or roll, as it were. ...

Okay, so Scoble is a Tablet PC evangelist. In my interpretation, this means that he is responsible for prophesizing the wonders and benefits of Microsoft’s Tablet PC platform to anybody he can interact with whether it be online, offline, or through a chain of 30 blogs. To my knowledge, Microsoft has all kinds of evangelists (keyword search on Microsoft Careers turns up 45 openings) and I’ve even met one such evangelist at a Chicago Nerd Dinner. I’m going to see how many times I can squeeze the word evangelist into this entry… ...

Being the lazy guy that I am, I decided to script up Ben’s tip on non-integrated mouse in Microsoft Virtual Server. Since Virtual Server apparently doesn’t have an easy way to turn off mouse integration (as opposed to Virtual PC), Ben posted the exact change to the config file that needs to be made. Using Virtual Server’s COM interface, this can be easily automated as long as you know the path to the parameter. I had to reset my virtual machine for the change to take effect. ...

I am not a praying man, but oh my god! Google Maps has a satellite view!!! amazed What I find most amazing is the directions view and how you can mantain one view in the popup window and another one in the main window. via forevergeekNow Google, who bought the company that makes the Keyhole software, is offering satellite images on their Google Maps beta site. Although you cannot zoom in as close as you can with their Keyhole software, its still fun to play around with. ...

I use the Outlook Connector for IBM Lotus Notes/Domino at work because I’ve come to find Outlook much more usable than Notes. Unfortunately, for the past few months I’ve been getting an error when I start outlook: The system cannot find the file specified error. I figured it was due to a botched Japanese language install and ignored it until I got my laptop reloaded on Monday and it started doing the same thing. After a quick Google, I found somebody with a similar problem.Cause ...

The International Lizard of Mystery took a trip to NYC recently. Apparently he had a pretty good time. ILoM-NYC-Home/manhattan

I stumbled across Asterisk, a software PBX, today. Looks pretty sweet and gives me another reason to try out software-based phone system which I did about three and seven years. It’s about time again.

I received my first ever piece of SMS spam on my Cingular/AT&T mobile phone today. Suck. I don’t know if Cingular sold my number or not, but at least they do appear to have an opt out option on their website. The odd thing was that the message appeared to pop up on my screen without any interaction whatsoever. I’m not 100% sure because I dropped the phone before I noticed I had the message and could have opened it, but I’m fairly sure. It is definitely some sort of custom message, though, because instead of “Reply” and “Menu” for the soft buttons, it has “Later” and “Delete”. ...