I leave today for a week in the tropics, so posting will be light until I get back. You’re probably all out playing Halo 3 anyway.

If you’re in the Redmond/Bellevue/Kirkland area, join Charlie Owen and me at 7pm tonight for pizza and conversation:

We are going to eat at Zeeks Pizza in downtown Kirkland. Excellent pizza but if it’s not your thing there are many other choices within walking distance where you could pick up a ‘to go’ order and join us at Zeeks — see here for a list. Zeeks stays open unitl 10 PM and there are several coffee shops / pubs close by where we can move the conversation if folks are still around.

If you want to sit at home and play Halo 3, well, we’ll understand.

It never fails. Microsoft always, always releases important updates when I’m traveling. This week, I’m on the road in Redmond, meeting with several product teams at Microsoft in preparation for an update to Windows Vista Inside Out (and also participating as a judge in the Windows Home Server Code2Fame contest). So, naturally, SP1 was released yesterday. (The first beta release, that is… Not the final version, which is due sometime in Q1 2008.)

Downloading the very large standalone installer via my hotel’s Internet connection wasn’t an option, and I wouldn’t risk knocking this notebook out of service in mid-trip anyway. So I’ll wait and get to it on Thursday, when I’m back in the office.

Meanwhile, if you’re a beta tester and you’ve installed the bits already, leave a comment.

It’s always sad to say goodbye to a friend. If you ever bought one of my books and looked at the bio up front, chances are you saw a reference to “my two amazingly smart and affectionate cats, Katy and Bianca.”

We had to say goodbye to Bianca today. This is the way I’ll always remember her:

I’m in Redmond for a round of meetings next week focusing on our 2008 update to Windows Vista Inside Out, plus a stint as a judge of the Windows Home Server Code2Fame competition.

Charlie Owen has graciously agreed to handle logistics for a geek dinner somewhere on the east side of Lake Washington on Tuesday. If you’re in the neighborhood and interested in joining us, click on over to Charlie’s site and get the details.

When: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 starting at 7:00 PM.

Where: Zeeks Pizza, Kirkland

In the midst of an interesting (and honestly titled) list of Random Vista Thoughts, Chris Lanier says:

Time synchronization still seems to not work. Hardly ever worked in Windows XP too.

For grins, I opened the Date and Time Control Panel, went to the Internet Time tab, and was greeted with this:

OK, first of all, that is a godawful error message. The peer’s stratum is less than the host’s stratum? Wha’? Whoever wrote that should have their keyboard taken away for a month. But this little experience reminded me of something that I’ve seen for so many years I’ve lost count:

The server at time.windows.com does not work reliably.

People have been complaining about this for ages but I can’t remember a time when this server was reliable.

It’s practically second nature for me to change the time server to one of the U.S. Government servers. There are several on the drop-down list that ships with Windows by default. You can also add your own just by filling in the address here and clicking Update Now:

That server (located in Boulder, Colorado) is physically close to my location here, and it seems to work reliably. You’ll probably have best luck finding a server close to your physical location. If you want more choices, check this link:

NIST Internet Time Servers

Update: Serdar suggests this link, which works worldwide:

http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Servers/NTPPoolServers

I’ve been a reasonably happy DirecTV customer for the past two years. I got a high-definition DirecTiVo box in July 2005 and it’s worked reasonably well since then (with one noteworthy exception around the beginning of this year).

Unfortunately, that all changed for me a little over a month ago. DirecTV is about to offer a slew of new HD channels, all of them in MPEG4 format. The TiVo-made boxes won’t be able to tune in those channels, forcing DirecTV customers (like me) to switch to the newer, non-TiVo HD DVR boxes.

I made the switch in August. Big mistake.

To put it charitably, the DirecTV HD-DVR is crap. Oh, it has a few nice features and an interface that is reasonably intuitive. But it simply isn’t reliable. I’m on my second box now, and here are some of the symptoms I’ve seen:

• At least three times a week, with no warning, the box decides to stop responding to all input. It continues to record in the background, but it won’t allow you to use the menus until you restart the system. So, you sit down after dinner, with the box actively recording a program that’s on right now and decide to watch something previously recorded and … you can’t. You can’t rewind the current recording or pause whatever’s playing live. If you press the Pause button, nothing happens. If you choose an item from your playlist, you get only a black screen. The solution is to restart the machine, interrupting the current recording.
• Speaking of restarts… It takes eight minutes to reboot the DirecTV HD DVR (I’ve had lots of opportunities to time it).
• Sometimes the HD DVR decides that you only need to watch a few minutes of a program you’ve asked it to record. For instance, the machine decided for me that this week’s episode of Rescue Me was just boring after the first 13 minutes, so that’s when it stopped recording.
• Sometimes it just decides to stop working altogether. Last night, I switched on my home theater system and was greeted with … a black screen. The Record light was on the DirecTV box (it was supposed to be halfway through a recording of Countdown), but the power light was off, and pushing the power button on the remote or the box itself had no effect. After pulling the power plug to force a restart (eight minutes to reboot, remember), I was back in business. Unfortunately, that first half hour wasn’t there for me to watch.

In short, all the flaws I read about earlier this year appear to still be present in the current shipping models. A helpful DirecTV support tech said the first problem (DVR refuses to respond to input and has to be restarted) is a “known issue” that will be fixed in a future software update.

I can’t wait. Or, more to the point, I won’t wait for DirecTV to get its act together, which is why I have an appointment with the cable company to come out and add CableCARDs to a new Dell XPS 410 with a pair of digital cable tuners.

I’ve been using Media Center 2005 as a backup DVR for nearly two years, and it’s been rock-solid reliable. I’ve had Vista Media Center in the living room for nearly two months (with over-the-air HD) and it’s been equally solid. So I guess I should thank DirecTV for finally forcing me to take the plunge.

Microsoft has finally taken the wraps off its v2 extenders (I might even get to see them next week in Redmond), and I’m told they’ll be for sale this holiday season. Finally!

Meanwhile, if anyone can fill me in on what happened to Denis Leary in the last 47 minutes of this week’s episode, I’d be grateful.

Oh, and if you’re in the market for a gently used, still-working HD DirecTiVo, let’s talk.

Congrats to Phil Maher and Brian Scott, who were drawn as the winners in my offer last week for two signed copies of Windows Vista Inside Out.

Updated to add: Just to make it clear, I think Microsoft should have disclosed that it was installing this update. It was stupid for them not to do so and even more stupid not to have a KB article on this update. But there is a very logical reason why a reasonable manager at Microsoft would choose the strategy they did. Without this patch, Windows Update stops working. If WU stops working, Windows users (Microsoft customers) are more vulnerable. Unfortunately, what’s good for the majority in this case is also ammunition for those who are looking to bash the company.

But leaping from a single update to the conclusion that Microsoft is about to start downloading and installing other sorts of stuff on your machine, as some of the reporters covering this story did, is stupid as well.

As a commenter notes at O’Neill’s blog, Microsoft has a procedure in place to require updates to it Windows Update code and related utilities. If you visit WU manually, you might see one of these updates, which you must approve and install before you get to see the actual updates available for your system. So why didn’t they use that procedure here? Offer me a single update. After I approve and install it, I get to see the rest.

Also, I should note that the Microsoft Update Services Privacy Statement, which governs this component, does not include authorization for silent updates. Whoever authorized this update really screwed up.

There’s ample room for criticism of Microsoft, and there’s a genuine need for them to fix the mess they created. It’s also important to keep the whole issue in context.

OK, back to the original post…

I’ve been somewhat incredulous over the fuss about Windows Update choosing to update itself automatically on systems where users had told it to check for downloads. I was even going to write something about it. Then I read this post by Microsoft’s James O’Neill, who said everything I was going to say.

Two excerpts if you don’t feel like clicking through:

I don’t think people should automatically trust Microsoft. I don’t think they should automatically distrust us either. We need to earn trust, and sensible people will keep re-evaluating “In this case should I or shouldn’t I”. There are plenty of people out in the world who think no-one should ever trust us, a great many of them post on line to discussions and blogs, some write for magazines. Giving these people ammunition is stupid. And any manager in Redmond who does should be made to write out “I should never do anything which undermines public trust in my employer” 10,000 times. Preferably while sitting in a set of stocks (I’d locate these under the campus flag poles outside Building 10)

and…

To me, the whole premise of this argument is stupid. First off when I went to grab the screen shot I’ve modified here it says at the bottom
“Note: Windows Update might require an update before you can update Windows”
Granted I had to read that twice, as obviously WU can’t update the OS if there are no updates, the word “Itself” should be in there. But I’ve been imagining a conversation with some of the people who are making this fuss, (who seem to want to the WU dialog to appear like this version)

Me: You selected a radio button which said check for updates, so do you want it to stop checking if we change something at the server ?

Them: No… but… WU shouldn’t change a single byte on my computer without my permission !

Me: Not one ?

Them: Not one.

Me: So how does it maintain a list of available updates to offer you ?

Them: Err… Well that doesn’t count, it shouldn’t change Executables

Me: So you told it to just get the list of updates

Them: … yes

Me: and to take the steps that are needed to get the list ?

Them: … obviously, yes. 

Me: Even if that means updating the software that gets the list …

I agree completely with James that the reporting on this issue has been crappy beyond belief, and that Microsoft deserves criticism for making it so easy to call them EEEEEEEEVVVVVIIILLLLL.

Anyway, read the whole thing.

Update: I should have mentioned that Adobe has some iFilters of its own. Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 both include their own iFilter that is supposed to index filenames and content. Reader 7 and Acrobat 7 have iFilters that index file names and properties only. I’m researching the effects of having two iFilters installed, but I can say on my working system, with Acrobat 8 installed, installing the Foxit iFilter seemed to improve search results and performance.

I mentioned the free Foxit Software PDF iFilter in the webinar this afternoon and promised to post the link. Here it is: 

Foxit PDF IFilter is designed to help users to index a large amount of PDF documents and then quickly find text within these documents. The PDF documents can be files, email attachments or database records.

This is a great addition to Windows Search. The 32-bit and 64-bit versions are free for use in desktop environments, and it’s nice to be able to do full-text searches of PDF files.

After installing this, you’ll need to go in and rebuild the Vista search index. To do that, open the Indexing Options dialog box from Control Panel (even easier, search for it from the Start menu). Click the Advanced button and then click Rebuild.