Category: Software

Thunderbird, meet Norton

I just downloaded a trial copy of Norton Antivirus 2007 to install on a test machine. On the same box, I have Mozilla’s new Thunderbird 2.0 e-mail client installed. As part of the trial install, I had to create a Norton Account (not sure, but that might be a (TM)) with Symantec.

Symantec sent me an acknowledgment message via e-mail within minutes after I created the account. Thunderbird’s anti-phishing module wasn’t pleased: 

Sym_scam

I’ve been reasonably impressed with the performance and design of Thunderbird so far, but this sort of false positive is always troubling, no matter where it comes from.

Update: I’m surprised that this post drew so many comments so quickly. Here’s why I’m pointing this out: Mozilla and Google are tight, very tight. They collaborated extensively on the anti-phishing technology in Firefox. Google Mail (Gmail) even gets its own entry in the New Account Setup dialog box for Thunderbird.

Gmail_tbird

So I would assume that mail coming into Thunderbird from my Gmail.com account should be the best possible candidate for the Mozilla/Google team to get right.

And in fact Google Mail does get it right. When I look at the message source, I see two headers added by Google: One shows the results from a Brightmail scan, which says the message is from a whitelisted domain. The other is an SPF header from Google, which is tagged PASS and says the IP address from which the message originated is a “permitted sender.”

Google has gone to a lot of trouble to screen all mail coming into a Gmail account as junk or suspicious. So why isn’t Mozilla able to piggyback on this analysis?

Update 2: For those who think I’m picking on Mozilla, note that I called Microsoft for an even sillier false positive about 18 months ago. And in both cases this behavior is the correct default. When in doubt, let me make the decision, exactly as Thunderbird has done here. But the algorithm really should be better than this.

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When was the last time you tested your backup system?

Back in the days when I was managing editor of PC World and then editor of PC Computing, I used to literally have nightmares about this sort of thing:

Business 2.0, the technology-aware magazine published by Time, periodically reminds readers of the importance of backing up computer files. A 2003 article likened backups to flossing – everyone knows it’s important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.

Last week, Business 2.0 got caught forgetting to floss.

On the night of Monday, April 23, the magazine’s editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server failed to back up.

Good thing the magazine, based in San Francisco, is a monthly. “If it had happened a week later, we would have been in trouble,” said Josh Quittner, the editor.

There were hard copies of edited articles, because they had been sent out for legal review, but the art department had to rebuild every graphic element and redo every layout by hand.

How does this happen? Because everyone assumed the backup system was working and never tested its document recovery features.

There’s a lesson for you.

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Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me

Long Zheng looks at the latest Microsoft research on counterfeit software and piracy and turns the numbers on their head. 

Does that mean 75% of websites accessed offer[ing] counterfeit product keys, pirated software, key generators or crack tools did not attempt to install malicious software? And are in theory, safe?

[…]

Does that mean an astounding 89% of key generators and crack tools downloaded from web sites were also safe?

[…]

Does that mean 41% of key generators and crack tools downloaded from P2P networks were also safe?

And apparently 76% of counterfeit copies passed activation, too.

This is purely satirical commentary, Long hastens to add. And they’re just hypothetical questions, too.

A fix for Windows Live Messenger sign-in issues

About a month ago, Brandon LeBlanc wrote about his problems signing in to the Windows Live Messenger network. Last week, it began happening to me. I was able to install the Messenger client software on another computer and sign in, but on my main system, even uninstalling and reinstalling wouldn’t fix the problem. And Brandon says he’s still getting “tons of comments” left on the original post.

Yesterday, I sent a note to support and got the suggested fix within a few hours. Open Regedit and delete the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger\Policies

After doing that, I was able to sign in again. If you’re having this problem, maybe the same fix will work for you.

Update 8-Feb-2007: OK, I’ve now closed the comments on this post. If you’re still having problems after following the advice in this thread and in the comments (in particular, see comment #79), this is not the place to complain about it. Call or e-mail Microsoft support. That is, after all, how I got the information originally posted here.

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This site’s browser stats, updated

With the help of SiteMeter, I’ve been keeping track of which browsers are used by visitors to this site. The latest stats continue to confirm that most people have made up their minds about which browser they want to use:

The last time I published these stats was on April 30, 2006. The share of visitors using Firefox or Mozilla has dipped roughly 1% since then, from 35.2% down to 34.18%. It’s still a bit higher than the August 2005 share of 33.2%, however.

Meanwhile, IE’s share crept back up by 1.5%, from almost exactly 60% to 61.47%. Not surprisingly, the percentage of people visiting this site using IE7 has more than doubled, from 6.53% last April to 14.52% today.

Five months ago, I drew this tentative conclusion and made a prediction:

The easy gains for Firefox are over. I’ll be very surprised if Firefox is able to make any significant gains in share when I look at this snapshot six months from now. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that IE will gain back some ground during that time with the help of IE7.

I jumped the gun by a month, but the prediction appears accurate. And although Firefox 2 looks like a perfectly solid upgrade, it doesn’t offer anything that’s likely to convince IE holdouts to switch now.

Trend-watchers can look at all previous editions by following these links:

April 2006

August 2005

October 2004

Update: Here’s a chart I put together showing the general trends among the major browsers. I combined all versions of each product into a single number to make the trend easier to see. (Click to see a larger version.)

Working with ISO files

If you’ve downloaded the beta releases of Windows Vista or Office 2007, you’ve had to deal with the ISO file format, which consists of an image of a CD or DVD. You can use most CD/DVD writing programs to copy the ISO file to a physical disk. In Nero 6, for instance, you use the Burn Image command on the Recorder menu.

In addition, there are software utilities that allow you to read an ISO file or mount it in Windows without burning a physical disk. This MSDN page has some useful links: 

Copying the contents of ISO files
The contents of image files may be accessed directly using third-party tools. Using this method you can extract the files from an image file to a temporary folder on your hard drive, then run setup. The following tools offer such image file support:

The products listed above have been known to work. Other products that can manipulate ISO files may work, but have not been tested.

Mounting ISO files virtually

The following tool for Windows XP allows image files to be mounted virtually as CD-ROM/DVD-ROM devices. This tool is provided here for your convenience, and is unsupported by Microsoft Product Support Services.

Nero 6 Ultra Edition (and presumably Nero 7 as well) has an ISO mounting tool called Nero ImageDrive. It’s incompatible with Windows Vista, however, as is the free Microsoft tool linked here.

What to do with old Windows software

In the comments to an older post, Chris has a question: 

I have a Windows XP machine that needs to be able to run old software. When I try to run the application, I get the error message “This application requires 386 Enhanced Windows”. What, if anyhting, can I do with this issue? I really need this software to run on the XP machine. Is there anyway to run 386 Enhanced Mode on Win XP?

Hoo-boy. For those too young to remember, 386 Enhanced Windows was part of Windows 3.0, circa 1990-1991. (There’s a Knowledge Base article that explains the different modes here.)

I’m not surprised that the old 16-bit program doesn’t run under a modern operating system. One possibility to try is using Virtual PC 2004. Set up a virtual machine using 1MB of RAM (man, it feels strange to write that) and then install Windows 3.1 in that VM and finally install the old program.

Anybody have a better idea?

Countdown to Windows Marketplace

[Update 28-Aug 8:30AM PDT: Well, the countdown ended four hours early and the new Windows Marketplace page is now live.]

I’ve been working with the latest build of Windows Vista for the past few days, and in the course of exploring a few features I stumbled across this countdown banner at Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace site:

By my calculations, this site should be open for business at noon, Pacific Daylight Time, on Monday, August 28. It’s a curiously soft launch. No one from Microsoft has pitched this story to me, and the only mention I’ve seen online is this short blurb at LiveSide.

Now, the really curious part is how I reached this site. As part of the setup process, Windows Vista runs a program called Winsat.exe – the Windows System Assessment Tool. This in turn produces a numeric rating for each component of your PC, which in turn gets rolled up into a Windows Experience Index. Here’s how my two-year-old Dell 8300 rates:

See that link at the bottom? The one that reads View software for my base score online? That leads to the Windows Marketplace page, and the URL contains the individual ratings for each of the components in the box shown above, passed as a parameter:

CPU=4.3&MEM=4.8&HDD=5.2&DWM=3.5&D3D=3.4

In theory, this should mean I’ll be offered software that matches my system’s capabilities, including upgrades to more capable (and more expensive) versions of Windows Vista as part of the Windows Anytime Upgrade program.

I’ll take another look at this on Monday and see if anything interesting shows up.

This is why I still love Microsoft

Microsoft has had me pulling my hair out over the past month or two with some truly boneheaded moves. But then they release something like Windows Live Writer and I remember that there is an upside for all the frustration.

I first saw a reference to Windows Live Writer on Liveside this morning and made a note to check it out later. Then I got a note from Dwight Silverman, who called it “the best blogging editor I’ve seen yet.”

First impressions? Wow.

But that should be no surprise. As soon as I saw who was behind this, I knew the bar was going to be set very high. The team is led by J. J. Allaire, founder of Allaire Corp., which developed ColdFusion and HomeSite (my very first website editor). A couple years ago, after selling Allaire Corp. to Macromedia, he founded Onfolio, which delivered the first version of what had the potential to be a great web-clipping application. It never got the chance to really see maturity, because Microsoft snapped up Onfolio and has been busily making use of its pieces.

I’ve used just about every blog editor around and had settled on BlogJet as the best of the bunch, although far from perfect. In less than 10 minutes, this one is well on the way to winning me over.

Update: LiveSide has an interview with J.J. Allaire.

Update 2: In the comments, Dwight points out that Allaire acquired HomeSite (and hired its founder, Nick Bradbury) from Bradbury Software. Nick went on to develop FeedDemon, my favorite newsreader, which was acquired by NewsGator, whose CEO J.B. Holston formerly ran Ziff-Davis Europe, where I worked on the German Windows Magazin in the mid-1990s. Small world. Thanks, Dwight.

Update 3: After a few days of using it, I still love Windows Live Writer. See this post at ZDNet.>

A big week for Winternals

Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell have had a very, very big month. First, their company, Winternals Software, settled a lawsuit they brought against Best Buy and its Geek Squad subsidiary, resolving claims that Geek Squad technicians were routinely using bootleg copies of Winternals diagnostic and repair tools.

And today comes word that Microsoft has bought Winternals Software. The good news is that the legendary free utilities Winternals produces will continue to be free – for now. No telling how long that will last, though, so if you’re smart you’ll download what you need now, before it vanishes.

Congratulations, Mark and Bryce. And congratulations to Microsoft for a great acquisition.