The second Tuesday of each month is when Microsoft releases its security patches. Last month, there was a bumper crop – 11 in all. This month? None.
That’s good news.
The blog
Geek Dinner in Seattle/Redmond?
Sean Alexander says:
…it looks like another Seattle MCE Geek Dinner is being planned. Details to come shortly.
Friday night, March 11, works best for me. Who else is going to be in the Seattle area and wants to go out and speak geek?
Uncle Duke’s first appearance
I did not remember that the character of Uncle Duke (based on Hunter S. Thompson) made his first appearance in Doonesbury in 1974. I would have guessed much later.
Of course, I don’t remember much about 1974.
(Via Paul Boutin)
eBay listings coming soon to Media Center
In the comments to my TiVo versus MCE versus Cable post, Christoph Bünger sends along this teaser to his upcoming eBay plug-in for Media Center:
mceAuction will include:
- Search auctions
- View auctions with images and description
- Bid on auctions
- ‘Buy Now’ support
- My eBay (“Items I’m Watching”, “Items I’m Bidding On”, “Items I’ve Won”, “Items I Didn’t Win”,”Items I’m Selling”, “Items I’ve Sold” + “Unsold Items”)
All “after auction handling” has to be made with normal browser. all things are “read-only” (Except the bidding-part of the application, that is real user-interaction with eBay).
The plugin will be officially eBay-certified and proofed. It comes with multilingual support (english and german at release, more languages when someone translates them for me), installation/deinstallation.
This one has the potential to be a real winner. Christoph’s other add-ins are first-rate. If you use MCE, the mceWeather add-in is a must-have.
More from Microsoft’s Media Center Bloggers
Thomas Hawk has posted Part Two and Part Three of his four-part interview with three Microsoft bloggers who focus on Media Center. (If you missed Part One, you might want to read it first.) I especially like the fact that these guys encourage questions and comments from readers:
[Sean Alexander]: The most valued comments I get on my blog are the feature suggestions and constructive criticisms. For years I’ve tried to get that level of feedback in Usenet newsgroups from other users but it was unwieldy.
[…]
[Matt Goyer]: I do not see the interaction of my blog directly influencing product development… yet… but my readers can take this as a challenge to send more suggestions via email and the comments.
Maybe they can spread some of that attitude into the groups that do Media Player and Internet Explorer.
TiVo versus MCE versus my cable company
These are rough times for a TiVo fanatic. The company and its groundbreaking box are getting squeezed into irrelevance. On the one side, cable companies offer their own DVR boxes, which may not be elegant but are easy and cheap. On the other side, you have PC-based solutions like Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, which do more than a TiVo and are improving by leaps and bounds every year.
I’ve been thinking about this topic for the past month, after I received a weekly Circuits e-mail on the topic from David Pogue, a sharp and funny writer for the New York Times. (It took me 20 minutes to navigate through the Times’ horrible search facilities, but I finally found David’s column online. You can read the whole thing here until the Times decides to put it behind their paid-subscribers-only firewall.)
Anyway, David’s thesis was that TiVo (the company) isn’t doomed, because TiVo (the gadget) is so refined and elegant and ingenious that nothing should be allowed to compete with it. And to prove it, he provides a laundry list of features that make the TiVo so hip it hurts. The list comes with a qualifier, of course: “I do realize that many rival boxes have some of these features. But none that I know of offers all of these them — and especially not in such an easy-to-use, brilliantly designed software package.”
Well, it’s a very good list. And since I am in the enviable position of owning a Series 1 TiVo, two PCs running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, and a high-definition Explorer 8300HD digital video recorder from Scientific Atlanta, I thought it might be instructive to compare all three.
Microsoft finally clarifies Product Activation story
An Israeli blogger named Aviran Mordo gets a letter from Alex Kochis, Senior License Compliance Manager at Microsoft Corp. with “clarifications of the Windows XP Product Activation changes and how it will affect end users.” (I wonder why I didn’t hear from Alex?)
In brief:
- Users of genuine Windows will experience no impact
- The intent is to dissuade the theft or misuse of the Certificate of Authenticity or accompanying product key
- Honest resellers have requested that Microsoft close this loophole so that they can compete effectively and they are extremely supportive of this effort
On Monday, Microsoft disabled Internet activation for all Microsoft Windows XP product keys located on COA labels that are adhered to PCs from large, OEMs who have direct licensing agreements with Microsoft. Directly licensed OEMs are authorized by Microsoft to customize their branded re-installation and recovery media so that if installed on the hardware it shipped with the Windows XP operating system will not require end-user activation.
Internet based product activation will remain available to all customers using products that require product activation today. The only attempts at activation that will be rejected are those using product keys that were pre-activated for the hardware they shipped with by OEMs on behalf of customers.
The intent is to dissuade the theft and misuse of COAs, and therefore, protect customers from counterfeiters and pirates. Honest resellers have also requested that Microsoft close this loophole so that they can compete effectively and are extremely supportive of this effort.
Of course, he could have just sent a link to my page on the subject, which explained Product Activation in detail. Once again, this is an example of Microsoft doing a reasonable thing, communicating about it in a terrible way, and then having to clean up the PR mess afterwards.
(Via Neowin.net)
I wish I could have been at this dinner!
Not only does it sound like the food was great at the San Francisco Geek Dinner, but the guest list and conversation were apparently, well, ultra-geeky. (And I mean that in a good way.) Thomas Hawk reports:
The conversations that immediately come to mind from this evening include everything from how to protect film makers in the digital media world (yes musicians can always tour and make money if they can’t from their recordings, but a filmaker can’t), the broadcast flag, HDTV, the generally poor UI interface and various problems with the current cable DVR offerings, the superior Microsoft Foundation television interface, the new MSN remote guide, the challenge of marketing to a new blog universe, video on demand, and oh did I mention HDTV?
I’ll be in Redmond next week. Think we could do a similar dinner there?
Spectacular wildflowers
As some of you may know, I live in Arizona, where this year’s wet weather (third wettest February in a century) means a bumper crop of wildflowers. The hills around here are spectacularly green, and the color is already appearing. Desert Wildflower Watch is a great place to go for details and pictures like this one, taken just a few miles from my house:
The Arizona Report is here. All these pictures make me want to go for a hike right now.
Thanks to New Mexiken (“Half Wisdom, Half Whimsy, Half Wit”) for the pointer.
More Firefox security vulnerabilities
Secunia’s Vulnerability Report for Mozilla Firefox 1.x shows seven advisories for 2005, making a total of 11 since the browser was officially released last November. Three of the 11 issues (27%) are unpatched, and five are shown as partially fixed.
In the same period of time, Secunia has issued 15 advisories for Internet Explorer 6, five of them in 2005. According to Secunia, 32% of all current IE6 advisories are unpatched.
Interesting reading.
