Southwest Virginia Blogs

Somebody e-mailed this to me this morning. I couldn’t resist posting it.

A helicopter was flying around above Seattle yesterday when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft’s electronic navigation and communications equipment. Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter’s position and course to steer to the airport. Seeing a tall building, he flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter’s window. The pilot’s sign said “WHERE AM I?” in large letters.

People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER.” The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely.

After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER” sign helped determine their position in Seattle. The pilot responded “I knew that had to be the MICROSOFT building because, similar to their help-lines, they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer.”

The Dangers of Modern Automotive Conveniences - Popular Mechanics

And I thought how much safer I was, driving in my 50-year-old Jaguar XK120–with no side windows, no radio, no distractions–than these women were in their new truck with its ABS, airbags and other modern tech.

Why? Because I was paying attention. - Jay Leno, Contributing Editor

Yes, that Jay Leno.

I see this sort of driver on the road every day. They are no longer in control of the technology, but the technology is in control of them.

I also see this sort of thing in design. I see an advertisement and I can identify the software used to lay it out because the designer used default settings or the free clip art that came with it. The designer is no longer in control, they are letting the software control the design. Now most people wouldn’t be in a position to recognize software, but that’s not the point. If you’re letting your software make your decisions for you, that is a problem. While the chances of a tragically fatal graphic design accident are slim, the chances your career will be mangled are much higher. Take control, make the software work for you. Then when somebody sees one of your designs and says, “How did you know to do that?” You can honestly say, “Because I was paying attention.”

Slashdot and others are now reporting that IE7 has been included in a high priority Windows update. Expect to see it installed soon.

Internet Explorer 7.0 is now a high priority update on Windows Update. Unless you setup the respective blocking script, expect IE 7 to be installed on your systems if they are configured to retrieve and install high priority updates from Windows Update. - Internet Storm Center

I was hoping to be out of the office the day this was released.

Slashdot and others are now reporting that IE7 has been included in a high priority Windows update. Expect to see it installed soon.

Internet Explorer 7.0 is now a high priority update on Windows Update. Unless you setup the respective blocking script, expect IE 7 to be installed on your systems if they are configured to retrieve and install high priority updates from Windows Update. - Internet Storm Center

I was hoping to be out of the office the day this was released.

IE6 is giving me fits today. Something that seems to have been included in an automatic update last week is causing IE6 to fail on a site that I work on. Pages not loading, forms not loading, freezing up after loading, a whole list of problems. Driving me nuts. It only effects IE6, and not every computer seems to be effected. No idea what’s going on here. If I don’t see a solution soon, something is going out a window.

Sidenote: If you’re less than 150 lbs., and would in some way fit out of a 2′ x 3′ window, you might not want to walk into my office right now.

Why does Microsoft include a web browser with their operating system? Due mostly I think to Microsoft’s insistence on making IE an integral part of their operating system, IE is and has been one of their biggest security vulnerabilities, yet they keep including it. Why not let Firefox or Opera, or anybody else have the browser market. What would it cost them? It’s not like they charge for the browser. If they stuck to making a stable reliable operating system, and skipped all of the other junk, I think they’d have a better product. If nothing else, they could split it away from the Windows OS, making it less integral, and therefore less of a security risk.

Just blathering today. I don’t know whether it’s IE7’s release or just a coincidence, but I’ve been dealing with a lot of MS fanatics this week. How do you tactfully explain to someone that MS Word isn’t an appropriate piece of software to design with? I had trouble not using obscenities in my explanation. I know it’s been a long week when my verbal filter isn’t working very well.

Now this is something I’ve been waiting for. Firefox 2 Released! I haven’t tried it yet, we’ll see how it goes. Unlike IE7, I haven’t tried any of the Beta versions yet either.

Update: Everything seems to work as expected. They rearranged some things, combined the theme and extension windows in one for instance. Several of my extensions don’t work, but most of those are made obsolete by new features in 2, the spell checker for instance. Didn’t expect a failure, but it’s nice to see that everything seems to work.

I’m not a big fan of Microsoft, but I’ll give them this, their fans are really, really loyal.

Someone I e-mail on an almost daily basis recently suggested I change my e-mail client to MS Outlook from Mozilla Thunderbird. Their reasoning? All of the e-mails she received from me were being flagged as spam and filtered by Outlook.

I suggested she should change her filter settings so that it didn’t filter people in her address book: done. Make sure I’m in the address book: done. No change, I’m still being filtered. I suggested that her Outlook seemed to be having a problem: Can you change to Outlook to stop it from doing this?

Hmm… You software isn’t functioning properly, so you want to alleviate your problem by having me install the same software that’s not working for you on my computer. Let me think… No!

Sad maybe, but very loyal.

This is quite funny actually. Microsoft has several products in the top ten.

The 25 worst tech products of all time - InterGovWorld.com

These products are so bad, they belong in the high-tech hall of shame.

At PC World, we spend most of our time talking about products that make your life easier or your work more productive. But, it’s the lousy ones that linger in our memory long after their shrinkwrap has shriveled, and that make tech editors cry out, “What have I done to deserve this?”

I thought Internet Explorer 6 might rank higher, but being the eighth worst tech product of all time is pretty bad.

How insecure? In June 2004, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) took the unusual step of urging PC users to use a browser–any browser–other than IE.

h/t Random Bytes

A Mac running 8 CPUs! Now this is the graphic design computer I need. No more of this dual core stuff, I need 8!

Slashdot | The Apple News That Got Buried

“Apple’s Showtime event was all well and good, but the big news today was on Anandtech.com. They found that the two dual-core CPUs in the Mac Pro were not only removable, but that they were able to insert two quad-core Clovertown CPUs. OS X recognized all eight cores and it worked fine. Anandtech could not release performance numbers for the new monster, but did report they were unable to max out the CPUs.”

Actually my new dual core is running great, no complaints.

Another intersting post at MobCode. It’s a strategy for learning… and I suppose life.

Chart a course

So chart a course. Look around and see what there is to know. Think about your career and what you want to be doing. Think about your skills and how you can round out your experiences or increase your depth in key areas. Decide where you are going and make a plan to get there. You don’t need a detailed week-by-week plan, but at least identify some steps to get where you want.

IE 7.0 Technical Changes Leave Web Developers, Users in the Lurch

My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It’s a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn’t secure and isn’t standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators. Because of their user bases, however, Web developers are hamstrung into developing for IE at the expense of established standards that work well in all other browsers. You can turn the tide by demanding more from Microsoft and by using a better alternative Web browser. I recommend and use Mozilla Firefox, but Apple Safari (Macintosh only) and Opera 8 are both worth considering as well.

I think I linked to this in a round about fashion before, but it bears repeating. I particularly like “Boycott IE. It’s a cancer on the Web that must be stopped.” I’ve added the links in the quote above. I refuse to link to IE of any version.

Internet Explorer 7 v Firefox 2.0

It pains me to say it, but my initial impression is that for a lot of people, there’s no real reason to head to Firefox. Internet Explorer is such a large improvement over version 6 that it’s hard to imagine what would get you to bother downloading it, unless you’re a Mozilla fanboy or an extensions addict.

Any comparison that ends with “there’s no real reason to head to Firefox” is not worth taking seriously. How about this for a reason: Microsoft has a long record of security weaknesses. Combine this to Microsoft’s insistence on making IE an integral part of the operating system and you have to be an idiot to trust them for your Internet security.

On a completely computer geek level you need to also take into account the CSS compatibility issue. If IE 7 was intended to be such a huge improvement over version 6, why didn’t they improve IE’s CSS compliance more than 2%?

Great, IE 7 is a huge improvement… over it’s highly flawed predecessor. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.