Windows Tips and Tricks

Rootkits are an insidious form of malware that can often hide from conventional methods of detection. The security firm McAfee has released a free program called McAfee Rootkit Detective 1.0 that is described:

McAfee Rootkit Detective 1.0 is a program designed and developed by McAfee Avert Labs to proactively detect and clean rootkits that are running on the system.

The software will detect normal, safe processes as well as dangerous ones so you should not delete or remove anything without some knowledgeable advice.

Download here.

Microsoft has loosed its purse again and spent some of its huge bankroll in a move in its struggle with Google for Web advertising. This time it’s social search site Digg that is the recipient of a Microsoft deal. Bits reports:

Digg, the where users vote for which news articles to display, has voted itself on a new advertising provider. It has replaced Google with Microsoft to sell text ads on its site. Microsoft will also sell graphical ads as well on the site, which claims 17 million visitors a month.
Microsoft has been trying to enter the advertising network business, competing with Google, the leader, as well as Yahoo and increasingly AOL. Last year, Microsoft won a deal to sell ads on Facebook, the rapidly growing social network. And it recently agreed to buy aQuantive, a large advertising firm, for about $6 billion.

Computers and the Internet have been a boon for genealogy buffs. Now Microsoft may be getting into the game with a program called Family.Show 2.0 that was announced in a recent blog. I can’t tell from the blog exactly what Microsoft plans to do with the program. At the moment it seems to be some sort of demonstration project but with hints of future development. Here’s what the announcement says:

Three months ago, we launched Family.Show, our first end-to-end reference sample for WPF. Family.Show is a genealogy program that demonstrates the usage of WPF for a complex, realistic scenario. If you’re a fledgling WPF developer who wants to pore over some code that demonstrates best practices for application construction, there’s nothing better out there today.

As is Microsoft’s wont, details are sketchy. Actually, there are no details, just puffery. The program is available at this site. To show what I mean by lack of details, that site has a big heading. “What is Family.Show?”, and the answer that is given is:

For a hobby that revolves around dead people, genealogy is remarkably popular: it’s the fastest growing scene in North America. And a perfect study for our first Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) reference application.

Our designers employed every trick in the WPF book– styles, resources, templates, data binding, animation, transforms– to present an innovative visualization of the classic family tree, freeing our developers to concentrate on behind-the-scenes features like XPS, Windows Vista “light up”, and ClickOnce for WPF.

Unfortunately for Microsoft’s sales target, that’s what quite a few people seem to be saying. They are quite happy with Windows XP and are willing to wait until 2010 or whenever. Windows 7 is the present working name for the next version of Windows. It’s supposed to ship in about three years according to ZDNet. If you thought that the next version of Windows had a different name, you are right. According to Paul Thurott, the next version after Vista started out as “Blackcomb”, then became “Windows Vienna”, and is now “Windows 7″ or maybe “Windows Seven”. It may not matter because another name change is likely before the actual release. Ken Fisher talks about the Windows development cycle at Ars Technica. He says that the subscription model is what Microsoft is aiming for. He comments:

Microsoft desperately needs to reassure its partners that it won’t repeat another Vista-like development cycle. Love it or hate it, Vista’s tardy arrival has damaged the company’s reputation for putting out frequent, usually upgrade-worthy releases. This hurts the company in ways not obvious to end users.

Microsoft’s pie-in-the-sky, dream-come-true version of the future is one in which both businesses and consumers subscribe to Microsoft products rather than buy them. As I wrote way back in 2002, this is ultimately about annualizing software revenue for Microsoft (IT shops don’t mind it either, in theory). Obviously Microsoft’s big focus is on subscriptions for businesses, but the company is already testing “pay as you go” consumer subscriptions in developing countries.

Vista will sell many copies simply because of the Microsoft near-monopoly, but many enterprises are waiting to adopt Vista until SP1 or even later. Also, Vista is getting panned by some experts like Chris Pirillo. Others, like David Berlind, say Vista is OK but nothing special. He echoes many of my own experiences when he writes:

Today, I’m a user of both Windows XP and Windows Vista and while I remain convinced that Vista is a better OS than XP, my usage of XP serves as a constant reminder that when it comes to getting my work done, I’m not getting it done any faster or better in Vista. In fact, because of the way several things have been moved around in Vista, and because of the way Internet Explorer 7, in an effort to protect us from ourselves, locks up the Web in a chastity belt, I often find myself being slowed down by Vista. It may only be a matter of time before I get used to it (and figure out how to reconfigure IE7 with the necessary wiggle room). But the bottom line is that (a) I’m definitely not more productive and (b) if I finally get to a point where I am more productive, it won’t be by much.

Speaking of Google software, updates have been made to the online applications Google Docs and Spreadsheet.

One of Google’s entries in the software arena is called SketchUp. It’s an architect’s tool but it’s very easy to use and has home applications as well. One home application would be to lay out where all the furniture would go in a room. It’s a lot easier than moving sofas and chairs around. There are two versions. including a free edition that can be downloaded here. Here’s some description from Google:

Google SketchUp 6 is a free, easy-to-learn 3D modeling tool that enables you to explore the world in 3D. With just a few simple tools, you can create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects - even space ships. And once you’ve built your models, you can place them in Google Earth, post them to the 3D Warehouse.

There is also a new Google blog devoted to SketchUp topics.

Are the representatives we send to Washington really as dumb as they often seem? It is beyond the scope of this blog to speculate on why “We the People” keep electing the sort that make silly proposals like this one (P2P Networks Harm National Security) from Henry Waxman of California but here we have another example of harmful headline-seeking. As far as I can tell, Waxman isn’t stupid but he obviously can’t resist getting on TV and in the paper by proposing a law that is not only useless for achieving its stated purpose but also would probably have unfortunate results. Sadly, this is the type of “leadership” that is so rampant in Washington. George Ou comments:

Every once in a while you’ll get a political hearing on capitol hill where elected Government officials will grand stand and politicize issues that should have nothing to do with politics. This time it’s Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman who says he is considering new laws against P2P (Peer to Peer) software citing the possibility that P2P software may compromise National Security and can be used by organized crime. The problem is that Mr. Waxman hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about and this new round of political grandstanding is absurd.

Update: Over in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid is contributing to the silliness with his own plan to prevent (gasp!) file sharing by students. Some details are at Inside Higher Ed.

As I have posted before, there are a lot of specialized search engines aimed at a particular niche. I know that quite a few people get recipes from the Web and here’s a search engine called foodieview.com that indexes recipes. It also has restaurant reviews for some major cities.

Everybody wants to know what you look at when you are online so they can sell you more stuff. If you use AOL, the company already knows a lot about you but it wants to know more. The New York Times blog called Bits reports:

AOL is getting nosier.

It announced today that it agreed to buy Tacoda, a private New York advertising firm that specializes in helping Web sites keep track of information about their users in order to show them ads for products they might buy. (Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.)

Tacoda’s technology is what is known as behavioral targeting because it mainly looks at what Web pages a user visits to try to infer what they are interested in.

The article continues:

Behavioral targeting, of course, raises all sorts of privacy questions. Tacoda says it doesn’t look at information that can identify an individual—such as names and addresses. Rather it just tracks the surfing behavior of a computer. AOL, of course, has access to all sorts of information about the identity as well as the behavior of people who use its various services, so it will doubtless have a lot of privacy questions to answer.

It’s an ugly term but it seems here to stay. I mean the unaesthetically named “mashup”. I can’t deny that it’s descriptive since it refers to taking disparate sources on the Internet and putting them together on one site- for example, maps from one source and weather for the places on the maps from another source. Unappealing as the name may be, the process is a very promising one. A number of companies, including Microsoft, are developing software to help make it easier to create Websites that bring together services. ZDNet has a discussion of “mashup” platforms. it begins:

While application developers tend to roll their eyes at the concept of end-user mashups, they remain one of the more promising new trends in software development this year. And while it’s certainly true it’s early days yet for mashups, the tools that enable them remaining rather limited, seems to be changing as I regularly come across compelling new mashup platforms as well as upgrades to existing ones that show what will be possible soon.