TO-Tech Blog

Dave Winer’s blog post titled Plan B got me thinking about my own plan B. Winer created a new business venture (NewsJunk) that relied on Twitter. I had just started using Twitter by feeding my own 140 characters or less tech news comments and links on my personal blog sites to provide more tech info. But, when Twitter crashes, which happens daily these days, my web pages don’t render making them difficult or impossible to view. I think I have a Plan B. It is not as easy or simple to use as Twitter. But, it seems very stable and provides a clean RSS feed. Will play with the idea later today.

This Information Week article…

Windows 7 Testing Must Start ASAP, Microsoft Warns Hardware Makers

…notes that Microsoft is imploring hardware vendors to test with Windows 7. That’s good, of course. But, it would also be nice (nicer, in fact) if they would test hardware with Windows Vista now too! Vista still encounters daily internal blue screens with auto-recovery (i.e., I see the message but not the blue screen). Nvidia has been doing a pretty good job of providing updated drivers for my, hmm, four year old PC? But, it hasn’t helped much so far.

Based on the comments on this blog, it looks like I’m not alone in having various hardware driver issues with a PC running Windows Vista.

Technology Review’s article…

Alarming Open-Source Security Holes: How a programming error introduced profound security vulnerabilities in millions of computer systems

…is alarming as-is. However, there is another issue I want to point out here. Note the last paragraph of the article’s first web-page:

So how did the programmers make the mistake in the first place? Ironically, they were using an automated tool designed to catch the kinds of programming bugs that lead to security vulnerabilities. The tool, called Valgrind, discovered that the OpenSSL library was using a block of memory without initializing the memory to a known state–for example, setting the block’s contents to be all zeros. Normally, it’s a mistake to use memory without setting it to a known value. But in this case, that unknown state was being intentionally used by the OpenSSL library to help generate randomness.

I’ve never used it, but I’m sure Valgrind is a fine Open Source source code profiler. However, it is just that: A tool. It is meant to augment human work, not replace it completely. The end-result of trusting Valgrind to the extreme resulted in what appears to be a very very serious problem for many of us who use anything that uses the OpenSSL library (like SSH/SCP). Even worse, this problem has existed for two years now. And, there’s more. The patch distributed doesn’t correct the problem on systems that have deployed keys in the past two years based on the broken code. Ouch.

Google continues to amaze me. Google Doctype is a completely open wiki that is an: encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

Looks like a great web developer’s reference.

I just picked up a Western Digital MyBook Home Edition 500GB USB/Firewire drive to back up files on my PC. Plugged into a PC running Windows Vista and the EULA window you see above popped up. I have no idea what WD wants to put on my drive, but it is not going to happen. I’m reformatting the drive as a NTFS partition right now (it came formatted as FAT32).

I just read about three bloggers who died recently over at…

In Web world of 24/7 stress, writers blog till they drop

I don’t blog for a living. But, I do blog and write quite a bit. I blog regularly for O’Reilly Media and try to regularly update my personal blogs. And, a bunch of Windows Mobile articles were just published over on the Microsoft.com Windows Mobile site. Over the past few months, I decided to cut back writing on my personal blogs just to get a bit of time back for other things. What used to be 6 or 7 posts per blog per week is probably down to 4 posts per week.

For those who think blogging full time might be the way to go, read the article. Maybe your day job isn’t so bad after all…

Take it easy out there fellow bloggers…

While discussing Web Design Guidelines with a co-worker, I flashed back to the old Klingon Programmer’s Code of Honor and decided we need a Klingon Web Design Code of Honor instead.

• Guidelines are for the weak. Klingons do not design with guidelines. They design with honor.
• The web server daemon serves the Empire would honor. It must be defended at all cost.
• Klingon web designs do not interface with the user. The web interface must instill fear and respect and overwhelm the user.
• Cross-site scripting exploits are the domain of the foul Ferengi. Therefore, XSS must be hunted and destroyed.
• Cross-site request forgery is yet another foul Ferengi technique. XCRF, like XSS, must be hunted and destroyed.
• Klingon web sites do not authenticate. Sign-ins require a Blood Oath.
• Style Sheets do not cascade. They swoop and dominate the page.
• Klingons battle and subjugate content. They do not manage it.
• Klingons use web design battleplans. Frameworks are for the cowardly.
• Klingons spit at spindly microformats. Klingon data descends as they please upon unsuspecting web pages.
• Web content is not syndicated, it is unleashed.

Just read this headline over at the Consumerist…

Buyers Beware: Current Blu-ray Players Won’t Correctly Play Future Discs

Hope this is not true since I finally decided Blu-ray had won the HD disc war and was starting to look around for one to buy.

Although I have a slightly newer (Athlon 64-bit) PC running Windows Vista, my main PC is a 3 year old Athlon 32-bit based PC running Windows XP Media Edition. Last week this main PC started acting funny. It started taking longer and longer to boot up. Finally on Thursday evening, it failed to boot.

My first though was that this might be a good excuse to buy a Core 2 Duo PC :-). But, I surprised myself by thinking I did not want my main PC to run Windows Vista. I preferred XP for this PC because it syncs with my Windows Mobile smartphone (not sure I trust WMDC on Vista) and it is where my family photos reside (UAC makes even copying files to an external USB hard drive for backups an exercise in frustration). So, although I actually like Windows Vista enough to run it on my main PC at work (a Core 2 Duo notebook), I’m not willing to run it on my main home PC. This surprised me quite a bit. Has anyone else been faced with this issue? What did you decide? Stay with XP or move on to Vista?

BTW: Listening carefully, I noted three long beeps. Though I couldn’t find any boot sound diagnostic info for this particular PC (an eMachines PC), I guessed that it might indicate a RAM problem. So, I pulled the DIMM from the second socket and, yep, the PC booted with just 512MB in DIMM socket 0. I pulled a 512MB DIMM from my Linux box (rarely used these days since I usually run Linux as virtual machine using either Microsoft Virtual PC or VMware Workstation) and put it in my main PC. I also decided to upgrade my Vista box from 1GB to 2GB and have a pair of DIMMs on order from Crucial. I’m sure Virtual PC and VMware Workstation will be happier with more RAM.

BTW: The photo above is my collection of dead RAM from the last couple of years.

Just bringing closure to my little experiment with SpinRite and a nasty looking 120GB drive. After watching SpinRite grind through a single sector for something like 10 days, I noted its spot and stopped it. After fussing around a bit with SpinRite and level 1 (which doesn’t mark problems permanently), I decided to restart it at just beyond the problem area and let it go on at level 2 over the long Labor Day weekend. As you can see from the screen photo above, it finished the last half (really about 43%) in 41 hours and 25 minutes. You can see that the second half of the drive was in pretty bad shape too though it did manage to recover 3 spots. I’m planning to reboot the drive to see what happened to the Linux system on the drive after going through this long SpinRite repair process. The drive should obviously be put out to pasture. But, I’ll keep it around the office in case I need to show anyone what a bad drive looks like in SpinRite.