Microsoft Playing Nicer with ISVs, Company Exec Says

Microsoft Playing Nicer with ISVs, Company Exec Says

evhead: Venture fund focuses on buying back tech startups swallowed by big companies – not a terrible idea at all.

Spent two hours yesterday trying to get one of our machines to correctly point to Google for searches from the IE address bar. Thru a combo of spyware, browser helper objects, toolbars, the IE search function had been slammed over to a variety of different search providers.

NewDotNet was the evilest. It kept re-slamming settings no matter how often we changed them in the browser. And no matter how many times we removed it as a startup item, it would reinsert itself – spyware/virus-like behaviour. This ought to be criminal. Spybot S&D didn’t seem to pick this one up.

SAHAgent was on the machine too – installs as a Winsock Service Provider! How do these people sleep at night? Spybot seemed to get it.

Clearsearch was on the machine too, Spybot got it.

After multiple runnings of Spybot, MSConfig, Sysedit, and Regedit, we are now down to one remaining slammer. Lycos is grabbing all our autosearch traffic, tho there does not seem to be an associated browser helper object or an process running, and i’ve tried to reset a dozen times thru the IE search UI and the Google toolbar UI. Nothing detected by Spybot. But clearly something still going on.

It is amazing how hard these have been to get rid of. What does a regular user do – just reformat their hard disk? This spyware stuff is a plague. Pisses me off more than viruses.

Great recent posts from Rich:

• Cleaning up Nvidia driver problems Part I and Part II.  Sadly if you want to live on the bleeding edge of video cards, you need to learn way too much about maintaining the drivers.
• Anandtech system guides – the low end is a bit too low end for my uses but a great site and service
• Dual core chips – basically no one has any idea what to do with all the gates provided by Moore’s Law so we might as well start stacking up multiple CPUs on the chip. 
• MT to Wordpress Migration tips and more flailing away on SixApart.

As an alternative to Rdesktop and WinXP’s remote desktop I tried out RealVNC. Oh my gosh the performance was baaaad between two XP machines. Latency, and really bad glitchy repaint. Hard to recommend this. I’d stick with XP’s facility for XP to XP connections (tho this kind of requires XP Pro for most general use) and rdesktop for *nix machines.

In the context of a discussion about RSS use in place of newsletters, Jon Udell asks The obvious alternative is a personalized RSS feed. Does anyone have this already? What a great idea. Now if feedster provided this service, that would be something special.

* Geekman discusses LAMPPIX and points toa list of Linux live distributions.  I had no idea there were so many bootable cd variants of linux, this is very cool. * Alienware yokes two GPUs together.  Wow.  If this is a reliable solution, how cool. * Sony’s Liquid-cooled media PC.  Is liquid cooling going to become mainstream? * Nvidia lowers power reqs for 6800.  Good thing, they are going to get toasted by ATI if they don’t lower the footprint of the 6800. * Rich is excited about bloglines.  I’ll have to try out the Mozilla integration. * Paul Thurrott is excited about Far Cry.  I’ve mentioned Far Cry before, it is a beautiful game and is a great value – much longer set of single player missions than most games.  It is incredibly demanding of your hardware. * Blogware – yet another blog tool to look at if and when i upgrade my blog software. * 7 tuner DVR.  what a beast.  But for college football saturdays I could actually imagine using it. * Encrypted monitors.  Funky.  * 2nd display over the network or what to do with an idle laptop. * Guide to steganography software.  One man’s guide.

* Blogjet. A nice posting utility but doesn’t seem to deal with Textile2 formating very well – blogjet tries to insert a bunch of formatting codes which collide with textile2. I’d like a posting tool that emits clean textile2 output. * Notepad2. Seems like a pretty nice casual editor. Scott’s hint to rename to N.exe is a huge timesaver. * Regex coach. Very cool, I need a lot of coaching. * The Ultimate Troubleshooter. You have to pay for it to get any value but it seems like a worthwhile tool (and I’ve always liked the site).

Going to be a great summer for Saturn images from the Cassini-Huygens mission

Wildseed (I’m a board member) had a great show at E3 – lots of great press coverage:

* The Inquirer * From Wireless Week, “Dobson Cellular gets into SmartSkins” * From Mobilemag.com, “Dobson Cellular first to Market SmartSkin Phone Identity” * From WirelessWeek.com, “Nokia Reaffirms Gaming Commitment” (Wildseed mention towards the end) * From PMN, “Wildseed announces first Gaming SmartSkin” * From LinuxElectrons, “Wildseed Announces First GameSkin Featuring the Top-Selling Fighting Game Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance” * From PhoneScoop.com, product page on Identity * From Linuxdevices.com, “Snap-on skins add games, music to Linux mobile phone”

Great job folks!

The Lexus and the Olive Tree – I’ve had this on the shelf for a couple years and never cracked because I expected to hate it, I thought it was going to be some anti-globalization rant, or just another “pop business” book. Actually tho it was a lot better than expected, a very clear articulation of why globalization will happen and discussions of implications and how we should react. Too long of course like every non-fiction book.

And then just for waiting room reading I worked thru Ben Bova’s Saturn. Very forgettable sci-fi. Won’t actually harm your brain reading it but no substance – I finished it yesterday and I couldn’t tell you today the names of any of the characters.

Marketing Playbook – looks nice guys.

Our house was flu-ridden this week and I am just catching up on all the discussion about MT 3.0 licensing – good stuff by Tim, Mena and the changes, Mark Pilgrim, Simon Phipps, Rich. 

Personally I have no problem paying for software that I use frequently and will happily pay something for my blog management tool.  The newly modified license looks reasonable.  I’ll look around at other solutions as Rich is doing though I will be cautious in jumping – MT 2.661 is not busted for me, I am not driven to move right away, I’ll let others experiment and I will learn from that.  I have to admire SixApart for modifying their proposal quickly in the face of overwhelming criticism.

I’ve been playing around with the remote desktop feature in XP.  I have to say, within the house, between XP machines, it works pretty well.  Good perf, very little latency, pretty good rendering.

I also tried using the Rdesktop tool in Knoppix against my XP machine.  It did work with a little more trouble (you can’t just enter a “netbios” name, you have to address the remote machine using it’s IP address).  It has some rendering problems – odd color matching, fonts don’t look as nice, etc.  But it works. 

For extra credit I fired up my vpn client and connected to work, and then opened up an XP-to-XP remote desktop session.  Then from another machine running Knoppix in the house, I rdesktop’d to the XP machine in the house.  And yes you can daisychain these sessions.  Rendering became really funky at this point however. 

I’ve read several places online that people recommend VNC in place of rdesktop.  If I get in the practice of doing remote control frequently from a linux box i will have to try this out.