Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: Microsoft

  • Just Get Rid of Java

    Apparently there are security flaws in the current version of Java allowing the installation of malicious software through web browsers unknown to the user. The known attacks using this flaw work on Windows, OSX, and Linux. According to Reuters: Java was responsible for 50 percent of all cyber attacks last year in which hackers broke…

  • Should CS Be Required?

    Each of the nearly 2,000 freshmen entering Georgia Institute of Technology each year must take a computer science course regardless of their major, says Charles Isbell, associate dean for academic affairs at the school’s College of Computing… Similar to traditional general education requirements such as philosophy or world history, the purpose of each courses is to turn out…

  • Paste Formatting

    Ideally every email I send would be plain text. Many of the people I email send to me HTML-based email For a decade an annoyance I had with Outlook was when pasting text from the clipboard, it would include source formatting. So, if I copied the title of a blog post to make it “Paste…

  • Apple Trying To Poach IE6 Users

    Attempted to watch the Transformer’s 3 trailer, but apparently Chrome on Linux was a no-go for the JavaScript which hides the web site and displays the trailer. Fancy but broken. So I thought I would look at the HTML and get the .mov file. I found this snippet of code in the HTML quite interesting.…

  • Microsoft Failed

    A good error message in my opinion provides enough information for the user or administrator to determine likely cause. It doesn’t have to be THE cause. Just something I can try changing and see if the problem disappears. For a while now, Outlook was telling me the “Operation Failed” in a toaster pop-up. O… kay….…

  • Linux Adventure Part 1

    For about a week now I’ve been without my personal laptop as anything much more than a brick. I think tonight I am going to copy off the pictures and other important information to my desktop. From there, anything I do to make the situation worse will no longer matter as much. Monday night, I…

  • Useful User Agents

    Rather than depend on end users to accurately report the browser used, I look for the user-agent in the web server logs. (Yes, I know it can be spoofed. Power users would be trying different things to resolve their own issues not coming to us.) Followers of this blog may recall I changed the Weblogic…

  • Microsoft Outlook 2007 Wishlist

    From 2001 to 2006, Microsoft Outlook was the email client I used for work (and on my home computer to access work stuff). Back then, Exchange was not available, so a number of the features were more hacks than reality. However, it worked pretty well. When I changed jobs, Netscape and Thunderbird were the pre-installed…

  • links for 2007-10-31

    Hope, loss, and bicycles in Zambia – World Blog – msnbc.com (tags: charity) National Geographic News Photo Gallery: Ten Endangered U.S. Beach Towns Named (tags: science geography) ADL Community: Supporting the Global Advancement of Distributed Learning (tags: standards community collaboration learning education) How to kill or close all running programs in Windows quickly (tags: software.microsoft.windows)…