August 2007 - Posts
Interview with Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division and a member of the senior leadership team, from the Guardian covering piracy, Office 2007 UI, SharePoint, etc.
But the part that caught my eye was:
"As an example, what happened with Mac Excel in 1985 was that we had a
programmer called Steve Hazelrig who was doing the printing code. Laser printers
were expensive then, and ours was way down the hall, so Steve wrote a little
routine that put an image of the page up on the screen, with a magnifying glass
so he could examine every pixel to make sure he had an accurate rendering of the
page. The program manager Jake Blumenthal came down the hall and said: "Wow,
that would be a great feature." That's how Print Preview made it into all of our
products: no customer ever asked for it.
So the trick is to understand the things people want to do, and they may not
know to ask for them, but the opportunity is there. So I think it's more
important to understand what customers really want to do, and to make sure we
deliver on that."
Whether that is completely true or not, it's a good reminder to understand what people
really want do with software and it work for them.
I thought this was an
interesting post talking about how to login to an expired (Windows Genuine Advantage activation system) Windows machine.
Basically involves using the Narrator program for accessibility to launch Internet Explorer where you can then browse to your local files, etc.
What I find interesting is by a simple hyperlink in an about box you can bypass the intended security - one simple looking change that wasn't completely thought through in all usage scenarios.
Disclaimer: I do not agree with breaking your EULA by doing this.
Handy tool,
Splitview, for people wanting to simulate dual screens over Citrix / RDP sessions.
I've mentioned before about productivity boost of having multiple monitors and
Scott Hanselman agrees.
Not related but on similar note, Visual Studio 2008 will going to
support viewing/editing code and design together for
ASP.NET and WPF.
I was asked the other day if I knew how this piece of software works,
MojoPac by Ringcube.
It is a relatively new product funded mainly by venture capital, the idea being a portable virtualization platform. It can be installed on a USB key and then when plugged into a host brings up your MojoPac desktop with your applications/data available but without the performance overhead or client install = great for corporate mobile workers.
After a bit of poking around using task manager, process explorer and other
sysinternals tools it seems to be dynamically loading a kernel level driver to 'hide' itself similar to how rootkits work.
Good interview
Steve Gibson and RingThree which confirms my thoughts.
That seems a bit scary to me and also likely to be closed or made more difficult by Microsoft if it is using undocumented or security holes to work.
Rootkits got alot of press from the
Sony DRM issue recently.
RootkitRevealer from Sysinternals is a handy tool and
Microsoft Research also have tools to help you check for hidden kits.
Another very good resource is this presentation,
Hidden RootKits in Windows (ppt).
A interesting product that I'll watch, but think risk of how they achieve the technology and Microsoft Softgrid on the eventually shipping horizon might overshadow in the long term.