To the guys at Apple and Microsoft

Picked this up from Luke Drumm. I think he is right on both counts, Apple and Microsoft. Apple first, I can’t stand quick-time, its extremely lame on Windows and I basically refuse to watch QuickTime content – I am even more determined now that it downloads a whole heap of iTunes crap which I just don’t want – I noticed yesterday that it runs a background process to do things like detect the iPod when it gets connected (presumably).

Now Microsofts turn. Really only core OS or critical component driver updates should require reboots. With most external devices its possible stop and start the device cleanly. USB has definatley helped here. I also think that its the partners fault to a certain extent – some of the software packages aren’t well constructed and say they need a reboot when they really don’t (its because they have evolved from Windows 3.1 installers ).

Next tool – a blogging application

Next tool – a blogging application

I meant to blog about this earlier but its been sitting here on my task list as a low priority until now. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve observed the amount of work that Darren and his collaborators are putting into this project and I’ve got to say that they are taking everything into account and actually coming up with a well thought out design.

It’ll probably be one of the first widely used blogging engines built on Whidbey.

Let the Firefox/IE FUD wars begin.

GROKLAW

Its a sad  behavioural trait of many in the IT industry that they need to go out and attack other vendors products just to make theirs look appealing. Firefox is definately the flavour of the month in geek circles at the moment and is a good alternative to IE. Personally I use both fairly regularly. I enjoy the tabbed browsing of Firefox and the performance and integration of Internet Explorer.

Most people, even in the Microsoft space would prefer not to use ActiveX, pretty much everyone is aware of its underlying characteristic which is to execute native code which can open your machine up. This is why so many spyware components are downloadable as ActiveX controls. I’d even bet that there are those on the IE team that would like to perminantly disable the feature altogether.

I think the reason they don’t is that there are a number of intranet applications out there that rely heavily on the feature. Our anti-virus solution at Readify for example uses ActiveX to easily deploy the client application. Windows Update relies on ActiveX and is the first line of defense to users against virus outbreaks and security vulnerabilities.

The problem is that ActiveX makes it too damn easy to protect your machine as it makes it difficult to defend! I wouldn’t give up Windows Update for quids.

XOP – Not your every day optimisation technique.

I thought that this was an interesting annoucement from the W3C around XML protocols. In particular I’d point you to the XOP recommendation if you have struggled with how to efficiently send medium to large chunks of binary data via web-services.

Unfortunately it doesn’t do much for me because when I look at the web-services overhead for doing things like WS-Security, its actually the verbose XML elements that I want to strip out, not the content between them. I guess we’ll have to wait for efficient stack to stack communication with Indigo to reach my nirvana.