Tech Notes

The Rich Client is Here

2004-10-24T23:32:00.000Z

You'll be surprised how much you can do with XUL. Very impressive, no?

[Requires Mozilla or Firefox.]

Pointless Achievements of Our Time

2004-09-26T17:19:00.000Z

A 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 has been overclocked to 6GHz, liquid nitrogen cooling required, of course. Such feats are of no importance without significant accompanying speedups in disk I/O, however, as very few applications in mainstream use are truly CPU-bound.
[Via Slashdot]

GDI Scan

2004-09-26T11:37:00.000Z

SANS has helpfully provided this tool as an alternative to the useless GDI vulnerability detection application provided by Microsoft.

JPEG Exploit on the Loose

2004-09-25T13:18:00.000Z

The Register has the story. It was only a matter of time, really.

A toolkit designed to exploit a recently-disclosed Microsoft JPEG vulnerability has been released onto the net. The toolkit makes it trivially easy for maliciously-minded attackers, however unskilled they might be, to exploit unpatched Windows systems and run malicious code.

The attack mechanism used here takes advantage of a recently discovered flaw in the way Microsoft applications process JPEG image files. Malformed JPEG files are capable of triggering a buffer overflow in a common Windows component (the GDI+ image viewing library), it was revealed last week. This behaviour creates a ready mechanism to inject exploit code into vulnerable systems. Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 make use of vulnerable library by default. Other Windows OSes might be vulnerable, depending on what applications users have installed.

Airbus abandons Microsoft as ally

2004-09-24T12:04:00.000Z

Why is this story less than surprising?

Is Blue Ray a Dead End?

2004-09-18T19:17:00.000Z

Mark Cuban has thought-provoking things to say about the current efforts by the rival consumer electronics consortiums to get a high capacity successor to the DVD established as a standard. Do the ever-rapidly declining cost of hard drive storage per megabyte and the advent of broadband spell failure for such initiatives?

There's a great deal to Cuban's argument, but it seems premature to me to suggest that he's got it completely right; for one thing, at this moment broadband is hardly the choice of the majority even in countries like the UK and Ireland, let alone in poorer countries in the Third World, and not everyone can afford keychain devices and iPods. I think there will indeed turn out to be a market for a successor to the DVD, especially in the form of a burnable that can be used for backup storage, just not quite as large a market as the success of the CD and the DVD might have conditioned consumer electronics manufacturers to expect.

Blogger Test

2004-09-08T14:21:00.000Z

This is a quick test to see if the problems with publishing are Blog-specific or Blogger-wide.

Overpricing Does that to You

2004-09-07T13:35:00.000Z

Via Slashdot comes some interesting news:

"In their 10-K filing, Microsoft says that Linux server units rose slightly faster on an absolute basis than Windows server units in fiscal 2004. To project the trends it is helpful to look at the percentages. Some Gartner Inc. statistics report Linux server unit shipments are up 61% giving it 9.5% of the overall market share. Windows has a much larger base, so it can get the same absolute unit growth with a much lower percentage. Gartner expects Linux to continue growing faster and have more than 1/2 of the new server shipment market by the end of 2008."

If anything, I'd say that this is an underestimate of the momentum behind Linux, as it doesn't account for PC shipments for which a downloaded copy of Linux is used to transform some spare machine into a server. From a market share perspective, Microsoft would have been better off in the long run either pricing Windows Server 2003 a lot more affordably, or turning a blind eye to piracy by leaving it free of product activation: the product just isn't compelling enough to warrant paying such a premium for, and yes, price does matter, as I can well attest having slapped Linux and Apache on more than my fair share of aging PCs in my day.

Subversion-Related Information

2004-09-05T22:13:00.000Z

OnLAMP provides ten Subversion tips for CVS users, while O'Reilly's Version Control with Subversion can be read for free at the linked website.

Writing Firefox Extensions

2004-09-02T20:25:00.000Z

A helpful HOWTO guide that walks one step by step through the process of extension creation.

Icaza on Avalon

2004-09-02T20:22:00.000Z

Miguel de Icaza has interesting things to say about Avalon and Microsoft's decision to backport it to XP. Others have already given their two cents on what it all means from a business perspective, but Icaza looks at the issue from the viewpoint of a developer.

Release Early and Often

2004-08-30T14:08:00.000Z

At first I didn't want to say anything about the disclosure that Longhorn would no longer include the much-hyped WinFS, if only to avoid the appearance of gloating, but this article pushed me to change my mind.

Steve Jobs was wrong: Apple’s Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” won’t be Longhorn after all.

Jobs and Co. tweaked Microsoft’s collective nose with this brassy assertion back at June’s Worldwide Developers Conference. During that Mac developer lovefest, Apple insisted that its next big cat (due in the first half of 2005) will deliver most of the features promised for the beefy Windows upgrade (slated for 2006). Longhorn is cowpathing, Apple maintained, and Tiger will take a chunk out of its hide.

Now that boast turns out to be inaccurate: It was too conservative.

Thanks to the intrepid journalism of Mary Jo Foley and Darryl Taft, we learn that Microsoft has put its big bovine on a radical reducing plan in order to make that 2006 deadline. Prime cuts carved out of the OS include the pivotal Windows File System and Avalon presentation technology.

"Longhorn is going to stop being a whole new thing and more of an XP with a lot of good new stuff," one unnamed developer told our intrepid Windows watchers.

Meanwhile, back here on the Mac OS X side of the tracks, Tiger development proceeds apace. In fact, the buzz is that the impressive feature set previewed at WWDC represents about half the loaf, and that Apple will unveil plenty more by the time Mac OS X 10.4 arrives. (I’m still holding out hope for my speculation that significant system-level Windows emulation will be one of those features.)

This is as complete a vindication of my conviction that Apple's incremental approach was to be preferred as I am ever likely to see. What is it with Microsoft and the need to do "Big Bang" releases anyway? Haven't they ever heard the saying "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?"

With the announcement that WinFS will no longer be part of Longhorn, and that Avalon and Indigo will be backported to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, I see no compelling reasons left for anyone to even consider upgrading to the new operating system whenever ite ends up being released.

Making Windows Programs Large Address-Space Aware

2004-08-23T19:49:00.000Z

Raymond Chen gives an informative rundown of what it takes to give programs an expanded address space of 3GB. Simply using the /3GB switch available with Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows Server 2003 isn't enough, as the programs must also be marked as /LARGEADDRESSAWARE, which raises further complications of its own.

Generatingfunctionology

2004-08-23T18:44:00.000Z

I was sitting there wondering to myself how on Earth I was going to obtain a copy of Herbert Wilf's excellent but apparently out of print book when for some strange reason the thought occurred to me to run a Google search for the title. On doing so, what should I discover but that a PDF version of the book should be freely available for download via Wilf's own page? It's an amazing act of generosity on his part, as I'd have been more than willing to pay hard cash for a copy were it still in print, and I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling this way.

SIGGRAPH Screenshots of Half-Life 2

2004-08-22T18:38:00.000Z

A very impressive slideshow of pictures originally incorporated into a PowerPoint presentation given at this years SIGGRAPH by Viktor Antonov of Valve. The level of realism on display is amazing, but at what cost in hardware to obtain a decent level of performance, I wonder?

Angels, Assholes and Morons

2004-08-17T12:35:00.000Z

An amusing rant by Mark Pilgrim about the different classes developers fall into when it comes to complying with product specifications.

PostgreSQL 8.0 Goes Beta

2004-08-15T14:50:00.000Z

At long last. What's even nicer to know is that it finally comes in a Windows Installer package, which can be found here.

A Retrograde Step

2004-08-13T12:09:00.000Z

Microsoft once again shows that it just doesn't get it. What kind of a controlling fiend must one be to oppose the distribution of a vital security update except through one's own website? This is just too stupid for words.

Microsoft has taken steps to stop its security update for Windows being shared on file-swapping networks.
The SP2 update for Windows XP was being used by file-swapping activists to show how such systems can help get large, important files to lots of users.
But legal warnings from Microsoft have forced the file-swappers to end their experiment and stop making the software available to downloaders.
Now the only place people are able to get the update is from Microsoft.

[............]

When it started sharing SP2, Downhill Battle said: "This project shows how file-sharing technology gives people without budgets or huge server space the power to solve problems themselves, without waiting for the government or some corporation to do it for them."
The version being made available on the BitTorrent network was intended for corporations who have a lot of PCs to patch. A smaller consumer version of SP2 is due later this year.
When asked about Downhill Battle's action, a Microsoft spokesperson said: "The Microsoft Download Center site is the only authorized web source for downloading a licensed copy of Windows XP Service Pack 2.
"To report a website offering unlicensed copies of Windows XP SP2 for download, please send an e-mail to piracy@microsoft.com."
According to the Downhill Battle website, Microsoft has now gone one step further and issued take down notices to two of the web hosts helping the group distribute the file.

It's bad enough that Microsoft should be trying to block the redistribution of such an important security update, but that it should be doing so with the loathsome DMCA really takes the cake.

When to Use Stored Procedures?

2004-08-01T23:59:00.000Z

Slashdot has an interesting discussion on the subject. I personally think they're invaluable, if only because they help mitigate the risk of SQL injection attacks.

Technorati and Software Development

2004-07-26T20:46:00.000Z

Heavy users of the Technorati may have noticed today that the service is currently suffering from major issues, and not just of the garden variety we've all become accustomed to, either. The way in which Technorati's chosen to unveil its latest changes flies in the face of what I consider to be a fundamental law of web development: never use the same platform for developing and providing services if you can at all help it, in order to avoid causing service outages if any of the changes you implement screw things up.

I don't know what Technorati's cash flow situation is like, but I very much doubt that it can be so bad that the firm can't afford to acquire a few old machines to use for beta testing purposes, rather than rolling out breaking changes without warning and then scrambling to fix things (if they are even scrambling, that is). The sheer unreliability of the service is getting to be so irritating that I'm feeling more and more of a mind to put together a home-grown alternative of my own, by which I mean not an aggregator like the excellent Bloglines, but a spidering/indexing service which confines itself to weblogs alone, and is able to return both the numbers of links to a blog and the context in which a given link occurs.

One additional feature I'd like in my implementation should I get around to it is to do away with the whole link-aging thing used by Technorati: why should I care that a given link is more than X days old, as long as I'm able to search and sort links by age?

Recursion and Dynamic Programming

2004-07-24T17:56:00.000Z

Eric Lippert put up an interesting post on dynamic programming some days back which I've only just gotten round to discovering. Here's a topic that's very much an interest of mine, as sequence alignment techniques like the Needleman-Wunsch and Smith-Waterman algorithms make heavy use of it.

IEBlog

2004-07-22T02:09:00.000Z

Microsoft's Internet Explorer team now has a blog of its own. It will be interesting to see just what comes of it.

Mozilla Code Review and Super-Reviewers

2004-07-15T22:53:00.000Z

A useful list of who owns what, and which modules require super-review before check-in. Also recommended for would-be Mozilla developers are the SeaMonkey Code Reviewer's Guide and the SeaMonkey Engineering Bible

SQL Server Data Mining FAQ

2004-07-15T22:47:00.000Z

Available at the SQL Server Developer Center, "dedicated to discuss[ing] issues on the Microsoft Analysis Services data mining functionality available with the Microsoft SQL Server product."

New Issue of Phrack Released

2004-07-15T22:31:00.000Z

Issue 62 of the notorious hacker journal Phrack recently hit the streets - or, to be more precise, the Web. As is to be expected, there's lots of interesting stuff in it, including guidance on how to circumvent 3rd party buffer overflow protection on Windows, kernel-mode backdoors (i.e, rootkits) in NT-based Windows systems like Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, and a tutorial on using process injection to bypass software firewalls on Windows - the sample provided works against Zone Alarm 4 (free and pro versions), Sygate Pro 5.5, BlackIce 3.6, and even Tiny Firewall 5.0 (though this last one did require a bit more effort). The lesson to take from the last of the three articles mentioned is a simple one - if security is important to you, don't expect a software firewall to do the job, or at least not one that's also running on a Windows machine.

I wonder if Microsoft's security people are Phrack users. They ought to be, and if they are I'm betting this latest article ought to keep them awake for a few nights. These Phrack guys are good at what they do.