LINKBLOG for January 30, 2006

• Why the modern office only lets you work for 11 minutes:
  This is so true. Since the (in)famous Peopleware book this is said over and over, but still is gets worse and worse. OK, sometimes of course interruptions of the normal workflow are neccessary for others to proceed their work. But still, we all should think a bit more if it really is required to interrupt our clearly-being-in-the-flow collegue with a trivial question.
  via "Software by Rob"
  


• This piece by Jan Goyvaerts on why (almost) bugfree software is more a business decision where money is involved than something that can never be reached because of technical impediments. Btw, I didn't know Jan of Editpad fame had a blog, nice.
  via "Coding Horror" blog
  

JavaScript Debugging In ASP.NET 2003

I read some things about debugging JavaScript on ASP.NET 2005, and thought, well, they have added it only in version 2005. But looking a bit further (*) I found an article by Rob Chartier on why this is disabled by default... well, not really 'why...', but 'that...': Clickety-click, fire up the app in Visual Studio, attach to the running document and debugging is all wating for you.

This must be a no-brainer to you, but for me working in .NET only partially, I found it out only now.

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(*) by the way using A9.com, which is at least as awesome as Google, and a lot more interactive (Ajax-like anyone?): you can choose search options like 'web', 'blog search' and 'wikipedia', which all are displayed on the same page but in different columns. Very customizable, slick and fast

LINKBLOG for January 20, 2005

• Read Web 3.0. In which Zeldman talks about the current state of the web: his point seems to be that while we're at version 2.0 (as we are supposed to be now) everything is still glitter, glamour and technology rules. AJAX and other technologies are in the center, as opposed to putting the customer and his / her experience first. We will arrive at a more mature state only when we hit Web 3.0.
  
  My only question to that would be: who decides the version number of the web? Windows became a mature OS when it arrived at version 3.0 (or maybe you could say: 3.1), but there was a very clear desicion by Microsoft to call a certain version 3.0. Now that everyone babbles about web 2.0, nowhere we can see a version number. I could just as well talk about version 0.1.1 or something and it would have the same value..
  (via PPK, Elsewhere on the 'Net)
  



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• Mark Russinovich has been doing his research again. This time the claim of Steve Gibson on Microsoft intentionally putting a backdoor in Windows a long time ago in the form of what has come to be known as the WMF Exploit. I have to say, I hae listened to Steve's podcast about the subject, but it seemed a bit absurd to me. I remember him from a couple years ago, introducing the 'raw sockets' issue: He predicted doom on the internet because Microsoft enabled these 'raw sockets' in Windows by default. Never heard anything about that either... more background here...
  
  Conclusion: you have to be very sure before you make these wild accusations toward a company like Microsoft. Given Gibson's track record and my intuition I follow Mark on this one!
  

Visual Studio "Paste as HTML" fallacy?

Visual Studio has this weird habit to paste text as text, but call it 'paste as HTML instead:

When, for example, you cut and paste some code from another location to a page in VS.NET (older versions worked the same), by default the editor will paste HTML cruft on your screen, like this

<asp:DropDownList <B>onChange="LoadCountries(this)"</B>ID="loader" Runat="server" />


while instead you expect something like


<asp:DropDownList <B>onChange="LoadCountries(this)"</B>ID="loader" Runat="server" />


Now my point is, when you press 'Paste As HTML', the HTML tags will be REMOVED and stripped down text will be pasted instead. This has always bugged me, and I don't know the reasoning behind it. If someone has an idea, please share your thoughts in the comments!

LINKBLOG for January 16, 2005

• Lightbox: a very nice and unobtrusive JavaScript thumbnail viewer.
  (via the DOM Scripting Blog)
  



• The WMF backdoor is not a backdoor, says Microsoft's Stephen Toulouse
  (via security.nl (dutch))
  



• Jeff Atwood was so annoyed - as do a lot of people - by the cruft of HTML Word produces, that he rolled his own .NET (C#, 2.0) CleanWordHTML function. I'm not working with 2.0 (yet), fortunately Sam ported it back to .NET 1.1
  



• A really serious-looking story about wirelesss connections on a Washington Post blog: Windows Wireless Flaw a Danger to Laptops. What's most worrisome - or fun, as some might say - is the next quote:
  

  " Here's the really freaky part about all this: No more than five minutes after I had deleted the "hackme" network ID from my laptop, Loveless and I spotted the same network name being broadcast from another computer that didn't belong to either of us. Turns out, someone else at the hacker conference was trying to join the fun. "

  
  
  Fortunately for Windows XPSP2 users, they won't have problems, as incoming wireless traffic is prevented by default. But still... many many people have no idea how their PC works. Even last week, I spoke to a neighbor, who started to have 'problems' with his PC after he got broadband. No idea he had to use those virusscanners, and he did not even understand words like 'firewall' and 'spyware' coming from my mouth...
  (Also via security.nl)

Official Microsoft Patch Against WMF Exploit Is Out Now

In contrast to what they had been saying before - that the patch would appear with the normal Patch Tuesday next week, see e.g. here- , Microsoft *did* release an out-of-bounds patch for the WMF exploit today, Jan 6, 2005. Now, go read the Security Bulletin or get the patch immediately (direct link if you're on WinXP SP1/2), all of you....

</back to normal situation now>

Bloglines Is Down, What To Do Now?

This morning I found Bloglines to be down. Oops, what to do now, ... well, just go doing some real work I suppose (and making my first post in 2006) :-) Now, hours later, we still can see the dreaded plumber happily announcing they had a '...database multiple hardware failure'. That actually shouldn't happen in case you have RAID0/1 systems and redundant power supplies and fans etc. But still, we've seen enough weird things happening at my company to know that hardware always follows the Law of Murphy.

Good luck with the repairs guys, hopefully I can do some catching up tonight.

That reminds me of something I wanted to write about, but didn't do for the obvious reasons (lack of time being the most significant): the abundance of personal data we all have lying around on the net (think RSS-feeds, bookmark and social sites, G- and other webmail; don't even think of all sites carrying unformation on all our account we have over there. And did I mention Amazon (wishlists) yet. Somehow, I think <prediction mode> 2006 will be the year people get fed up with entering data all over the place</prediction mode>. But that's food for another post.