Scott Hanselman

Wow, only 23 days since Microsoft acquired GIANT Company, they are releasing a BETA of Microsoft AntiSpyware.

It shore is purdy.

But I wonder why we need a separate program for:

• Anti-Virus (coming soon)
• SpyWare (in BETA)
• Firewall (in SP2)
• Popup Blocker (in SP2 and in MSN Desktop Search and in MSN's original  Toolbar. Why?)
• Phishing Protection (nothing from Microsoft yet. There's yet-another-toolbar available from Netcraft to protect against phishing)

These are no doubt different teams at Microsoft. It'd be nice to have a single, unified "Keep Evil Away" program that did all of these. Spyware is a virus as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't get spyware if I had ActiveX blocking, popup blocking or a good fireware. This is all getting a little confusing for my Mom, and I'd like a good way to explain to here why the Internet is out to get her.

Warning: be careful with the decisions you make with this particular tool, you may accidentally block your IT organization's SMS servers.

You know, you'd think the first thing one would do when acquiring a company would be to change the EXE name...

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Apparently my blog is listed on BlogShares.com as the 9th most Overvalued Blog. However, it's my Radio Blog! That's right, the one I moved away from 18 months ago. The old link is "worth" almost 10 times the current, actual link.

What's that about? Someone explain to me what's the point of BlogShares, and why their PageRank is so violently ill.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Those in the know already love Notepad2 and have much respect for Flo's flow. But, just when I thought I couldn't dig it more, today I had to edit some CVS files that were on SourceForge. They are Unix files (meaning Line Feeds terminating each line [LF] rather than CarriageReturn/LineFeed [CR/LF]) and the FAQ said in no uncertain terms - be careful when editing these files on Windows. 

That's advice that's always good to follow. Note only should you know your CR/LF status, but also whether you have Tabs vs. Spaces, and if you are ANSI or UTF-8 or Unicode.

Anyway, Notepad2 not only shows the the LF status in the status bar and optionally at the end of each line, BUT it also lets you CHANGE THE FILES STATUS by simply double clicking on the status bar indicator.

Fabulous. I was able to edit the Unix files without fear and with the confidence that the files I saved were correct. Slick.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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On the OT list recently the question was asked: "Does anyone know of an FPSE (Front Page Server Extensions/WebDAV) client that works on the command-line?"

The fellow basically wanted to XCOPY/COPY files from his machine to a remote site from the command line. I recommended the ridiculously powerful SynchronEX. I use it to automate the backup of my site from FTP (XFTP actually, maintaining file dates!) nightly, which is then backed up by my Iomega Rev Drive's Automatic Backup Pro Software. It's more than just a command-line tool, it's a complete scriptable beast with two-way sync and multiple remote file system support.

Later, John Schroedl responded with this built-in-to-Windows-XP tasty tip:

net use * http://www.webdav.org/ passwrd /user:username

He notes a caveat "Windows XP assumes that any WebDAV repository begins at the root of the server path. If a user mounts http://www.example.com/hr/ergonomics, then the OPTIONS request to http://www.example.com/ must show WebDAV support or the Redirector will fail."

For example:

C:\>net use * http://foo/Bar/SomeDirectory XXXXXXX /user:scott
Drive Z: is now connected to http://foo/Bar/SomeDirectory.

The command completed successfully.

C:\>dir z:
Volume in drive Z has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 0000-0000

Directory of Z:\

12/22/2004  05:01 PM    <DIR>          .
12/22/2004  05:01 PM    <DIR>          ..
12/09/2004  03:37 PM             2,335 File.egp
12/22/2004  05:01 PM    <DIR>          TestDir
               1 File(s)          2,335 bytes
               3 Dir(s)   2,620,660,736 bytes free

From here you can use the command shell commands (XCOPY/COPY) to work with DAV as any other drive. A great tip!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Omar and I are still busting our butts on a "newtelligence dasBlog Community Edition 1.7" release in the next few weeks. There will likely be a number of changes, many of which Omar has on the dasBlog Wiki.

In the last week we've:

• Corrected bugs in the HTTP 304 If-Modified-Since implementation that has cut Omar's RSS bandwidth from over 200 megs to under 40 megs.
• Fixed a number of little things and added better error logging.
• Command Line upgrade tool - You'll need to download your content directory, run this tool to update from 1.6 to 1.7, then upload your stuff. Think of it a "scandisk" for dasBlog. It also fixes the TimeZone problem.
• It will align the dates for entries with the dates for entry feedback (comments, etc)
• It will scrub referral spam
• It will repair Radio imported comments and entries
• A number of fixes to Login and cleaning up the MD5 security implementation for security logins over non-SSL'ed HTTP.
• Complete rewrite of ALL collection classes using Christoph Nahr's CodeSmith collections, plus some of my own secret sauce. I used version 1.6 of Chris's stuff because we desparately needed some thread safety in our (now) in-memory cache collections. We've also added thread locking in a few places which has reduced the number of "enumeration halted, collection modified" errors that I used to get all the time.
• The complete removal of BlogCoreData, CategoryCache and EntryCache increasing speed by roughly 200% and lowering disk access by roughly 400% with other perf benefits.
• All the features mentioned before like CAPTCHA, a referral blacklist, perf re-work and caching of RSS, an IP Address Blocking HttpModule, and OutputCaching in a few places.
• dasBlog will also move to SourceForge soon as newtelligence dasBlog Community Edition" with Clemens' blessing and continuing using the BSD license.
• Improved Omar's Link-by-Title-rather-than-GUID feature.
• Example:
  http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HappyNewYear-AndfromMySPOTWatchaswell.aspx 
  is
  http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=2a41619f-0dca-40ec-bf2a-e95e0b2b6483
• Addition of my Month View and Year View (here's 2004)
• Modification/Addition of the Complete Archives with bug fixes.
• Modification/Addition of the BlogRoll as an optional separate page with bug fixes.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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