Oren’s Weblog

I’ve been testing some things using Outlook 2003 on my Windows machine. Something happened when trying to view a particular PDF document from a link in an email and Outlook stopped responding. I killed it with the Task Manager, and consented to send the error report to Microsoft. The error report process nicely came back noting that there is an update to Office 2003 available that I should probably install. When I clicked on the link, it went off to the Microsoft site, but then came back with a message saying that I needed to use Internet Explorer to get the update (Firefox is my default browser).

I thought it was interesting that you have to use IE to get Office updates…. especially to see that on the same day that real-life exploits of the latest IE vulnerability have been reported.

Of course, my Windows machine is running XP SP2, so it wouldn’t have been affected, but it still seems silly that Microsoft should tie updates to other application software to its browser.

UPDATE 24 September
Bruce Fulton points out that it’s probably due to Firefox not handling ActiveX controls. I’m not sure I think updates to an application *should* be handled by active code running from a browser. It seems more architecturally sound to me to handle updates to an application (or an application suite) by having the update code run as part of the application itself – which is how Office updates are handled on the Mac.

I’m so tired of dealing with spam comments that I’ve turned comments off at the present time. I’ve been getting over a hundred comment spams every day, and even with MT-Blacklist I’ve still got to go through and delete them all, which is just too time consuming for me.

I’ll probably re-enable comments that have been authenticated using TypeKey, but I’ve got some work to do to reconfiguring Movable Type before I can do that – maybe I’ll find some time over the long weekend to do that work.

In the meantime, if you’ve got a comment you’d like posted, email it to me at oren at washington dot edu and I’ll put it in.

Sigh.

This looks cool – Wired is a new music sequencing and recording package for Linux, now available for download in a 0.1 release. Via Slashdot.

I seem to have gotten MT-Blacklist working now – hopefully that will ease up on the amount of comment spam I have to deal with!

I haven’t been regular about being on instant messaging for quite some time – in general the synchronous nature of IM tends to be too much of an interruption to the way I work.

But recently I’ve been using Apple’s iChat AV and enjoying it, so I’m making myself a little more available – if you want to chat, I’ll be on iChat or AOL IM as oren dot sreebny at mac dot com. I’m also on MSN as oren at cac dot washington dot edu. See you online!

I’m getting something on the order of a couple hundred spam comments a day now.

When I tried to install MT-Blacklist it blew up on me, so I’ve got to go back and figure out what went wrong, which I haven’t had time to do yet.

So in the meantime, I’m moderating all comments and deleting most of them. Hopefully I’m not deleting real comments as I go, but if you post a comment and it doesn’t show up on the blog within a couple of days you might try again (and I apologize!).

Shelley notes the same problem, and wonders if she finds a solution if she’ll be crowned Queen For a Day. Heck, Shelley – if you solve this problem I think you ought to be nominated for a Nobel Prize!

Matthew is also having problems with Thunderbird compacting folders, but his problems appear to be with folders stored locally on his hard disk rather than on an IMAP server.

Further testing here turns up the interesting fact that if I use the “compact folders” menu item from the File menu Thunderbird ends up crashing on my Mac (not on the Windows version though).

BUT – if I do a Control-Click on the Inbox folder and then pick Compact This Folder from the popup menu, it seems to expunge the deleted messages from my Inbox just fine. That’s good enough for my everyday use, though it might be nice to have a button on the toolbar that acts as a “Compact Inbox” click. Thanks to Dave Wall for showing me that I could do that!

So I now have two different theories on why the Compact Folders is crashing T’bird on my Mac – one is that I just have so many folders that if it actually has to go through them all and open them to see if there are messages that need to be expunged that it might well be receiving some sort of time-out before it completes, and perhaps T’bird isn’t prepared to deal with that particular error condition (I have 200 IMAP folders on the server, using up about 1.2 Gigabytes of disk space). The other theory is that there is some sort of corruption in one or more of my folders that causes T’bird on the Mac to throw up.

But I’m still using it!

An interesting post from last weekend by Shelley Powers, that somewhat echoes my own platform experience. I’ve added Shelley’s Burningbird blog to my list of regular reads.

A few years ago, I never would have thought this could occur. I had written a best-selling book on COM/COM+ and ASP for O’Reilly, I was a member of the Microsoft Development Network, had passed several Windows certification tests, attended Windows conferences almost exclusively, and programmed primarily in VB and VC++ and just a little Java. In addition, I scoffed at the Macs with their cute graphics, and decided if I were to go with a second environment, away from my beloved Windows, it would be Linux.

This weekend, though, I was able to install several open source applications far more easily than I ever could on Linux, primarily because Mac users won’t tolerate piecemeal packages, cryptic installation instructions, and a hackers attitude of “well, if you have to ask how something works, you shouldn’t use it”. Best of all, they work out of the box on the Mac – no mucking around with Windows ‘tweaks’.

I’m also increasingly finding OS X to be the *nix for the rest of us.