"Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state."

--Email from Bill Gates regarding Windows Usability 2003

Full text of email can be viewed at the Seattle PI's website.

Yet another example illustrating Microsoft's strategy to be the only, not the best, software supplier on the market.

As Jani Monoses blogs, a University in Cluj Napoca, Romania held a CS/informatics competition for high school students, which was combined with presentations from software companies for informatics professors.

The Seattle times and slashdot.org are reporting that "Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes." Obviously, this technology can be misused as well.

My wife saw a news article regarding users of Windows XP starting petitions across the internet and posting numerous blog posts in a useless attempt to stop Microsoft from discontinuing the retail sale of Windows XP.

Clicking on a link or visiting a web page could allow someone complete control over your computer, unless you're not running as an administrator, which you are.

Go IE!

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-024 - Critical

Executive Summary

So my wife gets a letter of recommendation and sends it to me for printing. I download the attachment and go to open it, only to notice the file extension...the dreaded .docx. Great. I open the file with Office 2003 and I get a prompt asking if I want to download the compatibility pack to open it. Sure, why not....only it takes me to an "I'm sorry, you're page cannot be found."

After setting up AWStats On IIS, I wanted to use awstats.pl instead of the static pages. I configured it according to what I found on the internet, but there was a problem. I would go to the awstats.pl and I would get the html on the page rather than the rendered html. I found the problem, but it requires editing awstats.pl.

On line 550, there is a function called http_head. In line 553, the following line:

else { print "Content-type: text/html; charset=$PageCode\n"; }

should be changed to:

else { print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK Content-type: text/html"}

I ran into a strange problem at work today. We have a web server on which is installed a self-generated SSL certificate. This page has worked fine as far as I know for several years. The certificate, however, was not generated for the URL and is therefore not valid. This is something we were going to get around to fix, but it looks like we'll have to do it sooner than later.

Normally, in Windows XP with Internet Explorer 7 and 6, Firefox on Windows and Linux and many other browsers and platforms I assume, a prompt is shown to the user asking if they want to connect to the website anyway.

Just figured this out. Using Microsoft SQl Server 2000, you can insert multiple rows into a table with one query as in the following examples:

Single Column:

CREATE TABLE test
(
val1 INTEGER NOT NULL
)

INSERT INTO test
SELECT 62
UNION
SELECT 91
UNION
SELECT 95
UNION
SELECT 98
UNION
SELECT 99

This will insert 5 rows into the table. To do multiple columns, use the following:

CREATE TABLE test
(
val1 VARCHAR(10),
val2 VARCHAR(10),
val3 VARCHAR(10),
val4 VARCHAR(10)
)
GO

INSERT INTO test
(val1, val2, val3, val4)

To me, innovation should drive the technology sector. Companies should grow through the invention of new ideas or methodologies, or by vastly improving current technologies. Technology should be driven by the consumer, not by fear or monopoly. These products should make consumer's lives easier, not restrict or police them.

That being said, I'm done with the behemoth known as Microsoft. Why?