Two Months without an Antivirus

No, in fact it is quite the opposite!

For a little over a year I had no antivirus on my computer at home because I thought them to be extremely resource-consuming and unnecessary given my configuration and my knowledge. I had tested several solutions previously—free, commercial—but they always seemed bloated and slowed down my computer. That’s why, when I was invited to attend a presentation of the latest version of Norton’s Antivirus—no, sorry, security suite Norton Internet Security 2009 (NIS 2009 for friends) I went there filled with prejudice.

It was Rowan Trollope, Vice President of the Division of Consumer Products at Norton, who had come to Paris to tell us of his baby. He had, after all, more or less staked his career on this version, as he explained to me during a long conversation we had after his presentation.

We were entitled to a heap of numbers: more than 500 000 man hours of development, 300 improvements in performance, 1-minute installation, significant reduction in the number of files to scan and, therefore, the time to do so… In summary, what we were supposed to get is that NIS 2009 is fast and light; fast and light as never witnessed before: able to turn on a machine with 256 KB of RAM, smart enough not to disturb the user of the computer and not to scan files that we know are “trusted” thanks to Insight technology.

After the presentation of the product I was able, as I have already said, to discuss at length with Rowan and by the end of the evening I only wanted to do one thing: test this miracle of computer engineering.

I would like to make a short "disclaimer": I was able to test NIS 2009 because I was offered a copy with a year of protection for 3 PCs. Sure, I could have downloaded the trial version on the site, but I am not dumb either. That said, I am known to be quite unpleasant and to criticize even gifts, so what follows is honestly what I think.

Back home, even if it was late, I could not help but to turn on the PC and install immediately. First test, is the installation time really under minute?

The answer: No. But almost. I spent some time filling out forms to create my account and activate, etc. The installation itself may have lasted less than a minute, but the experience in itself probably lasted just under 10, and that is what I remember.

That aside, everything else is true! When I say “Two Months without an Antivirus” it is just because it has been 2 months since I installed NIS I have barely noticed it. From time to time I see a small message, telling me that the current scan will stop because I am back.

Once, on my work computer (yes, I have also installed it on my machine at the office) an update didn’t go well. NIS automatically connected to the support servers (there’s free support, by the way, even if I have not needed to the call them for the moment) and offered a step-by-step procedure to solve my problem; and it worked, which is the most important.

A conclusion then? I like NIS 2009. It is undeniable that today it is vital to protect ourselves, or risk becoming a spammer robot or losing data. How can you not appreciate protection against the millions of threats around today when it is imperceptible? Now, will I renew my NIS subscription in 10 months? I’ll have the answer when the time comes, and it will depend only on my budget. Worst case scenario: I will take only the antivirus, instead of the complete security suite.

So you’re still here? How about a video of the Symantec meeting of September 18th:

Google Chrome's killing who?

At Google people don't make mistakes, they're just overeager to launch a new product. At least that's kind of what they imply at the Official Google Blog when they announce A fresh take on the browser.

This fresh take on the browser is nothing more than an open source project, called Google Chrome, that the Mountain View company will be making available for download sometime today (probably in the morning Pacific time). It hasn't even launched and it was announced with a comic book, but still, it has already been touted "Windows Killer" by some.

Open source browsers are not precisely something new. Changes in the interface are something we're starting to get used to even though it might hurt a little at the beginning. Sure, there are a few technical changes from what we're used to that might make Chrome feel different from other browsers and Google does have an advantage over others in the field since they don't have to fear antitrust suits with every line of code. But how is this supposed to kill the OS?

It's supposed to run JavaScript like a charm, OK. But will it run Flash? Will it run Silverlight (or Moonlight for that matter)? (Believe me, this will be important in the near future.) Oh, and it needs Windows (and only Windows for the moment) to run on. And how's it supposed to run the large number of applications that are open my computer right now? On JavaScript? Please! So really fail to see who's getting killed here...

Anyway, here's a screen shot of some Google results this morning:

Curiously enough, none of the links points to a real page. Funny how when your site does it, the search engine doesn't really place it in first position.

All this said, I will be testing Chrome by the end of the day as objectively as humanly possible. I'll let you know how it goes.

The fox won't come out to play? Get it now!

So, the "Fox" (I know it's not a fox) is coming out for the third time today, but someone decided that "today" starts sometime when the sun hits the American continent...

I personally didn't want to wait until 7pm to get software that must definitively be ready right now (I sincerely doubt that Mozilla would put "finishing touches" a couple of hours before release) so I went to spreadfirefox.com to see what could be done.

It turns out all you have to do is play around with their download URLs a little and you can the fresh bits before their links are up. Since I'm nice, I'll share a couple of them and then let you figure out the rest:

• Firefox 3 for OS X in English: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=osx&lang=en-GB
• Firefox 3 for OS X in French: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=osx&lang=fr
• Firefox 3 for Windows in English: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=win&lang=en-GB
• Firefox 3 for Linux in English: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=linux&lang=en-GB

That wasn't hard, was it? ;)

Have fun!

Accessing Sysinternals Tools Has Never Been Easiser

Do you know the Sysinternals tools?

You probably do if you're an IT pro or a developer. For those who don't, it's a series of free utilities written by Mark Russinovich that are essential to manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. I even need one of the Sysinternals tools for my classes: ZoomIt allows you to zoom and draw on the screen.

Microsoft acquired Sysinternals some time ago and since then the tools have been available, always for free of course, from the TechNet website. I, like many others, downloaded the whole suite and keep it in USB drives and my "Utils" folder. Even though the website's fine to learn more about each of the individual tools, it's not very practical when it comes to downloading and keeping them up to date.

Fortunately, the Sysinternals Team had the brilliant idea of actually sharing these files like you probably share your files on your home or office network, allowing you to run the tools from any computer connected to the Internet without having to navigate to a webpage, download and extract them. All you have to do is visit http://live.sysinternals.com/, which is simply a website with "Directory browsing" on or, even better, use the direct UNC link (\\live.sysinternals.com\Tools\) and run the tools directly. You'll probably want PowerShell installed for command line tools then, but those are the exception and all of the Windows apps will execute fine.

Lost in Office 2007?

If you cannot seem to find your way around Office 2007 after working with the previous versions of the Microsoft suite, you're probably not the only one. Luckily, a few developers at Microsoft figured out that, as good as the new ribbon may be (believe me, it is!) a few improvements wouldn't hurt and came up with an add-on that they called Search Commands. Unfortunately, they only released this internally.

These days, however, keeping tools like this internal is not a very good idea, even if they're not perfect; especially when the news of their existence has leaked into the general public. The official version is probably a little different, but I'll say that it's for this reason that Microsoft opened the new Microsoft Office Labs.

Sure, Live Labs, Office Labs, it could all get pretty confusing, like figuring out the difference between the MSN and the Live brands, except that with the "Office" keyword we can be pretty sure that what we will see here are applications and/or features related to the Office suite and, who knows, maybe even previews of what's coming next. The first application coming out of the new Labs is the Search Commands add-on that I mentioned above.

It installs on Word, PowerPoint and Excel and appears as a tab in the Office ribbon. The tab has a Guided Help button that will get you started.

In short, what the add-on does is provide a search field, which, by the way, is accessible with the keyboard shortcut . When you start typing a name, the ribbon will show you a list of matching commands. You can click on the one you're looking for, or use the numerical keyboard shortcut next to each icon.

A couple of nice features are also available, such as spelling suggestions:

And if you're interested in locating the command that you just found in the ribbon, the very informative tooltips will help you with that:

It's also possible that the command is not located in the ribbon at all, like the Copy As Picture command above, in which case the tooltip will say so, but I don't think that deserves a screenshot.

That's it! It maybe doesn't sound as much, but it's actually a pretty useful tool for the power user, who can access all commands without ever leaving the keyboard, as well as for the beginner, who will find commands "hidden" in the new ribbon.

More importantly, the fact that this tool is publicly available and that an Office Labs web site was set up shows that Microsoft wants to be closer to the user (notice the big Feedback button in the screenshots above) and isn't afraid of following other companies such as Google, in releasing products and features in a "Lab" environment. This is how Gmail was born after all, and nobody can deny Gmail's success today, even though it still hasn't left the beta stage.

Share your screen in 2 minutes with Microsoft SharedView

It took less than five minutes to go the Microsoft Connect website, download and install Microsoft SharedView to share my desktop with a friend.

The installation is as simple as it can be. Once installed, you use a Live ID to sign into SharedView if you want to create a session. The session is created in two clicks and you are given clear instructions to invite people to join it (see screenshot). Guests to your session don't even need to sign in to join.

When members have joined your session you can share specific windows with them and even let them take control of your shared window. You can invite one or more people to present your work or to collaborate. It works fine over the Internet, even across firewalls.

Microsoft SharedView is still a beta (then again, what isn't these days?), but I really recommend that you give it a try. Free download available here.

Decluttering and fixing other people's bugs

Since I moved into my small apartment in Paris, I've become rather obsessed with "de-cluttering".

One of the things that I have the most trouble getting rid of is my old lecture notes. If only I had had a laptop and OneNote at the time, I wouldn't have this problem, but today the fact is that I have quite a lot of notebooks and photocopies taking up valuable space.

What I decided to do is to start scanning and recycling. I use Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) to scan and perform OCR. I stated a while ago on a flatbed scanner at home, but that took forever. Fortunately, we have one of those multipurpose photocopiers at the office with an automatic feeder that will quickly scan my documents, even the two-sided ones.

Now, things have not been as smooth as they should have been, though. Mostly because, and I'm sad to say it, bugs in Microsoft software.

Bug number 1 was when MODI started crashing every time I was going to save a document. That was annoying because unsaved images are not really useful. So I started to try to figure out what was happening and realized that the program crashed as soon as I clicked on the File menu. Since the menu itself is pretty static, I assumed the problem had to come from the only dynamic part: the Recent File List. In Microsoft software, these lists are often stored in the registry, so I open regedit and started looking for the right key. That wasn't easy, but I finally found it:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSPaper 12.0\Recent File List

As you can see, the path to the key is quite obvious when you know the name of the program you are looking for and the path to the executable:

%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MODI\12.0\MSPVIEW.EXE

(Yes, it's called irony)

Bug number 2 is slightly more annoying because it can't be fixed easily. It seems that Windows Desktop Search (WDS), the service responsible for indexing files on Windows Vista, is "too secure" to index the contents of TIFF files, which is what I'm generating, because I already have a bunch of lecture notes in this format.

You see, in order to index the contents of files, WDS uses filters or IFilters, which are libraries that are also used by other Microsoft programs. But it would seem that the IFilter for TIFF files (and MDI files for that matter) does things (probably creates temp files or something in an unauthorized directory) that Vista doesn't like, so the OCR contents of TIFF files are not indexed. And there's pretty much nothing I can do about it aside from finding a 3rd party filter, or write my own.

I didn't find 3rd party filters and I don't have the time to write my own, so I'm just waiting for the fix that Microsoft is working on. The only problem is that the only ETA I've found is "soon."

Other solutions would be to install Google's indexer (which I'm seriously considering) or to change format. But I'm not ready to do either one. So, for now, I'll just name my files appropriately.

Visual Studio 2008 available for MSDN subscribers

Wow, it's been a while... Hopefully, now that I'm putting the finishing touches on the project that's been taking up all of my time, I'll be able to write more around here.

I'm starting with good news! At least for those lucky enough to have access to a MSDN subscription. As it was announced on Friday, the final version of Visual Studio 2008 is available for download as of this morning!

Slightly under 4GB, the ISO for Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite (32 and 64-bit version) DVD is just waiting to be downloaded. Go get it quick before people actually start waking up and download speeds are affected ;)

Get it while it's hot: Amazon2LiveWriter!

Have you ever wanted to write a book review or recommendation on your blog with Windows Live Writer that shows the book's image or name and links directly to Amazon.* using your associate ID?

You may want to talk about a book you're reading:

Or the greatest book ever (OK, I'm working on doing better...):

(By the way, have you ever heard about The Dangerous Book for Boys? I'd sure like a copy...)

Well, now all these links and more are made possible by yours truly thanks to what I call Amazon2LiveWriter.

This small plug-in will let you create associate links for any of the Amazon sites (com, ca, co.uk, fr, de, co.jp) quickly and easily based on ASINs (Amazon product numbers) or the Amazon address to a product. Just copy, paste, and it's done!

I created this for myself at first, but if it sparks interest, I'd be happy to consider feature requests. For now, I'm thinking of adding product and wish list search. What do you think?

Wow, what a day!

In the good sense of course… Today was a great day! It was a day of discovery, of rediscovery, of new things in general.

So, what’s all the excitement about?, you might wonder. Well, let’s see, more or less in order:

I might be onto a gig in Malaysia, how cool is that?

I was one of the winners of the Trick-or-Treat category in MAKE’s Halloween contest! I get the latest issue of MAKE magazine. Check out all the other winners in all categories. Next year, the Hack-o-Lantern will be mine :)

I installed Simon’s newest release of My Exposé for Windows Vista. It’s a CTP (Community Technical Preview), but it’s pretty stable and bug-free. It features a new placement algorithm, way more organic than the original grid placement. An improved trigger interface, so that you can write your own triggers. As a matter of fact, it comes with a new trigger for Voice activation and control (of which I wrote a first version, but Simon pretty much rewrote it afterwards). Oh, and it also comes with extremely cool icons, made by yours truly ;)

Last week I was notified that I had won a book, two books actually, on Certifdotnet, by getting a top score last month. Both books arrived today: Ajax : le guide complet and XAML, which happens to be part of the same collection as my own book. (Yes, all in French, sorry)

I got the serial cable for my Lego Mindstorms yesterday. I can’t believe how hard it is to get the right serial cable these days. What’s worse, it’s also hard to connect it to a “modern” laptop computer, since they don’t have serial ports any more. But no worries, I borrowed a RS232-USB converter from a friend (who will remain anonymous, just in case ;) ) and, after recharging and buying batteries today, I got to use my RCX again after about 3 years (OK, I’ll admit I could’ve looked harder…).

So, I’m geek enough that playing with Legos (albeit very technological and not-necessarily-childish Legos) is already exciting, I went ahead and downloaded and installed Microsoft’s Robotics Studio November 2006 CTP. Yet another CTP, but this one, sorry Simon, is way cooler that My Exposé. I guess the “new technology” factor + the “moving creations” one makes it more exciting. The only feature I’ve tried for now is the Visual Programming Language (VPL), which allows you to program your robots using drag & drop, but that was enough. I can’t wait to play with simulator and the runtime. I think it’s safe to say that this weekend I’ll be playing with Legos quite a lot :)

Finally, just before starting this post, I learnt that Photosynth, from Live Labs, is now live! Well, a preview is live… If you don’t know what it is, I suggest to get my OPML file and subscribe to most of the feeds to stay informed and/or click here for their explanation. There’s also videos here.

Well, I guess that’s pretty much all. Sure it might not be everybody’s idea of an exciting day, but then again, it’s not everybody’s blog ;)

Oh yeah, and I won 25 cents at poker, which doesn’t seem much, but I actually doubled my stack :)