John Fabry's Blog

Today I had to do something I've never had the occasion to do in all of the years I've been working with computers. I needed to see what ActiveX controls were currently installed in Internet Explorer. I figured I could dig through Internet Explorer 7's menus, or I could search Google. Oddly enough, Google failed miserably. Maybe I'm just a complete Google scrub and I wasn't searching with the right terms, but I couldn't really find anything about getting a list of ActiveX controls. With that said, I spent a little bit of time hunting around and finally found them. I figured if anyone else runs into the same issue at some point, then maybe I'll be that one hit on Google that actually works. It's a nice thought, but not likely. Regardless...

1.) Go to the Tools menu.

2.) Select Internet Options.

3.) In the new window, select the Programs tab.

4.) Click the Manage add-ons button near the middle of the window.

5.) From the drop-down menu next to Show, select Downloaded ActiveX Controls.

That's it. You should be given a list showing all of the ActiveX controls you currently have running, along with the options to enable, disable, or delete them at the bottom of the window.

When I first bought this laptop with Windows Vista on it, I have to admit that my expectations were pretty low. I figured that Vista would last for a month at most before I formatted the laptop and put some distro of Linux on it instead. After getting so used to running Ubuntu for a couple of years, I really didn't know how well I would be able to adjust back into the world of updating antivirus programs and hunting for applications to install on the Internet. However, things went much more smoothly than I anticipated, possibly aided by using Vista constantly at work, and I think I've been fairly positive about the whole experience thus far.

Unfortunately, there is one part of Windows that still drives me absolutely crazy. If you use Windows then I'm sure you've seen it before and (hopefully) you hate it just as much as I do.

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After updating Windows Vista, my options for restarting (if I choose not to do so immediately) are to be reminded in 10 minutes, 1 hour, or 4 hours. Where is my option for, "I'll restart when I damn well feel like it so stop bothering me"? This drives me crazy and it's something that I was thankful for every time I received a major upate in Ubuntu. The system would inform me that I would need to restart for the installation to complete. A little icon would appear next to the clock which would indicate that a restart was needed. However, the system would never pester me with mindless pop-ups telling me to restart and setting deadlines for when it would remind me next. That's just unnecessary.

If nothing else, at least the 4 hour option is an improvement over the options available with XP. Since I have a laptop, I don't typically leave my computer on overnight, and the 4 hour option means I will usually never see the pop-up more than two times (often only one time depending on when I'm using the machine.) Still, why Microsoft absolutely refuses to give users the ability to not be pestered is something I have difficulty understanding.

Internet Explorer is rather similar to Microsoft itself; people love to hate it. Granted, Internet Explorer 6 was certainly an abomination of software as a whole and it was rightly named the 8th worst tech product of all time by PC World. However, I feel like Microsoft made strides with Internet Explorer 7. I participated in the beta and I loved a lot of the new features it offered, not to mention the streamlined new interface. Even now, I still use Internet Explorer 7 as my main browser on my Windows machine and I don't have any serious complaints about it. Of course, a slew of "geeks" will always flip out when I tell them this, but most of them then tell me about how IE "stole" tabs from Firefox. When I asked them in turn if it happened the same way Firefox stole tabs from Opera, they don't typically seem to know what to say. Geeks? I wonder.

Regardless, since I've been fairly pleased with Internet Explorer 7, I've been eagerly awaiting more information on Internet Explorer 8. The first beta build is currently available and I'll admit that I haven't installed it. I really don't have much time for messing around with betas and dealing with bugs at the moment, so I figure maybe I'll jump on the bandwagon for the second beta, or maybe even hold off for a release candidate. That certainly hasn't stopped me from looking at images, articles, and videos of new features, though, and I'm easily the most excited about Activities.

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Activities are on a contextual menu that allows you to interact more easily with web pages and transfer data between different sites. I typically do a lot of saving, copying, and pasting when I'm browsing the Internet. I'm often adding pages to my del.icio.us account, sending images to Photobucket, grabbing URLs for my blog, or making another vain attempt to get to the front page of Digg. Activities make all of these easier by allowing users to highlight data and then choose what third-party service they wish to use in order to interact with it. If you highlight an address, you can get a quick preview of a map of the area or go to a full-blown web page for it. You can easily and quickly send links to dozens of different sites (and more are being added, as apparently it is up to the site to code itself into Activities), and then choose exactly what you want to do with it without having to copy and paste an endless number of URLs.

Activities essentially emulate the idea of browser buttons occasionally released by various sites. The difference is that since they are contextual, there is no constant screen clutter with which to deal. There is also a very high probability that many more sites will be willing to support them simply because more people will likely be willing to use them. Most people I know don't care enough to bother installing the full-blown Google Toolbar for their web browser of choice. However, most love using the built-in search bar and setting Google as their default search engine. I believe that the same concept will apply to Activities. Quite frankly, I can't wait to try them out for myself. 

Blogging is great because it opens up avenues of opportunity for so many people. You can blog about your life, your interests, or things completely unrelated to you. Bloggers can essentially publish whatever they want for the masses to see (or not see, depending upon popularity and privacy settings.) For me, I mainly blog about my interests - this translates to "technology" since my list of hobbies isn't exactly expansive. I'm the type of blogger who essentially tries to emulate professionally written articles with my work. The only difference is that I'm simply sharing my thoughts; no one would probably ever dream of actually paying me for the things I've written. Despite that, however, legitimacy is still a rather serious concern. Even if people are only reading your blog for fun (something that I would assume describes the current set-up of the overwhelming majority of bloggers), chances are that no one will read your content if you don't have some measure of credibility.

Of course, credibility is certainly difficult to prove when writing on the Internet and doubly so where blogs are concerned. I know that for myself alone, my thoughts are often sourced by information I read previously but the actual sources for which I never thought to jot down. In these instances, my "sources" are essentially at the mercy of my own forgetfulness and bias. I typically make an effort to link to my sources whenever possible. Just because I don't happen to remember where I read a particular "fact", however, isn't going to prevent me from writing an entire article.

To this end, I feel that grammar - at least to some degree - can serve as a form of credibility by proving some modicum of intelligence. Perhaps I am in error, but I typically would believe that someone who can master the English language to a relative degree (assuming no extraneous circumstances, such as English being a second language) is more likely to be a well-educated, believable individual than someone who has not. I'm sure many people will read that and think that I'm just being elitist. However, consider the following sentence:

Microsoft did not include a telnet application in Windows Vista because they was lazy.

I would honestly hope that if you were to read that sentence in the midst of one of my blog posts, you would find yourself thinking, "This guy must be an idiot." It's just exceedingly difficult to think of someone making such blatant grammatical errors as an intelligent individual capable of really knowning what he or she is talking about. Of course, I also feel the need to stress that I'm referring to grotesque errors on par with the one I used for an example above. I don't expect every blogger on the planet to have a writing degree (though it would be nice and I would certainly enjoy having one myself.) Errors with noun-verb agreement, harsh tense changes, and homonyms are ones that should be caught by anyone simply reading the piece. I will be the first to admit that my writing is typically loaded with comma splices and inappropriate verbiage.

Sadly, it seems that a great many bloggers are hamstrung by grammatical ignorance. For example, an acquaintance of mine (who shall remain nameless) has been writing about a particular hobby for several years now. This individual probably spends more time (and also money, sadly enough) with this hobby to have some fairly intriguing, even if overly optimistic, thoughts about it. It's unfortunate that this individual's writing is consistently plagued by what I typically feel are obvious errors, typically with agreement and tense, that make it hard for me to take the work seriously, even if I have had face-to-face discussions with the individual before and am well aware of how intelligent he or she really is. The end result is that I'm sure the popularity of this individual's writing has suffered, at least to some degree, from the fact that he or she was discredited by many readers who saw glaring grammatical flaws and assumed the worst.

Of course, no one is perfect. Articles that are actually professionally written appear to be so due to multiple renditions and expensive editors; obviously these are things that the average blogger is not going to have time and be able to afford, respectively. Still, a little proofreading can go a long way and it could potentially do wonders for the way readers perceive the authors.

"Open" is apparently the latest buzzword on the Internet. From supporting open-source software projects to "opening" websites, everyone wants everything to be open. However, I'm starting to get worried that the very concept of making everything open is starting to take precedence and overshadow the (hopefully) far greater concern of making things useful. This thought springs to my mind after reading (almost a month late, I know I'm falling behind) a blog post by Ariel Waldman about Google's OpenSocial project.

I have heard about OpenSocial, and in fact I even bookmarked their official page in my del.icio.us account several months ago when I first heard of the project and wanted to read more of it. Unfortunately, I never did until now. I had previously assumed that OpenSocial was akin to OpenID. OpenID serves to make a sort of universal login stemming from one location. Then for sites that support OpenID, you can log into them without having to make a new account. The idea is genius and very helpful. I've made it a point to start supporting more sites that, in turn, support OpenID. Of course, that may come off as somewhat hypocritical considering that Vox is not currently an OpenID supporter. In fact, just last week a friend of mine complained that she wanted to leave a comment on this blog and had to hunt for her Vox credentials since it was not an OpenID supporter. Oops.

Getting back on track, it seems fair to say that OpenID has value. It would be nice to have the same profile everywhere online instead of having login 1, 2, and 3 for sites x, y, and z. However, OpenSocial does not emulate this. Instead, it simply serves as an API (application programming interface) for web developers. The idea actually functions similar to the web browser. If web developers code their sites with correct HTML and CSS, then they will display correctly regardless of what browser the end viewer is on (ignoring the giant Microsoft vs. Standards war for the time being.) OpenSocial wants to be the standard API employed by Web 2.0 application developers. Then those applications will work on any social networking site that supports OpenSocial.

The real question, though, is this; who cares? My experience with social networking has led me to believe that the "applications" on them are nothing but a supreme waste of time and bandwidth. The open nature of MySpace (including the ability to embed apps if you were slick enough) drove me away from it. The applications on Facebook are nothing short of maddening and threaten to cause account deletion (again) at any moment. I'm tired of getting a barrage of invites to use the latest application that serves no real relevance. If the option was not included to block these invitations, I likely would've gone crazy months ago.

As Ariel writes, the entire concept of OpenSocial basically helps developers since they can put their application on multiple sites without having to recode anything. However, I honestly feel that it does a huge disservice to users by making these ridiculous applications available on an even larger scale. Instead of having one version of "Group X vs. Group Y" to deal with, you suddenly have 30. How is that a benefit?

Perhaps I'm being stubborn about the potential "evolution" of social networking, but I thought the whole purpose of social networking was to network. The Princeton WordNet defines this as to "communicate with and within a group". So communication is key. I fail to see how a re-vamped version of Drug Wars does that in any way. If I want to waste time, I know how to get to Addicting Games and dozens of other stupid, mindless sites that have the perfect minigames to kill hours upon hours with. If I want to actually communicate with someone, though, I would like for social networking sites to be a legitimate outlet for doing so.

I want to see the future of social networking filled with real evolution. By this I mean changes and improvements. I want communication to be easier and more effective. I do not draw a parallel between "evolution" and words like "proliferation" and "expansion". If Facebook is able to increase its userbase by a factor of 2, that's relatively meaningless to me unless I'm able to actually utilize the fact that these people have Facebook accounts in some meaningful way. Perhaps I'm being a stick in the mud, but I don't see the Family Guy Quote of the Day to be particularly meaningful.

Just a few days after recently making a post complaining about the lack of real power within the Windows command-line (officially coined the Command Prompt), I stumbled across the Windows Powershell. Designed to provide system administrators with far greater control in Windows Server 2008, Powershell 1.0 is a free download (assuming you pass Microsoft's validation first, of course) that will run in Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2003.

Now I will admit that I'm hardly an expert with Powershell. In fact, that very idea is laughable considering that I've had it installed for less than a week. However, I feel comfortable enough with my command-line experience to say that Powershell is impressive. Basically all of the complaints I had about the standard Command Prompt have been eradicated with Powershell, as it presents users with a massive array of capabilities.

First toying with Powershell seemed like a daunting task because it is a completely redesigned command language. While functionality exists similar to the commands of the Command Prompt or *nix Terminal, the actual input is completely different. At first I thought this was a mistake on Microsoft's part, as it basically made the existing knowledge users may have had with the Command Prompt effectively useless. However, as I continued to work with Powershell, I realized that the change in command language was actually a necessary sacrifice on Microsoft's part.

Traditionally, command language is cryptic at best. It requires users to memorize dozens of commands and while it can be immensely effective once that epic task has been accomplished, it makes for a steep learning curve to say the least. Powershell's command language chooses to instead standardize all of the commands, known as "cmdlets". All cmdlets follow the following convention:

<verb>-<noun>

The following screenshot shows functionality equivalent to the cd and dir commands of the Command Prompt.

powershell.jpg

While the functionality is the same,the naming convention makes them much easier to remember. Assuming that the names are intuitive, suddenly working with cmdlets doesn't seem like such a mammoth undertakin. I also discovered that once I became familiar with the terminology Microsoft selected for many of the cmdlets, it was easier and easier for me to naturally derive what a command would be without having to turn to the help command to see the entire cmdlet list.

On top of being a great Command Prompt replacement, scripting with Powershell also seems a little simpler (yet much more powerful) than simply making batch files or working with VBScript. Unfortunately (for me, at least), some aspects of scripting with Powershell are similar to .NET programming languages, none of which I really know. This it will take some degree of effort for me to become proficient with those. Still, I think that the payoff will definitely be worthwhile and I have to applaud Microsoft for making a great command shell that can finally provide the functionality that users need and stand up to the likes of the *nix Terminal.

I found it kind of funny that at the end of my article yesterday, I mentioned RSS as a valid reason why Yahoo potentially shouldn't aggregate quite as much news as they do. However, after posting I had to stop and think about just how few people use RSS, despite the fact that it's now employed by virtually every news site and blog you can think up. This thought was especially prevalent for me because the idea had actually just been touched on, seemingly out of nowhere, at a meeting last week. I won't go into the details for a multitude of reason, but the general topic that somehow came up was: who is responsible for helping people learn new technology?

It's often easy to forget that despite how technology is a hobby for me as well as a job, for the majority of people technology is job-related only. They aren't constantly scouring the Internet for new tech info or reading up on the latest tech news during their commute home. Instead, they show up for work, use a computer from 9 to 5 in order to accomplish whatever it is they need to do, and then return home without really thinking about a computer the rest of the night. For many others, they likely own a personal computer but use it for the bare minimum; they play a few games of solitaire, check their email, and probably look at a website or two that happens to interest them.

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How do people like these get informed about new technology? Currently, I really don't think they do. For some people, that's not a big deal. It doesn't matter if your average user is aware that a new version of Pidgin has been released or if Firefox made a new world record for downloads in a span of 24 hours. However, items like RSS can be a little trickier because they can be much more useful to many people. Sadly, many of these people probably look at the RSS icon every day and have absolutely no idea what it means. Continuing with the example, clearly people can get by without using RSS. However, it could still make their lives easier and a little more productive. Rather than having to stop by 5 or 6 different sites with information that might be instrumental to someone's job, he or she can simply subscribe to the RSS feeds in a web browser or desktop client and do the job in a matter of seconds.

Sadly, this isn't really a topic that I have an answer to. Instead, it's more of a musing, I guess. I have no idea how people who aren't particularly interested in technology are supposed to go about learning new things that aren't essential but which could prove to be very helpful.

As I've mentioned in a few recent posts, I'm a fan of Yahoo News. I like it for several reasons. First, Yahoo's mobile site is great, and I like having access to many of the same stories on my Blackberry that I could read on my laptop. Second, Yahoo is a news aggregate. So while several articles on the site are written by journalists employed by Yahoo, the majority come from other sources. I like this because you can get a solid mix of news with different viewpoints since the sources are at least somewhat diverse. It's kind of like Digg, only without the insane bias.

However, today I noticed these two characteristics coming together to cause problems. On Yahoo's mobile site, selecting the news gives you a few options. If you pick to view the "Top Stories", you'll be treated to several pages that have the biggest stories of the day. The list is fairly limited, but it's usually enough to give me ample reading material during my 40 minute bus ride home (which irritates me since I actually go to work before the rush-hour traffic gets heavy, and thus the commute into work is only about 20 minutes... go figure.) Today, however, there was a problem with the fact that the "Top Stories" were almost all the same story, just from different sources. Thus, out of a list of maybe 18 - 20 different articles, FIVE of them were about a bomb in Iraq killing 51 people. That's a quarter of the news... all for one story.

Granted, that's definitely big news. It's the kind of story I want to know about, but I think that one source should be plenty to satisfy my curiosity. I read the article written by Reuters, but decided to forgo the ones written by the Associated Press and whatever the other sources were. I honestly can't think of any topic that would interest me to a degree that I would really want to read more than one article on it just to get a slightly different take or viewpoint. That's just not worth my time.

Basically, I just really wish that Yahoo would implement some type of filter to prevent this type of issue from happening. If a lot of people were to actually read this, I'm sure a lot of them would think that I should have just gone back to the main menu and selected a more specific news genre. However, when dealing with the default Blackberry web browser, doing so is cumbersome and irritating. Having users with cumbersome browsers is something that Yahoo should really be expecting with their mobile site. The whole process would be much simpler if I just didn't have to deal with the same article 5 times.I honestly don't even understand the point of uploading material on one story so redundantly. If Yahoo wants to upload their own take on a story and then maybe one article written by an outside source, I can understand that. But five? If people really want to read an article from a particular source so badly, they can just go to that site's web page. RSS was developed for a reason.

Between work and buying a new laptop, I've been working heavily with Windows Vista Enterprise and Home Premium for about a month now. It's quite a change after a few years of extremely heavy Linux use. However, it hasn't been all bad and there are some perks to using Windows. On top of that, playing around with Vista has been a fun experience. I haven't really experienced any problems running it on my machine and I'm not sure what all of the fuss is about. I think a lot of the hate Vista gets right now stems from the rocky start that the OS experienced; the bias against it is still going strong even though the vast majority of the issues that had the system hamstrung from its birth have been fixed. I really haven't even considered formatting this computer, aside from maybe formatting it from Vista Home Premium to Vista Ultimate (which I can get a copy of from my my University for no charge). However, if there is one major gripe that I still have about Windows (meaning that I've had it since I first used Windows, it's not just a Vista-only problem) is just how weak the command line is.

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In Linux the command line is often essential, and it's one of the things that tends to scare away potential users. The command line is cryptic and becoming familiar with it is a daunting task. One of the reasons that Windows was able to rise to such popularity as it sees today is that everything in the system can basically be done via a GUI. However, I often find some tasks are actually easier for me to do via the command line, especially after I've achieved such a degree of familiarity with it. Rather than take my hand away from the keyboard to use a touchpad or mouse, I would rather just Alt + Tab to a command line and quickly type in a few commands.

Given this, it's fairly disapointing just how weak the Windows command line is. First and foremost, the functionality just isn't there relatively to the Linux command line. Launching anything other than Microsoft-developed Windows applications is a chore unless you want to manually set the classpath for everything. So instead of being able to type firefox into a Command Prompt and having it launch, I would actually have to specify the exact location of the Firefox executable (C:\Program Files\...). That's a chore.

On top of that, I'm highly disappointed with the fact that Microsoft still hasn't seen fit to develop a tabbed Command Prompt. The Linux Terminal allows me to open as many tabs as I want so that I can avoid having to clutter my screen with multiple instances of the same application. Sadly, when working in Windows I must either 1.) open multiple instances of the command line when working in multiple locations simultaneously or 2.) deal with extraneous typing as I navigate back and forth between the same directories over and over again. Clearly, neither situation is optimal.

It's true that I could simple go and download a third-party command line application if I wanted. I could even use CygWin and have a Linux Terminal on my machine instead of the Windows Command Prompt. Regardless, I wish that Microsoft would at least give a little bit of a nod to the "old-school" users who still find the command line to be an extremely useful tool and throw a few upgrades our way.

As per my normal routine, this morning I woke up, showered, made coffee, and the plopped myself in front of my computer so check up on my email and read any of the latest news. Of course, by "news", I mean "tech news", but I typically assume that to be understood. I've actually become quite the fan of Yahoo News because the site has a very awesome mobile version, which allows me to check the same article on my Blackberry that I would at my computer and vice versa. This morning I was treated to a delightful article on how Yahoo and Google hope to make their IM networks interoperable. I was beyond geeked.

I would like to think of myself as something of a tech connoisseur. I have an email account at every major webmail provider so that I can test out their new technology. I like playing with different operating systems. It's only natural that the same would go for instant messaging clients. However, as the Yahoo article says, instant messaging networks form "walled gardens". That is, you cannot enjoy the benefits of a particular network unless you are explicitily a part of it. It's a shame that I've had so many blogs over the years and have lost an article I wrote several years ago in which I claimed that IM networks should function like email or mobile networks; there can be perks for communicating with people on the same network as you (special formatting, better time, etc.), but all networks should still be able to allow basic communication with one another.

Aside from the fact that this would allow me to play with different IM clients, there are far deeper-reaching reasons for wanting IM clients to function well with one another. For example, life for many would be easier if they could simply use the network that works best for them without having to worry about who they will and will not be able to communicate with based upon that network. For a long time, I was a big MSN fan. To be honest, I still think that Windows Live Messenger is the best IM client there is. If you're running Windows, it's just so nice and smooth; it's a totally streamlined experience that fits amazing well with the Windows environment.

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However, I constantly run into the problem that Windows Live Messenger is of limited use to me because the majority of my friends use AOL Instant Messenger. Since the two network are incapable of sending messages to one another, I have to instead go with a network that provides the best usability, rather than the best functionality.

By the same token, I'm very interested in the latest version of Yahoo Instant Messenger on which Yahoo is currently working. I use Yahoo services a ton, especially for my email. For me to be able to use YIM and see constant updates for my Yahoo inbox would be extremely handy. Aside from that, Yahoo has also been working on some slick new Vista-specific features that I would like to try out. Of course, I don't know a single person who actually uses YIM, meaning that I would likely never get to try those features without some kind of external network capabilities. I'm really hoping that the deal between Yahoo and Google, along with the deal reached several years ago between Yahoo and Microsoft for interoperability, will help bring the walls of the IM garden down sometime relatively soon.