Posts by Roddy MacKenzie

Sony e-book reader to debut in UK tomorrow

Only for XP & Vista users

Sony's FAQ state explicitly that it only supports XP & Vista, so tough luck for users of Mac-OS, Linux, Windows 2000, 98 and the rest of us refuseniks.

On the other hand, the FAQ says it supports PDF, TXT and assorted M$ formats. Much as I detest Sony's DRM-everything policy for recorded media, they seem to have got this bit right. Being able to handle HTML would have been nice, but that may be added later .. or hidden in the Flush bits of their web pages.

For the record, only one of my home machines has XP: the rest have 2000, NT4, 95R2, assorted versions of Linux and even 3.11 on MS-DOS 5 & 6.22. (My main PC runs 2000 and my one XP box is on the fritz at the moment)

As for the office .. we have several dinosaurs limping along with NT4 and quite a few 2000 boxes, but mainly XP Pro.

Bumper Patch Tuesday plugs multiple Office flaws

@Jodo Kast

As I stated: NO outstanding patches yesterday.

There were, as Microsoft stated in the bulletin, only five patches for Office 2003.

I'm using Office 2003 Standard (Volume License) on XP Pro (Volume License)

My colleagues are getting 16-18 patches depending on their permutations of various versions of Windows (2000 Pro, XP Pro, Vista Business) and Office (2000 Std, 2000 Pro, 2003 Std, 2003 Pro, 2007 Std, 2007 Pro, 2007 Basic and probably some other versions too)

I haven't tried patching our 2003 Server boxes yet, but I'm expecting anything from 8 to 18 patches (They don't have M$ Office, but some have Excel 2003 Viewer and/or Word 2003 Viewer)

Hmmm. Eleven patches? What about the other six?

I ran Microsoft Update on yesterday to confirm I had no outstanding patches

I have just been informed that there are 17 high priority ("critical" & "important") and one optional (a driver) outstanding for my newly installed and fully patched copies of Windows XP, Office 2003 and Studio 2005 Express

Here's what Microsoft Update did to my PC

<snip>

Installation Summary

Successful: 18

Failed: 0

Remaining: 0

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Successful Updates

Microsoft Windows XP

Update for Windows XP (KB951618)

Cumulative Security Update for ActiveX Killbits for Windows XP (KB953839)

Update for Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP (KB939683)

Security Update for Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP (KB936782)

Update for Windows Media Format 11 SDK for Windows XP (KB929399)

Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool - August 2008 (KB890830)

Security Update for Outlook Express for Windows XP (KB951066)

Security Update for Windows XP (KB946648)

Security Update for Windows XP (KB952954)

Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP (KB953838)

Security Update for Windows XP (KB950974)

Update for Windows XP (KB951072)

Update for Windows XP (KB952287)

Microsoft Office 2003

Security Update for Microsoft Office Excel 2003 (KB951548)

Security Update for Microsoft Office 2003 (KB921598)

Update for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter (KB955434)

Security Update for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 (KB948988)

Security Update for Microsoft Office Word 2003 (KB954464)

</snip>

13 + 5 = 11? Even Paris know this ain't right

Still no update on the "Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification"

It *_still_* points at the June 2008 notification despite repeated requests in July and August to update the page

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/advance.mspx

Good to see they "raleigh car" (as Our Maggie put it) about us at Redmond.

Even Paris knows what month it is (give or take a bit)

MS preps 12 fixes for August Patch Tuesday

Thanks for the quick fix, Microsoft...

Good to see they read the "How would you rate the usefulness of this content ?" comments when victims respond

The "Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification"

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/advance.mspx

still points to JUNE 2008 (despite this being pointed out last month)

Paris? Because she would have (probably) been able to read the comment and fix the link by now

The return of Killer Chlorine

Headline: Dihydrogen Monoxide found in all cancer cells

Ban this dangerous substance before more innocents die.

For further detail, visit the campaign site at http://www.dhmo.org

This warning brought to you by the Minstri uv Ejukashun an Sines

Microsoft updates squash four critical bugs

Today's patches + XP SP3 + AMD/nVidia PC = chaos

It has taken me an hour and a half to get my system working again after today's patches were applied to my XP/SP3 AMD/nVidia box. Here's hoping I don't have similar problems on the other boxes, especially the HP/AMD ones.

Everything went absolutely swimmingly with SP3 on this machine and all the office machines were happy apart from a couple of Sony Vaios. (The KB925877 problem required tracking down a set of uninstall files for the KB925877 executable)

Are your staff adequately trained?

Adequately trained??

Some don't seem to have completed potty training, never mind anything even vaguely related to computers.

Since joining the company a mere 22 jears ago, I have been on one training course: First Aid at Work from the Red Cross. All other "training" has been a case of "There's the manual. We know it's c**p, but that's all there is" ... and that ends up splattered on my official training record. Not bad for one of the first UK software houses to get BS 5750 certified, and now ISO 9001(?) certified. (More worrying is the fact that we still work on projects for the nuclear, chemical, food, pharmaceutical, oil & gas industries)

Topless Liverpudlians confined to tropical fish stores

Re: British Law

Bad news: contrary to Stephen Fry's claim, the death penalty for crimes of Treason (in all its forms) and "Piracy on the High Seas with violence" was abolished in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. "Arson in the Queen's Dockyards" ceased to be a capital crime in the Criminal Damage Act 1971

I checked whether "knowingly and willingly aiding and abetting" a drugs gang was still a capital offence ("Treason in Time of War") - when the Right Honourable Jack Straw MP was Home Secretary he declared, while standing at the Despatches Box in the House of Commons, that "This country is at war with the drugs gangs." and went on to clarify in the rest of his oration that "with" should be interpreted as "in opposition to" rather than "as allies of" [my words, his meaning]

I wonder whether internment for the duration of the war and total forfieture of assets still available for the next time a "celebrity" is up before the beak.

How to counter premature optimisation

Optimisation versus depessimisation

About a decade ago I had the grave misfortune of taking over a project that included a lot of hand coded inline hex embedded in a Turbo C comms module. This ran to about twenty pages of negatively documented (i.e. the documentation did not describe the code or what it was meant to do) diabolocal code.

I ran it through debug's dissassembler and rewrote the whole lot in plain old C. With compiler optimisation disabled, it ran at least 3 times faster in a third of the memory. With optimisation enabled, it ran 4 times faster in a third of the original memory or 3 times faster in 1/4 of the memory.

On another occasion I depessimised a utility that had been taking a matter of hours to run and made it complete in mere tens of seconds, and knocked 10% off its memory use.

Both piles of (smelly stuff) were written by PhD's