About a week (maybe longer) ago I saw an email that Microsoft has commited to 12 principles for Windows Operating Systems. After that I saw a few articles but none of them had all 12 principles. I finally tracked them down (OK, I was busy and didn't really look for them until now) but here they are:

1. Installation of any software

2. Easy access

3. Defaults

4. Exclusive promotion of non-Microsoft programs

5. Business terms

6. APIs

7. Internet services

8. Open Internet access

9. No exclusivity

10. Communications protocols

11. Availability of Microsoft patents

12. Standards

While I whole heartedly applaud Microsoft's resolve to make sure they don't repeat the mistakes and behaviors that lead to the anit-trust trial and their being declared a monopoly, I am not sure that they go far enough. We still see the European Commision taking action against them and there are other countries as well. Since they already have to be doing this to not run afoul of the anti-trust settlement decree it would seem to me that this is insufficient to satisfy the other entities that are after them.

I would like to see the same principles applied to all computer products. I really hate getting software without any API or other way of communicating with them. I can't understand why manufacturers would think that making their products so proprietary would help sales. In any case I hope this has a ripple effect on the industry and that all products will be better for it.

After having some problems with the smart card reader in my Tablet PC I have decided to move my development to a virtual environment. That way I can format the host OS as many times as I need to (and it seems the only "supported" way to fix the smart card reader problems is to format the machine). I decided that I wanted to move the settings I have for blocking cookies in Internet Explorer. I have spent some time going through the logs from Adaware and SpyBot and trying to keep the cookies that they say are spyware off of my machine. I found that the settings for each cookie are stored in the registry under [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\P3P\History]. Each site has a separate key with a value that shows whether the cookie is blocked or always allowed. I plan on backing up this part of the registry and making sure that I move it to all of the machines that I normally log into to keep the spyware and ad tracking to a minimum.

The following announcement about the Utah Geek Dinner came in my e-mail the other day. I have attended a couple of these meetings and they have been fun and a great way to meet other people who are working on similar stuff. The announcement doesn't say it but I am pretty sure that this is like other geek dinners where you get to pay for your own meal.

We had a great time at Superman (we had our own theatre) and Tucanos last month, thanks to everybody who came to it! 

This month the dinner will be on Wednesday, July 26^th at 6:30 pm at Brick Oven Pizza (http://brickovenprovo.net) in Provo.  Corporate Alliance will be there to help us network better and hopefully make sure that everybody meets everybody.  More details are available in the official announcement on our blog at: http://www.devutah.com.  If you’re planning on coming, please RSVP on our wiki at: http://www.phil801.com/devutah/index.php?title=RSVP_for_the_July_2006_Dinner.

The purpose of Geek Dinners is not only to help technical folks get to know each other better, it is also to help techies and business people get together, hopefully fostering new business relationships.  So, feel free to invite your colleagues, bosses and employees – especially if you’re a business person looking to meet up with some technical talent. 

As always, Geek Dinners are advertised via word of mouth, please blog about the dinner and help us get the word out!  If you are a user group leader/member, please help us spread the word by posting the announcement on your user groups calendar.   

We will be having our monthly meeting for the Utah County .NET User Group (UCNUG) this Thursday at 7:00 PM in room CS512 at Utah Valley State College.

The topic this month will be BizTalk Server 2006. Local BizTalk expert Kris Lundell will come talk to us about how BizTalk 2006 is being used at the University of Utah Hospital. He will talk about practical uses for the technology and show us how to create some interfaces.

If you don't have the time, CPU Cycles, Disk Space, or secret combination to get into the Beta program, you can still test drive Office 2007 without having to install it. You can navigate to http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/testdrive.mspx?showIntro=n and with a few mouse clicks be working with Office 2007 in a hosted environment. While Microsoft doesn't offer support for the product you can jump on the newsgroup and provide feedback.

According to this article on CNET and some other posts I have seen around the Internet, Microsoft released a product called Private Folder that allows you to encrypt the contents of a folder with a password. I am not sure it is such a good idea. There are a few problems that I see with it. The first is that it is not supported by Microsoft. If I loose the password or if there is a bug how do I get back the files that are most likely the most important ones on my machine. The second thing is that with the encrypting file system I can get the same functionality on XP Pro so why do I want to add an additional product. The third issue I see is that I am not sure that it is well behaved. What I mean by that is that if I encrypt the folder that contains the data files for SQL server will SQL Server know how to decrypt the data before it tries to read it.

Having said all of that, I do think that we need to look at how to encrypt data and make sure that when a laptop, backup tape, or some other storage medium is lost or stolen that data is not available.

[July 17, 2006]
I just saw another article stating that Microsoft has pulled the product over concerns from enterprise customers over how maintainable this product would have been. I think it is very responsible of Microsoft to do that, but you would think with all the "smart guys" they have working for them they would have thought of this before releasing the product.

Yesterday marked the end of support for Windows 98, Windows ME, and will be ending support for XP Service Pack 1 in October. I am not sure how many people are still running Windows 98 and there seemed to be very few Windows ME installations out there. I do know of a lot of people who have not wanted to go to XP Service Pack 2 just because they fear that the security enhancements will break something. In most cases it is an on-line game that doesn't play well with the default settings for the firewall. I am aware of one instance where XP SP2 broke a fairly common application. The default for FTP using IE in XP SP2 is to use passive FTP. In accessing one server we would get errors. It had mostly to deal with how the server firewall was set up but it worked fine with SP1. In the end it was as easy as unchecking the checkbox that said to use passive FTP and it works now. You can get more information at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/support/endofsupport.mspx.

Hopefully you have updated your systems to Service Pack 2. If not you have some time still. Get on it.

For a long time I have watched with dismay as my e-mail has reported a lot of trackback and referrals to posts on my blog from places on the Internet that I would not personally visit. I have pretty much ignored the problem up until now figuring that most people who would read my blog would know that spam is a way of life on the Internet. The other day I saw a couple of comments pop up that were definitely spam, they had the same wording telling my site has blogging potential (since that is all I have done I would hope it does) and then a key word. I decided that as much as I hate to censor anything on my site I also don't need that. I went through and deleted the comments and now I am going to try to figure out a way to go back and remove all of the trackback entries. I am hoping that will help out with the signal to noise ratio on my blog and I will try to make sure I post worthwhile information.

I am not a really big fan of Formula-1 racing. Mostly because I don't have the time rather than any other reason. This article caught my eye. The quote "The Council also decided that Microsoft has won the tender to become 'official ECU supplier' for the same period." seems to me that Microsoft will be providing some software for the races. I am not really sure what an ECU is and the article doesn't elaborate. I remember a few years back a video about .NET providing statistics on race cars but I think they were more of the stock cars. I am sure that there must be a lot of trust in the software provided because at the speeds these guys travel it would be deadly to have a software malfunction.

In any case, it will be interesting to watch and see how many people bring out the old jokes about having to reboot your car.