Tag Archives | Microsoft

Dan Gillmor notes that Microsoft is looking for several employees with blogging experience. My guess is that MSN, AOL and Google will all have blogging within the next six months. Who else? How about Yahoo! and Lycos? Easy guesses. From Dan Gillmor’s eJournal

Answering earlier comments on Ken’s presentation, the XML/XSL editor he demoed was pretty impressive. Arnold Bilansky, who attended the day’s training, said Ken spent an (CORRECTION: half-)hour demonstrating it to them, but he only had 10 minutes at the end of a whirling two hour demonstration for us. (Ken had to get back to Boston for a 9 PM .NET User Group Meeting. Good thing he was on West Coast time!). Here’s what I recall:

• Color coded editor
• Support XSD, DTD and validates on the fly (little red squiggles under bad attributes and elements)
• Intellisense prompting based on XSD/DTD
• Tooltip prompts
• Preview window to view resultant XML/HTML from transform
• He also demonstrated a 3rd party SVG viewer (emphasizing that it wouldn’t ship with the package) and edited XML and showed the resulting SVG. Impressive.
• XSLT debugging using F5 and tracing line-by-line through the process.
• Expected to ship in “Whidbey” (VS.NET.Next) second half of next year.
• Possibly available as a standalone download in the first half of next year, but no promises. (CLARIFICATION: possibly available as a separate download, but still an add-on to the VS.NET IDE, not a stand-alone product – tr 18-Aug-2003 17:08 ET)

More as I recall it and check with others.

I purchased both Sonic Software’s Stylus Studio (update: corrected URL) and Dave’s WebSite’s XMLEditPro a few weeks ago. It seems to do most of the functionality, in terms of running XML through XSL into a result, and showing how lines of transforms affect the output, but it doesn’t have the slick Intellisense or tooltips, or at least I haven’t found them yet. But it may be a good interim solution to look at while we wait for Microsoft to catch up.

Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes You can imagine the SlashDot response to Microsoft’s claim that half of all Windows crashes are the fault of third-party code.

Flamester writes “In a ZDNet Australia story, Microsoft is claiming that half of all MS Windows crashes are the fault of third party code, not their own. That is, according to Dr. Watson. The article also goes into the ‘rigor in which MS tests their products before release’. ”

I am not a technical wizard at the details of the Windows architecture, but my understanding is that there are levels of protection you can develop between the layers of code to prevent a wayward application from crashing the system. In a compromise of performance vs. stability, Microsoft has lowered that protection, and that’s the source of a lot of these problems.

[Slashdot]

I guess you have to move your product somehow. This struck me as a bit bizarre. Microsoft expands Mac Office line with x86 emulator. Cuts prices too [The Register]

A new worm exploiting an older Microsoft flaw. Read the story at http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5062532.html?tag=fdfeed

More details here: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5062524.html?tag=fdfeed

A friend called me yesterday to say the Internet was falling down around him (he also said it was a buffer overflow in an RPC call to DCOM, so maybe he knew what he was talking about). Another complained the user group boards were down and the ISP wasn’t too responsive. It will be interesting to see what happens Saturday. With this much warning, can a DDOS be deflected?

In my inbox this morning are two security bulletins originally issued by Microsoft on July 9th. I cannot find anything in the body of the message or the linked bulletins that indicate why these were re-issued, whether the original patch had a flaw that required a patched-patch, or whether Microsoft was sending these out based on reports of ISPs shutting down sites yesterday based on a DDOS attack. No clue. Here are the links, patch if you haven’t:

http://www.microsoft.com/security/security_bulletins/ms03-025.asp

http://www.microsoft.com/security/security_bulletins/ms03-024.asp

It’s also worthwhile to run Windows Update regularly, and review the basic security precautions Microsoft recommends at http://www.microsoft.com/security.

One of the world’s largest consumer database companies “hacked” “Acxiom Corp has suffered data theft (a kind of quasi-hack) that exposed consumer data on millions of people, according to this AP report. Acxion manages consumer databases for a huge number of companies, including the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Sears, AT&T, General Electric and Bank of America.” Read more at Ars Technica

Cool! Moz is my browser of choice, but hand-coding all the HTML in my posts is tiresome. Looking forward to this update! “mozilla editing. Jake’s got wizzy-mozilla working in Radio under OS X. Watch how quick I change from Safari. Incredible that apple and microsoft don’t see the opportunity of browser based writing.” [Adam Curry: Adam Curry’s Weblog]