XP "Luna" Theme Back On

Since I Turned off the Windows XP "Luna" Theme back in April, I have been completely happy except for one deal breaking problem. Trillian, my IM client, does not flash the taskbar button without the theme on. I am not sure if this is an XP thing, or a code problem with Trillian, a couple quick googles yielded no results. This problem is infuriating since someone will start chatting and I will be involved with something else and completely miss a conversation for a while because of it. The XP Themes are not good, but missing important conversations is far worse.

Is Windows inherently more vulnerable to malware attacks than OS X?

Tom Yager at InfoWorld must have his flame-retardant suit on today because he asks the question if Is Windows inherently more vulnerable to malware attacks than OS X? The first question for Mr. Yager is why was he swapping out an Xserve G5 for a Windows server anyway? The next is why was the Windows Server service Internet accessible in the first place? It's been a recommended best practice since worms starting targeting this service in Windows 2000 to make sure that is firewalled off from the Internet, and with Windows Firewall you can configure it to only respond to requests from internal IP's However, his billion (million just not being what it used to) dollar question still stands. I dont' remember anyone of any serious technical depth truly going on record and declaring OS X superior to malware by design and enumerating a number of reasons why they believe that to be the case. I don't think its very controversial to say that Windows has some serious design flaws that cause a number of problems, and those design flaws make eliminating or preventing malware much harder than it should be. I think Mr. Yager lists a good number of them, but he does make a few mistakes. In Windows XP and 2003, not all services (daemons in UNIX verbiage) launch as SYSTEM (LocalSystem in the Services MMC), there are two lower privileged accounts that are used, Local Service and Network Service. A TechNet article has the details, but the summary is:

• Local System - Exactly as Yager describes, it is the SYSTEM
• Local Service - Equivalent to an account in the Users group, it access network resources as a "null session with no credentials"
• Network Service - Equivalent to an account in the Users group, but it accesses network resources as the computer account/

On my Windows XP SP2 system right now, I have A LOT of services running, 48 of them, it is a constant source of worry, e.g. do I absolutely need all this stuff running, here is the breakdown on service accounts:

Local Service	4 services
Network Service	2 services
Local System (i.e. SYSTEM)	42 services

That is a lot of code that could potentially compromise any system, and it's not all Microsoft's, Symantec, Lotus, Apple, Check Point, and IBM all have services running as Local System. I am nowhere near technically competent on UNIX or OS X specific internals to suggest that Mr. Yager is correct about OS X's design. My deepest technical knowledge is on the Windows and .NET stacks, so there is no way I can judge if the list of OS X design choices absolutely prevent malware, but if Mr. Yager is correct in his OS X assertions, that sounds like better more manageable design then what MS has ended up with in the production versions of Windows. I don't think it's controversial to suggest MS is well aware of these problems is making a lot of changes in Vista, the most visible being User Account Control. this link details the "Security and Data Protection" improvements in Vista, and there is a section on Windows Services hardening. This is particular telling about previous versions of Windows:

Windows services represent a large percentage of the overall attack surface in Windows—from the perspective of the quantity of overall "always-on" code footprint in the system, and the privilege level of that code. Windows Vista limits the number of services that are running and operational by default. Today, many system and third-party services run in the LocalSystem account, where any breach could lead to unbounded damage to the local machine—including disk formatting, user data access, or driver installation.

Read the whole article for the steps MS has taken in Vista to harden Windows Services. Will these protections make Vista more secure than XP? I would put money on it. Riddle me this: When Vista comes out and the security design changes, which emulate OS X security design decisions from years ago, result in a reduction in malware, spyware, virus, etc., would anyone ever again seriously claim that OS X was more secure primarily through obscurity instead of primarily through better design and implementation? I am not looking forward to Vista from an end-user perspective, but I am eager to see if the security design changes make computing more safe for Windows users.

Upgraded to Blogger Beta...might be a mistake

When I logged into Blogger this morning, I saw the link to upgrade my blog to the new Blogger Beta. I have been a Beta junkie for a long time, so I took the plunge with Blogger. First the good news, Blogger Beta is a lot faster than the last Blogger release, so less annoyance with posting/publishing cycles. Labels (I call them Tags on the actual posts) are finally available, something I wish had been here all along, but I guess I am going to have to edit 2 years worth of post to get this meta-data in, I am anal like that. Overall though, upgrading might have been a slight mistake. First, you have to link your previous Blogger account to a Google account. I choose my Gmail account, and I should have known better, now any Blogger related mail is going to Gmail instead of my main email address. You can't seem to control this, since it's a GMail Google account, I can't change where mail is sent, I guess I could remove GMail as a service from my account, but I should have used my non-GMail Google account. The new Layout Editor is pretty nice, it does most of what you would want to do with rearranging page elements and putting a GUI on editing the CSS and HTML. But I can't edit the actual HTML, that isn't working yet, so I can't replace the default header image with the one I recently created, lame. The JavaScript code for AdSense isn't working in the HTML/JavaScript page element that comes with the layout editor. Not a huge deal, I am not raking in the money with the Ads, but still another annoyance. The other think I did to the base template was remove the border around images I put in the posts, and I can't do that yet so like on my last post has a border around the image. The biggest disappointment by far is that the templates are still designing for 800x600. I hate his, maybe before I do any customization I need to run through all the templates and see if any are optimized for at least 1024x768. I started trying to change the old template to make it work on 1024x768, but I would have had to customize a lot of images and I thought Blogger Beta might have had some options with regard to template size...*sigh*

Tip: Quickly opening an Apple Mail message reply from your Inbox

The other day I stumbled on a bit of subtle UI that is actually useful in Apple's Mail.app. In pretty much all other mail clients I am using, an indicator that a message has been replied to is just that, a static image. Not in Mail, here you can click on the icon and see your reply to that message immediately. Now that I found this feature, I wish it were in Notes and Thunderbird, the two other mail clients I use day to day.

Visual Studio .NET SP1 - Released

Microsoft has released the long awaited (by me anyway) Visual Studio .NET 2003 SP1. I have only been running it since yesterday (I got into the beta program, but I missed the window to download it from Connect, damn) but everything seems fine. The link has the list of fixes, tops on my list are the crashers. If you have ever experienced some of these crash bugs, you know how maddening they can be. I told a co-worker about the release, he couldn't care less because he hasn't seen any problems with VS.NET. I don't think I have ever done anything very taxing to VS.NET 2003, so I guess he has been exceptionally lucky ;-).

Could Apple replicate the iPod+iTunes model to video chat?

One of my primary use cases in October 2004 for getting a Mac was the quality of video chat with an external iSight and iChat. The system has worked beautifully even as I moved from CA back to NJ and went through a number of ISPs before getting to my current configuration. The iSight+iChat experience has been so much better than anything else I have seen, anything on the PC (though I haven't tried the latest Windows Live Messenger, it's like why bother, iSight+iChat is awesome). I even tried connected the external iSight (I am making a distinction here because Apple has an embedded iSight in most new products) to a Windows PC back in 2004, but the results were not good, including garbled video and Windows crashes.

What's changed?
A few new pieces of information have surfaced that have led me to question if Apple isn't missing out on a huge opportunity with there iSight+iChat combination. First, Apple released Boot Camp 1.1 Beta, which includes a number of enhancements, but the one that's relevant here is:

Support for built-in iSight cameras

This reads like its only the embedded iSights which are supported on the Intel Macs, but that would leave Mac Pro buyers out in the cold because the Cinema Displays don't have an embedded iSight. It was only a matter of time, but Mac Only confirms the new Windows iSight driver supports the external iSight as well. iSight+iChat for Windows I am not suggesting the iSight driver is proof of anything other than Apple's intention to completely support the hardware in their machines completely under Windows. If there was speculation to the contrary, this Boot Camp update should put that completely to rest. What I am suggesting though is that Apple is closer to and could release an iSight+iChat for Windows combination, ala iPod+iTunes.

Reasons why Apple won't release iSight+iChat for Windows
There are many reasons Apple won't do this, or wouldn't be as successful as with iPod+iTunes:

• iChat feature enhancements are a key selling point to OS X upgrades, and by extension a key differentiator of the Mac
• iChat has no incremental revenue model
• Video chatting has been historically so poorly implemented it might be difficult to convince users this is real
• iChat can't call mobile or land line phones
• Crowded market for IM/video chat/audio call applications on the PC
• Porting iChat to Windows adds another Windows application that needs to be supported

The hurdles are pretty significant or with significant downside risk (OS X appeal reduced somewhat).

Reasons why Apple should release iSight+iChat for Windows

• iPod is nowhere near as successful as it is today without iTunes for Windows.
• Yahoo, Windows Live, Google, and Skype are all going to or already have started to attack the video chat market with force. iChat as a OS X differentiator from Windows might be in jeopardy anyway if Apple leaves iChat on OS X
• iSight+iChat for Windows gives those users another taste of the OS X world, it's an upsell opportunity to the sacred applications of OS X, the iLife suite.

Enhancements iChat needs to truly make this model succeed
On either OS X or Windows, iChat needs a number of important + fun enhancements, not just fun enhancements to remain competitive or increase it's lead over other applications in the space.

• Phone calls, both mobile and land line. This is such a no-brainer, Apple already has a billing relationship through the iTunes Music Store with millions of customers
• Micro-transactioned content - Similar to songs on iTunes, emoticons, pictures, backgrounds (look at the green screen style background stuff in Leopard), and ringtones all purchasable through the iChat Store using your iTunes account

Apple's Endgame
iSight+iChat for Windows could be the first step to expansion into another market with the iPhone. Online presence and communication can be unified using this device. Move from a Mac at home, or on the go with the iPhone, or at work on your Windows PC and maintain the same friends list and high feature parity between all platforms, with text, audio, or video dependent on the hardware (PCs can do it all, iPhone does audio and video, or all 3 with a BlackBerry style device). Everyone expects the iPhone will be a cellular based technology. It's possible Apple is going to go the WiFi, or WiMAX route, or even a hybrid approach that uses cell or WiFi depending on the network technology available wherever you are. Vonage and Skype are releasing WiFi phones that are modeled on cordless telephones, not very innovative thinking. The Vonage V-Phone a USB keychain that lets you take your Vonage account to any PC to turn it into a Vonage compatible phone looks a lot like an orange iPod shuffle, why can't Apple put iChat on all iPods? iChat on OS X is using the same network technology, SIP, as Vonage, so network connectivity can't be a major hurdle.

Conclusion
Apple's iPod millions should allow an expansion into another market. Apple's CFO Peter Oppenheimer said recently when asked about cell phones eating into the iPods market for stand-alone music players:

...we're not sitting around doing nothing.

I think that's clear they have to enter the mobile phone market, exactly what form that takes is the question. If they port iChat to Windows and unify the friends presence and communication problem across PCs, Macs and mobile devices, I think Apple could be a hugely disruptive force in the mobile phone market. Even if Apple just released the iSight+iChat properly for Windows, it could be very disruptive. Microsoft is now selling webcams in the same price range as the external iSight, and as this article about the announcement of the MS webcams states the webcam market is growing, Logitech reported earnings of $273 million with 36% growth. With Apple's great looking iSight and the elegance and ease of use of iChat, I easily think they could have a winner on their hands.

RoughlyDrafted just went up in flames

A few days ago I recommended Daniel Eran's RoughlyDrafted Magazine as one of my favorite writers on the interweb. Today Daniel posted Windows 5x More Expensive than Mac OS X and the site has basically gone up in flames because of the article. Daniel makes some good points on maintenance costs for Windows due to antivirus programs and updates for normal users (i.e. those that aren't geeks). I know multiple family and friends that are on the yearly subscription plan for Norton AntiVirus because it is the easiest thing for them to do. I just recently learned of free antivirus, so I will probably start switching people over after I have looked into how good or not this stuff is. I think Daniel's point still stands, a lot of Windows users are paying Norton or McAfee an annual fee for antivirus. Daniel goes off the rails when he suggest that Windows user's are paying BestBuy's Geek Squad $200 a year, $1400 since XP came out, for spyware and security cleaning. I don't know anyone that has used that service, they usually find a geek like me to clean up their machines or live with the infestation. I did recently find out my parents paid someone $90 to do a secure wipe of the hard drive on an old Windows 98 computer before getting rid of the machine (which was replaced by an iMac), so maybe there is something to it after all. But Daniel can't pin the Geek Squad fee on the annual costs of Windows with no supporting evidence, that's just bad reporting. Daniel I expect better.

Mozilla Thunderbird Theme Recommendation: Tiger Mail

With both Firefox and Thunderbird, I have in general stayed with the default theme. For Firefox, I am using the 2.0b1 and there aren't a lot of themes compatible, or if there are, the Firefox add-ons site does a real poor job showing me what is compatible, I can't find a way to tell it just show me themes for 2.0b1 and greater, you get everything so it turns into a fishing expedition. Anyway, there is a theme for Thunderbird that approximates the look of Apple's Mail in OS X Tiger so well it has become my default, aptly named Tiger Mail. It feels like Thunderbird is more usable now because most of the UI elements are more obvious with Tiger's graphics. I then rearranged the main toolbar buttons to be in nearly the same place as Apple Mail. Highly Recommended.

Configuring Mozilla Thunderbird to work with .Mac Mail's Trash Folder

I use Mozilla Thunderbird on my work PC to check my .Mac Mail account. All in all, it's a good program, with one nagging problem with .Mac, the trash folder name expected by Thunderbird is Trash, but .Mac's trash folder name is Deleted Messages. I have basically been living with this problem for years by configuring Thunderbird to "mark message as deleted" and "expunge on exit" combination, but it's sub-optimal since messages that get moved remain in your Inbox folder until you exit, although marked for deletion. I kept thinking this would get "fixed" in a newer release, or at least the ability to change the name of the Trash folder. After reading through the lengthy Thunderbird 2.0 Alpha 1 changlog and not seeing any mention of this specific issue, I went looking in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base, which I never thought may have existed and I never googled on this issue because it is obvious in the UI changing the name of the folder Thunderbird uses for Trash is not possible. But it is! You just have to know how to create a user.js file in your profile folder with the right command. The instructions are at MozillaZine KB - IMAP Trash Folder.

The misinformation that Mac OS X users are zealots

In the comment's for Daniel Eran's article, The Time Machine Rip-Off Myth at Roughly Drafted Magazine, I said the following in response to commentors suggesting that Daniel unraveling some myths being perpetuated about the Time Machine feature in OS X Leopard:

Another good article. It should be obvious to anyone that Time Machine is a tremendous advance in usability and capability over Volume Shadow Copies by allowing browsing and restoration within the native apps UI, making it within the realm of possibility that mom can do it on her own. The first part, the unraveling of the Paul Thurrott's "Secret Formula" is probably necessary, seems like he has spun more out of control than usual. Too bad it has come to this, I too would like reasoned intelligent analysis vs. the kind of stuff Thurrott has been doing lately. As for the Mac "haters" posting here saying that Mac users think they are better or smarter than everyone else, for most of us that's simply not true. A lot of us use Windows, OS X, and Linux and are just looking for the best technology that allows us to get more stuff done, with less hassle, than the other tech out there. If 1 million people say OS X is better than Windows, it means its better for them. If you talk to them about it and their use cases intersect with your use cases and you are not using OS X and its apps, most of the time OS X users are going to suggest why they think OS X might be better for you. Obviously, as with anything in life, some people that have discovered OS X before others believe they are better for getting their earlier, it validates them. Just like people that find good bands before others, you kinda have to ignore those people for being pompous about it. What Daniel does here, and hopefully from time to time I do on my blog, is show people what is better in OS X and why compared to primarily Windows since it has the market. This isn't some superiority complex, I think we are both trying to help people save time in their lives if something works better, because after all time is the most precious commodity we have.

Daniel is one of my favorite writer's on the interweb, I highly suggest you subscribe to his feed.