Mike's Thoughts

Windows Live. You may have heard of it, but how much do you really know about it? Microsoft, in an effort to slim down its Windows 7 installation, has decided to take a different direction. No longer will you find the OS bloated with applications, like Mail, Movie Maker, or Photo Gallery, that you may never use. The idea is that users who want, and will actually use these applications, can download them for free from Live.com.

However, although Windows 7 is still a way from being released, many of the Live services are available for download right now. Although I have professional video organization/tweaking software (Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom), I decided to give Live Photo Gallery a try. This is the same product featured on the “Mojave” commercials. I also decided to give Live Writer a try. Here’s what I found out.

Windows Live Writer

Live Writer serves one purpose, and it serves it well: blogging. Writer connects to a Live Spaces blog, a SharePoint blog, or virtually any other blogging platform in seconds. I’m even writing this post, which as you know is powered by WordPress, in Writer. It connected to my blog with three pieces of information: the URL, my username, and my password. That’s it. Now, I did need to enable an option in my settings, but Writer told me exactly what needed to be enabled and where to enable it.

After connecting to the blog, Writer temporarily creates a blank post, so that it can download information about your blog, including themes, categories, and more. When you are ready to create a post, you actually see your theme, with the text overlaying it, in the appropriate fonts and colors relating to your theme.

The interface allows for easy additions of pictures, hyperlinks, tables, maps, tags, videos, and more. Additional items can be added to your posts via Plug-ins that can be added to Live Writer. The interface also has one click access to your WordPress Dashboard, blog comments, as well a link to your blog itself.

All in all, this is a very feature rich application that allows you to easily create blog posts from within a professional feeling application, which also allows you to save local copies of your blog posts, just in case something happens.

The only issue I found with this service is that my host does not like the way Live Writer uploads the images that I put in my posts. To remedy this, you simply configure the account to upload via FTP instead of directly to the blog. (If you need help with this, please post a comment, and I will provide detailed instructions).

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery is very similar to Windows Photo Gallery, which is included in Windows Vista. Live Photo Gallery allows you to organize, tag, and fix your photos. The big difference between the Vista and Live versions is that the Live version allows you to automatically create panoramas from your photos with surprising accuracy. The results are similar to a panorama created with Adobe Photoshop. Obviously they are not as good, but they are quite impressive. The major issue with the Live panoramas is that they do not do any sort of optimization or color correction with the photos, so they can appear slightly off. However, for what they are, they are quite good.

Below is a group of five photos that I took, not intending to create a panorama. I created one using Live Photo Gallery and one using Adobe Photoshop CS4. Judge for yourself.

The originals

The panorama generated with Live Photo Gallery (above)

The panorama generated with Adobe Photoshop CS4 (above)

So, just a quick follow up to the issue that I was having with my PS3.

A few weeks ago, I received my PS3, back in working order. To my surprise, it was actually MY unit, and not some refurbished piece of junk.

So, as of right now, things are good. What’s more, I was invited to join the “Home” beta, so you’ll be seeing some posts about that sometime next week, after I get back to school (where I left my system ), and have a chance to download it and play around with it.

Ok, so if you’re here, then you are hear to read my thoughts. That’s the point of a blog. If you are a die hard Mac/Apple Fanboy (or Fangirl) who can’t stand to read something bad said about their idol, stop. Do not pass go. Do not continue reading.

Ok, so I’ve obviously peaked your interest if you’re reading this!

Let me start by saying that I do own a mac. I don’t deny that they are nice looking machines, and my 1 year old aluminum iMac is no exception. Ok, enough praising this sad excuse for a secure computing machine.

Let me paint you a picture. On my mac, I have several accounts. I am obviously an administrator on my machine. Now, sense I’m at college, my family borrows my computer, no problem, cool. My brother is an administrator on the machine, as is my dad. My dad, for whatever reason, does not have a password protecting his account. My machine doesn’t contain the answer to life or the formula to eternal youth, so I don’t really care. This point aside, I recently came to discover something that I would consider a huge security issue and a complete blunder on Apple’s part. For those of you who know Windows, you know that when User A locks their computer, only User A can truly unlock the system. If another administrator logs into the system, it will “unlock” the computer, which really means that the user is logged out, and the system returns to the logon screen. Now, on a mac, if User A locks their system… oh wait, I’m sorry, they can’t! The only way to “lock” the computer is to require a password when the system returns from sleep or a screen saver. Sorry, that’s not the same thing. But, whatever. Now, let’s say that User A locks their system, and an administrator comes to unlock the system. When they enter in their credentials, it does not log out the user, but instead returns them to User A’s session. Hello! Um…. yeah, I don’t care if you are an administrator, you should not be logged into my session where you now have free rein of my system to snoop through my files, change settings, send love letters to that girl in the cubical two rows over in my name, and change my background… don’t TOUCH my background!

Ok, so you’re prolly thinking in your head, HELLO, administrators have access to your files anyway. That’s why they’re administrators. Duh! Well, um, no. NTFS permissions on Windows, as well as the permission schema on the Mac allow users to explicitly deny a group of users access to your files. Without going into too much detail about file security (it can be a doosy), there are two ways to prevent a user or group from accessing a file or folder. You can either explicitly deny the user, or you can simply not define access for them, which will prevent them from accessing the resource. Oh, but wait, the administrator is now parading around my mac as ME, so it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t have access to my files, my mac thinks it’s ME installing 50 GB of software onto the system. Good job!

Now, there might be a way to change the way this logon/unlocking protocol is handled, and I have just not changed it. However, if that is the case (which I don’t think is), the better question is what dim-witted programmer DIDN’T ENABLE IT BY DEFAULT!?!?

This is only the tip of the iceberg on the way I feel about Mac security. I have bashed Microsoft before and said things about Vista and other Microsoft products, but I can say one thing with certainty. That company is not afraid to admit vulnerabilities and flaws in its products and provide prompt updates for them. Every second Tuesday of the month comes the famed Patch Tuesday where Microsoft pushes out important and critical patches to its customers. It does not try to hide these flaws. I don’t care what you think about Microsoft, you CAN NOT deny that it is looking out for the best interest of its customers. Apple on the other hand… refuses to admit flaws in its supposedly “perfect” operating system. Critical flaws can take months at a time to patch, often met with denial from company personel about the alleged issues. Don’t believe me? Read this ComputerWorld: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9110907

It’s crap like this from Apple that makes me want nothing to do with them. Once you get over the wow factor of their, admittently decent looking products, you will see that you are paying for overpriced crap. For the same price, you can get a PC with twice or three times the specs as the mac. I thought that it would be cool to work at Apple. After doing some digging on their business practices, and the horrible way that Steve Jobs treats his employees, I don’t want anything to do with them.

In a class a few weeks ago, we saw a video about the modernization of technology, including the first Apples and the first computers. I caught an early glimpse at how Steve Jobs views innovation, and it made me want to put my fist through a wall. I saw him talk about how he has not a care about how he and his company took specifications from Xerox all those years ago to create the first real GUI and the early macs. Yet, today, Apple whines and complains when Window starts to look “like a mac” <shutteres>. Or better yet, when a company proposes a way of organizing pictographic program depictions, we’ll call them icons, into a straight line, or container, and puts this container along one side of the screen, that’s copying the “Dock.” Hmm, I should probably remove the red box at the bottom of my desktop background into which I organize my icons, because, you know, that looks an awful lot like the Dock. >:/

I’m done watching keynotes where Jobs freaks out at the audience because the guy in the back row took more than 5 seconds to look at the “innovative”, “amazing” new Mac Pro casing that Jobs insisted everyone see. I always thought Apple products were cool, that they were imprevious to security breeches, and that they were made by a company that stood for innovative, original ideas; one that respeced its employees, and valued that interests and opinions of its consumers.

Althought I will probably continue to look out for what next product Apple tries to insist that everyone “can’t live without,” I know that once the potential wow factor wears off, I’ll be left with nothing.

So here we go, Wordpress 2.7. Although it’s in beta, it is showing some very good promise. I have yet to have any hiccups in working with it, other than some issues importing my blog from my old server, thought that isn’t the fault of 2.7.

The interface has been completely revamped and offers a cleaner look, along with a Dashboard that offers more than the old one ever did. No longer does the WordPress Development Bog take up half of the screen. Instead, you see the Blog, Recent Comments, QuickPress, “Right Now”, and information about your theme. QuickPress is a new feature that allows you to quickly add a new post to your blog right from Dashboard. It doesn’t have all of the rich editing capabilities, but it offers a quick and dirty way of creating a new post. “Right Now” shows a breakdown of the numbers of posts, pages, categories, tags, and comments from your blog. The comment section is color coded to give you visual queues as to what needs you attention.

The navigation links formerly along the top of the admin pages have been moved to modular sections on the left hand side of the page which can be expanded or compressed similarly to the way you would a folder in Finder or Windows Explorer.

One of the greatest features of 2.7? Its automation. Need to upgrade to the latest version? Simply click the update button and your system will automatically download, and apply the update. Admittedly, this feature has not worked for me, though I could just be jumping away from the update screen before the process completed. This idea extends wonderfully to plugins. Now, you can search for plugins right from the Plugins administration page. Simply choose the one you want, and the plugin is downloaded, extracted, and added to your system. Just like any plugin you would have installed the old way, you must first activate the plugin before you can use it. 2.7 also offers you the ability to upload a zip file containing the plugin, and WordPress will automatically unzip and install it.

Overall, 2.7 is a wonderful and welcomed change. It seems to be more professional, and allows the administrators and post contributors to log in, and get done what they want to get done, quick.

Ok, so I’m sure you know by now, that I thought, for some reason, it would be fun to host my own server, on my own laptop, in my house. This presented several problems:

• Low power from the laptop
• Limited manageability, especially while I’m away at RIT
• Unreliability the likes of which I have never seen

To remedy the situation, I switched my website hosting (the stuff I pay for) from Microsoft (why I ever did that in the first place, I don’t know), to Linux. This allowed me to transition everything over to a reliable host with more power than I had had before. This means that my blog should run quicker and smoother, and shouldn’t go down every other week! >:|

In short, I’m back! I’m going to continue to write as much as I can, about everything I can. As I mentioned on my blog’s home page, I have encorporated better PHP support, so if you would like to comment on my blog, please register by following the link on the right side of any page in my blog. It’s quick and painless, and you only have to do it once!

Everything is up and running, thought I am still transitioning over a couple of minor things that didn’t come over so nicely (blog tags, images, etc). But everything should be in working order in the next few days. To celebrate, I applied a new theme, which I have found to be my favorite so far, along with Wordpress 2.7 Beta 3. I will be posting about Wordpress 2.7 in the coming days as I have a chance to play with it, but first impressions are good. Very good!

Until then…