No More Sports Schedules
I’ve been asked by several people if I’m going to do baseball schedules this season. The answer is now unless you really really want me to. There are enough venues to get sports schedules from so it’s no longer worth the work for me. Thank you all for your support over the last several years that I’ve been doing this.
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Police Reunion at the Grammys
It was nice to see The Police on the Grammys last night. I had anticipated their appearance since I first read about it a few weeks ago. They did a good rendition of “Roxanne”. They fooled around with one of the verses to make it a bridge and it worked for the most part. “Roxanne” was an obvious choice for such an occasion but I’d have loved to hear them do something other than “Roxanne” or “Every Breath You Take” (their 2 most well known songs). One can only hope that they’ll do some shows together in the not too distant future.
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Google Toolbar Button Plugin Updated Again
I just updated the Google Toolbar Button Plugin again. I found a flaw in the way that the plugin outputs the XML file that the toolbar uses to create the button. This flaw caused the toolbar to output an error when someone would click on your link to install your button on their toolbar. This prevented any buttons generated by the plugin from being installable on the Google toolbar. I don’t know how long this bug existed so anyone using any version of this plugin is strongly urged to update it to this new version (1.2).
For more information and to download the Google Toolbar Button Plugin click here.
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Livingston Off Base On Vista Upgrade Use
Brian Livingston wrote a very controversial article in his Windows Secrets newsletter last week. The article was titled “Get Vista upgrade, never pay full price” and discusses how you can use an upgrade version of Vista to do a clean install of Microsoft’s new version of Windows. Upgrades are meant to install over Windows XP but Brian explains how to install the upgrade on an empty hard drive, an operation reserved for the full version of Vista.
The topic itself is not very controversial. Every time Microsoft releases a new Windows version a slew of articles are published describing how to do this very thing. The controversial part was Brian’s justification for actually carrying out this type of install.
Microsoft spent years developing and testing Vista. This upgrade trick must have been known to many, many people within the development team. Either Microsoft planned this upgrade path all along, knowing that computer magazines and newsletters (like this one) would widely publicize a way to “save money buying Vista.” Or else some highly placed coders within the Vista development team decided that Vista’s “full” price was too high and that no one should ever have to pay it. In either case, Vista’s setup.exe is Microsoft’s official install routine, and I see no problem with using it exactly as it was designed.
I’m no great fan of Microsoft and it’s business practices but that’s the king of all rationalizations. And while I agree with Brian’s statement that “this isn’t a black-hat hacker exploit” it’s still akin to saying that identity thieves are justified for taking advantage of known security holes to acquire peoples personal data. In both cases the person carrying out the operation is using software in a way that was not intended. And a defense the developers left a hole there to be used would not hold up in a criminal court.
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Flaw in Windows Vista Speech Recognition?
A story on Engadget discusses how a malicious website can take over your Windows Vista computer with speech recognition enabled. Also, you have to see this video on YouTube.
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