What if Microsoft Designed the iPod?

You gotta see this.

Don’t buy that Intel-based Mac just yet

…at least, not if you were expecting to be able to boot to both OS/X and Vista.

Australian PC Magazine reports that Microsoft Development Manager Andrew Ritz vows there will be no EFI support in the 32-bit version of Vista.

There’s a lot of alphabet soup floating around, but the bottom line is that it’s going to be difficult (nigh on impossible?) to get an Intel Mac to boot Vista.

No doubt Apple’s working overtime helping the WINE folks, so you won’t have to dual-boot; you can just run the odd Windows app, reliably, from inside OS X. ‘Course there’s a performance hit with any emulator. (Yes, yes, I know that WINE Is Not an Emulator, it’s a compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows programs. Call it an entrenching tool.)

Office 2007 User Interface update

Microsoft has just posted an update to its official preview of the Office 2007 interface. There are only four screen shots, so don’t get too excited. I haven’t commented – and won’t comment – on the interface until I have a chance to take Office 2007 Beta 2 through its paces.

Microsoftie Jensen Harris has the ultimate blog on everything about the new user interface. I agree with much of what he says, but I don’t buy it all.

Anybody who has used Office XP or Office 2003 for more than a day or two realizes that the old menu structure sucks. I mean, why do you have to click on File | Page Setup to specify locations for headers and footers, then click on the View menu to edit them? Doesn’t make sense.

But does putting the Format Painter icon in the Clipboard Command Tab make any more sense?

Sure, you can argue, “Hey, where else would it go?” But that’s the same argument that led to the abomination known as the Tools menu.

I’m still scratching my head. More after I work with Beta 2 for a while.

Hotfix to patch the MS05-013 patch

Here we go again…

Microsoft has just posted Knowledge Base article 906216 which describes a Hotfix for (yet another) bug in (yet another) security patch.

It’s an obscure bug that only surfaces when an ActiveX program displays a specific kind of previously-hidden part of a dialog box. Still, it took the ‘Softies more than a year to acknowledge the problem and fix it.

Chances are very good that you aren’t affected by the patch. Er, the patch of the patch. Don’t lose any sleep over it. But remember that when you apply security patches, weird things may go bump in the night. It isn’t your imagination; it isn’t gamma rays. It’s just another buggy patch.

MS06-005 may clobber Windows Media Player 10

Microsoft has just posted Knowledge Base article 912226 which says, inter alia:

After you apply some updates to Microsoft Windows Media Player 10, you may experience the following issues when you try to seek, to fast rewind, or to fast forward:

The position slider jumps back to the start of the media file.
Content playback freezes, even though the status shows that the content is playing.

The KB article lists three known causes for the problem: security patch MS06-005; Update Rollup 2 for Media Center Edition 2005; and a specific WMP patch that enables DirectX Video Acceleration.

Oddly, the KB article lists two fixes – but they both involve patching a server running Windows Media Services 9. I have no idea if the bug is strictly limited to streaming playback from a Media Services 9 server (which would make a server patch reasonable), or if it’s a more widespread problem, and Microsoft doesn’t have a generally applicable fix.

For now, I’ll just say, HUH?

Vista gets a Transfer Wizard upgrade

Very good news for all of us who expect to be using Vista by the end of the year…

Microsoft has just bought Alohabob.

You may know the company as Apptimum. You may know it as Eisenworld. But I know it for a tremendous program called Alohabob that runs rings around Windows XP’s Files and Settings Transfer Wizard.

Vista Build 5308 includes an uninspiring clone of the old Files and Settings Transfer Wizard dubbed “Easy Transfer”. With Alohabob, we may just get “Easy and Thorough Transfer” in the next version of Windows.

Internet Explorer “Non-Security” Security Advisory

Helen Bradley has an important short article in this week’s Windows Secrets newsletter. The article is in the “paid edition” content, so you have to sign up for the newsletter and pay (you decide how much) in order to read her column.

The gist: Microsoft has posted Security Advisory 912945 which is entitled – get this – “Non-Security Update for Internet Explorer”.

Why does a Microsoft Security Advisory advise you to install a non-security update? Because Microsoft lost another lawsuit. In this case, the powers-that-be in Redmond are trying to scare you into downgrading Internet Explorer by issuing a “Security Advisory” that imposes the changes mandated by the lost lawsuit. Hey, it could be worse. At least the IE team didn’t follow the Office team’s lead and try to convince you that eliminating features because of lost lawsuits is an “upgrade”. What drivel.

Self-proclaimed Ex-Security-MVP Alun Jones hit the nail on the head in his blog.: Eolas won the lawsuit against Microsoft, not against you. Microsoft has to release this update, but you don’t have to install it. Don’t.

Trustworthy computing.

Visual Studio 6.0 0day Exploit

If you have Visual Studio 6.0 installed on your machine, beware.

(Brief history lesson: Visual Studio is Microsoft’s gigantic multiple language programming system. Visual Studio 6.0 is an old version – released in 1998, and supplanted by Visual Studio .NET in various incarnations, then Visual Studio 2005. VS 6.0 included the last real version of Visual Basic – the .NET version of VB doesn’t look anything like real VB. If you don’t program, you probably don’t have Visual Studio installed. But if you cling to classic VB, Visual Studio 6.0 may still be on your computer.)

FrSIRT has posted working exploit code that takes advantage of (yet another) buffer overflow screw-up when Visual Studio 6.0 opens .dbp files (Visual Studio Database Project files) or .sln files (Visual Studio Solution files).

It’s a 0day exploit, which means that Microsoft hasn’t released a patch, and there are working programs “in the wild” that take advantage of the problem. Apparently a fellow called Kozan at spyinstructors came up with the first working exploit.

If Visual Studio 6.0 is installed on your computer, be careful opening .dbp and .sln files. Expect Microsoft to respond, sooner or later, on the
Security Response Center blog.

MS06-003 Patch Bug explained

Back on February 2, in Exchange Messaging Outlook, Vol. 10, No. 21, Diane Poremsky described a rather bizarre bug in the MS06-003 security patch:

If you’re suddenly having problems accepting tasks, check your recently installed security updates. The Security Update for Outlook 2003, released on January 10, 2006 and described in Knowledge Base article 892843, is reported to cause problems when accepting assigned tasks or updating completed tasks on the sender’s tasks list. This security update may also cause some VBA and scripts to fail.

Not everyone who installs this update is affected and later updates may fix it, so go ahead and install it, but if you experience problems opening or accepting tasks, with tasks updates, you’ll need to uninstall the update. You can do this through Control Panel, Add and Remove Programs.

In the current issue of EMO (which hasn’t been posted to the Web as of this writing), Diane nails down the details of the bug:

the update is not installed correctly, which may result in multiple installations of this patch. There doesn’t seem to be a problem if only one copy of the patch is installed so it only affects a small percentage of Outlook users and should not be a reason not to install
it.

For more info, and a workaround, watch for Vol. 10 No. 23 on the EMO Archive page.

It’s Official – Yahoo Helped Nail Chinese Dissident

Reporters Without Borders has posted a document that appears to implicate Yahoo as an informant to the Chinese government.

RWB has obtained a copy of the court verdict against Li Zhi, a former official jailed for eight years in December 2003, confirming that US firm Yahoo ! collaborated with the prosecution, as did local competitor, Sina.

I don’t read Chinese, but the document looks damning – and the story pathetic.

Six Flavors of Vista

Mary Jo Foley has just published a definitive list of the six different versions of Windows Vista. The article was posted at 12:02 am on Monday, so I assume that she was under some sort of gag until this week.

The lineup:

Starter is for developing countries only. I live in one of those “developing” countries (Thailand) so I’ll be particularly interested in seeing if Microsoft continues to cripple the product to the point that it’s nearly unusable.

Home Basic aimed at people who use their computers for Web surfing, e-mail, simple documents – and that’s about it. No support for the “Aero Glass” interface.

Home Premium has all the major features, including capabilities currently available in Windows Media Center and Tablet PC. Although Microsoft didn’t comment about it in the article, Aero Glass will undoubtedly be included.

Business includes Aero Glass and Tablet PC functionality, but apparently doesn’t have the Media Center bits.

Enterprise will include all of the features of Windows Vista Business, plus BitLocker drive encryption; Virtual PC Express virtual-machine support; the Subsystem for Unix-based Applications (SUA), which is designed to allow Unix applications to run on Vista machines; and access to all worldwide languages supported by Vista via a single deployment image. Sounds like a yawner, especially if you run VMware already. Enterprise is only available via site license.

Ultimate includes everything in Home Premium and Enterprise. Available off the shelf – no need for a corporate license.

Office 2003 Update Bugs

Sometimes I think Microsoft has the collective corporate memory span of a gnat.

Case in point: the Office 2003 update installer still hasn’t been fixed.

Back on September 27 of last year, I started a series of articles that described a bug in the Office 2003 update installer. The update installer has a nasty habit of crapping out in odd situations. The bug manifest itself with an “Error 0x51F” when you tried to install Office 2003 Service Pack 2. Thousands (millions?) of people got bit by the bug. Microsoft took weeks to document it, and many more weeks to fix it.

The source of the problem? It took a while, but we finally discovered that anybody who had run Windows XP’s Disk Cleaner and taken the default settings would get an Error 0x51F when trying to install Office 2003 SP2. Weird. But true. It seems that the Disk Cleaner deleted some temporary Office files that were required by the Office 2003 updater. When the updater couldn’t find the files, kaboom, everything went to hell in a handbasket, and the installer died with an inscrutabler error message.

The problem’s back. Take a look at Knowledge Base Article 914907, posted earlier this week, which describes two error messages you might encounter when trying to install an Office 2003 patch:

A required installation file XLVIEWER.CAB could not be found
A required installation file SKU011.CAB could not be found

Guess what? Microsoft hasn’t fixed the Office 2003 installer. It’s still succumbing to the same stupid error that we saw with Service Pack 2. The problem doesn’t occur with earlier versions of Office. Only Office 2003.

I guess Microsoft isn’t making enough money from Office 2003 to justify fixing the problem. Instead, the ‘Softies punt, publish a KB article, and try to sweep it all under the rug.

Bottom line: You and I get stuck with error messages in Office 2003 when we use Microsoft’s products precisely the way they were intended. Microsoft knows about the bug. They don’t have much incentive to fix it.

Trustworthy computing.