Two days ago, Mia and I saw the premiere of “Crowned“, a reality-based TV-show pageant, where a bunch of teams, each consisting of a mother with her daughter, compete for money and fortunes. Carson Kressley is great fun as one of the hosts, and his humor and down-to-earthy nature is needed. I like to see the plastic mom-and-daughter-combos desintegrate as they are criticised for being plastic, which leads their façade to disintegrate. That’s when they display their true selves. That feels very American TV-show to me.

Three days ago I made a horrendous mistake. I installed a little piece of software on my Windows-based PC which infected said computer with SmitFraud. Pains, pains. I quickly got rid of it once I’d found SmitFraudFix, a freeware. simple-to-use program that I recommend. Thereafter, I switched antivirus-software from Clamwin to AVG Free.

Apart from infecting your Windows DNS/hosts settings, SmitFraud-based malware often cause Internet Explorer to run wild, install a variety of dangerous add-ons, direct you to haywire sites that promise to cure your ills – which they of course won’t – and threaten to kill your kittens. So, what to do? To save you, Michael Howard, a senior security program manager in the Secure Engineering group at Microsoft, has written a utility called DropMyRights, that allows you to run programs in a non-administrator context. He’s written a little tricker – yet more configurable – program called SetSAFER, that allows you to run programs in another context than the one your user account runs in. For instance, if your Windows account has administrator rights, you can do anything. And therefore, as Internet Explorer runs using your account, it has admin rights, too. Therefore, wouldn’t it be great to run Internet Explorer in a user context? Damn right. This can be applied to other web browsers or programs, e.g. Firefox, MSN Messenger and Skype, to prohibit your computer from getting turned into a zombie or worse.

Why has Prada made a raincoat in latex?

I do love bands that let people listen to their latest single in its entirety. Dirty Pretty Things’ “Tired Of England”, listen by pressing the button: . Or you could listen to Glasvegas’ wonderful single “Geraldine” by pressing this one: . Or you could renew your world of thinking by listening to Black Pus’ “In The Garden Of Brackish Pus”: .

I’m thinking of purchasing an Apple Mac Mini to run both Windows and OS X. This would enable me to get rid of my big, stationary PC and save space as it currently takes up quite some space.

Yesterday I went on a little road-trip. Here’s video from the north of Stockholm city; the place we drove into is called Fridhemsplan.

OS X

Yeah, it’s all about Leopard, dropping in October. My fave features:

64-bit: yeah, stability. 64 bits are way better than 32 in terms of speed and stability. One version even supports supports both 32-bit and 64-bit apps.

Stacks: a seemingly nice way to organise your dock. You gather files in your dock as stacks and as you click them, they spread out. You can configure a stack for containing your downloaded files. Every new file’s added on top, and the rest are ordered chronologically. It can be used as an application launcher.

Spotlight: it now searches through other Macs and servers.

Quick Look: allows you to really preview files without opening the applications. E.g. you can browse through a Pages presentation in the Finder; the only limitation to what can be “quick looked through” is on the developer’s side.

.mac: now serves as hub to allow you to always find your computers. This means your home computer only has to be connected through .mac in order for your work computer to find files and other stuffs on it; I wonder how transparent this really is. Will one be able to use Spotlight to search another computer? What about the security aspects? This sounds a bit like the volatility of Skype.

iChat: better audio, tabbed chats and effects. Taking the piss out of Microsoft equals good.

Dashboard: widgets will be comically easy to create from existing web pages/parts, thanks to a small tool, allowing the user to basically scissor out what’s important and let that little part update itself in the Dashboard. Excellent, moahaha. It’s demoed here.

Windows

WTF? Yeah.

Safari: now available as beta for Windows, presenting mad rendering times. Should be interesting and will hopefully put more pressure on Microsoft. I loathe using IE7. What would be better, though, would be if Safari on Win XP actually worked, yeah. It loads, but doesn’t let me enter any text, anywhere. It doesn’t load apple.com properly. It doesn’t display any text on the menues. Blargh. I love it when Apple diss Microsoft but this is just laaame.

iPhone

They showed off a lot of developer stuff, AJAX, web services, and they basically want to say that you have to write a few lines of code to make the iPhone go McGyver.

Today, Plazes launched its new version of the software, also bringing stuff to the table that makes it really usable and web 2.0-y. You no longer need to install the app to use the system and can now let people know where you are going to be at a certain date². 1984 in a nutshell? Bring it to me.

TechCrunch has already written a good synopsis of what the new Plazes means, but I’ll expand on that.

Even though installing the software (known as Plazer, available both for Windows and OS X, although the OS X-version hangs every time I update where I’m at) is no longer necessary, it’s nice to have installed just to see your friends switch places; when they do, a box pops up above your system tray (Windows) and gives you the news. Nice! Now, if only my enemies would do the same.

Warning! Nerdy stuff ahead: I’m still wondering how come the box pops up three times as I update. Once to notify my new place (fair enough), once to say what I’m doing there (just irritating) and a third time…to please the tech gods? I hope it’s merely a sign that The Demon of Newly Upgraded Systems is cursing Plazes, and not that the system isn’t properly tested before launch.³ The developers have probably been under a lot of stress since launching the new version.

I like it, especially now that it’s no-app-required, letting people know where I’ve been in the past and where I’ll be. You’ll see this on my Plazes profile page. I like the idea of groups, but for this to be successful, I think a lot of users are needed. You can add a place to a group and then see them all together, e.g. this group I created for bunching music shops in Stockholm.

The real let-down with this is that I’d love to integrate Plazes with Upcoming, last.fm and Facebook events, but then again, they’re all pretty uptight about sharing their respective info. Say what? They want to prosper? Mash them up, please.

1. Technically speaking, “based on IP address, network IDs from routers and other information”, says TechCrunch.
2. Not within a certain time-frame, though, which I feel is bad.
3. The fact that my flash-badge still says I was somewhere “and hour ago” is probably just a little misspelling. As well as the link to the Mayor of Berlin’s supposed Plazes-page leading to a 404 error-page, which I mentioned in a comment in this post quite some time ago and isn’t corrected. Their web-page says the Plazer still isn’t available for installation, but it is – it automatically updates the old client. Call me whiny, but these scattered bugs and errors tell me the system may hold other little surprises in store.

What you see is me sleeping. Using a program called Dream recorder, I looked into how I slept last night. The software produced this 9-second film by compiling 186 iSight snapshots taken during the night¹ into the film.

The program also produced this picture, where bars indicate movement; the higher a bar is, the more I’ve moved during the night. Looks like 00:30, 01:30 and 03:00 were the interesting hours. Do note that the yellow bar indicates a dream sequence that the software tried to trigger using sounds – in this case, waves crashing onto a beach. It looks like it made me dream harder, and slightly after the sounds stopped I notably moved around.

Quite an interesting little novelty-program, this one!

1. Of course using the built-in webcam in the Apple MacBook I was using.

While driving I’ve found that very few people actually use their directional indicators. Nothing like sheer terror to wake you up in the morning!

11:50

I’m sitting at Blooms on Hornsgatan, which is located in the south of Stockholm city. The coffee is sub-par¹ and I’m waiting to have a slice of ready-made vegetarian lasagne, sitting among mountains of trash that’s just waiting to be cleaned off the tables.

It’s weird to have subscribed to Twitter MacWorld² for the past two days. People have been updating the channel with the most uninteresting stuff. As somebody has written, at times, Twitter is the “Seinfeld” of the Internet: a place where updates are mostly not very interesting. On the other hand, one chooses which to listen to, which is the brilliant thing about Twitter. And, what the hell, I cannot say my updates are interesting to anybody other than myself, which is good; Twitter is about egoism. One writes about what one is doing at the moment, and others choose whether or not to partake of this information. Personally, I’m surprised that not many Swedes aren’t into this, especially as it’s free, but I think most people need to be kicked in the rear about these things to start using them – either that, or somebody they look up to/admire use it. I even dare say that the Blackberry merely boomed when everybody and their dog found out that the contents of Paris Hilton’s Blackberry was hacked and placed everywhere on the Internet. Nothing like having Eminem’s former mobile phone-number to get you Blackberrying, is there?

Oh, Blooms missed my order. This goes well hand-in-hand with their utterly unprofessional service and approach. Too bad that they are in cahoots with The Red Cross in this location; the latter are certainly not benefitting from this relationship.

It’s time to get out of here. Blooms is making me sick.

14:56

What’s up with Microsoft? First, they’re touting open formats, next thing you know, Outlook 2007 breaks HTML rendering by switching their rendering-engine from Internet Explorer to…Word 2007. That reminds me that Microsoft has just announced that they will release Office 2008 for OSX during the second quarter of 2007.

15:45

Yes, I’d very much like an Apple iPhone. Check this video of Steve Jobs showing off the features at the MacWorld Expo, yesterday.

16:51

I like working in Excel 2007 a lot more than in previous versions. Just the new multiple-choice filtering menu is very nice.

1. Mostly due to two things: 1. being poorly made with re-heated milk and 2. the barista put a finger in the coffee and I didn’t complain about it, stupidly.
2. Check out what Twitter is about if you haven’t already, otherwise you might as well skip the rest of this paragraph.

I first wrote about this company a year ago, when their online MS Office-suite clone service was proffering free accounts, a mind-boggling 30MB of storage for every single user and an (at times) extremely sluggish interface. Today, the service brings 1GB of free space and collaborative features. And free accounts for all, yeay!

Now, they’re releasing ThinkFree Viewer, a series of techy ways to view and create MS Office-compatible documents, spreadsheets and presentations on the web.

For instance, by installing their Firefox add-on you can suddenly right-click any URL to an MS Office-file (that’s of the three formats mentioned above, plus these), choose “View with ThinkFree” and it opens without having to have any kind of MS Office-related program (or clone) installed on your computer, only java, which is free software. I just tried ThinkFree Viewer on my home desktop computer, and all that it takes is patience the first time around, as the java-files are installed. After that, even running a presentation in show mode worked beautifully. You can do other things, such as post your office documents to your site by simply pasting the generated HTML-code into your web page or blog post. Use a OSX/Yahoo/Google widget to open MS Office-files.

This is a well thought-through social application that definitely has some growth in it. So, what gives, besides the name that screams “the guy who thought of it wasn’t English”? You register for a free account, enter your mobile phone number, make sure you can receive and send SMS’s. You then invite/add your friends who do the same. Here’s the fun part: you enter what you’re doing. When you’ve done that, by web or mobile, that information is then relayed to your friends by SMS. Don’t see the fun? Imagine you’re in town and want to have a beer with somebody. Instead of calling/SMS’ing everybody you know, you send one SMS, to Twitter, saying the first one to come have a beer with you will get the first ten for free (like I always do, aa-humm). Now you see it!

It also means that you, through the web and for free, can type a message to a friend and it will be relayed as an SMS. That’s more than nice, it’s brilliant.

You don’t have to be tech-savvy to use Twitter. It’s very straight-forward and contains good stuff, such as the ability to configure a time-span when you don’t want to receive SMS’s (e.g. when you’re sleeping) and to turn privacy on, so that not everybody can see what you’re up to. Very nice. It’s quite a bit like Facebook in the way that you record your status and display it to a disinterested world; mine’s evidently placed on the right side of this blog, for example. Speaking of which, this is an interesting interview from The Guardian, where Andrew Herbert, Director of Microsoft Research Labs Cambridge, speaks about SenseCam, a way to “record your day” and then upload it. My Twitter profile page is here.

Ever wished you’d find a program that let you GMail-chat with your friends through a mobile phone? Yet again, Java to the rescue¹ and you’re as happy as pap. I installed this application to my Sony Ericsson M600i and it worked with no errors. It’s simple to GMail-chat with, even keeps a chat log, but, when I tried to use it for chatting through MSN Messenger, that’s when the people I added turned up as proxied accounts in my GMail account (!) and in order to get to “chat” with them this service wanted me to pay up so that it could call them at the phone number they’ve added in their MSN Passport-account. Not very likely. But you do get 0.2USD to text for, which didn’t even amount to 2 whole SMS’s in my case. Thanks, anyway!

Too bad the site looks like it fell from the top of Ugly Tree and hit every branch on the way down. But hey, enough slagging Talkonaut, so I’ll say this service is more than chatting. Or talking, depending on the nomenclature you/Talkonaut are using. I will only use it to text-chat through GMail, but you can use it for audibly chatting with people through GTalk, Jabber, SIP and VoIP.

1. Don’t get me wrong. I hate java even though it’s platform-independent.

Buggar
Ansvarsområden och när sker utbild
BS, DR, TL

1. Nya topplistor “Skrivare” “Skärmar”
2. Stämmer priser mot turbo, MA406
3. Reservation för fel
4. Praylista – sidor som saknar layout
5. Henrik. Mailfel…Uppdrag
6. Utbild torsd 08.00 MF, PA, BS, LZ
7. RSYNK/CRON loaded615C/images >> loaded615C_shop/images

–
inLife – Independent Solutions for Life
Björn Sundberg
Sveavägen 35-37
Stockholm
08-690 09 09
sundberg (at ) inlife.se

http://inlife.se

The list of recipients was quite long. Actually, very long enough to make you think inLife haven’t done what most people who handle professional send-outs do. Those people always make precautions so that e-mails meant to hit everybody on their address list aren’t sent out to everybody at once, in case an accident occurs.

So, what now? One of my e-mail addresses is now out in the wild, spawning more spam than ever. I now have the e-mail address to 2500 of their customers. Or, wait. Those addresses have not been validated in any way. By simply reading said list for a few seconds, I’ve found explicit spam addresses and names such as “FONT.a .font”, “Youve hateBush” and “fxgauoihbp”. I’ve also found e-mail addresses to some very interesting people working against spam.

The company, inLife, has not sent out a public apology, nor a simple apology to their customers, regarding this acute error. In fact, they have not responded at all. Of course, any company with a real sense of service and professionalism would. It’s one thing to make a mistake, but another to act like it never happened; for people that’s bad, for companies it is unacceptable. By the way, their CEO never contacted me despite his “assurance” that the company he works for is “devoted to service”.

P.s. I’ve obfuscated Mr. Sundberg’s e-mail address in his automatic signature, to save him from spam.

By the way, the presentation of Office 2007 was great, and Sharepoint Portal Server 2007 wasn’t very convincing, at least not for me.

edit: MS and Apple spew hate at each-other right now as Apple managed to sell iPods that were carrying virii. As this virus was spread by a person in the manufacturing-process who was using Windows…Apple blamed Microsoft for it. Really. That’s weak. Microsoft, in turn, have acted against Apple using Tyra Banks‘ #1 weapon: fierceness. From the Engadget article:

Microsoft didn’t know what they were shipping [...] Microsoft’s current quality assurance guru, finished off the tongue-lashings by prompting Steve Jobs to “contact Poon if he needed someone to advise on how to improve quality checks.”

Fight, fight, fight!

At the place I work people use MS Office 97 SR-2. When I say that, a lot of people counter with guffawing “whaa?” and a blank stare. “But, I mean, Office 2003 contains a lot of–” and here’s where I interrupt them with “What, really? Think of it, despite the refreshed design, the research tools, and a handful of really innovative, useful stuff, where’s the motif for raising millions of Swedish Crowns to purchase licenses and lift us to Office 2003?” No answer’s heard then, especially as we’re trying out OpenOffice, the free Office-suite (that has nothing to do with Microsoft, but is able to open, modify and save files that have been created through MS Office).

Office 2007 has been built through a process where Microsoft have, for the very first time, really watched how users work when using ye olde Office-suite: which menus and buttons don’t they use? How can we decrease the number of clicks needed for users to perform tasks? Should we concentrate on user productivity? New functionality? Why do users have to wade through loads of menus to find what they need? Those questions really, really needed answers, not only to make people buy the next version of MS Office (and to accept the fact that it will require more of the computer, e.g. processing-power and hard-disk space) but to break the Microsoft development curse: they haven’t delivered a new product in a very long time, and by that, I mean it’s been ten years since the Exchange, Office, VB, server-platforms and so forth jumped out of the bag, so there’s no real ring to it, right? No, shiny new versions don’t count, and neither is stealing everything new from OSX to Windows Vista. But this is shiny new in a nice way, so let’s see what’s up and has happened since my review a year ago.

First, PDF-support is not built-in any more. MS said they didn’t want to bring that competition to Adobe, but really, everybody knows they didn’t want yet another monopoly-trial coming, so they’re instead offering the PDF-functionality through a free plug-in. It actually binds together with XPS, which is Microsoft’s take on PDF.

Second, the visual side. I wrote this comprehensive review – based solely on a video from Microsoft – a little more than a year ago, and have since then been beta-testing Office 12/2007 myself. I’ve found the first versions to be nothing more than bait for developers and people like me, who love to test and often find themselves writing notes about bugs, sending reports to Microsoft all the time, finding differences between the previous versions of MS Office and the new deal – and believe me, if you haven’t seen Office 2007, you most definitely will now.

The Ribbon and the MiniBar (formerly known as the Floatie) are the two main new things. The Ribbon is the death of the drop-down menues in MS Office, and I still maintain there will be no “classic mode” implemented in MS Office that brings the old menues back, unless somebody codes a add-in that achieves that.

Last, a bit about the tiddlers: Pinnable files is a very nice function, charts are brilliant together with the super-new ways to display objects, elements, and putting stuff together, the Sharepoint Server Portal is nicer than ever, although I think it looks severely dated and…well, there are a few more interesting bits mentioned previously, such as the new file-types and how they’re saving space, but this is what’s interesting right now. Until this gets implemented. I mean, Office 97-users won’t be able to open documents saved in the new formats at all. Every newer version of Office will be able to open them (by installing a plugin for it) but then again, Office 97 is ten years old. Ten years!

To finish off, prices: OpenOffice is free, and MS Office 2007 will cost money. Is the new version/upgrade worth it? There’s only one way to find out – try before you buy, and keep notes on what’s good and what’s not. Use it as much as possible, and for heaven’s sake, keep notes – otherwise you will forget how long it took to convert your super-long legal document with 55 different charts to Word/PDF/XPS and you won’t remember what’s better about Outlook 2007 – or if its interface is just cluttered now that it displays much more, if PowerPoint (or, indeed, Office Online) has new, exciting templates you can use, or if those collaboration and reviewing tools just upped the ante. Keep notes. Here’s a visual tour of Office 2007, by the way.