Symphonious

G. Andrew Duthie asks: "Will 2005 be the year of Least Privilege" (via Robert Scoble).

Not a chance.  Why not?  Scoble sums it up pretty well (unintentionally):

For those who don’t know what Least Privilege is, it means turning off a bunch of administrator rights so that no software can install without logging off and logging back in as administrator

People don’t want to have to log off and log back on to get stuff installed!  That’s awful.  People want to use their computer and have it get out of the way.  What should happen is that they are prompted for an administrator login when admin privileges are needed and it should all just work seamlessly once such a login has been provided.  Similarly, if they are logged in as Administrator, they should have to provide their password to install software anyway so that they know it’s happening.

Essentially, don’t let software install and run unsafe code without first confirming the user trusts it.  Check out sudo for how to do it on the command line and OS X for how to put a GUI on it.  Then while you’re at it - disable the administrator account and just use this system instead (see sudo for how to handle permissions when there is no administrator/root account).

Sure users can still be daft and install spyware, but putting more steps in their way doesn’t make them not do stupid things if they want to do them.

Every piece of comment spam I’ve had come through in the past few weeks has tried to disguise itself by using HTML entities to escape letters so that spam filters don’t trigger.  Fortunately, this makes it exceptionally easy to filter out that spam - just block HTML entities.  So as of now, if you type an HTML entity into a comment the comment will be rejected.  If you really need a HTML entity to convey your point, post an entry to your own blog and track back.

Life’s too short to deal with comment spam, sorry for any inconvenience.

According to Reuters, everyone’s favorite former Judge - Donald Thompson - has fronted up to the district court and plead not guilty to 3 felony counts of indecent exposure after his famed usage of a penis pump in court (and other assorted indecencies).  I’m sure the team from CSI will put his DNA sample to good use, though I’d be surprised if there were a big enough twist to make a good episode out of the story.

CSI is real right?

Robert Scoble points to an article at Microsoft Monitor complaining that Microsoft is releasing too many betas.  Personally, I love the fact that companies are releasing previews of their software openly and regularly and I want to see more of it.  I know if it actually leads to better software or not, but it lets me evaluate new technology ahead of time and decide if it’s worth pursuing.  Most commonly it’s not worth pursuing straight away but later I run into a project that could benefit from that technology and return to see where it got to.  By that stage the product is normally out in a final release (often a 2.0 or 3.0).  The beta allowed me to see in broad strokes what the software was capable of and get a quick feel for it.

That of course does mean that if you put out a truly awful beta release I’ll probably decide the technology is useless, but it would require a seriously bad release to do that.  Besides, if the technology is totally useless and you were prepared to release it,even as a beta  it doesn’t bode well for the final release anyway.  If the software has a lot of bugs and crashes a lot or behaves unexpectedly that’s okay, but the core technology had better be properly thought out or it will be too late to fix it anyway.

More importantly though, I haven’t tied myself to anyone company so I don’t really care if Microsoft’s (or anyone else’s) beta releases give it such a bad name that everyone moves away from it’s products and it goes belly up.  I’m a user, I’m not supposed to care about that - I just care about the technology potential and if the beta excites me, then it will probably excite others too and do well.

The real problem that Microsoft has is that they have a number of core projects going which have blown their schedules and are in danger of entering a death march.  I’m sure they’ll rescue them but that’s what’s causing the bad publicity, not the fact that marketing is hyping products before they’ve been finished.  Not living up to the hype isn’t a huge problem for a company, but wasting millions of dollars because project management went wrong is a big problem.  If releasing betas can help the project team set milestones and deliver on them then they will help keep the project on track and that’s far more important than worrying about whether or not a few people are disappointed by the beta.

I finally gave in an bought a 40GB iPod this afternoon.  I intend to use it as much as a hard drive as an mp3 player though I’m already addicted to having music follow me everywhere, so it may wind up changing the way I listen to music - we’ll see how that pans out.

Where it will be useful (and has already been) is when the band is learning a new cover song and we need to find a copy of the song to refresh the memories of how it goes and work out the details etc.  Previously I’d have to go home, burn a CD and remember to bring it with me to the next rehearsal whereas now I can just plug the iPod into the PA and hear the song.  That alone will be worth the money over time and it only works if you can store your entire music collection on the player, easily carry it in your pocket (my hands are full carrying instruments and assorted paraphernalia) and most importantly, be able to navigate the songs quickly and easily.  I don’t know of anything other than the iPod that meets those requirements.  The fact that all my music is already stored, sorted and correctly tagged in iTunes (it’s only taken about 4 years to get there) is a major bonus.

I’m hoping it will also be useful for when I write musicals so I can go sit somewhere relaxing or sit in a coffee shop to write and still be able to hear the songs I’m writing into the story line.  It’s very frustrating to write three or four scenes only to get home and discover that the songs you wrote in have slightly different lyrics that make them not fit into the story line properly or a slightly different feel that doesn’t suit the mood.  Now that won’t be a problem and with a couple of weeks holidays coming up I’m looking forward to getting away and focussing on writing for a while to try it out.

A huge amount of the benefit of the iPod though is the fact that it’s an external hard drive that’s about as fast as my laptop’s internal drive.  So it’s perfect for keeping backups on and for installing other OS versions for testing etc.  Since I do most of the Mac testing for work and the iPod and my laptop will be used for that I can even claim a percentage of it off tax.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the headphones are very carefully designed.  If you try to put them in the wrong ears they keep falling out but if you get them the right way around the sit very snugly and don’t feel like they’re going to fall out at all.  Instead of just being round like most in-ear style headphones they have a slightly oblong shape to them so that they wedge into your ear securely.  It’s been quite a while since I’ve used in-ear headphones so perhaps that’s standard now but it’s definitely a very nice feature and one that I’ve not heard mentioned before.  For such tiny little speakers the quality is brilliant too.

Oh and I’m already a big fan of the Music Quiz game.  It plays a snippet of a random song from your library and provides a list of 5 songs from which you have to pick the song that’s playing.  I’m going to have to catch a train somewhere just so I can get some good playing time in…