Symphonious

It's interesting to watch our press release about the release of EditLive! for Java 5.0 flowing around the various news agencies via a Feedster search.  I really should circle back with the guy pushing out the notifications to see which ones he actively submitted and which ones it flowed around to by itself. It's pretty amazing what you can track these days.

Okay, lets get this clear, driver signing has nothing to do with security.  It might help stability, but security - nope, totally unrelated.  So when you see Windows developers posting under the title When people ask for security holes as features: Silent install of uncertified drivers, and then talk exclusively about system stability without mentioning security once you really have to wonder.

The security of the system has been breached long before the unsigned driver warning pops up - security is breached the minute the installer starts to run or possibly even by the time the installer downloads.

Now if someone would kindly explain to me why Windows 2003 Server refuses to load the drivers for our backup tape drive because they're unsigned (ie: doesn't provide a yes/no option dialog, just a notice to say it refused to load them) and how I might force it to play nice I'd appreciate it.  The whole signing system certainly hasn't improved my user experience with Windows - it's been nothing but a pain in the neck.

You'd think it would be obvious given the number of people looking for ways to clean up Word's so called HTML output to make it look something like HTML, but apparently Google failed to google it.  Good work guys.

So the new Blogger Word plugin is going to result in a whole ton of really, really, really bad HTML being published to the internet (in addition to the current volumes of it).  Sigh, and we had been making progress….

More importantly, even given the fact that most people are already familiar with Word, using Word plugins and macros to provide and interface and managing content within word is generally hated by users who have to use it.  I know because I happen to develop software (featuring a clean up Word HTML feature no less) that replaces that mess for a living and it never ceases to amaze me how much people hate using Word with external systems.  Mostly I see this with content management systems but I'd expect the same problems with blogs since they're just an extremely primitive form of content repository (which is a good thing - it gives them simplicity).

As always the greatest issue with trying to use Word is deployment, just check out the FAQ.  For a consumer level app this will probably work out okay but it will cost them a bunch of users and frustrate a lot of others.

(via Scoble)

Everyone's been busy arguing about what the appropriate name for those things that NetNewsWire and FeedDeamon download, parse and display (eg: Scoble, Steve Gilmor, Scoble, Dave Winer, Scoble, Scoble and of course Scoble - not that Scoble posts a lot or anything….)  Anyway, no one really cares, the vast majority of people haven't heard of any of those terms and will have to learn what they mean so whatever the majority of people wind up learning is what will stick and everyone will have to live with it.  I'm betting the easiest thing to say will win - most likely "feed".