If you’re just mucking about with IIS, you don’t really want to pay a CA to get a legit certificate, do you?
No, of course you don’t. Fortunately these guys have a freebie certificate generator. Mucho handy.
Just don’t even think about using it in production code.
Oh, and don’t get the page to email you the certificate to a mailbox you can only look at via Outlook. Outlook’s dumbarse “protecting you from shadows” attachment filter won’t let you at the CER certificate file that comes through.
I’ve been a huge fan of Microsoft’s Desktop Search since it was released, it has changed the way I use my PC and is amongst the first things I install on new PCs. I dream of the day they integrate it with their recently purchase, Foldershare (A magnificent free product that allows you to sync your files seamlessly over the net using P2P technology. It also allows you to search and download from any of your computers from any net connected PC as long as your PCs are turned on. Try it now if you have more than one PC and you want to keep files in sync across them.).
To get an improved version of Desktop Search download the beta of the Windows Live Toolbar. The toolbar doesn’t work in Firefox but it does allow you to update Desktop Search and gain a couple of great features. It installs a new toolbar in Outlook that allows you to save Desktop searches as virtual folders within Outlook – so now Outlook can display search results that include files as well as emails/tasks/appointments. It also changes the Windows default search function (found on the Start menu) to use Desktop Search which means the end of searches that won’t ever find what you’re looking for.
Linux is A European threat to ‘our’ (.us) computers proves how well trolling works.
Windows XP users in some countries who use Windows Update have got a new tool on their machines: the Windows Genuine Advantage Notification. Basically if it reckons your Windows installation isn’t legit, it’ll pipe up “This copy of Windows is not genuine. You may be a victim of software counterfeiting” on the logon screen, with similar messages appearing as popups at random times.
Could be irritating enough to get people to cough up. I’m sure it won’t be long before it’s hacked into submission, of course. Meanwhile Office is joining in with an Office Genuine Advantage verification being pilotted.
Apple launches Boot Camp, to allow Intel Macs to run Windows. There’s already some screen grabs of it running.
As one commenter said: Wow – this is GREAT! Now I can combine the overpriced hardware with the inferior software!
As Ed Bott points out running Windows through virtualisation would be even better. MS’s Virtual PC doesn’t currently run on Intel Macs, but evidently they’re working on it.
Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impossible
“When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit,” Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, said in a presentation at the InfoSec World conference.
It’s the only way to be sure.
They’ve done it: Windows XP is now bootable on an Intel Mac.
Could this be Microsoft’s attempted iPod killer? Origami. Clues on a vague marketing web site. SMH: Microsoft confirms Origami. Leaked advertising video.
Actually looks more like a sub-tablet, PSP-type device to me.
I’m not overly impressed with the Defrag utility in Windows XP. In my eternal quest to try and speed up my mysteriously slow work machine, I decided to give it a go. Cleaned up a bunch of files first, to give the C: drive 6.5Gb free (out of 29.3Gb). Analyze: said I should defrag. OK, so I left it running over night…
Came in the next morning. The little colour graph showing where files are didn’t look terribly different from how it was left. Still lots and lots of red (fragmented files). It said it couldn’t defrag some files… basically anything over 15Mb.
Out of curiousity, I clicked Analyze again. “You should defrag this volume.” What, again? What’s the point?!
I did some more purging and eventually ended up with about 10Gb free. Tried it again. Better, but it still couldn’t/wouldn’t move anything bigger than about 30Mb. Weird.
At least the machine seems to have sped up a tad now.
The Commonwealth Games are looming, as is the week’s extension of summer time in Eastern Australia.
Microsoft have issued a patch for most (but not all) versions of Windows. What they haven’t done is made it an automatic update for affected users, nor made it easy to find — it’s not shown on the Microsoft Australia home page, for instance, you have to search for it. They also haven’t provided a smooth way of reverting to “normal” summer time for next year: users have to remove the patch and manually set the timezone.
Meanwhile Apple have done… nothing. Charles Wright has tracked down how to fix it on Macs, which involves going an finding a timezone update file on an ftp server, untarring and ungzipping, running an obscure (if you’re not a Unix god) command… jeez.
Ask yourself: is the typical non-geek computer user going to seek out these solutions, and even if they find them, are they going to bother to figure it out and do it? I’m betting not. I’m betting a lot of computers will be an hour out during the week of the summer time extension.
This is very sloppy behaviour from both sides of the OS fence, and something the millions of Australian computer users won’t be too happy about in March. (Though most will have forgotten about it by late-April, no doubt.)
PS. 29/3/2006. Still getting a lot of comments here, but there is a later post on this topic here.
Australian Personal Computer: Will Intel-based Apple Macs be able to run Windows? Apple says they’re not doing anything to prevent it. Their Macs will use an Extensible Firmware Interface, which replaces the BIOS, and Windows Vista will support EFI.
Would be pretty cool to have the lovely Apple design for your hardware, plus the lovely Apple OS, but be able to boot into Windows when compatibility was needed.