Microsoft buys into the anti-virus market

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Following Microsoft’s recent foray into the anti-spyware market and ending months of speculation, Microsoft announced today that it is to attack another form of malware through its purchase of Sybari Software.

Whether anti-virus technologies will be included within Windows (alongside the Windows Firewall), or made available as a separate download (as for Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware) is yet to be seen but with the US Department of Justice and the European Union already investigating the bundling of middleware within Windows it will be interesting to see how Microsoft positions its new acquisition.

Sending SMS messages from within Outlook

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of months back, my colleague James Simmonds wrote about a free Microsoft Office SMS Add-in (MOSA) which allows the sending (but not receipt) of text messages from within the Outlook 2003 client (in this context, SMS is Short Message Service – not Systems Management Server). I finally downloaded MOSA this afternoon and it looks good.

MOSA can only send messages using a GSM mobile handset that supports the Protocol Description Unit (PDU) standard. Initially, I attempted to send a message using a standard modem (without success – generating a “the modem does not support messages in PDU format” message) but once I paired my notebook PC with a Nokia 6310i via Bluetooth, everything jumped into life.

For anyone wondering (as I was), what exactly the PDU format is, I found some further information about SMS and the PDU format as well as a PDU string analyser and converter.

Preselecting English (United Kingdom) settings during Windows XP setup

Posted on By Mark Wilson

By default, Windows XP installs English (United States) as the input language. It is possible to add other languages, for example English (United Kingdom), but if you try to remove English (United States) you are prompted that it is in use and will be removed after the next reboot. This may only be a minor inconvenience, but can be circumvented using an unattended setup file, either for a fully- or partially-unattended build.

Within the [Unattended] section of the answer file, a KeyboardLayout= entry may be specified. The Microsoft Windows Preinstallation Reference states that this entry is used to specify the type of keyboard layout to install during text-mode setup and I have found that by using a United Kingdom keyboard for text-mode setup, no United States entries are created during GUI-mode setup.

The KeyboardLayout= entry must match one of the strings (in quotation marks after the =) in the [Keyboard Layout] section of txtsetup.sif (which is found in the Windows XP installation source).

For reference, my RIS-based unattended installation uses the following entries to specify UK-only regional settings and location:

[Unattended]
KeyboardLayout="United Kingdom"

[RegionalSettings]
Language=00000809
SystemLocale=00000809
UserLocale=00000809
InputLocale=0809:00000809
UserLocale_DefaultUser=00000809
InputLocale_DefaultUser=00000809

Further information on the available regional settings may be found in Microsoft knowledge base article 289125 and the Microsoft global development website has a full list of the available National Language Support (NLS) code pages.

ieSpell – a spell checker for Internet Explorer

Posted on By Mark Wilson

One of my favourite features in .Text (the blogging engine used by my Conchango Blog) is ieSpell – a spell checker for Internet Explorer.

ieSpell is a free (for non-commercial use) Internet Explorer browser extension which can be used to check the spelling of text input boxes on a web page. Particularly useful for users who perform a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries), it is both fast (i.e. it runs client-side) and flexible, as its personal word list (custom dictionary) is the same for whichever site it is run against (cf. a server-side system, which would only work for one particular web application). I also like it because it has a UK English dictionary as well as the ubiquitous US English default dictionary.

Once installed, ieSpell may be accessed in one of three ways:

  1. Using the Tools menu.
  2. Using the Toolbar button.
  3. Using a context-sensitive (right-click) menu.

ieSpell is available for download from the ieSpell website.

Five ways to help protect your identity

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A few months back I wrote about the Microsoft At Work microsite and its advice for maintaining your computer at work. It may be a little high level – but it is aimed at end users and that in itself is good because us techies are generally not too good at communicating with non-technical people.

Microsoft At Work has a sister microsite – Microsoft At Home. Again, it’s full of practical advice, but is more consumer-focused and one of the articles that caught my eye recently discusses avoiding phishing scams. Phishing is a rapidly increasing form of online crime concerned with identity theft. In a phishing scam, a malicious person attempts to obtain personal information such as credit card numbers, passwords, account information, or other personal information by convincing the end user to give it to them under false pretences. Phishing schemes usually come via spam e-mail or pop-up windows.