Apple observations

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Although my day job involves a lot of work with Windows (often working closely with people at Microsoft), I also use a fair amount of open source software (e.g. Sun Solaris, Mozilla Firefox, FileZilla, etc.) so I’m not completely biased towards the company that everybody loves to hate. I’m also writing this post on a PC running Unix and like to think of myself as pretty operating system agnostic – it’s just that Windows is where I have the greatest knowledge and experience.

I think that Apple produce some great products – I love my iPod Mini and I’d seriously consider buying a Mac Mini should they ever go over to Intel and 64-bit – but I do find that people who use Macs tend to be… somewhat fanatical (maybe it’s something to do with being an oppressed minority). When I dared to suggest that OS X icons are big and a waste of space (not exclusively a Mac problem – I also slated the KDE and Vista desktop environments), it didn’t take long for someone with more Mac experience than me to slap me down and tell me to use CMD-J to alter the size and then “come back… and apologise”.

That was good advice, I’m sure, but my point was that the defaults are ugly (a personal view of course, which I’m entitled to). When I was writing about the OS X/Vista videos a few days back, I came across the following comment about Apple fans (it’s slightly out of date because of the Intel references, but I left them in anyway). I think it’s funny – I wish I’d written it myself, but I didn’t:

“I am an Apple user.I have no opinions, needs or desires that are in conflict with Apple. If it’s good for Apple it’s good for me. If it’s good for me, but bad for Apple, then I oppose it. If it’s good for me, but Apple doesn’t offer it yet, I oppose it. When Apple tells me that it is good for them, I will change my mind and support it. I need no choices because choices mean I can choose something other than Apple, which is bad. Therefore choice is bad. Unless Apple gives me a choice, then choice is good.

Apple’s success means I have been successful at making Apple successful. If Jobs is happy I am happy. If Jobs is angry I am angry. I have no opinions other than Jobs’. When something new comes out, Apple will tell me what it is and tell me how much I want it. I can tell if Apple wants me to have it because they will sell it to me if it is good, and not sell it to me if it is bad.

Apple gives me all the choices I need. I can load music on my iPod that I download from Apple, rip from my CDs or pirate. Piracy is good because Apple permits it. If it were bad they would prevent it. Pirated music helps sell more iPods, which is good for Apple. So pirated music is good.

As of today Intels are bad, feh, I hate them. IBM PowerPCs are good. As of whenever Apple switches, IBM PowerPCs will be bad. I will hate them. When Intel CPUs sit in a Mac they will be good. When they sit in a PC they will be bad, crappy Dells. I will hate them.

The Operating System. Ah-oom. The Operating System. Mac OS X version 4.1.2.3.4.5.6.7 Tigerrrrr. Ah-oom. Oooh, aaah, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, eeeeh, aaaaaaah. Oh Steve. zzzzzzzzzzz.”

[source: MacLive.net]

If you love everything Apple does, please don’t flame me – it’s a joke – and I just plagiarised someone else’s wit and humour, to share it with the world (well, the few people who read this blog anyway). I took a pop at Microsoft a few days back and now I’m redressing the balance! I’m sure someone could write something similar with the names Gates and Microsoft in it and if you still think I’m being unfair to Apple, there was another comment on the same post that made me laugh, pointing out that Vista could be an acronym for Viruses, Infections, Spyware, Trojans, Adware – make what you want of that (although I tend to agree that these are all caused by poor computer discipline).

Where has the Windows User Group – Nordic gone?

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Johan Arwidmark is a Microsoft MVP, who has published a lot of good advice over the years on RIS, Windows PE and other deployment technologies. I’ve found some of this content really useful and have linked to it in the past but last year Johan’s Windows User Group – Nordic website went offline. A whois lookup shows that it is registered to a company called Lutteman Consulting AB, whose website still links to the Windows User Group – Nordic forum but the link is dead (it used to be available under both the .com and .net TLDs).

I needed that information, so I e-mailed Johan to find out where it had gone. I didn’t expect a reply (and didn’t get one either), so I searched for copies of Johan’s articles that had been cached by Google (what a great feature that is!). In doing so, I stumbled some of the articles, republished on MyITForum, where Johan’s bio mentions that he now works for TrueSec AB, whose website proudly proclaims (under news from 16 September 2005) that:

“Sveriges främsta expert inom deployment är rekryterad till TrueSec. Johan är en av fÃ¥ i världen utsedd till Microsoft MVP pÃ¥ deployment.Johans kompetens förstärker TrueSecs förmÃ¥ga att leverera optimerade klient och serverinstallationer för kunder med behov av säkerhet.”

For those who don’t read Swedish, that roughly translates to say that Sweden’s foremost expert in deployment has been recruited to TrueSec, before continuing that Johan was nominated as a Microsoft MVP on deployment in a global poll and his competency enhances TrueSec’s power to deliver optimised client and server installations for clients who need security.

Anyway, for those who don’t want to be cybersleuths, tracking down lost information (I got lucky really), for Windows User Group – Nordic, check out Google’s cached results.

MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger tips

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Windows Live Messenger

My first impressions of the Windows Live Messenger Beta provoked a lively discussion on various issues (some on-topic, and some off-topic) but I’ve spent way too much time on that now (and in any case, I’m meeting up with the author of most of those comments in less than 48 hours so it will be far easier to bore our wives than to spend all afternoon and evening writing comments on this blog…) .

Anyway, here are some tips I found today for MSN Messenger 7.5 and 8.0 beta (Windows Live Messenger).

Removing those annoying tabs
As was the case for MSN Messenger 7.5, there seems to be no option for deleting tabs, just for changing the order in which they are displayed but if you go to Tools, Options, Security and set the checkbox where it says “this is a shared computer so don’t display my tabs” they will go away.

Removing the ads
Matthijs van de Water has some advice for removing ads from MSN Messenger 7.5 but it involves directly editing the Messenger binaries. I’ll leave it for now because the instructions will probably need updating for the new version and it’s in beta – so I expect there will be a few more updates yet!

Mess with MSN Messenger have produced a program called Mess Patch for customising previous versions of MSN Messenger. There are other patches available, but Mess with MSN Messenger is generally considered to be a trustworthy download location.

(Be aware that patching Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger or Windows Live Messenger infringes Microsoft’s Terms of Use. To do so would be your own choice I’m not responsible in any way.)

In any case save your bandwidth by making sure the Video Carousel is not enabled under Tools, Options, General (mine is greyed out).

Product team blog
The Windows Live Messenger product team have a blog. It’s not that useful – mostly “look what we’ve done in the product – isn’t it cool”, but probably a good way to feed back any comments on the beta.

Apple will not stop Intel Macs from running other operating systems

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve just read in today’s Windows IT Pro magazine network WinInfo Daily Update that Intel-based Macs will be able to run Windows (which presumably means they can also run Linux, or any other x86 operating system). I probably will buy a Mac Mini then (once they go to Intel too)… maybe I could find a way to turn it into a media centre PC (I could just use Front Row I guess) – a very nice set top box that would be…

I do think that Apple are missing a trick though by restricting OS X to Apple hardware. Surely software margins are much higher than (even Apple’s premium-priced) hardware margins.

Sun’s university challenge

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last week I blogged about Microsoft’s contest for the New Year and here’s Sun’s – a university challenge to encourage programming students to create a new application or port an existing application to the Solaris platform. The winner gets $5,000 and their university gets $100,000 to spend on Sun equipment.

There’s even a list of ideas for projects – and after just a few weeks of using the platform I agree with many of these (like a QuickTime player – Apple should have come up with one for Linux/Unix by now – after all, isn’t OS X based on Unix?).

Of course, some of the ideas are just plain laziness on the part of Sun – they should really be writing their own bug fixes and creating new device drivers, but then again, now that Solaris has become open source, maybe that’s the whole idea…

Windows Vista – how original?

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I know that imitation is reckoned to be the most sincere form of flattery, but this morning I was listening to episode 37 of the This Week in Tech podcast and my ears pricked up when the guys referred to a video doing the rounds on the ‘net with Bill Gates’ Windows Vista CES keynote over the top of some Mac OS X demonstrations.

I’ve tracked it down (on MacLive.net, although that’s not the original source of the video), and it appears that it was so popular the creator has made two follow-ups:

They’re very funny!

I’m not a Mac user, but I have previously expressed doubts about the Windows Vista interface (codenamed Aero). I also commented last month that the Aero interface seems to be a mix of the Windows XP Luna interface with hints of Apple OS X and KDE. It’s a fine line to tread between plagiarism and a familiar user interface but personally I don’t like any of those big icons.

Right now, my favourite interface is Sun Java Desktop (based on Gnome and borrowing heavily from Windows in its aesthetics and operation, but much “prettier”). I guess it’s all a trade off between user familiarly and innovation, but then Microsoft has always been good at buying other people’s ideas and then promoting them.

Useful command for controlling Windows services

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Back in 2004, I blogged about some new commands in recent Windows releases and yesterday, I came across another one – sc.

More details may be found in the Microsoft Windows XP Professional product documentation or by entering sc /? in a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 cmd shell.

Updating the FTSE 100 symbol for Microsoft Money 2000

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I use Microsoft Money 2000 to manage my home finances. It’s old (read out of support) and a bit confusing when it comes to investments, but it suits my needs and I don’t see any need to upgrade to the latest version right now.

One of Money’s many features is the ability to download stock quotes from MSN Money but mid-way through last year this stopped working properly, resulting in the following message when attempting to update online quotes:

Online Quotes and Exchange Rates:

Money was unable to retrieve a quote for FTSE (London). The symbol $US:FTSE is invalid. To correct an invalid or expired symbol, go to the Details for that investment from the Portfolio and correct or delete the symbol.

The problem is that versions of Money up to 2001 do not allow the investment symbols to be edited. A search of the microsoft.public.uk.money newsgroup turned up some useful information (along with lots of ranting about how Microsoft should fix this – they should, it’s easy enough but hey!) but with help from the advice in one particular thread, I got things working again.

  1. Firstly, I backed up my money data file (*.mny).
  2. Then, I downloaded a hex editor. The evaluation version of the one mentioned in the thread only handles 10MB files (mine was 13MB), so I used Cygnus Hex Editor (v2.50).
  3. Next, I used the Find Data function to search for the old symbol of 55 00 53 00 3A 00 46 00 54 00 53 00 45 (U.S.:.F.T.S.E.). In my data file, this appeared twice.
  4. I replaced both instances of the old symbol with 47 00 42 00 3A 00 55 00 4B 00 58 00 00 00 (G.B.:.U.K.X…) and saved the edited data file.
  5. After relaunching Money, I was able to successfully download FTSE data.

The less technical method of tracking the FTSE is to create an investment to watch, using the $UKX symbol. Whilst this works, it is quoted in pounds (not pence), so is inaccurate by a factor of 100, and doesn’t seem to allow comparisons (for instance, it is often useful to compare a stock against an index).

Now all I need to fix is that investment I made in March 2001, just before the markets took a tumble…

Stock market performance

Apple launches Intel Macs (and new iPod accessories)

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

So, Apple finally launched the new Intel-based iMacs yesterday. These use Intel Core Duo processors (formerly codenamed Yonah), which I think means they are still 32-bit, at a time when the rest of the PC world is finally starting to wake up to 64-bit technologies. Still, at least it’s a step in the right direction (and dual core should whip up performance nicely, although I do doubt Apple’s claims of a doubling in performance simply by going dual core, unless each core is also much faster than the old PowerPC processor).

Of more interest to me are new iPod accessories – like the iPod Radio Remote. Shame it needs an iPod Nano or Video and I’ve only got a Mini.

Telnet issues on Windows Server 2003

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve spent a good chunk of this morning trying to get the Telnet service working on Windows Server 2003. By default, this service is disabled and configuring the Telnet service to start automatically and then starting the service is straightforward enough, but when I tried to connect, after supplying username and password details, my clients received the following message:

Failure in initializing the telnet session. Shell process may not have been launched.

Telnet Server has closed the connection

Although the troubleshooting advice for Telnet at the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 TechCenter appears reasonably comprehensive, it didn’t detail this message at all; however Microsoft knowledge base article 309523 does – but only for 64-bit versions of Windows. My telnet server is also a domain controller, and as the advice involves demoting and promoting the server, I chose not to try it on a 32-bit version of Windows (a Google search revealed plenty of anecdotal evidence that it doesn’t work).

I had been trying to establish the connection from a Unix client, so thinking that was the issue, I tried telnet locahost from the server itself but received the same result and checking the application event log revealed various entries similar to the following:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: TlntSvr
Event Category: None
Event ID: 4049
Date: 11/01/2006
Time: 10:00:40
User: N/A
Computer:
servername
Description: Error in creating CMD process. System Error: A required privilege is not held by the client.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Following the link in this event led me to check for the presence of %windir%\system32\login.cmd

One post on the microsoft.public.windows.server.general newsgroup looked hopeful, suggesting that the Secondary Logon service also needs to be started; however, when I checked, the Secondary Logon service was already running on my server. I restarted the Secondary Logon and Telnet services just in case (that made no difference) but the newsgroup post had got me thinking about the credentials used by the Telnet service (by default, this was NT AUTHORITY\LocalService). I changed the service to start using the Local System account, restarted the Telnet service and it started accepting connections. Just to be sure, I changed the credentials back to NT AUTHORITY\LocalService (which does not need a password) and restarted the service, breaking Telnet again. That confirmed that it was related to the service’s logon credentials and I went back to using the Local System account.

I’m not sure what the security implications of this hack are. Pretty severe I imagine, as membership of the TelnetClients security group doesn’t seem to make any difference to whether my users can logon to the server using Telnet or not, but at least I can get a console connection to my server from a Unix client now (my Windows clients can use RDP).