JohnBs personal blog

I heard about Secunia PSI on the recent Security Now podcast. It’s a pretty handy tool - we’re all pretty well drilled into keeping Windows Update current to ensure we have the latest updates for the OS, what about all the apps we have installed?

Secunia PSI comes to the rescue. It’s a light weight download at around 500k and it peforms a scan of your computer for .exe/.dll if i understand correctly. It then checks back with their database of applications to see if there is a security related updated version for the app.

For instance, on my 1 week old installation of Vista it’s telling me my Sun Java 1.6 has a security fix available and provides me a link to download the patch

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If you’ve got an software that’s gone ‘end of life’ then it’s able to show you that too and also the ‘patched’ tab shows you all the software that it detected and the patch level - all on one screen!

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By default it installs it self to start on boot but i think that’s a bit excessive, I prefer to opt to run these scans myself so I’m always in control (or try to be) about what’s running on my machines.

On a slightly different tack from Adobe, the BBC are reporting that Microsoft will be expected to announce Silverlight will be going mobile onto Nokia handsets to begin with.

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One of the first things I did after getting my new Vista laptop was to disable UAC - it just got on my nerves. But after installing SP1 last week i decided it was time to try it out again to see if it had improved as living with it disabled makes Vista no more secure than XP.

So with UAC enabled you frequently see messages like;

it was at this time I disabled UAC and just got on with the job. But it turns out it’s easy to fix. The trick is to run the DOS prompt as administrator - simple when you know how. From the start menu type cmd and then when the search has refreshed the menu, right click the cmd.exe from the menu and choose ‘Run As Administrator’ and you’ll be fine the next time you issue commands from the prompt.

Blogs are beginning to fill with posts about Air vs Flex and a recent Techcrunch prompted this post.

Firstly, let me state I’m neither a Flex or Silverlight developer, I consider myself first and foremost a CF developer and I’m watching the whole Adobe/MS space with anticipation, excitment and caution. I’ve read the recent Silverlight 2 tutorials and i’m excited - Silverlight 1.1 was a beta product (much like Flex 1/1.5), 2.0 looks a much more usable product. One thing that constantly crops us (like the subject of this post) is that Silverlight is not comparable Air - it’s more a Flash competitor. Now, remember I’m not proclaiming to be a Silverlight developer but I can read and i’ve read through all of the Silverlight 2.0 tutorials, after the first 7 it sure seems like a Flash competitor but tutorial 8 moves away from the web and back to the desktop and brings an existing Silverlight app onto the desktop app via Microsoft WPF (with only minor changes to code - hey, it is beta afterall!). Granted it’s not portable (platform) like an AIR app but it leaves me still torn between two camps because on the surface it would seem that Silverlight mostly definitely IS a competitor to AIR - remembering that AIR is the runtime and for the larger parts of the world Microsoft already have a runtime out there, it’s called Windows!

So we’ll see if Vista has been improved…more later.

Way back when Microsoft lost the battle with Eolas (2006) about active content we’ve had to endure the annoying ‘Click To Activate’ prompt around our flash apps/movies - fortunately tools like SWFobject have provided us better ways to load Flash and degrade gracefully but as Microsoft have now settled with Eolas then it looks like the ‘click to activate’ prompt will be a thing of the past with an upcoming refresh of Internet Explorer.
Read more here.

EDIT: From the IEBlog - Additionally this change will be made part of the next pre-release versions of Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3. After giving people enough time to prepare for this change, we’ll roll this behavior into the IE Cumulative Update in April 2008, and all customers who install the update will get the change.

Orginally expected to release early November it turns out now that the offical release date for Windows Vista and Office 2007 for businesses will be November 30 whilst home users will have to wait until 30 January.

Go get it!! Download here

If you’re into LARGE scale enterprise stuff then these webcasts will be of great interest to you - all about how microsoft.com is built, put it this way there’s a lot of webservers and an awful lot of traffic

The Microsoft project ‘Atlas’ - akin to Adobe Spry has received it’s final naming. Name spaces will also be changed from atlas: to asp: and will be integrated into the next release of Visual Studio. Read more at Scott Guthrie’s blog.