Channel 9 - Discussions by petknep_home

Coffeehouse - You're kidding right?

petknep_home — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:45:44 GMT

sirhomer wrote:

Jack Poison wrote: What I don't get is why the video doesn't elaborate WHY people think Vista is hard and such to install: Apple commercials.

I'd love to know why Microsoft / Dell / HP / etc. aren't countering with "no, it's 10% truth, that they're saying happens 100% of the time". No, I don't necessarily have to upgrade my PC to run Vista (just my Wireless Router). No, I don't have a secret service dude asking me if I want to really IM some each time I send a message.

This stuff is plainly false, yet no company has the balls to counter it. I wonder why.

Maybe Microsoft should counter it (or pay the OEMs to do it)? Microsoft has the OEMs by the balls, I'm sure they would love to all switch to a free and infinitely configurable desktop OS in the future, instead of promoting someone elses product.

Why counter it? Customers are smart enough to see it for the petty attack that it is. There's no reason to dignify it with a response that only appears just as petty.

Vista is quality software. It doesn't need to attack any other vendor to demonstrate its worth.

Coffeehouse - MSNBC IE7 Issue?

petknep_home — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 20:14:58 GMT

LaBomba wrote:

petknep_home wrote:
It looks like a shockwave issue. I'll get someone to look at it, probably not IEs fault, shockwave seems to be doing the navigation.

Thanks.

By the way who are you and what do you do?

I'm on the IEUX team. My petknep@MS account got nubbed and won't let me in, attempts to retrieve the password have been unsuccessful. Charles also hasn't given me an MS tag.

I work in Bruce's team for Li (see team tour video). I'm the "new" guy on the UX team so while I do own a few features, I try to pick up all the loose ends to try to own more things [6]

Coffeehouse - IE7 vs Firefox 2.0

petknep_home — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 20:05:50 GMT

jamie wrote:

i hope IE8 has:

- easy simple css themes
- choose rendering engine (ie/ff)
- move anything anywhere:

You write the XPCOM -> COM wrapper for gecko and I'll get right on making that circular browser

Move anything everywhere is a good goal though.

I can't remember exactly what thread it was, but there was mention of a Jamie-made browser. It's really not that hard to prototype up a browser in C#, you can just drag the webbrowser control onto your winform, add an address bar and you're halfway there.

I wasted a couple hours of my Saturday putting together a tabbed C# browser with all my wants. Like:
No search bar, just ctrl+s from the address bar.
No tab row, just ctrl+tab switch and my quicktabs knockoff.
Smarter ctrl+enter behavior.
Only caching the toplevel domain in the address bar.
0 install, no 3rd party should need to register com interfaces if they aren't a platform, no setup needed
Small footprint, it's sub 30kb right now.

Coffeehouse - MSNBC IE7 Issue?

petknep_home — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 18:43:35 GMT

It looks like a shockwave issue. I'll get someone to look at it, probably not IEs fault, shockwave seems to be doing the navigation.

Coffeehouse - From redmond with love

petknep_home — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:50:08 GMT

Rowan wrote:

Nah, they'll just put up a big Firefox logo statue on the Microsoft campus.

TFA wrote:

Mozilla held a placard that read, "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18," referring to recent market share data.

I like their placard. It's true, pride does come before the fall.

Much love to the FF team though, don't break your arms patting yourselves on the back with this release .

/I want a giant wooden e
//All we have is neon e's

Coffeehouse - Does persistence pay off when getting a job with Microsoft?

petknep_home — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 07:10:12 GMT

BlackTiger wrote:

Xaero_Vincent wrote:
Plus...

If you're passionate Microsoft envanglist and know enough about technology, especially .NET, then you might have be a good job candidate.

IT'S LIE! Especially about .NET. MS not interested in any .NET developers at all! Look at MS "requirements" and you will see it (excellent "See/SeePeePee" and "KOM"? I hate See/SeePeePee! I'm SeePeePee alergic!). May be in US they are hiring "evanglists" (pronounce as "managers"), but not outside.

Also MS hiring alot of "loyal" but not experienced people. I remember one situation. We have meeting with some "MS guys". Everything was fine until... everything was fine. But suddenly happend some problem. And that guy became absolutely useless and almost disappeared! I found source of problem and solution in 15 minutes, but that guys just said "Oh... Strange... Try to uninstall it and install again". So annoying...

Time to feed the trolls:
Anecdotal evidence, it must be TRUE! If you meet with anyone from Redmond, you're probably meeting a PM and not a dev. The question of who is more leet is beyond the scope of this thread. You should work on your stories though, you don't sound like a fun guy to talk to at a party (some guy did generic thing, then tried another generic thing, and it didn't work!!! LOLOLOLOL)

There's tons of devs in Redmond. We're outnumbered by managers, testers, etc for sure. But too many cooks spoils the soup.

Beer 2.0: No one cares if you love/hate Google, Apple, Linux, whatever other company that you think we have to hate. People openly use their mac book and wear their ipod if that's the hardware they choose to use. We don't hate other companies (see cake sent to Mozilla). The only thing we care about is that you want to make good software.

Back to the original thread:
RJ, what kind of position are you looking for? Dev, PM, test?

Coffeehouse - IE7 slow scrolling

petknep_home — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 04:37:39 GMT

jgr wrote:

Since I installed IE7, I find that other programs have slower screen updates. For example, one program where it is more noticeable is Freecel. On this computer, when I won and the cards all went to the top it was impossible to follow them because they just suddenly seemed to all pop up at the same time. Now, I can definitely see that they are quickly going up one at a time.

The only thing that comes to mind is ClearType. I believe the setting is Inetcpl.cpl (Internet Control Panel) -> Advanced -> Multimedia -> Always use ClearType for HTML rendering.

See if you get a repro after disabling that.

Coffeehouse - Does persistence pay off when getting a job with Microsoft?

petknep_home — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 01:39:26 GMT

I interviewed twice for interning, turned down both times. Got some industry experience doing real win32 work then applied for a full time and got it.

My tips: Know how COM works, be able to debug it, understand how to make objects script accessible, etc. Be able to write apps w/ GDI calls.

Maybe it goes without saying, but it really helps if you work on a product similar to an MS product and then apply to work on that specific product.

My advice is for a dev. I don't know anything about getting hired in test or PM. I don't know anyone who was ever turned down for the test or PM positions which is weird when I think about it. I do know lots of people who were not given dev positions.

There's also the orange badge route which I'm not even close to an expert on. Supposedly contractors make a wage equitable to full time, with some extra to cover the absence of full time benefits. You do get the temporary ban hammer after a year if you don't get hired. I don't know the conversion rate, but I hear it's low.

Coffeehouse - Blimey, that was fast: IE7 sans WGA

petknep_home — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:04:40 GMT

W3bbo wrote:

petknep_home wrote:
It's not a good idea to run system binaries from a third party. All sorts of bad things could be in there.

Please don't post links to crap like this.

Yes, but who are the warez kiddies going to trust more, a fellow pirate or a company trying to shut them down?

This isn't about warez kiddies. This is about you posting a link, leave it on digg.

Coffeehouse - Blimey, that was fast: IE7 sans WGA

petknep_home — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 20:56:06 GMT

It's not a good idea to run system binaries from a third party. All sorts of bad things could be in there.

Please don't post links to crap like this.

Coffeehouse - Slashdot style moderation?

petknep_home — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 05:43:50 GMT

shreyasonline wrote:

In a democratic system, problems must be dealt democratically.

Shreyas Zare

Right now we have a dictatorship (or at best a representative democracy).

Slashdot style moderation is democratic.

Community moderation is power to the people.

A digg style moderation system would be a lot easier that slashdot. You only have to keep a count on the posts, no individual mod points. You can also choose to block specific trolls (yay!).

Most community moderation systems suffer from groupthink and the tyrrany of the majority however. It'd be an interesting experiment though.

Coffeehouse - Why we cant have this in IE7 ?

petknep_home — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 05:41:33 GMT

Having a million options makes things unusable. The button system that IE7 uses is sufficient for the task.

In the time that it would take you to push the checkboxes, you can push each desired button in the IE7 dialog.

Optimizing for the minority is not good style. Clean interfaces for the win.

Coffeehouse - Post your Pet

petknep_home — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 22:09:19 GMT

Taz the Norwegian Forest Cat

Coffeehouse - IE Market Share Drops to Lowest Level in Years

petknep_home — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 18:29:54 GMT

fdisk wrote:

I'm going to come out of retirement for one post and to make a point.

Like I said before, this is a site whose sole purpose is to gather information for the sake of making better ads and evangelizing products better.

It has nothing to do with improving products. This site is a salesperson's dream tool.

Go back to retirement, no one cares. I'm not here because some marketing guy told me to come research tech enthusiasts. I actually care what they have to say about IE7, good or bad.

Coffeehouse - IE Market Share Drops to Lowest Level in Years

petknep_home — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 18:23:52 GMT

Rory wrote:

Minh wrote:

Rory wrote: Or was it started to stir things up?

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, right?

Certainly not - I'd actually argue that "stirring things up" is a good thing most of the time, even though I used the phrase in a negative way here.

But, in stirring things up, Jamie *did* go a little overboard.

However, I'm starting to see that I did, too, so I'm going to back off.

You probably missed the other 100 threads where Jamie expresses his digust for the IE UX team. It may have seemed like he went from 0 to ultrahate in 4 posts, but all the other posts rationalize his level of hate.

Yes, you can't put toolbars and buttons exactly where you want them. Yes, the file menu is not at the top of the chrome. Yes, we put Jar Jar into the original Star Wars movies.

Anyways, back to the marketshare argument. Monoculture is bad in anything.

Coffeehouse - IE7 rollout tomorrow...are you ready?

petknep_home — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 22:35:44 GMT

Can't give you a date. But since IE blog said a couple weeks after available for download, I will confirm that it will NOT be on automatic updates tomorrow.

I was very puzzled when I read slashdot this morning.

Coffeehouse - Clicking "Yes" (or the problem with UAC)

petknep_home — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 21:25:34 GMT

petknep_home wrote:

AndyC wrote: Well it's obviously not impossible to circumvent then, as I just tried the Smiley Central page and you do indeed end up with an IE window running at medium integrity (which remains there regardless of navigation).

It did work as intended for Shockwave though, in that I got a medium integrity window, but attempting navigation caused it to launch a low integrity one.

Hmmm, that is bad. Protected mode gets disabled somehow. I'll check that out.

The smiley central install according to the blogger's notes does pop a UAC, so it might be in high rights. You can disable protected mode ie from high rights. That's not really a circumvention, if you let something run as root, you run the risk of your system getting pwned.

I'll give it a quick try and let you know what I find out.

Ok here's the deal with the smily central stuff. The installer loads IE while it is elevated. This disables protected mode for all zones. This should be a very rare occurence for the user, because of UAC. Note that the original IE window is still protected, only the new window is unprotected.

I misunderstood the last sentence where the author states that restarting the browser does indeed reinstate protected mode. This is why the protected mode status is printed at all times. If it is off, the user should be careful what they are doing and should attempt to restart the browser.

Installers in the future should know better than to do anything more than install files when root. It reminds me of temp file vulns on Unix.

No circumvention here, just don't elevate.

Coffeehouse - *Ignore

petknep_home — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 21:17:56 GMT

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=242873 is the same topic.

Coffeehouse - Clicking "Yes" (or the problem with UAC)

petknep_home — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 21:01:00 GMT

AndyC wrote:

Well it's obviously not impossible to circumvent then, as I just tried the Smiley Central page and you do indeed end up with an IE window running at medium integrity (which remains there regardless of navigation).

It did work as intended for Shockwave though, in that I got a medium integrity window, but attempting navigation caused it to launch a low integrity one.

Hmmm, that is bad. Protected mode gets disabled somehow. I'll check that out.

The smiley central install according to the blogger's notes does pop a UAC, so it might be in high rights. You can disable protected mode ie from high rights. That's not really a circumvention, if you let something run as root, you run the risk of your system getting pwned.

I'll give it a quick try and let you know what I find out.

Coffeehouse - Clicking "Yes" (or the problem with UAC)

petknep_home — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 20:01:05 GMT

AndyC wrote:

UAC itself is brilliant, wonderful, fantastic, will protect lots of people etc.....

What the article actually highlights at the end of the day is not an issue with UAC - it's with IE's Protected Mode. In order to install a add-on, IE needs to run outside of a low-privilege process and so a new instance is started. The problem is that a normal user will continue to use that window to carry on surfing, during which time they'll lose the benefit of Protected Mode.

A malicious site could potentially be crafted to take advantage of that - cause elevation once for something innocuous, then take advantage of continued navigation at an elevated level to attempt to compromise a machine.

Sorry, bro. All wrong. A new instance of iexplore is not started when we need to elevate. We have a medium integrity broker process and a high integrity broker process to handle actions that cannot work in Protected Mode IE. Only those few actions have elevated rights, the rest of your browsing is still protected.

Causing elevation once and then attempting evil actions in subsequent navigations will do nothing.[6]

There's a medium rights version of iexplore that runs when you are in zones that have protected mode disabled. But that has the same rules as regular zones: you leave the zone, you also leave that medium rights process or the navigation fails.

Coffeehouse - C# programmers are more mature than PHPers :)

petknep_home — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 23:01:10 GMT

Could it be that the CLR is less of a pain than IE6?

Coffeehouse - Firefox Developers Invade Redmond

petknep_home — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 22:23:07 GMT

That Firefox default browser problem is due to the new way that SPAD works. No longer are you supposed to screw&chop inside HKCR\http, you are supposed to make your own keyset like IE.HTTP and then use something like IApplicationAssociationRegistration to set it up.

I didn't see him mention that in his blog, hopefully the ISV readiness team talked to him about it. But it was all PMs so they probably just compared tablet pcs all day , just kidding Paolo.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnlong/html/AppComp.asp is an ok resource for vista compat stuff.

Coffeehouse - New Version of AOL is released

petknep_home — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 20:42:25 GMT

Cybermagellan wrote:

OK, this is a touchy point, the argument is NO it doesn't. However some people see talkback data (crashes) and the viewpoint media player as being spyware techniques. However I've personally have seen the data reported by crashes, there isn't anything sensitive (I would say something) with it. With viewpoint the argument is because the behaviors for triggering interactive IMs require streaming commands that there is some way to skim IMs for the context and that's data mining...well I've seen the way it behaves, we stand by our TOS and no information is collected by either of these methods, if you have other concerns please let me know.

Theadjack:
My beef with Viewpoint is that it gets installed after AIM is already running. It seems to install itself at random times (1). This sets off tons of redflags in my mind.

I would first get it trying to slip into start up through Spybot realtime registry warnings (teatimer). Now on Vista I get a random Exec.exe that is trying to elevate (which I'm assuming is Viewpoint).

I want to say no at AIM install time and not have installs slipped under my nose.

I'll say something nice now: On Vista, new AIM windows no longer pull me out of full screen Counterstrike. Not sure if any of this is on the AIM side though, but a much better experience than XP.

(1) It could be installing itself when AIM switches to an ad that requires playing videos/sounds. Which leads to another beef, the "forgetting" of my mute/pause of an ad, glad Vista lets me mute individual apps now.

Coffeehouse - What's your SteamID?

petknep_home — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 18:08:11 GMT

My steam ID should be knepleyp. I play late in PST on weekdays, but I can probably catch you euros on the weekends.

Not sure what all the whining about is with Steam. I never had to go to the store to buy the game, no cd to carry around, just copy to any computer that I want to play from, that's a huge plus for me. Just my opinion, you don't like it, don't buy it, let me enjoy my pwning in peace.

Coffeehouse - Firefox vunerability "impossible to patch"

petknep_home — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 00:16:58 GMT

Xaero_Vincent wrote:

OMG... those hackers are complete idiots!

My response:

30 * 500 = $15,000

Those two hackers could have scored $15,000 to share amongst themselves by simply disclosing information about their findings.

Regards,
Vincent

The problem with your response that $15,000 for 30 exploits is basically nothing between two people. A given browser exploit for IE supposedly has a street value of $10,000. Assuming FireFox exploits are about the same in price, they make 20x by holding them back from MoFo.

Not quite idiotic to hold them back if you have loose ethics. I doubt they have 30 exploits, but they probably take a great deal of pleasure making people with a (smug) sense of security scared again.

Side note: IMO, they should be responsible and disclose them.