Precision Computing

Well, Scott and Omar have been busy again, and have just released DasBlog 1.8. It's added a few helpful new features, and plenty of themes. The upgrade went painlessly as far as I can tell -- be sure to let me know if you see any issues!

I've set "BlogXP" as my theme -- it sure is beautiful. My pet peeve of the old "Discreet Blog Blue" was that the sidebar would float all around, and generally mess with layout. Especially on Administration pages. BlogXP is fully functional, and bug-free so far :)

The only down-side is that I try to port the general look and feel back to the stylesheet of my regular homepage when I change the look of the blog. I try to limit this to the colours and minor design elements, though, so my main homepage looks pretty darn plain again. Oh well, the last time I updated that page was over a year ago!

That reminds me. I've been meaning to drop a line to Scott and Omar, thanking them for a wonderful blogging system. I'll probably forget that again for a long time, so let me say it now -- Thank You! You guys have really got a great system going.

If you've read Adam's post ("Preparing for Slashdot",) you probably read how we worked to inform the Slashdot crowd via early entries in the discussion. Luckily, they were moderated up fairly quickly, and people were able to continue commenting with quite a bit more basis in fact than the original article provided.

Often, this is called "Astroturfing," alluding to "fake grass" in a grass-roots movement.

Scoble brought it up, as have some internal discussions over the past few days. Scoble wrote:

Here's one place I got uncomfortable. In the past Microsoft astroturfed its way into issues. I always told myself if I saw astroturfing going on I'd point it out and oppose its use. (...) I'm not saying Adam and Lee crossed the line here (they didn't), but I wanted to point out what they did so that we can have a public discussion about it. I think what they did was OK simply because it was in the spirit of getting the facts out.

I personally don't even think this even approached astroturfing. First of all, I do consider myself a member of the Slashdot community. In fact, I first heard about Monad from Slashdot before I worked at Microsoft. I've been at the karma cap for years, and don't generally post about Microsoft articles. Is the MSRC team astroturfing by going to BlackHat?

Second, I was very careful to mention my connection with Monad exactly to prevent the perception of astroturfing. My first comment, "Comments from a Monad developer," has about as obvious a title I could have given it. Of course, another option was "MOD SELF DOWN. COMMENTS FROM A BORG MICRO$$$LOTH DRONE."

Finally, the side-bar on the blog very clearly states: "Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft."

Let the public discussion continue, but it's pretty clear to me that recent events shouldn't be part of it.

F-Secure has reported on some recent work by Second Part To Hell on a Monad scripting virus ("First Vista Virus Found"). It's a misleading title, as it's an issue that affects any vehicle for any executable code on any operating system. There's an excellent treatment of shell script viruses on Virus Bulletin that covers this issue, but predates it by 2 years: Unix Shell Scripting Malware.

The fact that MSH is used as the execution vehicle is really a side-note, as it does not exploit any vulnerabilities in Monad. The guidance on shell script viruses is the same as the guidance on all viruses and malware: protect yourself against the point of entry, and limit the amount of damage that the malicious code can do.

To protect yourself against the point of entry, follow the guidance suggested by Microsoft's Malware FAQ:

The best way to stop viruses is to use common sense. If an executable computer program is attached to your e-mail and you are unsure of the source, then it should be deleted immediately. Do not download any applications or executable files from unknown sources, and be careful when trading files with other users.

To limit the amount of damage that the malicious code can do, try to limit the amount of time you run as Administrator / root.  Aaron Margosis has an excellent blog on how to run as non-Administrator.

I recently stumbled upon this blog entry that expanded on a piece I wrote a few days ago: Command Line Shortcut for Repetitive Operations. (Hankatsu?)'s entry is in Japanese, so I don't know what it says. In fact, for all I know, he or she could be making fun of me. In any case, the code included with the blog entry shows a quck way to download sequentially numbered files from the internet -- such as File001.jpg, File002.jpg, etc. That's a great use of the technique, and we can improve it even further with a useful script that acts as a download manager.

This was one of the first Monad scripts I wrote (about 2.5 years ago,) and I've faithfully ported it through every one of the many breaking changes that have happened since then :) It originally relied heavily on the Windows port of wget, but I was able to finally remove that a few weeks ago when I noticed that the .Net framework now supports the WebClient.DownloadFile() method.

It's one of my most heavily used scripts -- it's not very complex, but sure is useful.

## download-queue.msh
## Acts as a download manager, to download batches of files.
##
## 1) Create a directory, and place "download-queue.msh" in it.
## 2) Create a subdirectory, called "Queue"
## 3) Inside the "Queue" directory, place .txt files that contain only URLs in them.
##
## Download-queue.msh will use the name of the text file to create a new subdirectory.
## It will place the downloaded files inside that subdirectory.

## Ensure the System.Net and System.Web DLLs are loaded
[void] [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Net")
[void] [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Web")

## Keep on processing the queue directory, while there are batches
## remaining
while($(get-childitem Queue\*.txt).Length -gt 0)
{
 ## Get all of the .txt files in the queue directory
 foreach($file in $(get-childitem Queue\*.txt))
 {
  write-host "Processing: $file"

  ## Create a directory, based on the filename (minus extension)
  ## of the text file
  $name = $file.Name.Replace(".txt", "")
  $null = new-item -name $name -type Directory
  set-location $name

  ## Download each item in the file
  foreach($url in (get-content $file))
  {
   ## Strip the filename out of the URL
   if($url -match ".*/(?<file>.*)")
   {
    $filename = $matches["file"]
    $filename = combine-path "$(get-location)" "$([System.Web.HttpUtility]::URlDecode($filename))"

    write-host " Downloading: $url"
    $webClient = new-object System.Net.WebClient
    $webClient.DownloadFile($url, $filename)
   }
   else
   {
    write-host "$url is not a valid URI."
   }
  }

  ## Move the file list into the directory, also
  move-item (combine-path "..\Queue" ($file.Name)) .

  set-location ..
 }
}

For now, you're on your own for generating the queue files. Right-clicking "Copy Shortcut" in your browser is a great way to get URLs. Batching them this way is many times faster than downloading each file individually.

Here it is in action:

MSH:297 C:\Temp >md Queue

    Directory: FileSystem::C:\Temp

Mode    LastWriteTime            Length Name
----    -------------            ------ ----
d----   Aug 02 21:10                    Queue

MSH:299 C:\Temp >echo "http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/images/rssButton.gif" > Queue\LeeHolmes.com.txt
MSH:300 C:\Temp >echo "http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/images/xmlCoffeeMug.gif" >> Queue\LeeHolmes.com.txt
MSH:301 C:\Temp >download-queue
Processing: C:\Temp\Queue\LeeHolmes.com.txt
 Downloading: http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/images/rssButton.gif
 Downloading: http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/images/xmlCoffeeMug.gif
MSH:302 C:\Temp >dir LeeHolmes.com

    Directory: FileSystem::C:\Temp\LeeHolmes.com

Mode    LastWriteTime            Length Name
----    -------------            ------ ----
-a---   Aug 02 21:12                107 LeeHolmes.com.txt
-a---   Aug 02 21:12               1025 rssButton.gif
-a---   Aug 02 21:12               1486 xmlCoffeeMug.gif

Stay tuned -- in the near future, I'll write a post that shows how to parse all of the URLs out of a web page.

[Edit: I've updated the script, to make it a little less sensitive to URLs with funky characters.]
[Edit: I've now posted my link parser script, so you don't have to generate these files manually anymore.]

The community researchers that answer questions on Google Answers make their money off of exactly this type of ignorance. Although some of the answers require above-average searching abilities, others turn up on the first page of search results.

Hence the exhasperated shouts of RTFM, Just Google It, and others. Those don't help, though. They show you to be a pompous jerk who likes to belittle others. The solution is to either gracefully help change the user's habits (so that they do more homework before asking a question,) or seamlessly integrate the research into their habits.

Josh's idea covers the latter. He suggests that sites (such as the MSDN Forums) integrate a little live search feed to the right of the "Post a Question" form. It's a great idea.

Now, here's a little compressed version of the Microsoft product cycle. Being a Program Manager at Microsoft, he was nice enough to even draft a rough mock-up.

Now, being a developer at Microsoft, the next step in a project is to mock up a hack-and-slash technical prototype. At this point, you're really just trying to prove to yourself (and other technical folks) that the idea is possible. These prototypes also give you a basis from which to make a development time estimate for the feature. I've posted it here, although there was really no question that this specific feature is technically possible.

Next, you might want to construct a hi-fidelity prototype to show others. The guts are still hack-and-slash, but the interface is much more functional. Usability tests, and executive demos are a common target for this class of prototypes. I've posted it here.  HTML is a great prototyping medium for UI, as is Macromedia Flash.