Dylan Greene dot com

Normally it's not cool when Office crashes, but this time was different. When the "Do you want to send to Microsoft what happened so we can make our products better?" dialog came up, I clicked Yes. And then magic happened.

A new IE window opened...

"Hmm..." I thought, "That's never happened before."

And then I saw this:

"This is why you had the problem..." "...There is now a fix for it..." "...Click here to install the fix..."

This is near-nirvana for a usability freak like me.

That little "Submit your black box crash data to Microsoft?" dialog that most people curse at "I ain't helping Microsoft, they broke it, they fix it!" acted as my own personal IT servant, finding out exactly what went wrong and how to prevent the problem in the future. Awesome.

However, that wasn't the exact text. The exact text was more technical, talking about Knowledge Base article numbers, service packs, visiting Office Update, download times, etc. And I had to click through an Office Update web page or two, wait as it scanned for updates, and then install the fix. Not as intenerated as I would have liked.

Hopefully eventually Microsoft will tear away all that unnecessary techno-fluf for us mere humans and simplify it to a single dialog something like this:

"Sh*t, I crashed! No worries, I saved what you were working on, and I've already downloaded the free fix for this problem. How about I go ahead and install it now so we won't run into that problem again?"
Two buttons: [Fix it right now] [Fix it later, when nobody's using the computer.]

KISS in action. (Keep it simple, stupid.)

I finally finished the code needed to be able to sort photos once again. I'd start putting lots of new photos up but it's kinda late (or, um, really early) and I need to get some sleep for my last day of work before going on vacation to Florida.

I've noticed that there are a lot of new photo captions being added these days. What's with the new trend? There's some tasteless ones I'm going to remove. I might have to add a filter to the caption code.

Something that bugs me about the Bush Administration is how many illegal and unethical things they do, laws they pass, and business agreements they get away with, but have near zero opposition from Congress or mainstream press. People went nuts when Clinton had an affair in the White House, but hardly anybody really stirs as Bush tears apart our country with lies, deceit, and bogus laws such as CAN-SPAM.

This new CAN-SPAM law tops the list for me right now because I get between 500 and 1000 spam messages a day. The new law does not make spamming illegal but instead lists what spamers CAN do, hence the name.

Here are some things I've learned:

1) Consumers and ISP's cannot sue Spammers, only the federal government can do anything (and we know that won't happen).

2) CAN-SPAM makes California's requirement to "Opt In" to spam lists illegal. Bush made it illegal for any state to pass a stronger Anti-Spam law than CAN-SPAN.

3) This law says that Spammers can add anybody they want to their lists. Popular methods include using cheap software that scans web pages, chat rooms, message boards, mailing lists, and any other source for valid-looking email address. CAN-SPAM makes doing this legal, even though this practice is considered trespassing and unlawful entry by those that host the web sites and chat rooms.

4) Spamers also get email addresses by buying CDs with millions of email addresses for about $30. CAN-SPAM makes this legal. People are making money selling your email address and there is nothing you can do about it. CAN-SPAM makes it illegal to sue those that sell the CD's. CAN-SPAM makes it illegal to ask to collect royalties on the use of your email address.

5) CAN-SPAM says that Spammers can send pornographic and ads for body enhancements to anybody and everybody - including minors - as long as the subject is "informative." CAN-SPAM does not specify what "informative" means.

6) CAN-SPAM makes it legal to scan web sites that target children (like Kids.msn.com) to collect email addresses, and then send pornographic emails to those addresses.

7) This law specifies that all spam messages are supposed to put an "Opt Out button" to give receivers the option of not getting those emails anymore. As most people know, clicking on "Opt Out" in a spam mail list simply marks those people as a suckers that reads their spam mail and puts those email address in a coveted, more expensive, email address list.

8) The law does not specify how the Opt Out should work. It does not set fines for when it does not work. It even makes it legal to turn around sell the list of Opt-Out email address list to other spammers.

9) The law suggests that a national Do-Not-Email list be set up, but does not say how it should happen, who should be in charge, where budget for this will come from, or how to keep that list away from spammers who will just use it as a free list of emails to send spam to.

10) The law does nothing for off-shore spamming. Bush apparently does not realize that sending spam mail costs nothing and can be done from anywhere in the world.

BONUS) Typically any law put in effect will get the usual congressional investigations, time for outside opinions and debates, and will have the amount of detail required so that the law can be consistently interpreted. President Bush suspended those investigations, debates, and additional time usually spent on a bill so that he could pass it before California could put their ANTI-SPAM law into effect. The only group that was given an opportunity for input on this new law was the Direct Marketing Association of America - the group responsible for that regular flow of junk mail in your postal mail box and sales calls while you are trying to have dinner.

This law does nothing for us. CAN-SPAM is a Spammers' Bill of Rights and spits in the face of every spam-receiving American.

Is it not time for us to do something about this? Must we sit and wait until Election Day to voice our opinions?

David Coursey wrote an article on ZDNet titled what Microsoft needs to do in 2004 with his list of what he thinks Microsoft needs to do in 2004. I agree with most of his points, but I have my own list. What do you think Microsoft should do?

I just have one goal for Microsoft: Spend more bucks on public education. Here's a small rundown of how that goal must be achieved:

1) Marketing: This upcoming year a two candidates are going to spend a couple hundred million dollars trying to convince us to vote for them. They'll list issues they believe in, goals they hope to achieve, and information about their background, and why they are better than the other candidate. You will learn about them for their ads so that you can make a more informed decision. Today, what do you learn from a Microsoft ad? You learn nothing about the new features. You learn nothing about why it is better than the competition or previous version of the same product. You learn nothing about why you should want it. Microsoft's software is not cheap for a single-income family nor for a Fortune 500 company that would have to upgrade 10,000 desktops. And this is one of the reasons people don't like Microsoft: They feel that they are forced to use their software and don't see the benefits. Microsoft needs to spend money on educating the us as to why we should want their software.

2) Windows Update: Your computer crashes all the time. Do you know how to fix it? Since you are reading this site, maybe you do, but most people don't. I'd even guess that majority of Windows users, both home and corporate, have never used Windows Update. Never! There's so much important stuff up there, but it's treated like the Flu shot - "yeah, I could do that, but it takes up my valuable time and it could make my things even worse. Anyway, everything seems fine now, so what's the big deal?" I blame two things here: Windows Update, as simple as it is, is still too hard to use and too littered with confusing terms and crazy KB0335333-type numbers that only drive your Aunt Sue away from it, never to come back. Even when you visit the site for the first time you get the ActiveX Security warning, a warning now synominous with adware and spyware programs such as Gator. Microsoft needs to rebuild Windows Update to make it a transparent feature of Windows integrated into the operating system and sell inexpensive upgrade CD's at all the places you'd often see free AOL CD's, such as 7-11, Target, record stores, and anywhere else.

3) Point of Sales: When you buy Frito-Lays potato chips from your local grocery store, you will almost always find them to be in stock, set out nicely, clean, and stocked with related condoments such as salsa in less than arms-reach away. When you buy Microsoft products, especially their mice, keyboards, and XBOX games and hardware at stores like Best Buy, you will find a mess. My XBOX experience at almost any Best Buy: Games are everywhere, out of order. Various Playstation and Gamecube games are mixed in. New games are nowhere in sight. Some games are only by the XBOX demo machine. Popular games like Halo are never in stock. For grandparents buying XBOX games for their grandchildren there is no list of popular or new games for them to use as a guide. The demo machine often has broken controllers, or a bad XBOX disk, and never the game advertised on the side of the demo machine or even a new game people want to see. XBOX hardware is all a mess. The purpose of items such as Live or the "Advanced" A/V pack are not spelled out for casual gamers that don't read gaming magazine reviews to find out such items are required for Internet play or Dolby Digital Surround Sound. Microsoft needs to have representatives responsible for certain stores and make sure those stores are always in stock, have new and popular games out that are easy find, and spend time on weekends and holidays at the XBOX section of every popular store to answer questions such as "do I need a memory card?", "What is Live?", and "Are there XBOX games that my granddaughter would like?"

4) Microsoft.com: Microsoft's web site is clean, easy to navigate, and good information. But finding that information is nearly impossible. Try to figure out what version of Windows you should host your web site on: 2000, XP, XP Professional, XP Home, 2003 Standard, 2003 Server, etc.... See if it says anywhere that you don't need Windows XP to use Office XP. Try to find out what features are in Windows XP Professional that Mac OS X doesn't have. Try to find out why Powerpoint 2003 is better than Powerpoint 98. Microsoft.com content all reads and looks like the same lack-of-helpful information found on the back of the box any Windows box. Find screenshots of a product you aren't sure is right for you, find a list of games that don't work in the new operating system you are thinking about upgrading to. Find video demos of new features, or a list of features that you could email your boss or husband when you want to justify spending money on upgrading. Microsoft's Knowledge Base is probably the most helpful tool on the site (along with Windows Update and MSDN, which has some of the best online programming docs but is a pain to navigate with the refreshing-fames UI), but Microsoft practically hides it with the strange "Knowlede Base" name - how about calling it FreeHelp.com? I happen to know the owner of the domain if you'd like to buy it. The site has many other problems. Download URLs are long "FamilyID" numbers (example) and the download page is a generic looking page with no relationto the content it belogs with. Microsoft needs to give Microsoft.com a usability make-over with a focus on solving user's questions.

Well these are just a few of my ideas... Do you have others?

Photos of: DC in the snow taken with my new Canon Digital Rebel, the webMethods holiday party, my visit to the Mall of America, and much much more are comming soon.

I've been refactoring the backend of the system lately to get it ready to be upgraded from ASP to ASP.NET. I re-coded the photo sorting admin pages over the weekend while Chris played (and beat) Crimson Skies, and I redid most of the album organization admin UI this morning. Just one function to upgrade and some testing and I'll be ready to add 200+ new photos.

I'm waiting for my beta copy of Whidbey, the next version of Visual Studio .NET and ASP.NET, before I get started on porting this system to .NET. Lots of reason for Whidbey. I'll be using VB.NET (will I be the first/only blogging system in VB.NET?)

I got a new game... This one is kinda freaky...

Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix.

This is one of those games that comes with a mat that you jump on to the beat of the music. Arrows scroll on the screen that point up, down, left, or right, and sometimes more than one direction at once. You have to move your feet to the correct arrow or arrows on the mat.

I suck at it right now. I have no beat and I can't dance worth crap, but I'm still enjoying it. There's a ton of songs, and you can download more via XBOX Live. (you can't use music you've copied to the XBOX harddrive I guess because the game needs to know the beat of the music to be able to sync up the steps). My favorite mode so far is Workout, where you choose either how many calories you want to burn or how long you want to exercise. After each song it shows you how your workout would have compared to jump roping, jogging, or swimming, and it keeps a record of all of your workouts along with a fitness chart. About time exercising came to the XBOX.

I've only played this game for about 10 minutes, so I can't give it a good review yet, but so far it's all positive. It's fun, physical, addictive, and especially fun(ny) to watch other people play.

Here's a good review of DDR Ultramix from TeamXBOX.com.

One more thing: XBOX Night tonight at Pender 2. We have four XBOXs, four projectors, and lots of controllers. 16 player Halo? Only if we have enough players. We start around 6. This is for webMethods employees in the Fairfax office, but if you are in the area and want to join, let me know, maybe we can work something out.

Yesterday for about 24 hours put Google's text-only ads on the blog post pages. Google's text ads are cool in that they show ads relating to what is on the page. So if the blog entry is about an XBOX game, the ads will relate to the XBOX.

During that time there were 4,480 page views, showing 17,920 ads.

I've decided to take down the Google ads. Do you know why? 17,920 ads were shown, guess how much money I made?

Zilch. Zero. Nada.

Here's what the ads look like.

Not a single paid ad was clicked on. Ads could have been clicked, but Google doesn't count non-paid ads, which are shown on pages that Google hasn't scanned or doesn't have good ads for. Google doesn't tell you how many non-paid ads are clicked on or what percent are non-paid.

I'm not doing this site to make money, but I thought that it would be a nice bonus for the many hours I've put in it every evening.

I've made a simple tool for checking what Google Adsense text ads will display on your site, or any site for that matter.

intraVnews, the RSS reader I use and highly recommend, has reached 1.0 Final.

I like intraVnews over Newsgator because it downloads the news page along with the RSS content. This is helpful because many RSS feeds are truncated or just have the titles, and hardly any include formatting or images.

Halo 2's official release date is 4/4/04 (better known as April 4, 2004).

Supposedly this is from sources in the "know" but I haven't seen an official announcement yet. April 4th, 2004 is a Sunday, which is strange because games are usually released on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays.

Some Halo 2 videos keep you busy until then.

The NRA wants to buy a TV station so that the gun lobby will be exempt from spending limits in the upcoming Presidential campaign. This is just ridiculous.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Bush supporters probably feel pretty desperate...

I can see the NRA's huge monolithic headquarters from my cube window... Should I be careful with what I write?

A new version of MSN Messenger 6.1 was released (6.1.0203), and some people are no longer able to log in. Here's how to fix this silly little problem: Go to File, Choose "Sign In..." (the one without your email address). Put your passport email address and password in. Sign in. That's it.

I think with this new version they changed how passwords are stored when you use "Allow automatic sign in when connected to the Internet" and this changes the saved password.

If you're looking for a great game for these cold winter nights, and your thrust for Halo 2 is driving you nuts, I highly recommend Metal Arms: Glitch in the System for XBOX. (Metal Arms is also available for Playstation 2 and GameCube, but the visuals won't be as nice, you won't have in-game Dolby Surround Sound, and you wont have the hard drive for saving games and faster load times.)

Metal Arms can be called a Halo-clone because it has that style of "3D run around shooting things" play, but I think of it as a an original game of that genre (which was originated by ID Software with Wolfstein 3D back in the day, but that's another story).

I'm not good at reviewing games (I'm still getting hammered for my SSX3 review), so I'll be brief, and then link to a semi-professionally written review:

- Great Halo-style multiplayer, with several Halo-style customizable game types.
- Great single player missions, with professional voice acting (including the source of Homer Simpson's voice, Dan Castellaneta), good story, and a ton of levels.
- Not only are there cool vehicles to drive, you can also control several different kinds of robots.
- Taking over other robots (and "recruiting" them with a special grenade so they fight for you) in multiplayer is a great new twist. There's even a multiplayer mode that only gives you other robots to use to take out your friends.
- Great sound, graphics, controls etc.
- Lots of in game humor, and not stupid humor - actual good stuff.
- Awesome explosions - mechanical parts go everywhere.
- Multiple ways to solve levels (guns blazing or using your head).
- Two very cool gangsta robots that try to sell you stuff... you just have to see (and hear) to know what i mean.
- Upgradeable guns!
- Lots of beeped out bad words from pissed off robots! (Games need more of this! Nobody that gets shot simply says "umph" - they cuss up a storm!)

Things that I don't like:
- No XBOX Live (for playing online with Internet scoreboard and voice support)
- No XBOX System Link (for connecting XBOX's together locally)
- You must find hidden computer chips to get all of the multiplayer maps. There's a ton of multiplayer maps, and the chips are fun to find, but I don't like being forced to play alone in order to be able to play all of the multiplayer maps.
- Best Buy never seems to have it in stock for XBOX. I don't know what Best Buy has against XBOX, but every one I go to never has the new games out, and if they do, they aren't on the shelf with the rest of the XBOX games, they're hidden somewhere else, like by the XBOX demo machine or in the hallway in front of the refrigerator section. What's up with that?

Overall a great game for most ages. Lots of bleeped out cussing, great satisfying explosions, good brain work, and great levels. I had a lot of fun playing with my family and my youngest brother played single player for three days straight.

TeamXBox.com has a more detailed review.
There's also the official Metal Arms site.

I just noticed it's been snowing outside. Even though I have a great window cube, I really get into my work and sometimes miss obvious things like the fluffy white stuff covering the near-empty parking lot. Oops... the only car there is mine.. 10pm and this is the third day this week I've spent more than 11 hours at my desk. Time to go home!

Well, I might have to some photos of the snow with my new toy, as long as I can keep it dry.

Thanks to Mike Diehl for finding this must watch training video for anybody who has ever had any interest in operating a fork lift. It's also damn funny.

It's in German, but you'll see that doesn't matter.

Watch it: Forklift Training Video (or: How Not to Operate a Forklift)

Thanks to Foo for find this simple Blog Reader created using Flex.

Flex is Macromedia's XML-based UI API, which I talk more about here.

This is the first almost-real-world Flex example I've seen. I've played with XAML a small bit, but haven't seen any real-world examples like this.

What I want to see now: A MXML (Flex) to XAML (Avalon) translator done in XSL.

I can't read this site [2cpu.co.kr], but if you go about half-way down there's a link to my blog entry about fixing Windows Update Error 0X800A138F.

This is one of many message boards where Windows users are frustrated beyond belief because when they try to use Windows Update they get error "0x800A138F" without any explanation or suggestions for how to fix it. My blog entry on how to fix it was written in August, about four months ago. Today it has been viewed over 1000 times. There's been over 8000 page views across my entire site in the last 24 hours, so that means 1 out of every 8 visitors has come to see how to fix that Windows Update error.

You'd think Microsoft would realize how many people are getting this error and put some help for fixing it on Windows Update (or fix Windows so it won't happen), but I'm guessing the Windows Update team doesn't even realize how popular this error is because when you use Windows Update no information is sent to Microsoft - for privacy reasons. I think that "privacy reasons" are going to far here, when there's a problem such as Windows Update not working at all (which is the case with this error), there should be an option to let Microsoft know whatever they need to know to learn about the issue and help you fix it.

There's many reasons for this error, and all are easily fixable if you know what's wrong. Popular reasons for why Windows Update won't work include IE's default language not set and the date being wrong, but how would any user know this?

If you are suffering from Windows Update not working, learn how to fix it here.

My dad is in Israel putting together gas mask kits for the Israeli Defense Force.

He's participating in a non-profit program called Volunteers for Israel. He flew there out of pocket (only about $600 with Air Canada), and now that he's there he's staying the barracks, eating with the soldiers, and doing what he can to help. Today he's assembling gas mask kits. There's 25 other volunteers as part of this program, and he said he's bonding with all of them.

My dad has been excited about this two week experience for several months now, and now that he's there it sounds like it's living up to his expectations. The work isn't too strenuous, as most of the volunteers are over 50. The weather is "perfect," and he's helping out a country that needs all of the help it can get.

More about the Sar-El Volunteers for Israel: American Site Israeli Site

I've been to Israel twice, once with my family and once with a college group. Both times were incredible. It's a beautiful, tiny (smaller than New Jersey) Mediterranean country that doesn't get the respect from Westerners that it deserves.

I give up. What's the best tool for creating XSL web site templates? I don't want no silly XML editor that happens to support XSL, I want something of Frontpage or Dreamweaver caliber for the web design part and Visual Studio in the XSL coding debugging part. I'm sick of trying to memorize my XML schema just to build a web page around it.

Office 2003 is cool, but the cheap FM radio they sent for being a beta tester kinda disappointed me. I guess a MP3 player would have cost a lot more, but this is something I'll probably never use because my MP3 player (the Intel Pocket Concert) already has a FM tuner built in. I guess this is a good toy for owners of the Ipod, which still doesn't have an FM tuner.

Okay, I just tried it. The earbud earphones are the same thing you'd get with an Ipod, and I can use them on with my MP3 player. It doesn't have a display to show you what station you are listening to, just a Scan button and a Reset button. Scan found station, but I don't know what Reset does. It doesn't seem to save the stations, or let you scan backwards.

I shouldn't be complaining because it was free and unexpected, but all I really wanted for testing Office 2003 was a free or discounted copy of the release version of Office 2003.

The top 60 beta testers received the radio I have and a copy of Office 2003. Guess I didn't put enough bugs in. I put in a bunch, but all of them were pushed back to a future release. They need to start the beta process earlier in dev cycle if by the time the beta starts it's too late to change the user interface.

Here's some links to photos of the goods (this link should work).

According to ScottGu, the architect for ASP.NET, the next version of Visual Studio, currently code named Whidbey, will have built-in support for XHTML and Accessibility output, verification, and debuging.

By default ASP.NET will output XHTML 1.1, have intellisense (auto-complete) for various versions of HTML, XHTML, Mobile cHTML, and Mobile HTML, and will do the red-swiggle underline when you don't comply.

The output will also be Section 508 compliant (the US Government accessibility checklist which includes the requirement that tools are usable by those without proper vision) and WCAG compliant (the W3's Accessibility guidelines).

ScottGu has screen shots of his latest Whidbey build showing off these great new features.

There's built-in support for internationalization and globalization already today. Anything else we should be asking for? Hmm... TopStyle Pro-quality CSS tools?

XAML: Vector-based UI described using XML. From Microsoft.
FLEX: Vector-based UI described using XML. From Macromedia.

XAML: I've seen some very cool demos of XAML, and I've made a simple animated Hello World app using PDC Longhorn build. There's sample code, PDC sessions with demos, documentation, and even Longhorn on MSDN.

FLEX: I haven't seen any demos of FLEX. There is a Developer's site but it only has marketing talk and a Flash-powered Powerpoint-like slide show that is just more marketing talk. There are no demos or sample code on the site that I can find. There is a sign up for the beta, but I just want to see what it looks like right now.

XAML is built to replace anything you use today for building user interfaces, from Windows applications to web pages. The engine/technology that renders XAML in Longhorn is called Avalon. Since Avalon will probably not be available for platforms other than Windows Longhorn, I'm not sure how popular building XAML user interfaces will be because your audience will have to run the latest version of Windows. Given how bad Microsoft's marketing is for upgrading OS versions (how many of you are still using Windows 2000, which is now almost four years old?), it will probably be a while before a good market share is using the new operating system.

I assume FLEX is targeted at replacing Windows Forms, Swing, SWT, etc. I assume FLEX is not going to target replacing HTML/DHTML because you wouldn't want the fate of your application to hinged on the user not pressing the Back or Refresh buttons which would cause your application to instantly shut down or restart. You also don't want your users to have to download hefty Flash UI's every time they want to load your product. Anybody else sick of slow-loading Flash UI's?

While Flash is considerably slower on the non-Windows platforms that support it, at least it is available. I haven't done any non-Windows testing of Flash, so I don't know if it is as bad as Java's "Write Once, Run Anywhere" broken promise ("Test Everywhere" is what it should say), but the idea of software working on multiple platforms is what makes management happy (more people to sell our software to!).

Having seen only chunks of pre-release XAML code in non-real-world demo-only applications, and having seen zero FLEX code because Macromedia doesn't seem ready to show it off yet, I'm going to make is possibly a crazy stupid silly statement: XAML and FLEX are going to be interchangeable.

This won't be from Microsoft and it won't be from Macromedia, but somebody will built a XAML to FLEX translator or converter or mapper or XSLT or something. Just because they both use XML doesn't mean that the job will be trivial, but XML makes the project a lot easier.

Once this is possible you'll be able to use Flash MX to create your XAML UI's, and Visual Studio to create FLEX UI's. Note I'm not going into what's behind those UI's... in XAML you use any .NET language, such as C#, J# (basically Java without the name), Fortran.NET, Smalltalk.NET, etc. In FLEX you get to use... J2EE. Ugh... (Find me one person that knows both .NET and J2EE and has nice things to say about J2EE and I'll remove the "Ugh".)

I also have no doubt that we'll see XAML renderers from other companies, such as Adobe which could add XAML support to Adobe Reader (check out the very cool Adobe Reader clone done in XAML demo to see what I'm referrering to.) The non-Microsoft .NET CLRs from Novell and GNU are probably already working on non-Microsoft cross-platform XAML renderers as well. I have never seen a non-Macromedia program render Flash and I bet we'll never see one render FLEX either.

So you've read my predictions... what do you think?