Dylan Greene dot com

DARPA Grand Challenge video clips

Sad but real.

The last one in the video is a robotic motorcycle. Now you'd think: Why build a motorcycle? It would be so hard for the computer to keep it balanced, never mind navigating the 300 mile off road trail?

I won't spoil the ending.

Linux geeks all over the world must be coughing up their Mountain Dew when they saw this latest report from Forrester.*

According to their report, from between June 1, 2002 and Mary 31, 2003:

• Red Hat Linux had 229 vulnerabilities
• MandrakeSoft ... 199
• SuSE ... 176
• Windows ... 128 (classified as "severe")
  
• Debian ... Fixed 96.2% of the vulnerabilities
• Red Hat ... 99.6%
• MandrakeSoft ... 99%
• Microsoft ... 100%
  
• MandrakeSoft... average of 82 days between disclosure and a fix release
• Red Hat... 57 days
• Debian.. 57 days
• Microsoft... 25 days

From the report: The answers were a bit surprising. Microsoft gets a fundamentally worse rap than it deserves.

The report cost $900, so I got this data from two articles about the report. The two articles did not mention if Forrester summed the numbers for Windows 9x, 2000, XP, and 2003, or just used one of those.

It also says that just because patches are released doesn't mean firms are automatically secure: "For example, for the nine highest-profile Windows malicious code incidents as of March 2003, Microsoft's patches predated major outbreaks by an average of 305 days, yet most firms hadn't applied the patches."

For Windows IT people, that means using Windows Update, SUS, or SMS, and maybe even attending the free Microsoft Security Summit, which MS is holding at major cities all over the US. For Linux IT people... well you have FreshMeat and IRC (chat rooms).

Also in the news, yet another report that says Linux is more expensive than Windows. According to the report, while Linux may be "free", the software and man-power you need to run your business is going to be more expensive. Of course they don't factor in the cost of selling your soul to Microsoft.

* Just a joke. Linux geeks would never trust a report from Forrester or any other research firm unless it was publicly approved by RMS, Linus, and CmdrTaco.

While right-click menus are often full of great shortcuts, their nature of being completely hidden from the user until a user clicks the secondary mouse button means that beginner and advance users alike have trouble discovering the existence of these helpful menus.

When a use moves their mouse pointer over an object or area that has a right-click opportunity, I propose altering the mouse pointer to show the existence of the hidden functionality.

Think about how helpful mouseover highlighting is in Windows XP in preventing miss-clicks. Take the feature a step further (and a button over), and suddenly Windows is helping beginners and advance users learn about the availability of these hidden, but useful, menus.

I also think there should be a standard user interaction method that triggers Windows to highlight all available right-click targets, such as right-clicking an area where right-click is not supported.

Anybody from the Longhorn team reading?

Wow... I went almost 20 days without blogging. That's a new record for me.

Here's some numbers relating to this site, mostly for my own personal knowledge...

• 250 blog entries (not including photo album announcements)
• 2874 entry comments
  
• 17,158 photos
• 3,608 photo captions
  
• 351 photo albums
• 10 photo albums I've yet to put online (soon!)
  
• 24,137 lines of code
• 4+ years of work (free time only)

The reason I went so long without any blog entries is because all of my free time has been dedicated to bringing back TeacherReviews.com.

So far:

• 9,087 lines of code unique to TeacherReviews
• 9,547 lines of code shared with DylanGreene.com

The new TeacherReviews system uses the same engine that I wrote for this site, but instead of blog entries and photos you'll see professors and reviews.

It's important to note that lines of code doesn't really mean much because a line of code could be the solution to some great problem or it could just be a semicolon. Some day I'll have full documentation of how the whole thing works, but for now, I must spend my free time wisely because there still lots of TeacherReviews work to be done, and I've yet to do some other important things... such as my taxes...

Fundrace.org has a new tool they call Neighbor Search that lets you put in any address or name and find out how much people are donating and to which presidential candidate.

• WhereI live(Arlington, VA)
• Beverly Hills, 90210
• Washington DC
• Donald Trump and his neighbors

Also interesting is that it showswherethe people work andwhat their titles are. Ever wonder what your neighbors do for a living?

Thanks to the Lost Remote for reporting that the excellent cartoon series "Family Guy" is being brought back thanks in part to great DVD sales. According to Lost Remote, "Family Guy" was the top selling DVD from a TV series.

More coverage: E! Online, Memorable Quotes from "Family Guy", The Family Guy Reference Archives

Family Guy is my favorite series next to The Daily Show.

A friend of mine just got an Apple laptop to supplement his PC. Here's some Apple news in his honor:

• Apple has applied for a US patent for elements of the iPod user interface. This patent includes obvious features that all mp3 players have had before the iPod came out, such as forward, back, stop, play, and organizing music by category. If you think that's silly, you should know that last August Apple received a patent for a staircase design they use some Apple stores. Is there anything they won't patent?
  More coverage: NeoWin, Slashdot, MacObserver
  
• Last November, the UK's Independent Television Commission found that Apple's ads that said their machines were "the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer" were false advertising and they must stop posting those ads. They stopped using those ads in the UK, but continued in the rest of the world. Now the Better Business Bureau in the US has told Apple to cease those ads as well, plus their claim to be have the "world's first 64-bit processor for the personal computers," which came out to be not true either.
  More coverage: ActiveWin, NeoWin, News.com.
  
• Not really news, but I like to post in three's. Unlike most other MP3 players, you cannot change the battery or hard drive in the iPod without sending it back to Apple for "repairs." ThisIsBroken.com has a screenshot of the repair bill for a first-generation 5GB iPod with a faulty hard drive, which at $255.95, is about the same price as a new 10GB iPod. It's also mentioned that when you send an iPod to Apple, instead of repairing that one, they send you back a refurbished one and don't even copy over the content from iPod you sent in.

I think Apple has some great looking products, but I feel that the quality and uniqueness of their products are overstated by press that loves them and their great marketing tactics. Every time anything new happens with the iPod, news appears in every major paper as if it's some life-shaping event. Apple's web site and stores do great justice to the Apple products, making it seem like each introduction of a new product is a life-shaping event. The iPod alone has a dozen screens of easy-to-read information, plus diagrams, pictures, videos, and more. Compare that to a popular competitor to the iPod, the Creative's Muvo2... it has has one small pitiful paragraph on the web site. After looking at Apple's site, it looks as if Creative doesn't even want to sell their devices. Creative isn't alone. Even big shots like Dell and Gateway have hardly anything on their web sites, especially compared to Apple.

Check out l (as in llama), they've copied the Apple web site to some success. Too bad their vague name will prevent them from ever being more than something that's just fun to look at.

XBOX marketing manager John Porcaro liked my Microsoft campus photos so much that he is using one of the photos in the banner on his blog. Very cool!

John recently sent XBOX Realm (an XBOX fan site) several free XBOX gamesto review.
John: I, too, happen to like free XBOX games. :)

And speaking of XBOX, after seeing some of my XBOX Live ideas and feedback, Major Nelson, XBOX Live Director of Programming, contacted me about joining up fora game some time to talk more about my ideas. Unfortunately I don't have any recent Live games, so I haven't been able to take him on that awesome offer.

Undo is a great feature that most modern programs now have, but here's some feature request for that great Undo God in the sky that would make Undo even nicer:

1. Selective Undo: Select an area of a document and Undo only undoes changes in the area selected. The rest of the document is not touched.
2. Undo/Redo Preview: Microsoft Office is the only application I've seen that that has text that says what it is going to undo or redo (hidden in the drop down next to the icon in the tool bar), but the text is so generic that it's not even helpful. Right now I'm using Frontpage, which is use almost exclusively in text-edit mode. I'm editing Javascript functions, XSL, XML, DHTML, and CSS - but the the Undo dropdown only has "Text Editing" listed 35 times. What good is that? I'd like to see a collection of "Undo preview screenshots" and be able to click on the one that matches the changes what I return to.
3. Undo Support for User Interface Modifications: How many times have you accidental rearranged a program's layout by dragging a menu bar or icon bar only to find what happened by accident is a total pain to fix. Clicking Undo (or maybe a special version of Undo) should undo these user interface changes. This would put icons back in place, fix relocated menu bars, and return lost toolbars back to view.
4. Standard API for Undo and Redo: Why does Notepad have only one level of Undo? Any program that uses standard Windows API for input should automatically get unlimited levels of Undo and Redo. Today all Windows programs automatically get access to Cut, Copy, and Paste. In Longhorn, the codename for the next major revision of Windows, every input also automatically gets a Spell Checker. Maybe a feature-filled standardized Undo stack will be added to the features.

Agree, disagree? Have other ideas for improving Undo?

Hard drive or no hard drive, the XBOX 2 will likely have some sort of large local storage for storing downloads, game data, and saved games.

Here's two idea I had that would further take advantage of the XBOX's local storage:

Instant Game Swapping:

You're playing a game, and then your friends come over and watch to play some other game. You aren't near a save spot and you don't want to loose your progress. Instant Game Swap would copy the current memory contents to the XBOX hard drive so that when you put that game back in, it loads the memory from the hard drive and you can continue from exactly where you were.

Instant Hibernation:

You're playing a game and it's time to go to school, work, dinner, your wedding, whatever, and you're not at a convenient point at which to save. Instant Hibernate would copy the memory contents to the hard drive so you can comfortably know that your game will be exactly the way you left it.

These features are not new in the PC world - Emulators such as Virtual PC and VMware let you do the equivalent of Instant Game Swapping to swap operating systems, and laptops have been doing hibernation for years. Car and portable CD players have these same features so that you can turn your car off and on and not loose your place on the CD. The fact that it is automatic part of what makes it so nice.

I don't think these features will make or break the XBOX 2, but I bet they would raise the bar for expectations of all gaming systems.

..baby seals!

No, just kidding....

It's been rumored the the XBOX 2 (also known as XBOX NEXT, XBOX II, and XENON) won't have a hard drive, making many gamers worried that some of the coolest advantages of the XBOX over other gaming systems will be lost.

Today the XBOX has a hard drive that is used to store saved games, store game data which greatly speeds up game loading, for storing downloads from XBOX Live, and for storing MP3s and WMAs which can be used as background music in many games.

Today M-Systems CEO Dov Moran has confirmed in an interview with Israeli business journal Globes Online that the "XBOX 2" will not have a hard drive, and instead will have a solid state flash card made by his company.

M-Systems, which many of us have never heard of, is the the Israeli company responsible for inventing flash memory. Flash memory is what digital cameras use to store photos. Unlike the memory you use in your PC, flash memory does not require a power source to remember the data, and unlike a hard drive, there are no moving parts and it makes no noise.

This is great news - it means the next XBOX will be smaller, quieter, and lighter. This could also open an opportunity for Microsoft to build a portable XBOX, although shrinking down the top-of-the-line video card and cpu's will still be a hefty challenge.

Today's XBOX hard drive is about 10 GBytes. Today most digital camera owners use memory cards less than 1/2 Gbyte, however M-Systems makes Fast Flash Disks up to 47 Gbytes, so there's no telling how much memory Microsoft plans on stuffing in the XBOX 2.

Another day another security problem. This time the victim is anybody with Apple's QuickTime player. The security hole lets hackers run malicious code on your machine when you visit a web site that references adevilishly hand-crafted file that QuickTime attempts to play but the file instead exploitseither buffer problems or other issueswith the player.

It's been two weeks since this problem has been discovered by security group eEye, butApple has yet to release a fix or even announce the details of the problem.That meansthose of us with QuickTime installed have no idea what to do to protect ourseleves other than uninstall QuickTime.

Possibly to help keep that "Apple is secure"image going, Apple has no mention of this on the QuickTime site or the very unApple Apple Product Security web page that seems to be void of any helpful information.

Asimilar security hole was found in QuickTime last Aprilwhich effected QuckTime versions 5.x and 6.0.

I've been re-writing TeacherReviews.com over the last month. Everything is going great, the new system is fast, flexible, and easy to use. I'm using the framework that I built to power this site, so reviews are treated like blog entries which means universities and professors automatically have RSS feeds and a feedback system.

The look of the site is all new, and thankstoa helping hand fromgraphics and web guru FoO, the newTeacherReviews looks great and should perform perfectly on every modern browser.

Here's some screenshots to wet your appetite:

Do you attend lengthy conference calls that tend to put you to sleep?

Microsoft has created an awesome solution for this: XBOX Live

Now wait, hear me out...

1. Talk for Free. XBOX Live has free full-duplex voice chat. Unlike telephones it's digitally encoded so you have a better quality call and no worries of outsiders listening in. Comparable TelCo conference call plans cost about $5 per hour per person and still aren't going to be digital quality.
2. Free Meeting Rooms. XSNSports.com (XSN stands for XBOX Sports Network) is a web site Microsoft has built for all of their sports games. Here you can set up tournaments, ladders, championships, or in the business world: public and private meetings. There's a public "meeting" called "Road 2 Longhorn" where Longhorn developers and independent software developers meet and talk about the the future of Windows.
3. Have fun at the same time. During the meeting you get to play golf. When you join this "meeting" you are on the same course as everybody else, with the same weather, rules, and other settings, all set up by the meeting host.

With up to 64 people able to join each "meeting," the lure of a golf game to entice people to join and keep them there for the duration of the meeting, it seems like XBOX Live and Links 2004 would be marketing gold. Right? Wrong, it seems....

Well it seems that Microsoft is doing as little as possible to publicize the fact that Links 2004 even has online play:

• No mention of Online Play. Microsoft's Links 2004 home page never mentions playing online, online public and private tournaments, stats tracking or the multitude of other features Links 2004 has. There's no screenshots of online play either, and videos seem to only show cut scenes and not actual game play.
• No mention of significance of XSN Sports. There's a link to "What is XSN Sports" but it doesn't say on the Links page why I should even care enough to click it to find out what it is. The What is? page doesn't really say much either.
• Old videos with no game-play. There's two videos on the site, and like all videos on XBOX.com, they are really really old and don't show what it looks like when you actually play the game.

XSNSports.com, which is the free online network for Microsoft's sports games has issues too:

• The web site is too hard to use. Way too much focus was put on "use Flash to make it cool!" and not enough on "give easy access to what the user needs." I still haven't figured out how to join "Road 2 Longhorn" because the "Join Competition" link brings me a to new page that lists all of the competitions going on, and for whatever reason Road 2 Longhorn no matter what I search for.
• Too many tabs! Tabs are everywhere. Since I can easily scroll the web page with my mouse wheel, why not just make the page longer rather than requiring me to click on each and every tab to see what's changed? On my personal stats page there are 26 tabs!
• Terrible message board. The Message Boards are using message board technology from the Internet stone ages. There's 8,000 messages in the Links Form alone and they are only available as one huge flat list of 15 titles per page. The only way to read them is clicking one title at a time, and each time you do that it reloads and displays this annoying flash animated menu.
• Not enough personalization. Your personal profile doesn't let you give a picture of yourself. Seeing who you are meeting with (and playing against) adds greatly to the overall experience.
• Why require an email address? When you modify your personal profile it requires an email address. Why? Your XBOX Live already has to be associated with a Passport just to view the page. Oh yeah, last one:
• Why require a Passport account? A Passport account is required just to view the pages. Passport should only be needed when trying to join a competition or modify your settings.

Well the potential is there, but the problem is that Microsoft doesn't seem realize the goldmine that they're on and my bet is that full capabilities of XBOX Live are never understood by anybody outside of their Redmond offices.

Maybe XBOX marketing manager and fellow blogger John Porcaro will fill us in?

Here's a review of Link 2004 with a more information and screenshots than you'll find any Microsoft site.

My Gamertag is Dylan.

The concept of using Links 2004 and XBOX Live for online meetings was not my idea. I first read about it on Scoble's blog. Scoble saw it on Newsgator author Greg Reinacker's blog. Greg saw the idea on Microsoft blogger Jeff Sandquist's blog.

Tim Macrina, who hosts my blog along with the other projects I work on such as TeacherReviews, has some nice things to say about upgrading the server we use from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003.

I've been running Windows 2003 Serverfor about a monthand I can't sayanything badabout it. My biggest reason for praising 2003 is that my average memory usage went from 1540Mb to 862 Mb. CPU usage seemed to have also dropped significantly but it is hard for me to gage because I added a second processor at the time of the upgrade install. Aside from resource usage improvements, I've also seen a significant improvement when it came to the way that IIS handled web requests, but I won't get into that here.

Windows 2003, which isa version ofWindows for onlyfor servers (Windows XP is still the latestdesktop operating system)adds a bunch of speed improvements over Windows 2000, such as component caching, page compression, and a improved code for accessing data from the hard drive (it still uses NTFS but it's faster than before). Strangely some of these great new features are disabled by default, but enabling them just requires finding the right checkbox in your IIS settings.

I'm sure there's a bunch of other features we could be taking advantage of, but as usual it seems thatMicrosoft's marketing department would rather keep them a secret.