August 2008 - Posts

Opera begins smear campaign against IE 8
29 August 08 01:07 PM | Brandon Live!
There’s an article over at everybody’s favorite internet tabloid The Register about IE 8’s decision to default to Compatibility View (that is, IE 7 emulation) for INTRAnet sites.  The article lambastes the IE team for “breaking its promise to embrace web standards.” You might be wondering, “Why does the author of this article care about intranet [...] Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks
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Picked a new laptop!
24 August 08 06:08 PM | Brandon Live!
So after writing about the new laptop choices I was considering, I decided yesterday afternoon to drive around and look at which laptop models were available at local computer/electronics stores.  Best Buy and Circuit City didn’t have anything of interest to me.  They seem to stock only mid-size or large laptops, and they’re largely outdated models with [...] Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks
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Picking a new laptop
23 August 08 06:36 PM | Brandon Live!
As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m planning to buy a new laptop very soon.  The timing seems to be about right, with a bunch of new machines become available in the next week or two.  Unfortunately, I’m having a really hard time deciding what I want. Right now I’m using a black Macbook, Core [...] Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks
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Get A Mac ads jump the shark
19 August 08 11:35 AM | Brandon Live!
These may have been kind of cute or clever in the past, misleading as they were.  But now they’re just plain obnoxious. When I bought my new car last year there was a car salesman at one dealership who only seemed concerned with what other options I was looking at.  He tried to tell me that [...] Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks
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How my team and I fit into Windows 7
18 August 08 11:25 PM | Brandon Live!
As you probably heard (if you’re reading this blog), Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan recently launched the Windows 7 Engineer Team Blog. This afternoon the Steven made his second post on the blog, discussing the Windows 7 engineering organization.  He describes the rough dimensions of the various feature teams, including a pretty complete list of the [...] Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks
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NYT says passwords, OpenID suck
10 August 08 01:23 PM | Brandon Live!
Randall Stross, the same guy who recently said Microsoft should abandon Windows, says on the NY Times site that passwords aren’t good because they’re vulnerable to spoofing attacks, and that they should be replaced by “information cards.”  Well, he’s got a point here, and many companies and services already use non-password authentication mechanisms.  Microsoft uses them for [...] Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks
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Why are browser plug-ins so insecure?
10 August 08 12:59 AM | Brandon Live!
Flash and Java, I’m looking at you. You may have heard about the paper released at this week’s Black Hat conference, describing limitations in Windows’ memory protection schemes like ASLR, DEP, etc.  The paper is well-written, very detailed, and I’ve no reason to doubt that it’s pretty accurate.  Some points it makes are things that teams [...] Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks
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Microsoft Intern Video 2008 - The Spy
08 August 08 05:52 PM | Brandon Live!
In traditional Microsoft fashion, this year’s interns have put together a video about Microsoft… in this case, telling the story of a spy trying to find all our Win7 secrets Somebody posted the video to YouTube, which you can find here. Random trivia:  The building that this takes place in is my building, building 86.  [...] Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks
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OpenSearch spec status
05 August 08 10:21 PM | Brandon Live!
In addition to the aforementioned e-mailing, I also spent a little of the weekend on some personal projects, and did some poking around at the OpenSearch discussion group.  I was curious about the fact that OpenSearch 1.1 has been stuck in “Draft 3″ status for well over a year now.  Apparently my prodding has provoked [...] Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks
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Home from LA
05 August 08 10:15 PM | Brandon Live!
Last week I headed down to LA to spend a long weekend with my sister and my friend Sara, both of whom live there.  I tried to remain disconnected during that time but failed pretty miserably, at least the last couple days.  I even kept up with my work e-mail most of yesterday.  I really [...] Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks
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