Random Stuff

This year I am attending OSCON for the second time. One of the more interesting sessions talked about YUI CSS, the Yahoo User Interface style sheets. With very simple CSS, they manage to support multi-column web page layouts that work reliably on all browsers. Since my biggest project, the Madison Digital Image Database, still uses tables for page layout, this is what I have been looking for, I just did not know.

Today I updated my blog software (Serendipity) to try to get the comment and trackback spam under control (I received over 27,000 comments and trackbacks over the last months, ain't I popular?) Let's see how much success this will have. Hopefully I'll be able to find valid comments now and breathe some new life into this.

In my earlier post about moving away from using an administrator account for daily use, I mentioned a problem with MSN Messenger and the fact that upgrading to the latest version (8.0) fixed it - well, it did not. What happened was that after I installed Messenger using my administrative account, Messenger ran - using the administrative account. Stopping and restarting using my regular account produced a login error message again. Lots of people seem to have the same problem, so I took a different route by downloading and installing Gaim.

A few more issues I ran into since my last post:

Symantec AntiVirus no longer auto-protects my hard drive. I decided that was acceptable and scheduled nightly scans of my hard drive instead.

Microsoft Word shows an error regarding Adobe macros when starting up. Apparently the Adobe Acrobat macros that get installed in Microsoft Office don't work when running as non-admin. I'll try to uninstall them, they don't seem to be essential.

All Microsoft Passport related logins seem broken. This also is not a big issue for me, I dropped Microsoft's Finance site in favor of Google's a while ago, and the automatic update feature in my copy of Microsoft Money 2003 has been broken for a long time anyway.

Visual Studio 2003 actually worked with the exception of web application debugging, I had to set the ASP.NET worker process to run under my regular user account instead of the SYSTEM account. Instructions for this were actually referenced with the error message that appeared.

Otherwise everything looks just fine right now, I'll post again in a few days with any additional experiences.

We recently decided to switch users in our department to LUA, which unfortunately has nothing to do with a trip to Hawaii. LUA stands for Limited (or Least privileged) User Account and basically means that you are no longer running Windows using an administrator-level account. While this greatly increases your security, especially while browsing the Internet, it is not without problems. It seemed sensible to switch my own account first before telling everyone else to do it, and immediately I ran into an obscure problem that did not seem to exist on Google yet (or I used the wrong search terms), so hopefully this will help somebody who is trying to make the same jump.

Lots of great information about LUA can be found on Aaron Margosis' WebLog and on the noadmin site.

My user profile

After removing my account from the local Administrators group, I logged out and back in and was presented with a Windows 2000-style taskbar without any custom toolbars and my desktop icons all neatly arranged by filename. The taskbar itself was permanently locked. I tried switching back to the XP theme, which worked, at least until I logged out again. Aha! Seems like the desktop settings are not being saved. Fast forward two or three hours and I know the culprit - my now least privileged account is no longer allowed to write to its own HKEY_CURRENT_USER tree in the registry. After another hour I figured out how to fix the problem: Put the account back in the Administrators group, run regedit, find the user in the HKEY_USERS branch, add the account to the permissions list and give it full control, remove the account from the Administrators group and log out and back in.

MSN Messenger

After my account seemed to be working again, MSN Messenger 7.5 was non-functional. When trying to log in, I got a 80048883 error, which does not seem to be at all uncommon.
Downloading the DLL file that is advertised on many of the web sites did not work for me, so I upgraded to the latest version, Windows Live Messenger. Problem solved.

I have not had the guts to start up Visual Studio to see what will happen. Stay tuned.

I wonder if they have a waiting list for job openings...

Here's what I did for the last four hours...
I'm working on my favorite project to make it compatible with MySQL 5.0 (which for some reason has several incompatibilities with the previous version) and I run into a weird bug when inserting Unicode strings. The project supports both Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL, so I use the N'...' syntax to encode Unicode strings.
According to the documentation, that should be fine, but of course it is not. The documentation says that these two statements are equivalent:
At least when using Connector/Net, that does not seem to be true. When
inserting values into a UTF8 column, the following statements yield different
results:
Even worse:
For now I'm waiting to see what the response to my bug report will be - perhaps it's not a bug after all, but a feature...

So I'm reading this great book on software development called Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity, which is a title only a software guy could come up with (after all, anybody else would shy away from having to type it all the time; a software guy just writes a macro). Whoever wrote the "Currently" plugin for the blog software I'm using or the people at Amazon.com should probably read the book too, since its title always brings up the picture for this book, which is, while probably cool and interesting, barely related to the one I want.

A collegue referred me to this excellent presentation titled How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters by Joshua Bloch, principal software engineer at Google. If you are developing software that has to interoperate with other systems, check it out!

I was lucky enough to attend two excellent concerts this year, after several years of scheduling conflicts, lack of information, and just living in the middle of nowhere.

U2's Vertigo tour played Madison Square Garden in October, which coincided with a conference I attended. I probably paid too much for a ticket on eBay, but it turned out to be well worth it. With few exceptions the band, music and venue were plain awesome. That particular night, Keane, another excellent band, opened. The tour is still going on, if you can get a ticket without having to sell a kidney, do it!

Last week I went to the Pink Floyd Experience at the Paramount Theater in Charlottesville. The Paramount Theater is an old movie theater that has been beautifully restored as a regular theater, including chandeliers, gold leaf and whatever it may have had when it originally opened. The band again was excellent, the experience itself not quite befitting a concert of this kind, with a rather small (and older) audience.

Just recently I received several comments regarding my earlier Secure POP3 client for C# entry. When I originally posted it, I expected the author of the OpenPOP library to release a new version with the changes to support SSL in the near future. Since this has not happened, I am now providing the modified POPClient.cs source file. To use it, download the OpenPOP source code (version 1.3 from June 16, 2004), replace the POPClient.cs file in the OpenPOP/POP3 directory, and recompile. You also need this SecureSocket library.

From today's The Breeze, James Madison University's student newspaper:

The difference between New Yorkers and Virginians [...] is that for all our diversity, we New Yorkers drive homogenously; in effect, like New Yorkers. While that means that we do drive like jerks, we all drive like jerks and are therefore able to anticipate and compensate for each other, to provide a fairly safe, if high stress, driving environment.
But one cannot compensate for stupidity. The only accurate prediction that can be made in Virginia is that the other drivers probably don't know what they're doing [...] -- Brian Goodman

As a Harrisonburg, Virginia resident who loves to drive in Manhattan, I fully agree. I like driving like a jerk myself, which is no fun in this town.

Serenity, the movie follow-up to the TV series Firefly (cancelled by Fox like so many shows before it had a chance), deserves all the good reviews it's getting. Even if you are not a fan of the show (how come?) the movie is entertaining and can stand on its own. What I liked most is the mix of Star Trek like elements (but without the sterility) and good old Star Wars action (without the cardboard acting, more like The Empire Strikes Back). While some of the TV episodes were a little campy, the movie keeps from being overly happy - there is plenty of humor, but also lots of dying, which makes for a (you guessed it) serene ending. 9/10

This week is the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, so go ahead and read a banned book!

Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.
—Lyndon Baines Johnson

One of my bigger development projects at work is the Madison Digital Image Database. It is basically a teaching and learning tool that allows faculty to build slideshows from a large repository of images and present them in a classroom or allow students to study them online, print them out etc.

Earlier this week, I also got my first iPod, which was shipped from China on Saturday and arrived Monday morning on the "ground shipping" option - thanks FedEx!

Since the iPod nano can display photos, I had to squeeze some MDID slideshows on it.