Dylan Greene dot com

Silly me, my XML feed was broken. I should program a feature to tell me when it's not working correctly. Thanks to Nicole Simon for letting me know!

Some friends now have a new roommate, so they had a house re-warming party. There's no rules against that, right?

Windows Update is like going to the Dentist: It's tedious and sometimes painful, but those that avoid going today because they feel fine end up going through a more painful and expensive process down the road.

Keeping our computers up to date should not be as tedious and painful as a dentist visit. Being up to date should be as simple and automatic as the fluoride in our drinking water.

What I think needs to be fixed:

- Never require reboots. If I'm updating a mission critical server, I don't want suffer downtime. If I'm updating my personal machine, I don't want to have to wait for my machine to reboot. The Windows sub-system is probably componentized to the point that individual systems should be able to restart if needed. I don't mind Windows pausing for 10 seconds while it does an "internal restart", but all of my apps better be where I left them and how I left them.

- Never require multiple WindowsUpdate.com visits in one sitting. I can't stand when I choose a bunch of items to update, and then it says "This update must be installed separatly from other updates." Why not? Install one, then install the next one. Duh.

- Never require a visit to WindowsUpdate.com after a fresh Windows installation. After installing Windows XP on a fresh machine, I had to spend about an hour making about eight visits to WindowsUpdate.com just to get all of the updates. During the install it even asked if it should look online for newer files, which I said yes. Users expect their install to be the latest and greatest. Don't give them a stale install that requires hours of patching right out of the box.

- Never make the user read. Users don't read, we're too busy with other things on our minds, like our real jobs. Windows Update should be graphical. Show me three things when I visit WindowsUpdate.com: What updates I'm missing, a image of my computer, and a Go button. I press go and then I see updates moving into my computer as they are downloaded and installed. Users don't know what a KB# is. They don't know what RPC is. They don't know what DirectX is. Just give it to them.

- Never require IT admins to use Windows Update. IT admins are picky. They don't want you to install the latest Service Packs the day they come out because their weird phone dialier they force you to use to dial in from home doesn't work with it. Give admins their own tool. After searching around I found Microsoft System Update Services, which lets IT admins choose what updates go to which machines and automatically deploy them. Microsoft: Why don't you advertise this tool on WindowsUpdate.com? There are so many irrate IT admins that are ready to move their entire enterprise to Linux just to spite you, and all you do is hide these great tools in your deeply nested web site.

- Never require a random visit to WindowsUpdate.com. Did you know that the .NET Framework 1.1 is available? DirectX 9? Maybe you do because you visit Windows Update regulary and I know what they are. But what about the typical user? They don't know what those are. If they need them, just give it to them. The only cost is the time it takes to download.

- Never release software that can't be updated via Windows Update. Everything Microsoft sells should be easily updated via Windows Update. There is a hard to find, hardly known about, strangly hidden Office Update (there's a link from WindowsUpdate but it's not obvious. This should not be a separate web site. This should be one tool. And it should update everything I've ever purchased from Microsoft from Office 2003 to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004.

- Never require an install to use Windows Update. For some reason, the Windows Update ActiveX control used on WindowsUpdate is not included with Windows. Why not? Not only should this be included, but this should be self-updated via Windows Update. A user should never have to see the confusing and abused ActiveX "Are you sure you trust us?" certificate screen. What if a user doesn't trust Microsoft, but they still want to update their computer?

- Never give the user a choice for critical updates. This might sound scary, but I constantly see people hitting "remind me later" to the Windows Critical Update dialog that pops up. They are afraid of doing, or don't want to be bothered about something that doesn't relate to their job. Just install it.

- Never install anything that can't be undone. Okay, so sometimes you might not want to install a patch. Maybe you are testing your software and want to see if it runs on a machine with older settings. (Well ideally, that shouldn't be possible, see the note before this one.) That's why there is undo. Today this feature is in the Control Panel in the Add/Remove programs program. This is the wrong place for it. Windows Updates are not programs. They are updates. If I use Windows Update to update my machine, I should be able to use Windows Update to undo updates. There should also be a similar tool on my own machine.

- Finally, Help users who aren't able to use Windows Update. A blog entry I posted on how to fix error 0X800A138F has had over 10,000 visitors since I posted it a month ago, which is about 9,500 more than a typical blog entry for me. Windows Update simply gave users Error 0X800A138F if it wasn't able to download the update list. The site does not say what to do if you get this error, or even link to a page that could be of help, or even link to a way to contact Microsoft incase the problem is on their side. In thise case, it ends up that the update list was moved to an Akamai servers that have been known to be ad servers, a server which many people block to prevent getting as many ads and pop-up ads. Some people got the same error because their IE wasn't set to any particular language, so Windows Update didn't know what language updates to give. Instead of automatically using an alternate server or asking the user for their language, Windows Update just gave error 0X800A138F.

Fix these problems and Windows Update will no longer be like going to the dentist. Perhaps people won't even care when a new security hole is found because their computers will be updated before the press even has time to report about it.

I just had a great IM conversation with Robert Scoble, Technical Evangelist for Longhorn (the next major version of Windows). Who knew busy MS employees could be so open, available, a pleasure to talk to? Is Scoble starting a cultural change at MS? Who knows, we'll see... Scoble posted his MSN IM on his blog with an open invitation for anybody to chat. Dave Winer... what's your IM?

Scoble and I briefly chated about: Eclipse and the lack of a similar application framework for .NET; selling Windows (or how not to, and why I dislike Microsoft's lack of informative marketing); a conversation Bill Gates and I had when I was an intern at Microsoft in which he argued that he didn't care that people saw Windows 98 as a $98 bug fix because the marketing efforts never said what was new with 98 because his real target was Gateway, Dell, and Compaq; and some other random complaints. Basically I complained about MS and he listened. I like that. Normally when somebody complains about Microsoft the only people that care to listen are Microsoft bashers to begin with, not somebody who wants to help improve the company.

Now that my power AND internet are both back up, here's a short list of sites I often visit but I wasn't able to the last few days:

Gizmodo - The Gadgets Weblog. I found out about the Roomba here first. (Yes, get one, they're great.)

Weblogs.asp.net - About 300 blogers all blogging about their experiences with .NET. Often informative and funny.

The Scobleizer Weblog - Tech news from a high-ranking Microsoft employee.

PocketPC Thoughts - Lots of PocketPC news and opinions.

Neowin - Lots of technews.

TeamXBOX - XBOX News. Their forum often has more timely screenshots and videos than any other site, including their own.

LostRemote - Current & former TV producers blog about the crap on TV. Often informative and funnny.

DPReview - Best digital camera reviews and news site. Hmm.... Canon 300D Digital Rebel...

Scripting News - Blogging News. Dave - why do you still call it Scripting news?

Do you have a favorite site or two? Add them in the comments. URLs that start with http:// will automatically hyperlink.

Here's a bunch of bad local news stations slogans. All About Your World at Home. Where News Comes First. News From Where You Live. And so forth...

With all this news about Hurricane Isabel, have you ever wondered what's required to cover it first person for the news? Here's a good hurricane news coverage Things to Bring list. I'll probably at home or at work when it hits here Thursday afternoon.

This site, and the others I run - TeacherReviews.com, Messageboard.com, and the preview of the next version of TeacherReviews, were down from about 4pm EST yesterday to 8:45am EST this morning. A reboot of the firewall fixed the problem, but we aren't sure yet what happened to cause the lockup.

I'm always curious as to how people find this site, so I've kept a track of the pages that bring people here. Most often it's a Google Search that bring people here, which somehow I have a good pagerank for almost anything I write about. In the web world, this page called the Referer. (Even though it should probably be spelled Referrer, the W3C specification for this feature never mentions why the spelling error. Does anybody know?). This information is sent by your web browser. If you type in the URL, or use a bookmark, the referer string is sadly empty. I wish I could use this to many people have bookmarked this site, but it's not possible.

So these URL's are interesting, but cryptic for anybody who can't read URL-encoded text (like me). So I wrote a simple ASP script that uses MSXML to connect to the URL, retrieve the page, and pluck out the name of the site, and if it's a search engine, what the user was searching for too.

The end result: Now when you look at the list of incoming links, you'll see the actual name of the page instead of just a long confusing URL. I added the time because it's interesting to see how frequently random people are finding this site. Eventually I'll add a counter to estimate how many referrals per hour this site is getting.

The script I wrote caches the titles in SQL Server so it will only retrieve the URL once. I wrote this feature for the new TeacherReviews.com redesign I'm working on in my free time. I haven't planned on releasing the source code for the referal title feature, but if there is demand I will.