Nifty Windows Tweak

I'm fairly change averse when it comes to my computing environment. I spend most of my day in front of the computer so I develop comfortable habits and am reasonably productive. Recently I make a small configuration tweak to my Windows desktop that is down right nifty. Friends have been telling me to do this for years and I finally gave in.



This little box is the Address toolbar from IE. From it you can execute commands (the Run... option on the Start menu), type in URLs, and with the help of another nifty little tweak, quickly access your favorite search engines.

Here is how to set it up:

1. Right-click on an empty part of the Taskbar and make sure that Lock Toolbars is unchecked.


2. Right-click on an empty part of the Taskbar and select Toolbars > Address.


3. Carefully drag the Address bar to the left hand side of the screen. Be careful to keep your mouse cursor in the Taskbar or the Address bar will leap off and won't come back.


4. Right-click over the Address bar and uncheck Show Title.


5. Go to IE > Tools > Internet Options... > Advanced > Browsing and uncheck Show Go button in Address bar


6. Finally position the tool bars to taste and re-lock the Task bar if desired. I like to keep everything in the smallest, most tidy configuration possible. (Did I mention the comfortable habits?)

I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft makes this the default configuration in the next version of Windows, except the label will change from the geekly "Address" to the hot and sexy "Search". Of course, the search box will default to use Microsoft's web search engine and will also search Outlook, your Office documents and the rest of your hard drive.

Windows as subscription software

From Reuters: Microsoft on Track to Offer Anti-Virus Software

You heard it here first (actually, this has probably been predicted by thousands before me): Microsoft will use anti-virus software to effectively charge a subscription fee for Windows. Microsoft is finding it harder and harder to sell new OS licenses, PCs are near saturation and upgrade cycles are lengthening, a subscription fee for Windows makes lots of sense. Eventually I expect Microsoft will bundle the first year of anti-virus service with the OS license and then get people on the $30 per year plan after that.

Of course, anti-spam comes next but that is probably a couple years off.

Gambling on Voting

There was a great editorial in the NYT this weekend comparing the security of gambling machines to the security of voting machines. The short version of the story is: The security of gambling machines is much better. Paradoxically, the situation is the way it is because large amounts of money are involved in both.

Email Authentication Update

Things have come a long way since I first heard about various "Reverse MX" SMTP authentication schemes a little over a year ago. The various efforts have coalesced in to something called Sender Policy Framework or SPF.

Even Microsoft has agreed to merge its similar Caller ID effort in to a future version of SPF. I wouldn't be surprised if all of the major email senders are doing SPF a year from now.

The Yahoo! DomainKeys is the other interesting area of email authentication. While SPF works to authenticate the domain of the SMTP envelope sender (think, "mail server") DomainKeys uses cryptography to protect the From: header along with the contents of the message. Both techniques are useful; SPF is easier to roll out quickly while DomainKeys offers stronger authentication. They each have a different set of failure modes and ancillary features.

All of this is good news for Qurb. The weakness of any whitelist based anti-spam approach is that spammers can pretend to be someone they are not, such as order-confirmations@amazon.com, to sneak past the whitelist. Authenticated email plugs this hole.

Monitoring Elections

A coworker, Dave Moore, suggested at lunch today a great way to improve election monitoring: Have volunteers from each party stand outside every polling place with a camcorder. Sure you'll go through a few tapes before the end of the day. Sure most of the tapes will be spectacularly boring. However, if something does go wrong you'll get a contemporaneous record of what happened. Just knowing that there will be video of any irregularities on the evening the news may keep everyone on their best behavior.

Realistically, camcorders and tapes are a bit expensive and cumbersome for this kind of project. I bet by 2008 digital cameras (which can also do video) and cell phones (which will soon be able to do video) will make it cheap and easy. Pipe the results directly to a blog and you have a wonderful way for citizens to monitor their own elections.

The first rule of Terrorist Club is you DO NOT talk about Terrorist Club

I was always a bit confused when various public officials claim that nobody in the government considered that terrorists might use planes as missiles. I read about it in Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor in 1996.

Now it appears that alleged terrorists (or the interrogators, hard to know) also watch movies. From the NY Times:

"They would rent two apartments in each building, seal all the openings, turn on the gas, and set timers to detonate the buildings simultaneously at a later time," legal papers contended, according to The Associated Press.