Bleeding Edge: November 2008 Archives

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November 16, 2008

Cut Off

Readers of this blog are knowledgeable community. Remember, I was looking at the sky one day and noticed skywriting but could not make out the intent? I was surprised to see quick and well informed response. How about this one - looking up in Melbourne City, we're seeing lots of stars

From Spring in Melbourne

and Cut-Offs. I get the stars, but what are the Cut-Offs?

What purpose do they serve, pray tell....

Posted by Anandasim at 07:15 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 12, 2008

WEC getting you down?

Image via Wikipedia

There's some doom and gloom about the world's economic crisis. It isn't all bad. There're big fish with cash reserves waiting to pounce on the little ones (yes, I know, mixed metaphor...) . Or little piranhas waiting for a chance at a big un with no reserves.

People are predicting that major brands will collapse - the automotive industry is hoping to or getting bailed out depending on which country you're in. There will be a thinning of well known camera brands says Thom - of course, he's not using the brand that's gonna thin out.

If you're steering the ship though (yes I know, what is it, with these metaphors), it's crucial to make the decision whether to soldier on with a grand project or to discard it as non core business. You can over worry about it and make the wrong decision, or you could flip a coin.

We live in interesting times.

Posted by Anandasim at 06:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 02, 2008

That pesky Windows autorun dialog for removable media

Image via Wikipedia

I have long detested the Windows autorun dialog which opens up when you insert removable media into the machine. The autorun feature has been heavily leveraged by all and sundry. The infamous Sony rootkit fiasco used that, respectables like Adobe love to give you some starter PhotoAlbum as a rider to some download you want and from then on, autorun offers to do additional things to every USB flash you insert. Whiz! Autorun for CDs is also famous for interfering with early attempts at CD / DVD burning and device useage contention in virtual machines.

The breaking point came for me when my precious USB stick got infected by virus/malware, promising to spread to my own Windows machines. Since that time, I have switched off all autorun on all drives on the computers I use. Which isn't a big problem for me, I prefer to explicitly run Herr Ghisler's Total Commander to see what's what.

The other day, I spotted DeskDrive from one of my RSS feeds. It's a little app, it only does It's still early days in my use but this little app is really giving me a wow! experience. It dynamically puts drive icons on your Windows desktop (and removes them when they are disconnected). That's all it does.

I remember a colleague who wanted to dominate the corporate LAN. He would create drive icon shortcuts to all the LAN drives for staff machines. I asked him what would happen to those notebooks or even desktops where staff routinely forget whether they are logged on or not. If they were not logged on or attached, those drive icons would be irrelevant and confuse the very people they were supposed to help. He gave me one of those withering stares. And for the next few years, Helpdesk had to patiently explain that even though the drive icon was there, the drive might not be there, if LAN connection had been terminated, if they were not logged in or if they were plainly at home.

Part of the charm of Deskdrive is the developer. He's hit what many of us in the software industry hit often - adding a feature or resolving a bug creates new ones..... But there's "moment of truth" from him and that's always precious in this world where the author of the program is insulated from the end users by other corporate divisions. To the extent that Microsoft had a WYSYP campaign

Oh, one disclaimer - some corporates and relationships really want you to have your autorun untampered with, and working. In which case, you didn't hear this from me.

Posted by Anandasim at 01:19 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack