inside aebrahim’s head

I tried to log into my Hotmail account today with Firefox 3.0, and I got the following error:

Clearing the cookies and cache doesn’t help. When I log in via IE7, it works fine. This problem started to happen after the upgrade to Firefox 3.

A couple of days ago I wrote about some headaches upgrading to Windows XP SP3. This was related to my ability to rotate my screen being scuttled by the SP3 update. Microsoft said I needed a driver update to restore this functionality but Dell did not seem to provide one, so I tried to get some publicly available drivers from the ATI website which didn’t work for me, because they didn’t contain any definitions for the Mobility Radeon series, only the desktop versions. This meant that although my monitor rotation worked, I couldn’t get my LCD to display at the native 1400×1050 resolution that it usually displays at, which was a deal breaker and I had to revert to SP2 and install the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit to stop it from automatically upgrading again.

A couple of comments later, people pointed out that the problem is really Dell’s rather than Microsoft’s because Dell hadn’t bothered to release a driver update in years despite ATI continually updating their reference drivers. What’s worse, Dell has a deal with ATI where Dell users can’t download drivers directly from the ATI website. So users are supposedly stuck with the broken old Dell drivers that Dell couldn’t be bothered to update.

I did some researching on the Dell forums and found two entries that gave me the correct information so that I could find drivers that worked with SP3, even though they were unsupported by Dell. There is a “hidden” link on the ATI website that allows you to download the drivers for Mobility Radeon series bypassing the compatibility check that usually stops Dell users from accessing the drivers:

http://www.ati.com/online/mobilecatalyst/

After I got the drivers from this site, everything worked like a charm and I was able to use my video card rotation function correctly with SP3. One small gotcha regarding the latest ATI drivers is that you must have the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 installed in order to use them.

All of this would have been a lot simpler if Dell just kept their drivers up to date! I have a Dell Latitude D610, which is widely deployed at enterprises worldwide. It’s surprising that their enterprise customers haven’t made a bigger fuss about this.

I took the plunge and updated my machine to Windows XP SP3 today, a good month after general release. I don’t like to install Microsoft software when it’s first released, because more often than not, there are too many unknown bugs and I like my workhorse machine to work well.

After installing SP3, everything (so far) seemed to work fine except that the monitor rotation feature of my ATI Radeon X300 stopped working, so I could no longer orient my monitor in a vertical position rather than the standard horizontal. I like vertical because it’s better for the office as more email headers and text info can be viewed on a single screen.

After tinkering around and getting new drivers from the Dell website (I have a Latitude D610), it still doesn’t work. I then do a bit of Googling and find Microsoft KB 947309 (euphemistically titled Some third-party programs may experience a change in functionality after you install Windows XP Service Pack 3), which explains that this feature requires an updated driver to work with SP3.

Dell’s newest driver didn’t work (go figure), so I tried the one from ATI. When I tried to install it, it said that I didn’t have any cards that were supported by the driver (which cannot be true). In the end I had to use XP’s manual driver update interface and use the “Have disk” button to force it to install drivers that it warned me would not be compatible. I chose the ATI Radeon X300/X550/X1050 Series driver that came with version 8.5 of the ATI Catalyst software.

That seemed to do the trick after a reboot, but it did leave me wondering how any Joe Average computer user is supposed to figure this out and why this kind of stuff needs to break with a service pack upgrade in the first place.

This is also precisely why I never let any of my friends do OS upgrades with Windows, because it’s less headache to start fresh and reinstall apps then it is to try to troubleshoot the shortcomings of Microsoft’s upgrade paths.

UPDATE: I had to revert back to SP2 and the old Dell drivers. More details later (and a fix).

We’re buying some new PCs for a couple of new hires at work. We buy through Dell and for the first time we’re buying PCs sold with Windows XP preinstalled but under the Windows Vista Downgrade plan. The way it works is that the PCs have XP SP2 preinstalled but we get OEM media and OEM license keys for both XP Professional and Vista Business. This way when we want to upgrade OS we can do so without paying for a new license.

I’m guessing in another year or so this option may disappear and we’ll be stuck with Vista only. So to prepare I asked our office IT technician to call Microsoft and ask them to send us a 180-day eval copy of Windows Vista Business so that we can install and smoketest all of our office software and make sure it works.

Turns out that Microsoft stopped giving out 180-day eval copies of Vista last year. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Seems like they’d want businesses to move to Vista and would want to make it easy by providing time-limited eval licenses for testing. Car dealers let you test drive the car before you purchase. Why not with an OS too?

They suggested using the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. Hardly a substitute for a real world test, though.

After reading CNET’s review of Windows XP x64, it looks like this might be the case, if only temporarily. CNET notes that although Windows XP x64 defaults to the 64-bit version of IE, Microsoft’s does not yet have a 64-bit version of Windows Update for IE, so one has to run the 32-bit version of IE (both 32-bit and 64-bit IE are included) to get Windows Update functionality.

I’m not familiar with the internals of IE, but based on my understanding of the above, it looks like if someone was running the 64-bit version of Internet Explorer, a 32-bit BHO would probably not be able to execute, thereby thwarting the current crop of [ad|spy|mal]ware targeted at IE users.

Certainly as people begin to write malicious software targeted at 64-bit systems this “advantage” will disappear, but early adopters of Windows XP x64 might get a bit of a free ride, at least with respect to IE’s security.

Now that Windows XP x64 has been released, we should decide when we will begin supporting it by providing official 64-bit builds of Firefox/Thunderbird. Plugins will probably be an issue, but since extensions are not compiled, they should have no problems running. Work has started on this front and is being tracked in bug 237202. Third party Windows x64 Firefox builds are already available.

CNET’s News.com was able to interview Bill Gates at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It’s a pretty interesting read, if for no other reason than it gives a window into the software industry’s most well known individual.

However, in a not so subtle way, Gates likens IPR opponents to communists. I think this is very much a misnomer. Here it is in his own words:

Q: In recent years, there’s been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, “We’ve got to look at patents, we’ve got to look at copyrights.” What’s driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?

A: No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.

Make of that what you will, but I think his usage of the word communist here is pretty misleading, and is just trying to play upon the general public’s ignorance of what communism actually is and their misconception that communism is inherently evil.

There’s also the obligatory quote marginalising Firefox, but we’ve heard all that stuff before, so I’m not going to reproduce it.

If you were browsing The Register on Saturday using Internet Explorer, and weren’t using Windows XP with Service Pack 2 installed, chances are your computer has been infected with a virus. One of their ad providers, Falk AG was compromised, and the ads they served exploited the Bofra/iFrame set of vulnerabilities in Windows/IE to install a viral payload on viewers’ machines. Slashdot is also running a story on it.

The Register is apologising for the incident, and recommending that all their visitors who used Internet Explorer but were not using Windows XP with SP2 perform a full virus scan on their system and install SP2 immediately. They’ve also suspended Falk AG from their ad rotation system pending an explanation.

How’s that for security, Microsoft? If you aren’t using Windows XP with SP2, protect yourself by using Firefox 1.0 instead of Internet Explorer. Even if you are using SP2, it’s still a good idea. You never know what other exploits are lurking out there waiting to infect you.

Microsoft has made life too easy for would-be hackers. It used to be that they had to convince you to do something stupid. These days, even that’s not necessary. You can get infected just by visiting random websites that you trust. Imagine the impact if one of CNN’s ad partners had been involved here.

If you haven’t yet installed SP2, the best way to get it is by filling out this form. Microsoft will ship you a Windows XP SP2 update CD at no cost, to almost anywhere in the world.

Thanks to yusufg for letting me know about this.

UPDATE: Falk has issued a statement regarding the above incident. Apparently it was caused by a flaw in one of their load balancers that was exploited to redirect ad requests to search.comedycentral.com, which served the malicious ads.

Microsoft hosted another Internet Explorer Team Chat yesterday. I’ve put up logs of the chat in plaintext and RTF format. Not a whole that we didn’t already know was said. All in all, it was pretty disappointing compared to the last one I participated in, during which there was at least some useful discussion. Oh, and for those who are wondering, the person nicknamed “ali” in the chat who was asking questions was not me. I don’t know who it was.

Do you know anyone who needs to grab Windows XP Service Pack 2 but doesn’t have the bandwidth? Microsoft has a solution: they’ll ship an SP2 installer CD for free to pretty much anywhere in the world. All you have to do is fill out this form, and a CD will be shipped out almost immediately. My brother received his less than a week after it was ordered.

There are a lot of nice enhancements in Internet Explorer and Outlook Express in SP2. They feel a lot smoother. Browsing with Internet Explorer is no longer popup hell, and Outlook Express is no longer prone to loading remote content without thinking. Even so, Firefox and Thunderbird still blow them away.

It looks like Microsoft is hosting a new IEBlog over on their new MSDN Blogs site (thanks to mine for the heads up). It’ll probably be worth following and seeing what they have to say. Certainly not daily reading, but probably something to check out every now and then. I’m hopeful (though not very optimistic) that we’ll see some good debate there. Right now most of the comments over there are just mindless IE-bashing, which isn’t very conducive to getting any real use out of the blog. If this sounds like something you’ve done, consider leaving thoughtful comments instead.

Also, there is an Internet Explorer Feedback Wiki hosted on Channel 9. There are some useful links on there, but surprisingly, the site seems to have a somewhat ‘IE-sucks’ kind of vibe. Odd for an MSDN wiki.

All in all I’m happy that Microsoft is trying to become more open with its development efforts. It’s headed in the right direction. However, it remains to be seen how committed they are to it, and whether or not it translates into any real changes.