Webs’ Random Ideas

I wanted to phrase the title there as “MS Stupidity” but I’m not sure this is only inherent to MS…

Why are windows in any OS allowed to take activation when the user is currently engaged in either typing or mouse movement? That seems incredibly stupid and nonsensical to me. Take for instance my case from this morning. I just got an advertised update that needs to be installed through SMS. Okay, no problem. I accepted and continued working on my other monitor while it downloaded.

I was in the middle of typing when a popup came up during the install and since this is MS, that popup was allowed to activate which means it has control. This means all my key strokes were sent to the popup rather than the window I was working in, without my knowledge. This means I wasn’t able to read the popup because one of the keys I pushed was Enter, so I sent that key which was sent to the OK button.

No someone could say, “Well you shouldn’t of been working on something while the update was running.” Well you might have a point there except I was simply doing some typing in a text document. And with my dual core system I should be able to use the other core that isn’t currently running.

Anyway, regardless its annoying that a window in any OS can take over control while a user is currently working. There should be a user editable parameter where the user has to be inactive for “x” number of seconds or minutes before any window can take over.

Rabble rabble rabble!!!

good riddance!

I just got an email about my Google Apps Domain account from Google stating that HTML5 and java improvements from Google will phase out IE6 support. It took forever but finally it dies!!

Another school in news for making the switch to Open Source, this time in New Zealand…

Albany Senior High School in the northern suburbs of Auckland has been running an entirely open source infrastructure since it opened in 2009. The 230-pupil school was set up to follow open learning principles, offering large “learning commons” areas where multiple classes interact rather than conventional classrooms and setting aside one day each week for pupils to work on self-driven research projects.

Ditching Microsoft is highly unusual within the NZ education sector, as a long-standing contract with the national government means the software giant is paid for technology for the school even though none has been used. Microsoft’s dominance also means that most planning documents for education presume an Microsoft infrastructure.

The whole article is just a fascinating read! Not just about the school making the switch but MS’s dominance in the computer market and their ingenious marketing to get themselves so intertwined in school districts (which is smart on many levels for MS).

I also liked how the principle stated his server room in the school was built to common practice standards for schools of that size and enrollment, which was 4 racks. Each rack able to hold 48 servers or 24 2U servers. Yet the school only needed 4 servers to run the whole school on an open source system.

I’ve written about this before so it comes to little surprise to me to read about this again. What does surprise me though is how these stories still seem to be few and far between. I’m still confident the Open Source model will win out as free software that works great (in many ways better than the paid version, think archiving programs, Internet browsers, antivirus, or file transfer clients) is hard to pass up. Heck even my company is finally starting to adopt OSS.

It doesn’t know how to render my website correctly. I’ll try to look into when I get time.

So i figured out how to get Windows 7 Beta running as a VM. This was important to me as I didn’t want to install another MS OS on my computer, 1 is more than plenty. It was a simple process when I learned I had to choose “Windows Operating System” and then “Vista 64bit” rather than “Other Operating System” and “Other 64 bit”. Should of guessed this right away, but it wasn’t really intuitive as Windows 7 isn’t Vista. Anyways, on to the goods…

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A Microsoft truck driving down the road on 74. I guess the got a new campaign going on called “Microsoft Mobile Event Experience”. I had trouble tracking down a link and in doing so found a security flaw in a Microsoft Partner’s website. I don’t want to divulge any more information than that, but I did find it midly humorous that a MS site had a major security flaw.

Oddly enough I saw the truck on the road as I was searching up information on Zimbra.

Scenario:
Only one user cannot connect to Exchange with Outlook. OWA (Outlook Web Access) works fine and no one else has reported the problem. Lower right corner of Outlook shows something like “Cannot connect to Exchange Server”. Reboot Outlook and now Outlook won’t even load up. It starts and you can see something that might be the inbox, but then Outlook closes and throws up an error. I have never seen this before…

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You can skip forward to about the 9:50 marker, or if you like some intro from Gates, about 6:00-8:00 (can’t remember exactly)…

http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx