Microsoft today released Windows Media Player 10 to the web.

Jump on over and grab the download, find out about some of the new and forthcoming devices that take advantage of the technology, check out the WMP 10 trailer (300Kb), or view out one of the online streaming videos just released that describe the new features of the technology:

Sync Your Portable Media Center Device with Your PC

Synchronize Music and Pictures to a Portable Media Center Device

Convert and Sync Video to Your Portable Media Center Device

Using Windows Media Player 10 to Create a Digital Jukebox

Cool stuff. I like the Bliss add-on visualization, that's nifty.

I have only found one minor glitch so far (and its one that occurred in the tech-beta version, as well, but this is a fresh install on a clean, non-beta-poisoned computer). In the upper right corner there is a broken image icon, reminiscent of Internet Explorer. I wonder how much IE is leveraged in the WMP10 interface. Interesting. A reboot did not fix the issue, either. Clicking on the broken image placeholder resultsi n the same menu associated with the down-arrow image to the right of the broken one.

Time to find a Portable Media Device!

CERT (the Computer Emergency Readiness Team) made it little more official this week and issued a Cyber Security Alert [SA04-243A] recommending that computer users upgrade to Windows XP SP2.

Taken from the US-CERT web site alert:

Recommendation

To help protect your Windows XP computer from attacks and vulnerabilities, install Service Pack 2 using Windows Update or Automatic Updates.

Note: Service Pack 2 makes significant changes to improve the security of Windows XP, and these changes may have negative effects on some programs and Windows functionality. Before you install Service Pack 2, back up your important data and consult your computer manufacturer's web site for information about Service Pack 2.

The recommendation is made specifically for home users, which stand to see the highest benefit, but applies in principle to businesses as well. However, note that many business computing environments are centrally managed. If you work in a company that has centrally-managed software and security procedures, be sure to check in with those people before you install SP2 - they may already have a plan in place.

I have FIVE FOUR THREE TWO  ONE [Sorry - ALL GONE! Next time!] Gmail account invitations to hand out.

Update: Six more invitations up for grabs here.

I've been a Dish Network customer for years, and before that I was a DirecTV customer. These days I have standard-definition Dish Network equipment with a TiVo DVR box, and in another room I have one of Dish Network's standard-def DVR receivers, as well.

I'll be honest: I don't like Dish's DVR receiver at all. I don't even use the DVR capability. It's annoying - it doesn't even download the programming guide on it's own - It makes me do it when I try to access the guide and it suddenly realizes there's nothing in memory to display. I have no idea who designed Dish Network's receiver software, but I can almost guarantee you it's been the same person(s) since day-one. All their equipment has this unusable "engineer" flavor. Instead I use my TiVo all the time, every day, with the TiVo remote and IR blaster controlling the satellite receiver.

But what I want is High Definition TV all-around. I have a nice high-def projector and I want to do more than playing Counter-Strike and Halo in HD.

Dish Network has a $1000 HD DVR available, but I can't bring myself to risk spending the money on it - every Dish Network receiver I have ever owned (and that's several) has been lacking in the usability department. Maybe they got it right on their new one, but there is no way for me to know. No one I know has one of these units. I can see the potential in it, but past experience scares me too much to pony up that much money. Now, if Dish Network wanted to send me one to try out, they could do that - I'd even review it (objectively) here. But no up-front money any more, not unless I can see it in action. Sorry, Charlie.

So, I have been looking at options to the Dish Network lineup. Probably the most obvious is DirecTV, my long-ago former satellite television service provider. They also have a HD receiver, and this one is a DirecTiVo model, which certainly catches my attention. TiVo's product is solid and ranks high in my one-man usability survey. If I try hard enough, I can probably find a place somewhere in this city to demo the DirecTV product. I will probably try to do that, since I doubt DirecTV will be willing to loan me one to evaluate, either. But if they want to, I'll gladly take them up on the offer.

But there's another company that's got my eye, as well. I have been watching a third company, VOOM, for the past several months. I like VOOM and their web site- they even show you on their site what you see on the screen, what the equipment is like, pretty much anything you want to know. Why don't all the companies do that? They also have something that just caught my eye, and which I might even be willing to wait around for - They're prepping a HD-DVR and their "Whole House Solution." This is looking very interesting. Accessing your PC - does this integrate with Windows XP Media Center Edition by chance? Maybe not, and that's a whole different post topic for another day - The only thing that's really missing from XP MCE -- in my not-so-humble opinion -- is high-def support. Anyone know? Hey VOOM - you need a market tester???

Ripped unabashedly and directly from the VOOM^TM web site and their future-stuff page:

With the introduction of our HD-DVR, you'll be able to watch and record any channel, whenever you want, in both standard and high definition. Every recording is a perfect digital version of the original. The VOOM DVR has multiple tuners, enabling you to record two shows while you’re watching a third! And you can expand the DVR’s usefulness even further with our Whole House Solution.

Our upcoming Whole House Solution extends the power of our DVR throughout your home. With a single click, you can pause live TV and HDTV, then go to another room and pick up where you left off. It also connects your TV and PC entertainment like never before. You can access your PC and enjoy digital music and photos on any TV in the house. That's VOOMing!

Obviously, this looks like it has some potential. I've been considering moving to a PC/network-based digital media solution, and Satellite TV in HD is the only way I can take advantage of the video equipment that is presently leveraged only by my X-BOX and DVD home theater systems. I'll be buying something eventually, I just don't know what.

If anyone has any personal experience with any of this new technology. please share your thoughts - We'd like to know!

My friend Dian wrote to say she is thrilled to let everyone know that the new Urban Grind Coffee, in the Pearl, is finally open!  They're done with construction and training and are fully operational. Head on down and check them out. Be sure to take your laptop - they're a Personal Telco site, so free WiFi is available!

Urban Grind Coffee is located at 911 NW 14th Ave. in the Pearl, on the corner of 14th and Kearny (Portland).  The building is just one block north of the new REI store in a very cool part of town. Their business hours are:

• Sunday 7am-7pm
• Monday/Tuesday 6am-7pm
• Wednesday-Friday 6am-9pm
• Saturday 7am-9pm

Right now they're focusing on espresso drinks and pastries, but should be adding more breakfast and lunch items in the coming weeks.  Desserts and wine/beer are a month or two away.

If you're in the area, stop in and check them out!

Web forums used to be useful. Then h4xZ0r teenagers found them, and the world changed (for the worse). Over at adminmod.org for example, about two years ago things in the support forums went to hell in a hand-basket - about the time goldzip came along (or a little thereafter). Forum flaming became an art for a short time, but as it is with most art-forms, it was quickly commoditized and thus cheapened.

But I digress...

Someone apparently picked up on this little-known and less-understood behavior over at the Steam forums, and having realized that a FAQ or sticky post won't get read by the people that need to read it, did what all good communicators do: Took it to their own medium and style.

Introducing: Posting and You

Pretty much hits the proverbial nail right on the head.

This is not exactly breaking news, since it was officially announced a few weeks ago, but I neglected to point out at the time that Microsoft dropped the retail price of their OneNote 2003 software to $99 early in August, with similar reductions in other currencies worldwide.

See Chris Pratley's weblog announcement for more info. Chris is the Group Program Manager at Microsoft for Office Authoring Services, and as such is a member of the OneNote team. His blog is a terrific resource and insightful read, by the way.

Don't have OneNote yet? Want to buy a copy of OneNote for yourself, your new college student, or someone else? Hey, you just can't beat the price now. If you really want to make someone crazy who desperately deserves it (and have a little fun with a colleague of mine at the same time), call Scott Rommel at Softchoice, at 503-241-6554, and order a copy directly from him on the phone. Tell him Greg said to call and you're looking for the extra-special price, and he'll take care of you.

Oh and no, I won't get anything in return for software orders placed through Scott. All I get out of it is a good laugh at the calls he'll get from you. That's all I really need. DOPS attack! (Denial Of Phone Service, that is).

Darron Devlin recently published two useful new PowerToys for OneNote 2003 with SP1:

OneNote Image Writer
This PowerToy is a virtual printer that enables the import of document images into Microsoft Office OneNote® 2003 sections. Any program that is capable of printing can send a document to the OneNote Image Writer just as it would when printing to a physical device. The printed document is converted into a document image that can be used as a foreground or background image on a OneNote page.

WebPageToOneNote
This PowerToys adds a WebPageToOneNote button to the Standard Buttons toolbar in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later. Click this button to copy an image of the entire current web page (WYSIWYG) to a new page in OneNote. The new page is created in a WebImageCaptures section in your notebook.

Grab the new powertoys to install and use at Darron's web site. As mentioned in the past, you can also download a couple of useful add-on powertoys for OneNote from Microsoft.

MSDN will be hosting two weeks worth of webcasts October 18th-29th, organized into three skill levels and covering a variety of aspects of web development. This is a great way for people who want to learn new technology or to sharpen their skills with the latest and greatest. Learn about ASP.net and other web development topics.

From the MSDN Webcasts announcements blog, here are some early details. Look for more information on the Webcasts main page and on the MSDN Webcasts Blog:

Web Development Webcast Weeks, October 18 - 29, 2004

• Basic/Novice - (level 100) 12 webcasts – Good for hobbyists, beginners, students looking to learn about Microsoft’s web development environment and tools
• Intermediate- (level 200/300) 18 webcasts – Ideal for experienced developers who have some experience with Visual Basic.NET, C#, ASP.NET, and XML web services.
• Advanced - (level 400) 10 webcasts – All about the advanced features in ASP.NET 2.0. Must attend sneak preview on ASP.NET 2.0. I attended the internal airlift that Microsoft held for it’s partners and employees and there is some truly wicked features that you need to check out here.

The other day I wrote an article about how RSS saves me so much time when it comes to work. Interestingly, it's been so heavily traffic'ed I'll have to look at upgrading my account to accommodate the extra bandwidth. But that's just fine, and I have had a few interesting conversations with people the past couple of days as a result. The beauty of the blogging community is that everyone has thoughts, ideas and opinions, and we can share them so effectively.

Matthew Lanham commented on what I wrote, and made an interesting point:

“Sounds great - but here's a question: How many corporate information infrastructures out there already have RSS/Atom aggregation as part of the big picture? My bet is that most of them still don't and the RSS driven employee is still using her own aggregator or a centralized system like Bloglines to read those feeds. So what happens to that information once you've read it? Is it piped into the corporate information system to be spread amongst the rest of the company or does it just "disappear"? From a corporate side there is still a lot to be done to bring both worlds together. And the software vendors like Microsoft and IBM need to integrate that functionality (both aggregating and reading) into their line of products before RSS and Atom become corporate mainstream. But it'll happen.”

He's right - for now there is no real, commercial, out of the box capability for aggregating information found via RSS at the corporate level. That's why we built our own, of sorts.

We run SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services on our Intranet, and one of our talented developers created in-house web parts that both consume and expose information in RSS. Since then, several others have created similar things.

The RSS display web parts allow me to create areas on the Intranet where users can see the latest information about any given topic, and the web part is available for any site creator to use, so they can aggregate internal and/or external information/feeds on their Intranet sites, too. The other components allow us to expose any list of information on a SharePoint site as an RSS feed.

It's only a first step, and Matthew's point is well-taken. We can create it now, each of us putting the work in individually to create something custom, or the big boys can do it for us. The beauty of a company like Microsoft or IBM building it and packaging it (there is a standard to follow, after all) is that they can make a single investment that the rest of us can leverage. That is a value-add proposition, and what I expect from the companies whose software I buy.

Wow. This is different. [QuickTime MOV]

Ever wonder what your purpose in life is? Apparently, so does that little lawn bomb your dog left in the yard:

"Once upon a time, a little doggy poo lived on the side of a road. He felt all alone in the world. He believed that nobody needed him for anything, and that he had no purpose in life. If only Doggy Poo had a reason for being, then he wouldn't give up on his dream to be useful to the world.

"One day, Doggy Poo meets a lovely dandelion sprout. Will she explain his purpose in life? Will she help make his dream come true?"

You ever get the feeling maybe someone is stretching the premise just a little too thin? Well, anyhow if you're into this kind of shi... uhh I mean stuff, go buy the DVD or book or soundtrack. Enjoy.

Larry Osterman points out what should be obvious, but is largely overlooked or ignored since it makes tasty "news." Recent reports that there is a security "hole" in Windows XP SP2 miss the big picture, he says.

The gist of the reported complaint is this: The new Security Center in SP2 uses WMI to control what information is displayed to the end user regarding what software is in place and it's status. Malicious code can, therefore, potentially use WMI to modify the information displayed by the Security Center, thereby convincing the user of the system that their firewall is on and AV software is running when in fact it's not.

PC Magazine and others ran articles about how they were able to spoof the new Windows XP SP2 Security Center, causing it to display false information about the status of the system. Microsoft later responded and PC Magazine followed up on the response, where they changed their tone somewhat.

From PC Magazine's original article:

"Based on an anonymous tip, we looked into the WMI and the Windows Security Center's use of it, and found that it may not only be a security hole, but a crater in the wrong hands. Due to the nature of WMI, the WSC could potentially allow attackers to spoof the state of security on a user's system while accessing data, infecting the system, or turning the PC into a zombie for spam or other purposes."

While this is technically possible, what is missed is the fact that in order to use WMI to make those changes, a program would have to be downloaded and installed on the machine with "system" level permissions. Any unwelcome code that is allowed/able to get that level of access has already won the race and is able to do much more harm than simply changing the information displayed in the Security Center. Even if the security center was not a part of your system, as soon as you ran the malicious code you'd be equally screwed, and the malware could make changes to pretty much any other apps running on your system. It would not need the Security Center to do its dirty work.

Read Larry's post for more, but remember one thing: The fact that someone claims something is a security hole - or in this case, a "crater" - does not mean they're right. It is, of course, always best to check things out and play the role of the skeptic, but accuracy in reporting is of primary importance, even if it is not as exciting. I'm glad PC Week followed up with their second story.

Their conclusion?

"We see the WMI and WSC as an indirect security risk, or hole, or whatever you want to call it. Maybe we're giving hackers and malware writers too much credit. WMI allows a program to get the security status of a user's system, as well as spoof it to give the user a false sense of security. Maybe it is too subtle. However, it is another tool in the hacker's toolbox. To have easy public access to the security status of a user's machine is like sending a password in plain text to a web site. It may not be used, but then again it might..."

"Do we think that end users should upgrade? Yes, Windows XP Service Pack 2 is a must do, especially for end users. However, we would recommend users not take the WSC as gospel, If you use an antivirus, or 3rd party firewall, look at their status panels as a sanity check. Keep your Antivirus, windows, firewall updates current, and most of all, be very careful of what you run on your system."

I do think the articles serve an important and valid purpose, though: They call to light the importance of securing systems by default and continuing to improve in that area. It's fair to say that in the real world, people will do exactly what you hope they would not do, and that the default configuration of the operating system, which is certainly greatly improved with the new service pack, is still a real concern. They point out that there is still work to be done, and that while things are better, they;re not perfect.  In that sense, I think they're right on.

Crater? No. Worth mentioning and asking about? Absolutely.

Microsoft will ship the CD to you free of charge. This CD includes the same Service Pack 2 software that is available for download from Windows Update. You'll wait 4-5 weeks for delivery, according to the site. You can also download the complete service pack here.

Note that Microsoft started the electronic delivery of SP2 to Windows XP Home Edition users last week, and to XP Professional Edition today via the Automatic-Updates distribution route.

Microsoft's latest version of MOM has been released to manufacturing, with retail availability slated for October 1. MOM, or Microsoft Operations Manager, is a console for administering Windows servers and applications, with tools for monitoring and analyzing performance. MOM 2005 includes an easier setup, new user interface and improved built-in security.

MOM 2005 takes the product to a whole new level. Pricing and licensing has also changed.

To enhance and extend MOM 2005 even more, there are five MOM Solution Accelerators available to streamline the way MOM works, integrates and deploys. Solution accelerators at Microsoft are generally chunks of code, tools and prescriptive info you can use to design your own custom extensions and to make their products fit more tightly into your environment:

• Notification Workflow Solution Accelerator is a Microsoft SQL Server–based Notification Services application that can be used to extend notification functionalities of MOM 2005.
• Autoticketing Solution Accelerator provides guidance for automated ticket generation, enabling the automated posting of a request (or ticket) into the Trouble Ticketing (TT) system used for incident management.
• Alert Tuning Solution Accelerator helps reduce the volume of alerts when deploying MOM 2005 management packs.
• Service Continuity Solution Accelerator helps maintain the availability of MOM 2005 service.
• Multiple Management Group Rollup Solution Accelerator allows a business to propagate data from multiple management groups into one data warehouse to create consolidated and aggregated reports.

Check out the animated demo presentation, here, for a high-level explanation of how MOM works. You can also use the MOM 2005 Online Virtual Lab to learn more about the product and how to use it to solve problems in your environment. Looking for more information? Check out the blog published by the Microsoft.com Operations Management team, which did the dog-food work with the product before it was released.

Small businesses with 10 or fewer servers to monitor should check out MOM 2005 Workgroup edition, which is priced appropriately - one flat fee of $499. Nice to see Microsoft taking the needs of the smaller business into account. My company has many more servers than that license would allow, but I know a number of people who will be able to take advantage of it.

[via betanews.com]

Corey Gouker is a Media Center MVP, and he has posted a detailed description of his experiences with a new Creative Portable Media Center Device. Included at the bottom of the article are a couple of Windows Media videos and a gallery of images showing the device in action.

For anyone who has been wondering what these are all about and what you'll really get, check this out - with the videos and his description, it's a view that you've likely not had til now, unless you have been lucky enough to get your grubby hands on one.

Also: Sean Alexander post more links to details about the devices.

[via Scobleizer]