greg hughes - dot net

The Business Journal Online reports on an Annenberg survey that finds people who watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart are more likely to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates than people who do not watch late-night comedy.

"In recent years ... traditional journalists have been voicing increasing concern that if young people are receiving political information from late-night comedy shows like The Daily Show, they may not be adequately informed on the issues of the day. This data suggests that these fears may be unsubstantiated. We find no differences in campaign knowledge between young people who watch Leno and Letterman – programs with a lot of political humor in their opening monologues -- and those who do not watch late-night. But when looking at young people who watch The Daily Show, we find they score higher on campaign knowledge than young people who do not watch the show, even when education, following politics, party identification, gender, viewing network news, reading the newspaper, watching cable news and getting campaign information on-line are taken into account."

While this does not mean the Daily Show makes people more politically aware, it shows the sample audience is more aware of the pertinent issues and facts. So for me, the full results of the survey and Annenberg's review of the content of each night-time comedy show were very interesting to read, especially when you compare and contrast the actual content of different shows, such as The Tonight Show and Late Night.

This helps explain why, even for someone like me who does not necessarily agree with Jon Stewart's political positions or leanings, The Daily Show is a program I look forward to watching - I TiVo it every day. It's funny and in fact does address the issues in its own way. It's comedy, so you have to take all of it with a grain of salt, but if nothing else, it's one more place for intelligent people to process the vast amounts of information (both relevant and irrelevant) that makes up this never-ending election cycle.

Note: You can view the actual Annenberg Center news release, which contains the full survey questions, results and analysis here. [PDF]

The Annenberg Public Policy Center also operates FactCheck.org, I site I mentioned recently here, which does an excellent job of non-partisan review of the advertisements and other messages put out by the political campaigns, with the tag-line, "Holding Politicians Accountable."

Survey Excerpts:

"Polling conducted between July 15 and Sept. 19 among 19,013 adults showed that on a six-item political knowledge test people who did not watch any late-night comedy programs in the past week answered 2.62 items correctly, while viewers of Late Night with David Letterman on CBS answered 2.91, viewers of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno answered 2.95, and viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart answered 3.59 items correctly. That meant there was a difference of 16 percentage points between Daily Show viewers and people who did not watch any late-night programming."

"Young people who watched The Daily Show scored 48% correct on the campaign knowledge test while young people who did not watch any late-night comedy scored 39% correct. Meanwhile, young people who watched four of more days of network news scored 40% correct, equally frequent cable news viewers 48% correct and newspaper readers 46% correct."

"Of the 83 political jokes made by Stewart, only 9 specifically targeted Bush. That was 11 percent of his political jokes. The same number targeted Kerry."

"The Daily Show segments are less likely than a Leno or Letterman joke to use a quick punch-line to make fun of a candidate ... Instead, Stewart’s lengthier segments employ irony to explore policy issues, news events, and even the media’s coverage of the campaign."

I swear to God, I just heard Robert Scoble schooling Michael Savage on his talk radio show about what blogs are and why people write web logs. So cool!

And here I am driving down the road at 70 ... Uh I mean 60 55 miles an hour blogging about it Blackberry-style, heh. Moblog yo!

Cool stuff, Robert. Amazing new world we live in - You read on someone's web site that they listen to talk radio. It's a web site I read in order to learn and stay up-to-date in my field. A couple days later, I'm driving home and I hear (what I think was) the author (Scoble) on talk radio, talking about blogging. Nice.

Tonight I had the privilege of watching two very smart people speak about a technology I barely grasp at the PADNUG meeting, with a few good laughs thrown in. The requisite pizza never showed up, but dinner afterwards was a fun time and I had a chance to talk to some people I otherwise would never get to meet.

The speakers were Rory Blyth and Scott Hanselman. Scott is a friend and co-worker of mine, an accomplished technical presenter and regional MSDN director. He played code-monkey while Rory, a rather infamous blogger and all around good guy who recently started work at Microsoft as a MSDN Presenter^**, demonstrated the beta of Visual Studio .NET 2005 (aka "Whidbey"), showing off many new capabilities in developing ASP.net application web sites with membership capabilities (almost all without writing any code).

Thee guys are both crazy freakin' smart. Much smarter than I. I'm one of those guys who deals with lots of hardware and software, manages a group of fine employees, deals with a wide variety of people and their needs, and generally does his best to make sure things work. These two guys are in a higher league. They're amazing when it comes to coding and building things out of thin air. I wish I was half as smart.

Rory and Scott presented things in a way that I - a simple IT jock - was able to follow and pretty much completely understand. That's the mark of a good presenter and teacher: When you can impart and transfer some portion of your knowledge and to someone truly outside your profession.

By the time they were done, I had a good picture of what kinds of things Visual Studio 2005 will be able to do for the developer crowd. Understand that I am a guy who tends to get lost in developer presentations, so the fact that I actually followed along the whole time and was able to use words like "cool" and "ahhhh" with actual meaning and understanding proves these guys can teach as well as present.

Rory will also be presenting in Portland (Hillsboro actually) at the local MSDN event scheduled to be held on Thursday November 18th at the "Movies on TV" theaters. The target audience for those presentation sessions is developers interested or working with Visual Studio and .NET technologies. If you're in a different city and want to attend an MSDN event, check the schedule of all upcoming events and locations here.

^** Note that Rory's title is really something like "Pacific Northwest Microsoft Developer Community Champion," but "MSDN Presenter" is much easier to use in a sentence.

According to Microsoft, 23 percent of Windows computers in the United States are running bogus versions of Windows. The new program installs an Active-X control (users can opt out, at least at this point) that examines a system accessing certain files on Microsoft's Download Center to see if the copy of Windows that is installed on the machine is legitimate. At this time a number of Windows Media files are flagged for the check, along with several others. Files that will prompt the user to validate his or her copy of Windows are marked in the file listings with a small gold arrow on a blue circle background (see above).

No doubt Microsoft is legitimately interested in making sure its updates are getting into the hands of those who have purchased the products the company produces, while at the same time providing software thieves with a reason and incentive to pay for the operating system they use. It should not come as a surprise that Microsoft is doing this now, nor that they will likely expand this capability in the future. Ultimately, it takes people spending money on software to allow a company, regardless of how big that company may be, to continue to build new and better software products. No matter what your philisophical position with regard to Microsoft, the one core rule of business always applies: If you're not making money, you shouldn't be in business.

I know he didn't mean to (so I won't act all flattered or smug or anything), but Robert Scoble just sort of summed up the better part of my topic/category list for this-here-blog of mine, over on his blog...

I thought it would be interesting to compare his list of cool upcoming topics for the future to what's categorized or searchable right now on my site. So, I did just that and have added the links, below. Not a bad start, and it points out to me where I am falling shorter than I had realized in my content. Hey Robert, thanks for the copy.

“For the next 18 months, where are the business opportunities going to lie? Tablet PC. Bigtime. Windows Media Center. Gonna be a big deal. SmartPhones. Wanna watch how fast the Motorola MPX220 sells when it's released in the next few months? Xbox Live. You only need to say one number and everyone knows exactly the Xbox thing I'm talking about: "2." Visual Studio 2005. Tons of stuff coming there. MSN has a whole raft of things up their sleeves. And we haven't even started talking about BizTalk, SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, 64-bit Windows, SBS, CRM, LiveMeeting, and OneNote, among other things.”

It also gives me a gut-check on my existing blog categories. Here they are, with the ones that apply to this posting checked:

I have been using Furl for the past few months to create an online quick-hit catalog of items that I want to keep track of on the 'net for a number of reasons, such as items to keep track of for work purposes, stuff I may want to show someone else, or things I might want to write about at a later time here in my weblog. Today Furl sent an email to its users telling them that LookSmart has acquired the company, and describing the plans. It looks pretty good, and I hope it will be, since I have come to appreciate the Furl application.

From the email (my emphasis is added in bold):

"We are joining LookSmart, a provider of Web search and research-quality articles search, in addition to other high-quality search products.

  ...

"To show how serious that commitment is, we are officially allocating 5 gigabytes (GB) of storage for each individual member's public archive, enough space to store tens of thousands of archived items.

"We are also now working on many new features, some of which you may have requested. These include a groups feature, and the ability to search across all public archives.

"You might be wondering whether Furl will continue to be a free service, and the answer is: "Yes!" Furl will create revenue through the display of relevant, contextual advertising on search and content pages. This revenue source enables us to continue offering Furl free of charge. It also allows us to keep investing in the service. As Furl gets better and better, it attracts more members. They in turn attract new advertisers, creating a cycle of growth that benefits our members as well as our business."

Sean Gallagher writes at eWeek online. In his column, Root Access, he asks, "How connected is *too* connected?"

Do I have OCD? (Obsessive Connectivity Disorder) Do you?? My results are noted below, in-line... Damn Blackberries...

Gallagher: "I think that I've allowed myself to actually accumulate too much connectivity. As a remote employee of a highly-distributed organization, it's important for me to be as wired in as possible. But sometimes that may go a bit too far. As I sat in my car at a stop light responding to an instant message on my cell phone, I pondered exactly where I crossed the line into connectivity stupidity.

"Here's a simple test to determine if you have what I've come to call "obsessive connectivity disorder." The symptoms are listed in order from least to most severe; if you get more than halfway down the list, then you probably have OCD."

E-mail connectivity :

• You have more than one e-mail account that you check from work. YES
• You have more than one e-mail client running on your PC. YES
• You have more than one e-mail account that you check from a mobile device. YES
• You move information from one device to another by e-mailing it to yourself. YES
• You have read e-mail while at a sporting event. YES
• You have read e-mail while coaching a sporting event. NO
• You have read e-mail while participating in a sporting event. NO
• You have read an email while driving. YES
• You have responded to an e-mail while driving. YES
• You have responded to an email while home, in bed. YES :-(
• You have sent an e-mail from your phone to your Blackberry just to find it in your drawer. YES :-(

Instant messaging:

• You have more than one instant-messaging client running on your desktop PC. YES
• You have an instant messaging client running on your mobile phone. YES (in the past)
• You frequently see the AOL Instant Messenger alert, "Your screen name is now signed into AOL(R) Instant Messenger (TM) in 3 locations." And all of those locations are you. NO (AIM Sux0rz)
• You have more than two instant messaging clients running on your mobile device. And they're both active. NO
• You have instant-messaged yourself a reminder at your desktop from a mobile device. YES
• You IM your children to tell them to take out the trash. While you're at home. Uh - NO
• You have responded to an instant message while driving. On your cell phone. And it was more than just, "OK." YES

Security Pipeline has an interesting article that explains how you can do some simple and cost-free things with your network setup to significantly improve your security situation, in the event you have not already applied the measures they describe.

Note: I am not so sure I agree with the article as a whole (in my book, a good firewall is an absolute must, and vulnerability scanners do add real value, especially when used in combination with common sense and a good, well-trained set of brains and eyes), but the points made in the article are interesting and, at least on a case-by-case basis, valid. But I do not agree that implementing just those measures would provide anything even approaching acceptable network security. To state that many IT managers become mired in the volume of patches and configurations is a valid point on its face, and is worth considering when looking at how to manage security and prioritize, but to suggest or imply that one therefore avoid any of the patches and tools is not - in my opinion - a good option.

From the article (which gives specific items to address):

"According to Peter Tippett, CTO of the newly-formed security company Cybertrust (formed from TruSecure, BeTrusted and Ubizen), you're better off looking for good solutions instead of perfect answers. "A few solutions that are only 80 percent effective give an overall 99.9 percent solution," Tippett says. In fact, he says that the most effective security solutions require little time and less expense, and can reduce your exposure 40-fold."

From Microsoft Research, ConferenceXP v3.0 beta is available for people who are interested in seeing the latest developments in the areas of wireless classrooms, collaboration and distance learning:

ConferenceXP integrates recent advances in high performance audio, video and network technologies to seamlessly connect multiple distant participants in a rich immersive environment for distance conferencing, instruction and collaboration. ConferenceXP provides an extensible foundation for interactive collaborative environments, and serves as a research platform for designing and implementing distance conferencing and learning applications. Please visit the ConferenceXP 3.0 Beta web site for more information.

I don't usually link to this kind of stuff here (simply don't click if you're offended way too easily), but this is great:

• Robert De Niro as the Homeland Security Director

There's something about this that just doesn't smell quite right...

Starting in October and running into mid-December, MSDN will have a whole slew of Infopath webcasts going on. One of Office 2003's best kept secrets (and that is not necessarily a good thing), this program provides a powerful front end to designing, creating and using XML forms.

All times are Pacific Daylight Time (UTC–07:00) until Oct 31, and Pacific Standard Time (UTC–08:00) on and after Oct 31st.

Last week while I was out, Microsoft released a new tool on their downloads site called SSL Diagnostics Version 1.0, which aids in quickly identifying configuration problems in the IIS metabase, certificates, or certificate stores.

x86 and ia64 versions are available. The download contains a document called the SSL FAQ that is a great resource for people wanting to learn about SSL from the beginning, as well.

Recommended for anyone who might need to deal with web servers, certification authorities or SSL certificates for any reason.

Microsoft's TechNet has released a useful set of step-by-step guides to help people learn, understand, plan, deploy, configure and maintain Active Directory infrastructures on Windows 2003 domains.

From the AD Step-by-Step Guides page, the following individual titles are available (see the main page for more information about each):

• Installing Windows Server 2003 as a Domain Controller
• Installing a Windows XP Professional Workstation and Connecting It to a Domain
• Setting Up Additional Domain Controllers
• Managing Active Directory
• Understanding the Group Policy Feature Set
• Using the Group Policy Management Console
• Enforcing Strong Password Policies
• Using the Delegation of Control Wizard
• User Data Management and User Settings Management through Group Policy
• Configuring a Dial-Up Remote Access Server
• Building a Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network Connection
• Using the Encrypting File System
• Digitally Signed and Encrypted E-Mail
• Active Directory Sites and Services
• Active Directory Bulk Import and Export