Robert Scoble over at Microsoft got a look at prototypes for the next version of IE and commented:

Dean Hachamovitch the other day showed me prototypes of the next Internet Explorer. I got to see them before he even showed them to other executives. He told me I could say about that much (I wanted to post screen captures on my blog, but he turned down that request, bummer). I'll add in that if they ship about half of what they showed me that I'll uninstall Firefox. Of course, I'm guessing that...

Read more at Robert's blog

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| Session Start: Friday, October 15, 2004                            |
| Participants:                                                      |
|    Greg Hughes                                                     |
|    Dave                                                            |
.--------------------------------------------------------------------.
[01:06:01 AM] Dave: man im mean, girlfriend is having trouble
              with her pc, and i tell her its an id10t error and that
              they are quite common and shes like Oh no can you fix
              it?
[01:06:10 AM] Greg Hughes: hahahahah
[01:06:16 AM] Greg Hughes: heh
[01:06:42 AM] Dave: i thought she knew what it ment
[01:10:47 AM] Dave: havent the heart to tell her now
[01:12:54 AM] Greg Hughes: hehehe just dont let her read my blog :)

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Don't worry, Dave - I'm sure she won't be reading this, so you're safe!

YAPBE (Yet Another Political Bog Entry) (Well, ok - no position here, just something about the political contest)

I have been using two main web sites over and over again to check reality and the status of the current political race (which I am very interested in both from an issues standpoint as well as from the position of being a person who is quite interested in the mechanics of the political process).

Here they are - I recommend both highly:

The Electoral Vote Predictor at http://www.electoral-vote.com/ provides a look at where the electoral college appears to be on a daily basis, based on the latest polling data. The interactive map is cool, and I check this daily. [RSS 2.0 feed available here]

FactCheck.org (yes, we know it's not .com) is one of the greatest resources I have found for cutting through the crap and getting to the simple facts. They analyze the messages out of the campaigns and compare/contrast them to the evidentiary facts. Nice. And while the site don't actually have an RSS feed, I sponsored the creation of one for them, so subscribe to the feed at this link [RSS 2.0].

Peter over at Tabula PC has posted a list of Tablet PC resources - and quite an extensive and useful one at that.

Lots of great how-to stuff in this list. If you have a Tablet PC, be sure to check it out!

Jesper M. Johansson, Ph.D., ISSAP, CISSP is a Security Program Manager at Microsoft. The second part of his three-part article on the use of passwords vs. passphrases was recently published.

The Great Debates: Pass Phrases vs. Passwords

• Part One - coveres the fundamentals of passwords and pass phrases, how they are stored, and so on
• Part Two - discusses the relative strength of each type of password, and use some mathematical approaches for illustration
• Part Three - offers some conclusions and guidance on how to choose passwords and configure a password policy

In this installment, he looks at three arguments for the use of pass-phrases:

• Claim 1: Users Can Remember Pass Phrases
• Claim 2: Longer is Stronger
• Claim 3: Pass Phrases Can Have More Randomness

This is a great read, worth the time for anyone who works in the security field or in IT operations and security. I am looking forward to the third installment, as well. Jesper has a powerful way of cutting to the heart of the arguments and coming out the other end of the conversation with good facts in tow.

Every now and then a company comes along that Just Gets It^TM.

Google is one of those companies. I have been playing with the new Google Desktop Search beta application, which is a locally-installed program that indexes content on your local computer and allows you to search it, in-line with other Google searches.

It might take a minute to realize the utility of this. Bear with me. Then use it and see for yourself. This is (as Scott world say) pure sex.

Once you install Google Desktop, any Google search can then include your local desktop/machine search in-line, as shown above. You can also do a desktop-only search, and you can choose to disable the ability to show Desktop Search results on Google Web Search result pages. Google states that your personal search results and data are kept private from Google.

What can you index on your desktop machine? Google Desktop is able to index the following items so that you can search for them:

• Outlook email
• Outlook Express email
• AOL IM 
• Word
• Excel
• PowerPoint
• Text and other Web history
• Secure pages (HTTPS) in web history

Find out more on the Google Desktop “About” page, or see more screenshots here. Also available are the Getting Started Guide and a page dedicated to privacy questions and concerns.

I've been using it for a couple of hours, and already I can tell that this is not something I will not be giving up any time soon. I am adding this to my little box of tricks.

Want to try? Jump over to http://desktop.google.com and install the small app, and you'll be on your way. If you have thoughts or comments after trying it, feel free to share them here, and be sure to let Google know.