greg hughes - dot net

I saw this when it was posted on the anti-malware weblog the other day, and I thought, "Sure, makes sense, yep uh huh." But I guess others found it to be big news. The Microsoft anti-malware software (Windows Defender) and the Anti-spyware beta software will be able to detect and remove the Sony DRM rootkit that's been discussed in extreme detail over the last week. the Malicious Software removal tool will eradicate it as well.

I think this is great and all, but in my book it's not actually huge news. Big news would be if they didn't detect and remove it. Glad to see the MS software and team is for real and doesn't worry about business boundaries. Bad is bad is bad, and doing something about it is good. It's what we expect.

If you already have a bunch of XBOX games, you've likely been wondering what's the dealio with the new console? Will you be able to play your old original XBOX games on the new XBOX 360? If so, will they play better? Will they be displayed in HD?

Well, Microsoft has posted the official backward-compatibility list of games you'll be able to play on the new console when it launches on November 22nd. There's also a Q&A page that answers a lot of questions about backward compatibility and how the legacy games will work. It looks like the list will likely grow over time, so you can check back to see if more games get added.

As of the time I am posting this, there are 207 titles on the list. Not too shabby, and definitely more than I expected.

And - even bigger news - every game title on the list will be up-scaled to HD resolutions of 720p and 1080i and will use the 360's anti-aliasing engine. Wow, that's great news! Yes, it's up-scaling, but the end result is better game experience on the old titles when using the new hardware. Nice. To do backward compatibility, you'll need a hard drive accessory (which is an option for the less-expensive "Core" XBOX 360 package, and is included in the premium package. 

Microsoft notes that: "A software emulator is required for each original Xbox game you play on your Xbox 360™ console. Please check back for more details as we approach the launch date."

From the Q&A page come these useful nuggets of information:

Xbox.com: How is your backward compatibility solution going to work?

Todd: As you’ve heard from us before, backward compatibility on Xbox 360 is done through software. Now that we’ve solved the technical challenge and the emulator is working, we’re certifying each original Xbox title by hand to run on Xbox 360.

What I’m really proud to tell you and your readers is that it’s easy to get the emulation software, and it’s free. We’ll give gamers a choice—you can get the latest software updates from Xbox Live, burn a CD from xbox.com or sign up on Xbox.com for a CD that can be delivered to your home at a nominal shipping and handling fee. Once you get the CD, put it in your Xbox 360 and you’re ready to go.

Xbox.com: Will there be any benefits to playing original Xbox games on my Xbox 360 console?

Todd: Absolutely. One of the great things about gaming on Xbox 360 is the satisfaction of knowing that every game will be playable in high definition. We are now proud to reveal that this extends to the original Xbox games as well. Every original Xbox game will be upscaled to 720p and 1080i, and will take advantage of Xbox 360’s anti-aliasing capabilities, delivering a picture that is clearer and crisper than anything available on Xbox.

UPDATE: Rory comments on the slashdot comments on the XBOX 360 backward compatibility announcement. Slashdot readers were typically (and predictably) assinine, and Rory is his typical genius self.

The other day my co-worker Matt (a truly-all-around-good-guy who will almost certainly laugh (I sure hope) and turn bright red (like I certainly would) when he reads this) wrote on his blog that he was...

"...curious where I would rank if you searched for "bit-shift". So I loaded up my favorite web browser, pointed it towards google and off I went. Was I on the first page...Nope. Page two you say? Notta. When I loaded up page three I was beginning to get depressed. But Wait! There at the bottom of the page, second to the last link was Bit-Shit.Net. Woohoo! At least I beat out a link to an Intel article on 64 bit-shifting, HA! Take that Intel."

Heh. The emphasis in the above quote is mine. You see, the funny thing is that Matt made a similar slip (typo? psychological? Hmmm...) a couple weeks ago in a blog post, which I dutifully pointed out (in person), and which he promptly changed before I could do a screen-grab and post it here for all to see. I'm not sure why he has a recurring problem typing "shift," but I am sure it's pretty darn funny from a reader's perspective. No spell checker maybe? Or is that word allowed in the spelling dictionary? Heh... All in good fun here, Matt. I don't think he'd ever purposely type that word. Must be a deep subconscious thing.

Anyhow, hopefully some post linkage here will help drive a little search-engine-bot attention to Matt's site, where (by the way) he's writing about interesting thoughts of his and whatnot. I've subscribed to his feed and added him to the blogroll over there on the side of this page somewhere. Google indexing and ranking is driven by many things, especially inbound links. So, check out his blog. I like his writing style - some of my favorite weblogs are the ones that follow whatever happens to be on the author's mind at the time. Now all we have to do is get Matt to stop thinking about sh... Oh, never mind. Hah! (Just kiddin' ya there Matthew ).

So - What can we learn from this? Simple, really: Accidentally type about poop, someone notices, and hopefully it generates a little more traffic to your site. And it just goes to show, at it's core the universe really is awfully entropic.

Or maybe the lesson is something more like "type sh*t once, shame on you. type sh*t twice, shame on... well... you."

Thanks for the fun fodder there, bud.

Want to create some of your own holiday cards and stationery? Hey, might as well get started now. Head over to Office Online and download templates for:

• Greeting cards
• Recipe cards
• Mailing labels
• Meal menus
• Gift labels
• Banners
• That dreaded Family Holiday Newsletter

There are content categories for holiday cards in general, Christmas, Hanukkah, and lots of others, too.

Lots of stuff there to use and customize. Enjoy.

I've spent way too much time in the past 24 hours driving my cat absolutely crazy with a little laser pointer. It's hilarious to watch her chase that bright red dot all over the room, across the floor and up walls and around/over furniture. But hey, it's great exercise. Heh.

I got the little laser pointer with my new holography book that recently arrived in the mail. I decided recently to give the one form of photography I've not yet done a try. The rest of the needed materials are on order, will be here before too long.

I've wanted to make holograms since I was a kid. My dad's a physicist and he has mostly always worked with lasers in some shape or form (and he still does today). I remember when I was a kid and he brought a laser home one night and showed me how it worked. I think he explained the inner workings, too, but that night I was amazed by what I saw. I was completely hooked and since then have been fascinated with them. I still enjoy learning about them. Add to that several years of professional photography experience, and - well - this is just a natural when-I-get-around-to-it hobby for me.

The book I just received is called Shoebox Holography, and I ordered a good, inexpensive laser pointer with the book. The book is very good, and any teachers or students looking to use holography for school projects would find it excellent and easy to understand, as well as quite complete in its explanations. Recommended.

But the cat's getting locked out of the room when I make holograms. Something about that combination seems unworkable.

Web services - are you ready for it? Take the quiz at CIO magazine online. Find out where you rank. I scored 80. Of course, we're already grokking them. How about you?

Platform, vendor and language independence - sounds pretty good to those people who are responsible for tying all these systems and companies and technologies together. When Microsoft launched their .NET initiatives a while back, the industry thought it was a lock-in situation - that Microsoft was making a move to own a market and that the effort was doomed to fail. But as it turns out, what the .NET story and other efforts have driven (at least in part - it's not just a Microsoft thing at all) is the continued growth of interoperability - through web services. Walls have been torn down in the process, not built up.

And now we're starting to see the popular landscape (this is not anything new, it's been around for years now) shift more toward a services-oriented model of application development. Some say it's Google taking on Microsoft. Whatever. What really matters (or should matter) to businesses today is participation. Time to get on-board if you're not on this rocket ship already.

(via Adam Gaffin)

If you didn't notice, Research in Motion - the wildly successful and smart company that created and sells BlackBerry devices and the services they run on - has been the subject of great debate recently, due to a patent conflict that's working it's way through the U.S. courts. In a nutshell, there's this other company that claims they own the rights to the concepts that the BlackBerry devices run on. RIM says not so.

People have been all but freaking out every time a news article comes out that suggests the patent dispute could cause BlackBerry services in the U.S. to be shut down. Anyone who reads the court decisions and can follow the parallel court cases can tell that the likelihood of this is very low. But hey, "news" is just acting like it's old typical self (meaning hyperbole and emotional button pushing). The patents claimed by RIM's opponent (a company called NTP) have been challenged and practically invalidated. But since that's happening in another court, I guess the news services just selectively choose what to report on.

Anyhow - What I think is the most interesting event to come out of the recent news, though, is the fact that the U.S. Government's Department of Justice has made an argument in the courts that the RIM/Blackberry services are necessary as a matter of national security. As it turns out, their highly-secure infrastructure and right-now capabilities of the network and servers has become a critical piece of how many government employees and agencies communicate.

The government department wants 90 days notice before a U.S. trial court enforces the potentially crippling injunction on BlackBerry devices in the United States to ensure public workers can keep using the devices, which many users call "CrackBerrys" for their addictive nature.

Lance Johnson, an intellectual property lawyer in Washington, D.C., said the filing is good news for RIM.

"This really throws a wrench into things [for NTP]," Mr. Johnson said. "It brings to this [legal] forum a national-security and government-functioning imperative that was not there before."

The U.S. government also said the extra time is necessary so the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office can reconsider the validity of wireless e-mail patents held by NTP. The Patent Office has already overturned the five disputed patents filed by since-deceased inventor Thomas Campana Jr., although NTP has asked the patent office to reconsider its decision.

If the patents are overturned, the four-year-old court case would be rendered moot, legal experts say.

The real test of technology success today is acceptance and dependence, let's face it. And RIM has put together a quality service and set of infrastructure and devices over the past several years. You want to know how hard RIM is to knock over? Pretty hard, I'd say. A little more coverage is available here.

Time for a weather post, so someone out there can complain about how lame weather posts are...

The temperature has officially dropped below the freezing mark here in my part of rural northwestern Oregon for the first time this fall. Just a little crunchy effect walking across the lawn, and dang, it's kinda cold outside.

Snow is on the mountains and the ski hills have started to open. That's a lot more than you could say for last year, when the ski season was pretty much terrible. Maybe we'll end up with another of those storms that snowed us in a couple years ago. Well, we can always hope.

Well, it's getting more and more interesting (and official) with each passing day. The anti-spyware team at Microsoft has announced the new name for their anti-spyware application (which really handles more than spyware). It's going to be called Windows Defender, and will ship with Vista. That's good news. Even more good news comes in the later part of the blog announcement, where Jason Garms explains the package will also be available to Windows XP users.

They'll be delivering the malware signature updates over Windows Server Update Service (WSUS), as well. As a result, "Windows Defender" will begin appearing in the WSUS product list and a category called "signatures" will also appear. It sounds like a beta will be released sometime in the future that will take advantage of those update facilities.

Read the announcement here.

Yahoo! released a new version of it's mapping web service today, and it has a bunch of notable changes and improvements. the first thing I noticed was the "ajax-y" UI, which lets you do the gotta-have-it, grab-and-drag scrolling that's all the rage, and which adds a fairly nifty animated zooming feature that's quite a bit fancier than the competition's. Plus Yahoo! Local is integrated. And you can mash-up with their APIs. Check out this cool mashed-up application that shows local events using maps, images, local search, and other services all combined.

Another cool feature of the new mapping service is live traffic conditions for major thoroughfares, color coded for easy analysis:

     

I also like that I can get multi-point driving directions from Point A to Point B, then Add Point C and D and on and on - The result is one full set of directions for a full trip worth of driving, all on one map. Quite useful, and very easy to use.

  

Check it out at http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/ and provide Yahoo! with your feedback by clicking here.

The security geek in me is a happy guy today. The Anti-Malware product team at Microsoft has fired up their new blog. They're "the team responsible for building Microsoft's antivirus and anti-spyware technology (along with anti-rootkit, anti-bot, and other stuff)." Malware, for those who are not yet familiar with the term, is short for "Malicious Software."

"We already have two pieces of technology our technology shipping: the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, which helps to remove some of the most prevalent malware from a user's machine. We also are shipping a beta of the Windows AntiSpyware technology. We'll talk more about these in future blog posts. We also have a bunch of other cool stuff in the pipelines."

This will be one worth watching, I imagine. The security threat landscape has eroded, changed and reshaped itself significantly in the past year, and things are only getting more and more complicated. So, it's good to see the face of a critical team in Redmond and to have some insight into what they're addressing.

Subscribed.

Do you live in or around Toledo? Are you a professional, experienced network administrator with Unix/Solaris experience? If you are, Corillian is looking for someone to join the Corporate IT department to support network and computing needs in the company's Toledo office, as well as other offices in the region.

If you or someone you know fits the bill, get in touch. I can be reached at 503-629-3771 (my desk number) if you have any questions. I'd be glad to chat. We're looking for experienced professionals that can operate both on their own and in a team. This is a terrific job for someone who has the self confidence and skills to own making all sorts of technology things happen reliably and well.

Note: I am posting this because readers of this weblog might be interested in the job opening mentioned here. This post is my own doing, and is not a communication by or on behalf of my employer. I am just trying to make people aware of some opportunities that I happen to know about. I won't be compensated for this hire or anything, since the position reports into an organization I manage, anyhow. Do not pass go, do not collect, etc...

Here's the high-level job description for the position:

LAN Administrator - Toledo

Manages and is primary person responsible for maintenance, setup and changes related to the corporate local area network infrastructure. Evaluates and/or recommends purchases of computers, network hardware, peripheral equipment, and software. Consulting management regarding use of computers and networks to satisfy business needs. Installs, configures, and maintains servers and workstations. Maintains proper levels of security of systems and information using patches, virus management, and domain-level security tools. Travel and providing after hours support on a rotating schedule is required

Essential Functions/Job Duties:

• Manages operations and maintenance of corporate computer network infrastructure, along with associated systems and attached devices. Provides reports and maintenance of corporate computer network infrastructure, along with associated systems and attached devices. Provides reports and maintains physical, logical and information security related to all networked systems. Protects against internal information systems damage by viruses and users.
• Assists users in-person with network and computer issues and questions.
• Performs desktop and portable computer setup, maintenance and repair and associated record-keeping/tracking in Help desk issue tracking software, in support of desktop support personnel as-needed.
• Keeps abreast of new developments and trends in areas of responsibility; makes recommendations to manager regarding enhancements, additions or replacements.

Knowledge, Skills and Ability Requirements:

• Training and/or certification in computer network systems management and maintenance; extensive experience and/or training in LAN infrastructure and software, maintenance, configuration and troubleshooting; experience working with applications and performing system setup and network configuration on workstation- and server-role computers.
• Specific knowledge, experience and training in Active Directory administration, setup and troubleshooting. Experience building, maintaining and troubleshooting LAN infrastructure equipment and software; Excellent organizational, decision making and communication skills.
• Administration experience with Solaris 7, 8, 9, and 10, and HP-UX 11i Operating Systems.
• Windows NT/2000/2003 Server, Server hardware, PC?s and other networked computer equipment.
• Experience with Weblogic.
• General office environment. Considerable stress may occur at times. Occasional lifting in excess of 50 pounds to an overhead position. Travel is required.

HO-LY CRR-AP!!

Okay, so... When Microsoft says the XBOX 360 is a whole new level of gaming machine, they're serious.

I just played a couple shooters on a XBOX 360 game console and that's it, I'm sold. The graphics are GREAT. The visuals make the gameplay amazing, and it's clear the processing and video power is extreme. Add to that the Media Center connections and, well... Wow.

If you want to get your hands on one, go to the Best Buy in Beaverton, Oregon on Cedar Hills Blvd. Apparently, at least according to the sales guy there, that store is the second one to get a working display setup (the first one was a WalMart in California, he said). Some Microsoftie walked in with a bunch of boxes, set up the display, and just left. "No one knew what to do!" said the Best Buy kid. Heh. Cool.

The crowd was excited. A sign is taped to the end cap where the 360 resides that says "5 minutes, please." The crew of giddy people (mostly adults by the way) quietly contained themselves and politely took turns splattering people with their virtual firearms. It pretty much rocked. Ooohs and Aahhhhs abound.

Check it out if you can. I'll try to post some pics in the next day or two if I can get back there. This was the first day in months I didn't have my camera with me, go figure.

I've been using my X41 for a few months now, and overall I like it a lot. It's one of the better portable computers I've used.

Charles Jade over at Ars Technica has put together an "unreview" of the X41 and it's a fun read, not to mention an interesting evaluation of this specific Tablet PC computer, as well as a commentary on the Tablet PC edition of Windows, which he frequently refers to (in his somewhat sarcastic but also accurate fashion) as "WXPTPCE2005."

He finds both good and not so good things to write about. I liked the review. Read it here.

Can you tell it's almost Halloween? I can. And I can also tell how much traffic one little blog article can drive. My stats for the past few days are awash with Google and other searches landing people on this site for pumpkin carving patterns, since I wrote about a great deal I found and how to get them them the other day. Here's a small, partial listing of a small portion of the search referrers for pumpkin carving, taken from today's web traffic stats on this site:

 

pumpkin carving patterns (www.google.com)	34
free pumpkin patterns (www.google.com)	29
pumpkin patterns (www.google.com)	29
free pumpkin stencils (www.google.com)	21
free pumpkin carving patterns (www.google.com)	13
pumpkin patterns (www.google.ca)	11
pumpkin patterns (www.google.com)	11
free pumpkin patterns (www.google.com)	11
pumpkin designs (www.google.com)	10
free pumpkin carving stencils (www.google.com)	10
pumpkin stencil (www.google.com)	10
free pumpkin stencils (www.google.ca)	9
free pumpkin patterns (www.google.ca)	9
pumpkin carving pattern (www.google.com)	9

And it just keeps going from there, too. Hundreds of similar search combinations and terms in addition to those. Definitely noticing the increase in the number of visits (still a small drop in the bucket, but interesting to see).