All posts by onlyconnect

internet, search

Why Microsoft’s search share is declining

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Internet Explorer is the dominant browser, Windows the dominant desktop, yet Microsoft’s share of internet search is apparently declining. Here’s why. I’m researching Yahoo Pipes; I forget the exact url for the Pipes home page so I type the search into the IE7 search box, where Microsoft’s “Live search” is the default.

The page I want is not on the first page of results. The ads are irrelevant. Some of the search results are at least relevant, but they are not what I would call top tier results.Even the O’Reilly link is a page for all articles tagged Yahoo, not one of the actual Pipes articles.

So I switch to Google search. The page I want is top of the search results. The other entries are more relevant. Even the ad is moderately relevant (at least it is about software Pipes not metal tubes).

This is of course anecdotal. It was also a tough test, considering Yahoo Pipes is new. Perhaps there are hundreds of other searches where Live Search gets better results. All I can say is that I rarely discover them, whereas I frequently find Google’s results much better. This just struck me as a good example.

Microsoft will never improve its share of search unless it can deliver at least equally good results.

See also my IT Week comment.

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borland, delphi, java, software, software development

CodeGear (Borland) to support PHP tools

New is drifting out concerning CodeGear’s plans to evolve its development tools. Here’s a snippet from Michael Swindell, CodeGear’s VP of products, writing in the Delphi non-technical newsgroup:

Dynamic languages such as PHP and Ruby new areas where we will be going. Some products will be more in the RAD camp, aligned with Delphi and VCL, and others will be more in the Open Source/Eclipse/Enterprise world. As a developer focused company we cannot be just the Object Pascal, C++, Java development company… there is way too much happening in the world of programming and languages and frameworks for us to stand still.

All a bit vague, but I do get the impression of renewed energy at CodeGear now that it is somewhat independent of its parent company, Borland. There are also mutters about Ruby and about another take on Kylix, Delphi for Linux.

Is PHP a good bet? Possibly, insofar as PHP is hugely popular but not particularly well supported by development tools. Personally I’d rather work in ASP.NET or Java; yet I have huge admiration for WordPress, to mention just one PHP-based application. As ever, CodeGear will be up against strong free tools, not least the existing Eclipse PHP Development Tool.

Cast your mind back 12 years, if you have been around that long. Borland’s Delphi 1.0, released in 1995, was worth paying for, in fact a fantastic bargain, because it cracked the problem of combining visual RAD productivity and fast native compiled code. What could have a similar impact today, when Microsoft has Windows development wrapped up, and Java has a surfeit of high quality free tools? I don’t find it easy to see.

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software, windows

Why Outlook 2007 is slow: Microsoft’s official answer

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A knowledgebase article published last week acknowledges performance problems with Outlook 2007, though it says these only occur with mailboxes larger than 2GB:

You may experience one or more of the following performance problems when you are working with items in a large Personal Folder file (.pst) or in a large Offline Folder file (.ost) in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 … Note When you perform the same operations on the large .pst or .ost file in earlier versions of Outlook, the same performance problems do not occur. These problems may occur if the .pst or .ost file is larger than 2 GB. Additionally, the performance problems are more pronounced when the .pst or .ost file is larger than 4 GB.

I think this is optimistic and that smaller mailboxes are slower too; nevertheless, it does confirm that that the size of the local store is the key issue.

If you use Exchange, the local store is the .PST or .OST file on your workstation or laptop. If you do not use Exchange, a local .PST store is all you have.

Here’s what Microsoft says is the reason:

To accommodate new features, Outlook 2007 introduced a new data structure for .pst and .ost files. In this new data structure, the frequency of writing data to the hard disk increases as the number of items in the .pst or .ost files increases.

Intriguing, especially as I had thought the .pst format was the same in Outlook 2003 and 2007. The big change was from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2003, when Unicode was introduced and the maximum size increased to 20GB.

I’d also like to know whether Microsoft is just stating the obvious here (bigger file, more disk access); or whether there is some exponential increase in disk writes, suggesting a design fault in the software. I have already noticed that if you show the I/O columns in Task Manager’s performance tab, Outlook 2007 shows some extraordinarily large numbers.

So what’s the fix? The news is not too good. In essence, you have to reduce the size of the local store. You can archive or move items to separate .pst files, or switch off cached mode so you always work online to Exchange.

The article doesn’t say it, but there are significant problems with switching off cached mode. These include hugely increased network traffic, problems with junk mail filtering, and loss of all your mail when using a laptop disconnected from the network.

The most imaginative suggestion is to filter the sychronization. For example, you could filter out messagse with large attachments, or all messages from last year or earlier. These messages will still exist in Exchange, but not in the local store.

Worth a try, but none of the workarounds is really satisfactory. Outlook 2003 worked fine with large mailboxes, Outlook 2007 does not. That’s a blunder.

 

software, windows

Vista – worth having?

Now that Vista is on the shelves, people are asking: is it worth having?

I’ve been testing it for a while now, using it for most of my work and as a media center.

If there is a “Wow” in Vista, it is in the Windows Presentation Foundation, not the core operating system. And WPF is available for XP as well; and there aren’t yet many applications which use it. So forget the wow for now.

That said, it is mostly an improvement. Why mostly? Mainly because of driver quality. For example, I’ve been chasing an Intel display driver bug for a couple of weeks. It made certain games unplayable and also caused problems when more than one display was active. Last week Intel posted an update that fixes the problem. That’s on a laptop; on my desktop the sound card doesn’t work as it should – because Creative’s Vista drivers are still in beta and far from production quality. I get stuttering sound from a supposedly high-end X-Fi card.

These issues will gradually disappear as the hardware vendors properly support Vista. That said, I have a scanner that will probably never work. It’s old enough that the vendor has no incentive to come up with a driver.

The other major issue is software compatibility. Everything has to work with XP, but Vista is new and there may be problems. Most of these are caused by the new security feature called User Account Control. In reality I have not had many problems. If you have a few key applications you depend on, it makes sense to verify whether or not they run on Vista before making the switch.

Upgrade? Buy new?

Now a few specifics. Would I upgrade a laptop? No, not unless you enjoy techie problems or can get a supported upgrade pack from the vendor. Laptops are stuffed with devices, updating the hardware is near-impossible, and things like sleep and resume are prone to go wrong.

Would I upgrade a desktop? Possibly, if it is no more than a couple of years old. It’s still somewhat risky. I’d plan to upgrade the RAM to 1GB or more, update the motherboard BIOS, and buy a new graphics card. You might get away without; but my impression is that Vista is more demanding (ie. slower) on the same hardware than XP.

Would I buy a new compter – desktop or laptop – with Vista rather than XP? Yes, provided you’ve established that you can run or replace the applications you depend on and the hardware you intend to plug in. 

Vista is a better version of Windows, more logically organized, more pleasant to use, more secure. The best feature for usability is the search box on the start menu. No more hunting through the fly-out menus; just click Start, type the first few letters of what you want and hit Enter.

Security

How much more secure? Unfortunately the blizzard of hype and counter-hype has obscured the security changes in Vista. A substantial industry has been built on security weaknesses in Windows, and this industry is desperate to persuade us that we still need its services, while journalists everywhere are keen to find and publicise any security problems; and undoubtedly there are and will be problems to find.

The key change is that users by default run without local administrator permissions. This brings Windows into line with standard practice on other operating systems including Linux and Mac OS X. In consequence system files are protected unless the user passes a dialog approving a change. Some claim that these dialogs pop up frequently and are annoying. I can’t substantiate that – I don’t often see them, and when they do appear I don’t find them particularly objectionable though there are cases when I’m not sure why admin rights are needed.

Of course if a virus comes along in an email attachment and says, “I’m an important update from Microsoft, please run me”, and you click Allow, then Vista isn’t going to help you.

Another less publicized change is Internet Explorer’s Protected mode, again on by default. This means IE runs with even more limited rights, and should help to prevent silent installs of malicious software. Arguably, this makes IE more secure than FireFox on Vista. 

In reality, this is a process. The changes in Vista mean that software vendors might actually stop producing applications that breach basic Windows guidelines. A side-effect will be better separation of application code and data, which will help with backup as well as security. It will make sense to set Vista to a higher level of security, where you have to enter an admin password to make system changes, and the intrusive dialogs will appear less often.

 

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software

Help! I’ve been sent an ODT file

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The document format wars are upon us. I know this, because I got a tech query from someone at another desk. She couldn’t open the attachment she’d been sent. The file had an .odt extension. Someone had saved a document from Open Office using its defaults, and emailed it, probably without realising that this could cause problems for the recipient.

ODT is Open Document Text, the XML document format supported by Open Office and heavily promoted by IBM, Sun and everyone not in the Microsoft camp. The solution? There are converters around, some of which don’t work properly, but the easy answer is to go along to openoffice.org and download the free Open Office suite. In Windows, this sets up the requisite file association so you can double-click an .odt document and it opens. Once open, you can edit it in Open Office or use the clipboard to copy the contents into Word or other applications.

Installing Open Office is painless. The main caveat is that you might want to stop the thing loading itself at startup. Otherwise you’ll find a process called soffice.bin occupying large amounts of memory even when you are not using it. Right-click the OpenOffice icon in the system tray, uncheck “Load OpenOffice.org during system startup”, then choose Exit Quickstarter. Next time you restart, you should not be troubled by soffice.exe or soffice.bin until you actually want to use Open Office. Of course you might prefer Open Office to Microsoft Office. In that case, by all means leave the quickstarter in place.

What’s interesting here is how effective document format frustrations are in persuading, almost forcing users to install new software. Those who follow the above advice now have two office suites on their system. If they find themselves receiving lots of .odt files, or get many requests for documents in that format, they might switch, just to make it easier to get their work done.

What about the other scenario, where users receive .docx attachments? This is Microsoft’s Open Office XML, and is the default save format in Word 2007. It’s not too bad for existing Office users; they just download an add-in from Microsoft which, unlike the ODT converter, works smoothly in my experience. Only those with Office 97 or earlier will run into problems. It’s not so good for those who do not currently use Office, or for Mac users, though free utilities like this Mac example are turning up. Note that whereas Open Office is a complete solution for .odt, most converters have shortcomings and tend to lose some of the formatting or content of the original.

The key difference here is easily stated. Users who need to deal with .odt files will install Open Office. Users who need to deal with .docx files will be more inclined to get a converter – because buying Office 2007 is expensive, or not available at all for those who do not run Windows. In other words, the document format wars will increase the installed base of Open Office, but this will be less true of Microsoft Office.

Personally I prefer Microsoft Office, though in fairness it’s a year or so since I took a careful look at Open Office. On the other hand, Open Office is free and pretty good. Many users of word processors and spreadsheets don’t stress the products at all; where this is the case, it is hard to see how Microsoft Office is worth the extra cost. That said, most people use Microsoft Office anyway, simply because it is the de facto standard. That position is now being eroded.

internet, search

Google Maps puzzler

Ran into this puzzler today:

Google Maps showing Mansfield on the map, but unable to find it for directions.

I could not persuade Google Maps that it knew where Mansfield is. I mean Mansfield in Nottinghamshire; but even when I typed in “Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, UK”, Google Maps professed ignorance – although I could easily scroll to the actual location on the map itself by the strategy of searching for another place first. No doubt there are other Mansfields in the world – but why not a disambiguation menu?

Eventuall I tried Mansfield, UK and it worked. Except that the position is miles out:

I guess Google Maps just doesn’t like Mansfield. Microsoft’s local.live.com had no problems.

I’m sure a postcode would have worked; but these are not always conveniently at hand.

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internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring, windows

IE7 script madness

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Ever seen this guy?

Stop running this script dialog in IE7

I’m writing a piece on Javascript. In the new world of AJAX, web applications may run large amounts of client-side code in the browser. I’m having a look at performance issues, so I wrote some code that does some processing in a tight loop and tested it in IE7, FireFox 2.0 and Flash 9.

Getting timings was difficult, because IE7 pops up this “Stop running this script” dialog when my code is running. Nor will it let go. You click “No”, and 1 second later the dialog pops up again. And again. And again.

I’ve trawled through the IE7 options looking for a way to switch this thing off, but cannot find one. I’m hoping I’ve missed it, or that there is a secret registry key I can change, because it is really annoying.

I don’t understand why there is no option for “don’t ask me again”, or “allow long-running scripts at this site”. After all, this scenario is going to get increasingly common. Neither FireFox nor Flash suffers from this problem.

I appreciate that IE7 is trying to be helpful here. There is though a fine line between helpful and annoying. Without any obvious way to prevent it, this falls in the latter category.

That said, I did find a way to get my timings, because of my experience with the htmleditor.  If you host Mshtml in an application, you can implement the COM interface IDocHostShowUI. This has a ShowMessage function which IE calls when it wants to show a dialog. This enables you to catch the over-helpful “stop this script” message and not show it.

Unfortunately this solution isn’t something users can easily apply. It requires creating your own customized version of IE. There must be some easier way and I look forward to learning what it is.

One last comment: why does Microsoft still come up with poorly thought-out UI elements like this? It is easy to think of better ways than a brutal modal dialog. How about a “stop script” toolbar button that appears only when scripts are taking too long or grabbing too much CPU?

Update

FireFox does exactly the same thing, also with a modal dialog, “A script on this page may be busy” …

Still, two benefits to FireFox. First, the timeout is set to a more reasonable 10 seconds. Second, you can easily amend it. Navigate to about:config. Find the entry dom.max_script_run_time. Change it from 10 to whatever you like. 

Further update

A comment has pointed me to this knowledgebase article.

Here’s the fix:

  1. Using a Registry Editor such as Regedt32.exe, open this key:
    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\InternetExplorer\Styles

    Note If the Styles key is not present, create a new key that is called Styles.

  2. Create a new DWORD value called “MaxScriptStatements” under this key and set the value to the desired number of script statements.

    By default the key doesn’t exist. If the key has not been added, Internet Explorer 4 defaults to 5,000,000 statements executed as the trigger for the time-out dialog box.

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apple, drm, internet, itunes, software

Steve Jobs on DRM: sense and nonsense

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Kudos – mostly – to Steve Jobs for his remarks on Apple and DRM. I like his closing comments:

Convincing [big music companies] to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace.  Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Yes please. But while I applaud these remarks, I have to note some curious logic in the rest of his defence of Apple’s DRM policy. Remember, the essence of the complaint against Apple is that it will neither license its FairPlay DRM to others, nor support other DRM schemes in its iTunes store. The consequence is that iTunes customers are locked to Apple’s software, and for portable devices, largely to its hardware as well.

Jobs says Apple doesn’t license FairPlay because it could compromise its “secrets”:

The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak.

However, Jobs has already stated that such secrets often get cracked anyway. The intransigent problem is that the keys reside on the user’s own machine:

In other words, even if one uses the most sophisticated cryptographic locks to protect the actual music, one must still “hide” the keys which unlock the music on the user’s computer or portable music player.

This is a greater impediment to FairPlay’s security than licensing it would be. Further, any iTunes purchase can be burned to CD and ripped to unprotected files, albeit with loss of quality if you choose a compressed format. I also note that DVD Jon (as far as I’m aware) achieved his success at cracking DRM by reverse engineering, not industrial espionage.

So this statement makes no sense:

Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies.

Apple has actually concluded that it can’t “guarantee to protect the music” anyway, irrespective of whether it licenses FairPlay.

Further quibbles: Jobs sees a “a very competitive market”, where others see Apple’s unhealthy dominance, particularly in portable music players.

Another. Jobs says:

Since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

No Mr Jobs, they are not locked into the iTunes store (yet). They are locked into the iPod to play this music back. Well, subject to the caveats already discussed. And what about iTunes exclusives?

Finally, Jobs notes that “The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free”, referring to the continuining importance of CD sales, which greatly exceed online sales.

Yet CD sales are declining and will continue to do so. We are having this discussion because we know that those figures will swing, probably quite fast, and that online or subscription sales will dominate the music business.

Users would love to see more legal, DRM-free downloads. In the meantime, Apple’s refusal to interoperate its DRM with others remains anti-competitive.

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internet, windows

Windows web server market share grows

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Netcraft reports that Windows/IIS has a growing share of the web server market:

Microsoft-IIS gains 935K sites, continuing an advance that has seen Microsoft steadily chip away at what once seemed an insurmountable lead for Apache. In our Feb. 2006 survey, Apache held 68% market share, giving it lead of 47.5% over Windows (20.5% share). In this month’s survey, Microsoft’s share has improved to 31.0%, narrowing Apache’s advantage to 27.7%.

Netcraft counts sites, which means that its monthly figures are hugely influenced by the actions of a few big players in the web hosting market; many “sites” are no more than parked domains. It’s also worth noting that the total number of sites is constantly increasing. Apache probably has more users than ever before, despite the above “decline”. Other web servers have a miniscule market share.

Even with these caveats, it seems that Microsoft is at least holding its own in the web server market. My hunch is that this has to do with the high quality of ASP.NET, and the fact that Windows Server 2003 has won a decent reputation for security as a web server. I am not saying it is more secure than say Linux-Apache; just that security isn’t the deal-breaker that it tends to be on the desktop.

Congratulations to Scott Guthrie and his team.

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