I have 6 Gmail invitations if anyone wants them... Let me know soon!

If you don't know what Gmail is then you don't want one.

For the last few months I have been working at HP in Rancho Bernardo working with there Instant Share. I like the gig so far the people are smart and cool, I was brought in as a scaleablity expert so help them meat the ever increasing demand on there service. The code base is solid but there are some issues there but the biggest thing they need is a hardware refresh in production. So there operations group is trying to get all new hardware and get that setup I am also advocating for them to switch to Windows 2003 but they have some ISAPI filters and some old COM objects that need to be tested so I testing them on a killer test stack of equipment.

I will continue to post as I go through this project.

With the rebuild of my system I also switched a new bogging client. I had been using w.blogger and don't get me wrong w.blogger is good and the price it right (read free) but there it is a bit slow and has flaky support. The last beta of the next version was published in July so I looked around and tried BlogJet and wow simple yet still rich and easy. The only problem so far is that the Preferences are not kept where a limited user can change them so it looks like I have to run it as an administrative user to set Preferences :(.

I also have not gotten it to connect to my FTP so that it can upload images for me but I am sure that is just me doing something dumb.

Now playing: Kate Bush - Leave It Open

OK I think I am back from my blogging hiatus. I had to rebuild my system and just could not face the web UI way to post to this blog so until I got a blogging client setup I just did not blog anything.

No that dose not mean I have a backlog of things to blog about but at-least I can start back. I know the one lonely

Now playing: Paul Van Dyk - We're Alive [Breathless Remix]

I am sorry to the 2 people that read my drivel here but I a little while I rebuilt my system and have not installed a client side bogging application yet. I had been using W.blogger and like it quite a bit but there are several new ones out and I need to reevaluate them. Any suggestions?

I did fin this interesting Microsoft has a site at http://www.microsoft.com/getthefacts that has a bunch of white papers and case studies that show what others have found as far as the Total Cost of Ownership, Security and more regarding Windows and other OSs.

I have advocated running as a standard account and not as a administrator for quite some time and have over the last year switched all my families accounts (yes I am the single Pewitt family IT department more some other time) to run as standard user and I have a admin account on each box that I can login in to. That is good for them but what about me?

For a long time I figured I know what I am doing I don't need to worry about it and seeing that I am a developer it will be to hard to run as a user. Then last week I was schooled on why every one needs to run as users!

The current project I am on is at HP and they got send some e-mails to almost all of there accounts the e-mail looked official and had an apparent extension of .txt (I can't believe I am going to admit this) it was good enough to fool me "Mr. attachment paranoid" and I double clicked it. As soon as I did I knew something was wrong I immediately unplugged from the network and checked TaskManager for process that I did not recognize, I did not see anything then I ran Autoruns from www.sysinternals.com and sure enough there in my registry was a application that should not have been there! I cleaned it from the registry and deleted the file and all was good in the world again no damage done. Over the next few days HP was hammered by this many of there systems were affected, it was so bad they announced over the 1MC (Navy term for announcement system) that attachments should not be opened. Yes you guessed it each person here is a local admin.

I had started to rebuild a new system for myself in this time and I decided to bite the bullet! I am now living the pain of being a developer running as a user and so far it's not that bad. I have found this excellent blog by Aaron Margosis that is all about living as a user on your system. Would I suggest this for everyone? Not yet but if things keep going this well I will soon.

Have fun!

I have yet to read this article but it looks great Survival of the Fittest: Natural Selection with Windows Forms

http://www.plur.net/thisland.html

This is great! look at who they quote in this!

In an interview to CNet News.com Novell's VP of development, Miguel de Icaza, founder of Linux GNOME project, talks about resource efficiency when comparing ASP.NET with J2EE: "We did a study at Ximian when we were trying to find customers for Mono. We found that people said that it was 25% more efficient to build in ASP.Net, because they have to do all this academic crap (with J2EE). Microsoft later funded a similar study and they came up with 30%. We interviewed about 25 customers...

[Via IT Facts.biz]

Well the guys at Channel9 have been posting some great videos of late the one linked below is a great one about Team Services.

I still can't believe that MS lets Robert Scoble run around loose with a video camera and them post all of this stuff. Many may not know but Robert Scoble has been around the MS development community on and off from the VB 1.0 days on CompuServe forum days. He as gotten in trouble several times by talking about things that the Powers Above did not want disclosed at the time and it looks like he has found a place that is encouraging him to do that. Thanks Robert and the entire Channel9 team keep up the good work!

This is a different kind of video for Channel 9.

Watch the Video

[Via Channel9 Forums]

Here is a good consolidation of topics that I will be using when I rebuild my laptop... That is right I am drinking the kool aid and not going to make my normal local user account part or the Administrators group I will report on my success or failure.

It's painful! It is. And on top of that, it is painful! But the following resources do help:
- Developing Software in Visual Studio .NET with Non-Administrative Privileges
- How can I run Control Panel applets as another user (one with administrative privileges)? (See the additional links at the bottom)
- Run Using a Least-Privileged Account

[Via Microsoft community blog posts]