I find it useful to have multiple Firefox profiles for developing and testing. A clean profile for testing allows you to replicate most users' environments, who don't install extensions. Running a development profile in a separate profile lets you restart the browser without messing with your default environment. You can also run Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 side-by-side in separate profiles.

More at the Cozi Tech Blog.

Picture this.

An external USB hard drive plugged in to a machine running Win64. The OS has virtualized the underlying transport so that it's essentially indistinguishable from an internal IDE, SCSi, or SATA drive. Call the machine, Boss, and the USB drive, L:.

Boss is running Virtual PC, which is hosting a 32-bit virtual machine on top of Boss's 64-bit OS. Let's call the 32-bit VM, Sidekick.

Sidekick is not only a VM, but a virtual network host. Boss is bridging connections to Sidekick, and Sidekick and Boss both appear on the LAN as separate network hosts.

The USB drive has several ISO images, which Sidekick wants to use. Sidekick connects to \\Master\L$ over the virtual network, and uses a tool like VcdTool to mount the remote ISO on a virtual CD drive.

Amazingly enough, it all just worked for me last night.

I'm trying to set up an environment where I can build Vim with various 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft compilers and, more importantly, run the Win64 binary. I have a set of VM images with distinct flavors of MSVC, which was necessary to update INSTALLpc.txt and to keep Make_mvc.mak building.

In previous iterations, I got Remote Desktop access to a colleague's Win64 machine, but that was at Atlas, so it's no longer an option. I bought a new AMD64 desktop system a few months ago and over the weekend set it up to dual boot.

Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) talks multiple protocols, including MSN and Google Talk. To configure, follow the instructions.

For Google Talk (XMPP), you may also need to set some advanced settings. At least, I have needed this at my last two jobs.

Scott Hanselman wrote today about family backup plans and alerted me to MozBackup. MozBackup can backup all of your crucial Firefox and Thunderbird files to a single, consolidated PCV file, saving you the hassle of figuring out where all the crucial files live on your hard disk.

You still have to back that PCV file up to a CD or an external drive, but now you have one file to back up instead of several dozen, scattered across several different, deeply hidden directory trees with non-obvious names.

Speaking of backup plans, I need a better one for myself. I regularly do a manual backup of my crucial data to a rotating set of thumbdrives and move them by hand between my different computers. I'm not doing a good job of backing up my photos, only sporadically backing them up by hand to external USB drives.

I really need:

• a centralized server at home, so that all the other computers can do a network backup to it;

• automated backup on a regular basis;

• to take some of those backups offline — or better still, offsite;

• a private Subversion server on the Internet, so I can keep most of my crucial files under version control, obviating the need to move them by hand from computer to computer.

I use Clipboard.NET as a clipboard manager on Windows. It stores the last few entries sent to the clipboard.

There's one problem: the default hotkey is Ctrl+Comma, which also happens to be an important key for Outlook (previous message). I figured out a while ago how to change the hotkey, but my report doesn't show up when you search for it.

Net: using a key name from the ConsoleKey table, change the value of ShortcutKey in %ProgramFiles%\Tom Medhurst\Clipboard.NET\clipmon32.exe.config:

 <applicationSettings>
     <clipmon32.Properties.Settings>
           <setting name="ShortcutKey" serializeAs="String">
                   <value>OemComma</value>

The new hotkey will be Ctrl+keyname.

Gmail's Mail Fetcher now works for me! As of today, I can now read my reilly.org email through Gmail, instead of the crappy webmail interface that NetIdentity provides. Much, much nicer.

I still prefer to read my email with a real email client, like Thunderbird, but I don't have POP3 access from work.

In related news, it looks like anyone can sign up for Gmail. You no longer need to be invited.

SysInternals has always been a source of great tools for troubleshooting your system. FileMon, RegMon, Process Explorer, Handle, ListDlls, PsTools, DebugView: all of these have earned a permanent place on my Windows installations. Mark Russinovich, the co-founder, is a world-class hacker. He co-wrote Microsoft Windows Internals without access to the Windows source. It was he who discovered the Sony Rootkit and publicized it on his widely read blog.

Many people were somewhat disturbed to learn that Microsoft bought SysInternals a few months ago, that it would compromise the tools.

It seems not to be a problem. The tools have just been re-released on the TechNet SysInternals site. There's one new tool, ProcMon, which aggregates together FileMon, RegMon, and a process monitor. And they've made the whole suite available as one zipfile, instead of having to download each tool separately.

I have two blogs, my personal blog and my technical blog. The technical blog is a small subset of the personal blog containing posts that are more likely to be of interest to the techie audience at weblogs.asp.net.

Lately, the comments in one post at weblogs.asp.net have been repeatedly spammed with sad little gems like the following:

• "not much on my mind right now"

• "I just don't have anything to say , but shrug"

• "I've just been letting everything happen without me"

• "Basically nothing noteworthy happening right now, but eh"

• "My mind is like a void"

If you click the links above, you'll find that I'm not the only one who's getting this treatment. The spams are clearly generated by a bot, which is generating links to an enormous variety of randomly chosen sites, with no obvious commonality.

Surprisingly, I can find very few discussions of this particular phenomenon, save Nihilist spam and Best Comment Spam Ever. It seems to have been the catalyst triggering PocketNow: Requiring Registration [to Post].

My personal blog is running dasBlog, which has a CAPTCHA implementation, as well as some other anti-spam features. So far, I haven't had a spam problem there, but perhaps I'm just flying under the spammers' radar.

Brian Goldfarb recently sent mail to all the bloggers at weblogs.asp.net, detailing forthcoming changes and improvements (sorry, can't find a public post). There was no specific mention of dealing with comment spam, alas.

I found the SixApart Guide to Comment Spam to be useful, if wordy and Movable Type-centric. They agree with Scott Mitchell on the Worth(lessness) of CAPTCHAs. And this summary of the problem of Comment Spam ain't bad.

I mentioned last week that my parents have no aptitude for computers.

My father emailed me with a list of computer woes; notably, he was getting messages about no firewall. There was no way I was going to get to the bottom of the issue just by email or talking to him on the phone. It's 5,000 miles from Seattle to Dublin, so I can't drop by to take a look at the computer in person--much as my parents would like to have me visit.

I had tried using the built-in Windows Remote Assistance to troubleshoot issues on their laptop a couple of years ago, while they were on a protracted stay in Cape Town. I had solved the problem, but that had been fairly painful for me. The primary problem was the horrible sluggishness of the connection: they were on a slow dialup connection and the latency is something fierce. Another problem was the fragility of my control: if I dismissed a dialog by hitting Escape, I stopped controlling the remote desktop, and as a longtime vi user, I have certain deeply ingrained reflexes that are hard to overcome.

I decided to try out Joel Spolsky's Copilot. The Copilot service builds on TightVNC. The helper and the person being helped both make outbound connections to a Copilot server, which proxies the virtual session, neatly avoiding all kinds of NAT issues that can arise when you try to make a direct connection through a firewall. It's also supposedly easy to configure, requiring only a visit to the Copilot website and typing in an email address or a 12-digit number, before downloading a half-megabyte executable. It wasn't too painful to talk my father through making the connection, though the first time that he did it, he "lost" the binary and had to download it again. We initially tried the two-minute trial version, but that wasn't nearly enough time to do anything, so I shelled out the $10 for a day pass.

In Dublin, as in Cape Town, he dials up to the Internet on a 56K modem, and that once again proved to be the primary source of pain for me. It seemed a little less sluggish than I remembered Remote Assistance being, but I wasn't about to subject myself to trying that out too. The experience varied between tolerable and infuriating, but there's only so much that can be done at a little over 3Kbps.

The second reason the experience was so painful was that I ended up needing to repair the eTrust installation, and to download a full set of antivirus signatures, and I simply couldn't do it. The eTrust FTP site kept dropping the connection, and the full signature package takes over 20 minutes to download. I blame the FTP server, as I was VPN'd in to his laptop the whole time, so his Internet connection was obviously working. I eventually gave up at 4AM PDT, in utter frustration.

Verdict. Copilot works fairly well, although it can be painful over a dialup connection. I would have killed for a file-transfer facility so that I could send files directly between his computer and mine. $10 for a day pass isn't cheap, but he gets to pay it in future! I use Terminal Server and Virtual PC regularly: both of them provide ways to press all of the Windows keys (Terminal Server, Virtual PC); Copilot doesn't.

I hang out on the SourceForge-hosted inkscape-user mailing list, where I pick up useful tips for the Inkscape SVG editor (vector drawing program).

For months, the list has been plagued with spam; largely because anyone can send to the list. The policy has been not to require new users to sign up for the list before being able to send questions. This is commendably friendly and user-centric, but the spam has become a real annoyance.

One of the Inkscape developers finally said that, if a dozen or more people said "yes, restrict posting to list members only" and no-one opposed it, he would lock the list down. I attempted to vote yes and got the following rejection letter from SourceForge:

 <inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net>:
 66.35.250.206 does not like recipient.
 Remote host said: 550-Postmaster verification failed while checking <george@reilly.org>
 550-Called:   205.158.62.206
 550-Sent:     RCPT TO:<postmaster@reilly.org>
 550-Response: 550 <postmaster@reilly.org>: User unknown
 550-Several RFCs state that you are required to have a postmaster
 550-mailbox for each mail domain. This host does not accept mail
 550-from domains whose servers reject the postmaster address.
 550 Sender verify failed
 Giving up on 66.35.250.206.

Such irony! I had received a similar bounce a few days before from the FlexWiki-Users mailing list, which is also hosted by SourceForge, when I announced Vim Syntax Highlighting for FlexWiki.

I don't own the reilly.org domain. It (and thousands of others) are owned by NetIdentity. I had an exchange with their postmaster, who said in part:

I did talk to sourceforge. They claimed it is an essential part of their spam filtering process to reject domains that dont have a postmaster mailbox.

I've tried that (at least on a test basis) myself and with all due respect to them, it is passe' ... doesnt work too well. And it has the added "advantage" of having to connect back to the sending mail domain every time to see if a postmaster for that domain exists. This holds up email and creates additional smtp connections - and hence even more load on mailservers, in the case of domains - with postmaster up and running - that are forged into spam.

I did suggest a few more rather efficient (and practical) filters they could use, but well, they didnt respond to those

He has since added a postmaster mailbox for reilly.org, so I can post to SourceForge lists again.

The Inkscape vote passed, of course. Only subscribers can post now. Non-subscribers can also use a webform to send questions, so it's not a big impairment.

I've just spent an hour working through the tutorials for Google SketchUp. It's a free 3D modeling tool. Pretty slick and easy to use.

I worked on 3D graphics and user interaction when I was a Master's student at Brown in the early 90s. What we had then wasn't bad, but the SketchUp UI is easier to use and more functional, and it runs on a regular PC instead of a high-end Unix workstation.

I can see myself using SketchUp to model woodworking projects.

Vim and DasBlog, two open source projects that I'm associated with, have both switched over to using the Subversion source code control system in the last week. In both cases, the prolonged problems with anonymous CVS access at SourceForge proved the final straw. And I provided the impetus, by bringing up the need for a change on the vim-dev and dasblogce-developers mailing lists. I take no credit for doing the work, however, as that was done by others.

(Vim's primary repository continues to be CVS, with Subversion acting as a mirror for anonymous access. Bram didn't want to change over until after Vim 7 ships.)

Earlier this year, we switched over to Subversion at work, after years of using Visual SourceSafe. It was a huge improvement. Having to use VSS was a big shock to my system, after years of using Source Depot at Microsoft. Transactional checkins are really nice and I've grown to like TortoiseSVN as a front-end to Subversion.

The latest issue of BusinessWeek covers Atlas On Demand, the product that I've worked on for the last six months, in a piece called TV Eyeballs Close-Up

Ever since the advent of commercial television, advertisers have wondered exactly what they get for the megabucks they spend on 30-second spots. After all, the networks and cable companies offer only a crude approximation of who is watching what. With such thin information, advertisers can't target specific neighborhoods or consumer tastes. As for converting ads directly to sales, well, that's virtually impossible. Yet the Web, with its sophisticated per-click metrics, does all of that billions of times a day. "The problem," says Yankee Group analyst Aditya Kishore, "is that there's not enough math in [the TV] business."

But aQuantive Inc. (AQNT ) aims to change that. ... Despite the hoopla about advertisers moving online, the $70 billion television ad market dwarfs the Web business 5 to 1. Says aQuantive CEO Brian P. McAndrews, once an ABC executive: "TV is the largest medium out there."

... 

That's why aQuantive is taking baby steps. Starting in June, the company's Atlas on Demand unit will begin testing technology that measures video-on-demand (VOD) viewers for Charter Communications Inc. (CHTR ) VOD's Web-like interactivity is what sold aQuantive. Besides, the medium is taking off, with digital cable now in 25 million homes, far ahead of TiVo's 4.4 million.

By gathering data from the same set-top boxes viewers use to order shows and movies, Atlas on Demand plans to figure out how many people watched a show and when, as well as how many watched the ads vs. skipped them. From there, company executives hope to help advertisers determine precisely how much attention their money buys. "You know people watch Lost," says John Chandler, Atlas on Demand senior analyst. "[Now] you'll know if they watch the ad."

... 

Proponents of VOD hope the medium will become as interactive as the Web itself, allowing viewers to get discount offers, enter contests, and even buy stuff. Burger King is considering running ads offering drive-through deals to late-night VOD viewers. Such ads could be priced based on the number of leads or sales they generate rather than the number of viewers they attract. "The intersection of video on demand and interactive TV is the next frontier," says Time Warner Cable (TWX ) Executive Vice-President Peter C. Stern. "I look for it to emerge in 2007."

... 

Despite myriad challenges, the cable guys have little choice but to become more Web-like. Every other day, it seems, marks the launch of yet another ad-supported online channel. Karl Siebrecht, Atlas' general manager, bets Web video will become a major ad market sooner than VOD, but he says on-demand TV eventually will be bigger. He and the other Atlas folks don't care whether the next great video market is TV or the Web. They plan to make money either way.

Read the full article here.

By the way, the Atlas On Demand team is hiring. We have current and future openings for a dev manager and for senior developers. There are other openings at Atlas in Seattle too: look at the Atlas Careers page.

If you want to send résumés through me, email me at George.Reilly @ AtlasSolutions.com

I installed dasBlog at Emma's The Wheel site, so that she and the other knitters in Team Ireland can blog during the 2006 Knitting Olympics. What an ordeal that was! But that's a post for another time. (It's not working yet, due to permissions issues that require the intervention of support at our hosting site.)

I decided today to create a favicon for The Wheel, based on the logo that I drew last year with Inkscape.

A favicon is a 16x16 icon which shows up in the tab in a tabbed browser, such as FireFox or IE with MSN Search. For example, the little gvr icon that shows up if you're reading this on my personal blog. I think I created this with a trial copy of Microangelo Creation, but I've repaved my laptop since then, so I'm not sure.

Initially, I drew the favicon by hand with the icon editor in Visual Studio, since it was the only tool that I had handy at work. It looked like crap.

This evening, I remembered about the automated FavIcon from Pics service over at HTML-Kit. I stripped the wording off the logo and submitted that. Much better! And much easier than using Visual Studio's horrible icon editor.

If you look at it with Magnifixer, you can see that this image has effectively been heavily anti-aliased. Or rather, FavIcon from Pics did a good job of shrinking the original image.

I had to flush Firefox's cache before it would pick up the new favicon, whereas IE picked it up after Ctrl+F5. Score one to IE.

I blogged before about KeePass, a free password manager utility. A few minutes ago, I added the 200th entry to my password database, when I registered to download VMware Server.

200 entries! At one point or another, I've registered on a hell of a lot of websites. I also use KeePass to keep track of credit card numbers, software registration keys, and so on. KeePass not only lets me use distinct, strong passwords for each site, but it also lets me remember which sites I've registered on. Some sites want me to use my email address; others prefer an alphanumeric username.

One friend reliably informs me that KeePass runs just fine under Wine, giving him a cross-platform way to manage his passwords.