For long in Windows security experts have been advising all of us to have two different accounts. One with Admin privileges that you use rarely when you need to install something or do some system configuration. The other will be a normal user account with minimum privileges. The second type of account is even more important for a developer. This way the developer doesn't assume admin privilege when he/she codes an application. So applications can run fine with least privileges. This will also prevent all trogans and malicious email attachments to cause chaos having been run as an admin user.

Personally I feel it will do lot of good for Windows World in general, if all developers in Redmond are denied Admin privilege for their own machines. For developers who really need it like System Drivers team it should be rationed out that too only for a given period. This way they get to feel what is the world without admin privilege, because in real world everyone will be fortunate (or unfortunate, depending your viewpoint) to have admin rights.

In this context, I got to read this well written article “Security in Longhorn: Focus on Least Privilege” by Keith Brown of DevelopMentor. I was happy to read that Microsoft is finally doing something serious about this in Longhorn. They are making it easier/default for applications to run with least privileges. Read the article for the exciting details. I hope by the time Longhorn ships MS doesn't succumb to compatibility pressures and dilute this heavily.

What do you think about LUA in Longhorn, share your experiences in the comments section below.

CDs when they came were cool, you could store 600+ MB of data, portable, light-weight, more reliable than floppies and good looking (unlike ugly tapes). Soon we wanted more and got DVDs, which can store 4.7GB on one side and mass produced industry-strength DVD's can double that capacity by writing on both sides.

The two big concerns I have on CD/DVDs, are that:
1) They are not bio-degradable, the chief raw material that goes into making one of these shinny beauty's is “black“ oil
2) To destroy a CD/DVD that contains my sensitive data is very difficult and dangerous; you can break a CD/DVD but you have to extremely careful that it doesn't cut your skin.

Last week I saw a major announcement that solves both these problems. Sony on April 15th, announced a paper-made disc that can store 25GB!. It is based on Blue-Ray and the disc is made of more than 50% paper, so can be recycled. It can be easily cut with scissors to destroy it permanently.

Read more on this from Moore's Lore (a blog that takes daily look at new implications of Moore’s Law in real time).

As many of you noticed I am using the .NET dasblog engine for blogging. Though the official page for dasblog is still dasBlog.NET, they seem to have moved home to Gotdotnet. Anyways, thanks to Rockford Lhotka, I got the new version of DasBlog today. Download: DasBlogWebSetup-1-5-3337-0.zip (669.39 KB)

Though I don't know the official upgrade steps, since dasBlog is an ASP.NET application, I tried the following XCOPY method and it worked. I ensured that I don't overwrite the data folders that dasBlog uses (content, logs and SiteConfig).

1. Backup your entire web folder (say blogfolder1) where you have your current blog running
2. Extract the zip file and install the new version into a new web share (say blogfolder2).
3. Delete all folders except Content, Logs, SiteConfig in the current web folder (blogfolder1)
4. Copy all folders except Content, Logs, SiteConfig  from the new web share (blogfolder2) to the current blog folder (blogfolder1)
5. Test your blog
6. Delete blogfolder2 and remove the webshare

Today the success of a  software/website is decided not only by its feature list, but more on how easy is it and how good is its User Interface (UI). In fact, I believe at the end of this decade UI of the software we use is going to have improved several magnitudes than what we use today.

I have seen many people thinking that once you have the software (from now on this includes websites as well) build, you can quickly slap an UI on top of it. My personal experience contradicts this - developing a good UI is equally or more difficult than building the software itself. To build a great UI you need a completely different mindset. I have seen many great websites and web applications simply not flying, at the same time a mediocre/bad website with great UI initially flys and then dies because of the bad backend. So for sustained life, a mix of good UI and good backend is needed.

In this connection, it was interesting to read Eric S. Raymond (the famous OSS evangelist) blog entry titled “The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story” published on March 2004. Here Raymond talks about the pain he went through when trying to print using his wife’s shared printer connected to a Linux machine. This experience doesn’t surprise me at all. When it comes to doing day-to-day tasks, definitely Windows (more specifically Windows XP) wins thumbs-up. The research and the money the folks at Windows usability lab do are mind-boggling. I have heard that after they design a new approach in UI, they call in total strangers and ask them to do a task and record their every keystrokes, mouse movements, response time, satisfaction, ease they felt and so on. Impressive, isn't it. Think about on how many OSS projects can support this type of activity?.

Coming back to the article, Raymond’s blog entry created huge ripples both in the Linux and Windows side of world. From the Windows world, one of the interesting responses I read was from John Gruber in Ronco Spray-On Usability. I liked especially the last paragraph where he says “Fast, good, cheap: pick two.”