On June 20th Windows XP has done it again — updated with service pack three (SP3) as commonly called. One of the things I dislike about it is that it doesn’t clearly state what it is. For example, many people I know refuse to download the Malicious Software Tool (link) from Microsoft as they feel it phones home too much information. You need to study a long time and ultimately assume that this update doesn’t somehow include that tool.

I find it annoying that if you hit decline on download Malicious Software Tool, it goes away only for the current version and the next time they update it … well you need to decline it again.

So if you were smart enough to downgrade from Windows Vista or if you were really smart and never updated in the first place, I guess it’s time for an update.

When you use Data Validation (Data/Validation/List, then =RangeName), I find it very helpful to be able to specify a dynamic range for the drop down because you may later add additional items to the list. It is fairly “easy” to do I guess.

I found this site most helpful on this topic. You simply need to specify a range using the explanation made there. Is it cryptic and hard to type? Yes.

Insert/name/define, type in a name, then use this:
=OFFSET(Data!$B$2,0,0,COUNTA(Data!$B:$B),1)

That would start in column B2 (very common place to start if column a contains labels and top row contains labels. There are basically three things you need to change as you go over a column at at time, the three $B’s.

Hope that is helpful to someone else because I find it confusing every time I use it for the first time in a while.

In less than 24 hours, the latest release of Firefox has been downloaded more than 8 million (8000,000) times.

So far the reviews have all been positive, and while many themes and extensions are not yet available for 3, many have already been ported over and more are available every day. Additionally the default theme for Firefox 3 is much more eye catching than the corporate looking (read: boring) theme of Firefox 2.

Testing here at HTMLfixit.com over the release candidates and the final release show it to be an order of magnitude faster than Firefox 2 to load and to render, even on sub standard computers. It also doesn’t significantly increase it’s memory use over time as Firefox 2 did. The list of new and improved features is as long as your arm and has been detailed on dozens of sites so I won’t go into it here.

Interestingly Firefox 3 already accounts for nearly 10 percent of HTMLfixIT’s traffic, which goes to show that a good many of our techie visitors already know about it.

It’s been about 5 years since I released the first advx counter, so much has happened in my life that I had a hard time making room for the next version of the counter, but I finally got there.

There is a ton of new stuff in this release candidate, the following are just a few:

– Up to date browser and OS detection.
– Significant bug fixes and improvements throughout.
– Navigation changes include first/last/next/previous links when displaying large
volumes of stats rather than displaying all in one page.
– Search engine bot detection.
– Non JavaScript browser detection.
– Much better file locking and error reporting routines.
– Display collected URL strings encoded to stop XSS problems.
– Detailed displays are in alternating colour codes to aid readability.
– Updated country of origin library.
– Aided install. The script can check all of its required files locations and permissions and report problems.

This is a release candidate, but it is a fairly stable one as it’s been running endlessly behind htmlfixit.com for over a year.
Please try the newly upgraded demo to see what’s different. (Keep in mind that the actual statistics displayed in the demo are fake and fairly old except for a couple I added to show Firefox 3 and vista/ie8.)

Those of you with the current ADVX counter, can upgrade to the new RC just by overwriting the old files with the new. This
upgrade is of no use to people without the old ADVX counter because the upgrade doesn’t come with the configuration files
required to get it working. (you use your old ones unchanged)

The new advx counter 2.00 upgrade can be downloaded here. and the instructions are included in the zip file.

Anyone wishing to report an error or bug, please use the forum listed in the menu to the left. Assuming nobody finds any show stoppers, this release candidate will become the final 2.00 version in a week or two.

Microsoft’s recent release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 has resulted in several problems and incompatibilities, one of which was their own retail software. I bit the bullet and installed SP3 on a helpdesk machine (dumb, I should have known better than to put a new Microsoft service pack onto an important computer.) and all of a sudden I lost the ability to control my firewall settings and ports that were previously open where now locked shut. It required that I reset the registry in that area to get it working again.
The only difference I’ve really noticed so far in general usage once I got the firewall working again, was that it seemed to get to the login screen faster. Other then that, I’ve not noticed improved speed or stability, so I’m thinking it’s probably something of a non event for most people if you can get it installed correctly. (not everyone has as can be seen by several articles like this and this showing up on the net.)

I’ve heard a couple of people at work speculate that Microsoft would probably love for XP to get some of the bad press Vista has enjoyed up till now, in the hope it might convince people to “upgrade” to Vista. I have no idea of any truth to that, but I must admit that I thought SP3 would make XP slower so Vista didn’t seem so bad by comparison, and that has not turned out to be true, at least not in my experience so far.

So I find that Microsoft has once again decided to switch things up in the Excel world with the xlsx file format. Why would you not build in backwards compatibility? Because you choose to make it inconvenient in hopes of forcing people to buy your new product? Fortunately they do have a tool to allow you to open the new format in your “old” program. However to use it you need to update your Microsoft environment and even in this age they FORCE you to use Internet Explorer.

I fire up Internet Explorer (I used it very very rarely) and go to Microsoft and the first thing that they do is of course ask me if I want to be part of their beta program for the Silverlight Download Center. Why? What advantage to me? No.

Next they require me to download the validation tool to be sure I’m not cheating them. Now I can really go get the “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats“. Hopefully it works and I can open my Office 2007 file in my Office 2003. What a bother. I much prefer Open Office anyway, but this time it didn’t work for me to open the Office 2007 file. I bet that won’t last long.

Secunia have reported that more flaws were found in Redhat Linux (633) than in Windows (123), but even a blind man can see it is nowhere near a fair comparison.

Redhat is made up of the core operating system, and thousands of third party applications that people can choose to install. (or not). 99% of the 633 security flaws found in Redhat Linux were in the third party applications, only 1% were in the core OS.

Windows however, only had 123 bugs, but 96% of them were in the core operating system. Since 3rd party apps are not supplied or supported by Microsoft however, all of their bugs did not get added to the total as they did in Redhat’s case.

Does anyone else think that this is perhaps not a fair comparison? I can tell you one thing, I’d rather have a core OS with 1% of 633 flaws (6.33), than one with 96% of 123 flaws 118.08. The OS results could just have easily been put “Windows had 118.08 more OS security flaws than Redhat Linux.”

With regards to Firefox, they also seem to be counting flaws that Mozilla have found themselves. We know they are not doing the same for IE, because Microsoft don’t announce flaws they find themselves. Again, not really a fair comparison.

Interesting however, is the patching statistics for IE and Firefox.

Out of eight zero-day bugs reported for Firefox in 2007, five have been patched, three of those in just over a week. Out of 10 zero-day IE bugs, only three were patched and the shortest patch time was 85 days.

(taken from here)

Microsoft’s best patch result was 85 days to release and only 3 out of 10 flaws patched, verses 5 out of 8 and just over a week for Firefox.

Statistics are all good and interesting, but taken in the wrong light, can paint a picture that is dangerously incorrect.