Odd behavior for double quote key on US keyboard

I've recently invested in a new Dell Precision T5500 workstation. I'm really happy with it, apart from the fact that:

1. The fans are really loud and because the fan noise isn't constant, it really gets on my nerves. I'll need to find some kind of cupboard to stick it in out of the way.
2. I wanted a UK/Ireland keyboard and the Dell representative changed the order in between the quote and final order to a US/Europe keyboard. I'm constantly typing the wrong characters!

Anyway, I can cope with the different keyboard layout, but what was really driving me nuts, was the way the keyboard was handling quotation marks. It appeared to use "smart quotes", which means that when you hit the quote key, it waits for the next key before it decides which quotation mark it will use.

The problem with this (especially as a programmer), is I just want the bog standard basic "dumb" double quotation mark, and quite often I go back and add quotation marks around text, rather than typing them inline. The only solution I could find until today was to double type the quotation mark and then delete the second one. Highly annoying.

This isn't just a Word feature, but across the board. I'm not sure if it is anything to do with Windows 7 specifically, but I found that if I changed the keyboard via (Control Panel -> Region and Language -> Keyboards and Languages) from "United States - International" to "United States - US", the problem went away.

i hope this helps others who are experiencing an unexpected odd behavior with double and single quotation marks on their keyboards!

Facebook shares private information via your friends

This week Facebook made sweeping changes to its privacy and upset a lot of people. Users were greeted with an obligatory pop-up which forced them to set their preferred privacy but appeared to default to a "show everyone everything" setting. Many users just clicked OK and carried on their merry way.

Jason Calacanis make a great post in his newsletter this week, and asked whether Facebook was unethical, clueless or unlucky. This however is half the story. What nobody seems to have realised yet, is that Facebook have ended up sharing your private information, via your friends' lack of privacy control.

We still have a fair amount of control over our own privacy through Facebook's privacy controls. However, Facebook have now decided (in all their wisdom) to allow people to publish their wall posts. This means that Facebook have created a back door, around your privacy settings, and now, anyone can view your status updates, pictures and anything else you post, when your friends "like" or "comment" on your content in Facebook.

Let's take Jason Calacanis as an example here. Jason has allowed Facebook to show his wall publicly. I presume he'll change this fairly quickly, so here's a screenshot of what I can see at the moment.

Scanning through his wall, you'll see all the things he has commented on, liked or also where friends have liked or commented on content of his. This includes a picture of him holding his new baby "London Athena Calacanis, born December 8th 2009 at 7 pounds 11 ounces". It also includes a comment on a photos posted by Randi Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg's sister), specifically a comment on a private photo of Randi and Demi Moore. Also included are seemingly private family Halloween photos and various other people's photos (including Leo Laporte), and their status updates and comments.

However the problem doesn't stop there. Facebook has always employed a security through obscurity methodology when it came to photos. That meant that you could easily "share" photos with people that weren't on Facebook, but they needed to know the exact link. You might have also noticed that if someone shared one photo, you also had the link to the rest of the photos in that album. Randi Zuckerberg's photo album for instance is linked in the "Back to Album" link. No security is employed here, thus any user, as long as they have the link to one picture, has access to all of the photos in that album. Now that is public, and not just limited to your friends via other public walls of your friends.

You can prevent friends from interacting with your content in the future, including preventing friends from posting on your wall, and commenting on photos. You can set "Posts by Friends" and "Comments on posts" to yourself only, but this rather destroys the basic ethos of Facebook. Worst of all, the status updates are a static archive, so if you prevent friends from commenting on your photos today, any previous "comments and likes" will still remain in their Wall history.

So, how can you stop this? The basic answer is that you can't. You can protect all of your content through the privacy controls, but you can't prevent your friends from sharing their walls as well. If just one of your friends has shared their wall, then potentially your private content is left open to the world, through what I think is the worst, most public back-door-fuck-up that Facebook has made to date.

Google Chrome OS is coming

According to TechCrunch, today is Google Chrome OS day in Mountain View, California. Technical details, demos and an overview of what's to come will be presented.

The new operating system targets PCs and will focus on netbooks. It is open source and Google plan to launch it to customers in the second half of 2010.

I think we will see a paradigm shift in this operating system, or that is at least my hope. The world has moved on from an operating system that needs to install programs, over to a browser based world where everything is on demand and in the cloud (however safe or unsafe that may be).

Whilst there will always be some need for some users to install software (i.e. to develop software), the day-to-day usage of email, web browsing, sharing documents and communications need no longer be installable software. Google's existing applications prove this, although their current pricing model would seem to be impossible to maintain long term (i.e. free).

Microsoft on the other hand is hedging all their bets on Windows 7, and although it appears to be a rock solid OS, I have my doubts as to how many more versions of Windows we will see in this kind of format. Apple too, who thrive on a closed marketplace of OS and hardware, could be thrown a huge curve ball if this new concept takes off. Ubuntu and other Linux clones are essentially based on the same concepts as the commercial OS's too, so where does that leave them?

I'm still puzzled as to how Google are going to get people to switch to Chrome OS. The simple and free part will appeal to those that are not computer literate, and just want to access their email, browse the web, watch YouTube videos and chat online. However, those people are not going to understand how to switch their OS, or even know what an operating system is.

Android appears to be the "model" that Google will try to follow; that is to say, installed by the vendor, but in a world where large PC manufacturer's such as Dell and HP have tied themselves to commercial operating system manufacturers (namely Microsoft), how will Google persuade the PC and netbook vendors to offer a free OS, on which they gain zero revenue?

Time will tell. What are your thoughts on a new free operating system in the marketplace? How does simple and free sound to you?

UPDATE: The presentation has been made available on Google Chrome's Youtube channel.

UPDATE: 67TZPNXF539A

EU has its knickers in a twist over Microsoft Windows 7

Microsoft has decided that the forthcoming release of Windows 7 will exclude Internet Explorer 8 in the EU, to avoid any further anti-trust fines from the European Commission. Now the EU have their knickers in a twist because they told Microsoft to stop including Internet Explorer in Windows, but actually that wasn't what they actually wanted. They really wanted Microsoft to offer alternative browsers to customers when the customer installs Windows 7 for the first time. Therein lies a rather short sightedness from the EU, that has genuinely left them looking rather stupid.

Microsoft is unable to pre-install other companies software into the operating system. If they did, that too would be an anti-trust case waiting to happen. Who gets included, who doesn't? Furthermore, can you imagine the licensing implications, the tie in for language support. The list goes on. It is simply never going to happen, and nor should it. PC manufacturers have the responsibility to offer the alternative, not Microsoft.

Now the EU is left with egg on its face (yet again), and Microsoft will be giggling like a bunch of school boys. The EU got what it asked for. Case closed. No company should be forced to promote a competitors’ product. Now, how about we take a look at Apple and Safari, oh wise ones in Brussels?

Taking a bite out of Apple

Apple are in the news again today. The first story that caught my eye was that O2 is to charge an extra monthly fee for iPhone tethering. It plans to charge a whopping £15 per month when the new iPhone 3G S models come out, and the base contract cost will also increase for the new model. At first one has a tendency to blame O2, but if you really think about it, the bad guy here is Apple. Apple has mastered a very non-consumer-friendly "exclusivity deal" with O2, and O2 had to bid a lot of money to get the deal. This cost is being passed on to O2 customers.

I actually think that what Apple has done with O2 should be made illegal across the EU and that they should be fined. The French competition agency ruled the Orange-Apple exclusive deal anti-competitive and illegal back in 2008, and the Germans made a similar decision in 2007. The EU needs to stamp out this practice, and soon.

The second piece of news that I noticed this morning, was a story about a criminal gang that published their own songs, but then bought them via iTunes (and Amazon) with stolen credit cards. Notably, the gang made $300,000 from the royalties on $750,000 of sales.

If you do the math, that's a 40% return for the gang. The real crime is that Amazon and Apple earn the other 60%. Previous estimates have suggested that Apple's iTunes profit margin is around 30%. Have I missed something here, or are these two figures vastly different?

So in summary, the British authorities do not see a problem with Apple and a mobile operator openly colluding to restrict competition and fix prices and Apple are taking a rather nice cut on iTunes sales, passing 40% to the producers.

Dirty workaround for iPhone RDP and Cisco VPN problems

I've been trying to setup my iPhone VPN using the built-in iPhone Cisco VPN IPSEC client. The main reason being is that there is now an Remote Desktop (RDP) client available in the Apple App Store (RDP Lite) for free and I have servers which require a Cisco VPN client.

However, the iPhone only seems to support certain Cisco VPN configs. I have a wide range of VPNs I can test with and none of them would work. The suggested Apple/Cisco solution is to configure the Cisco hardware to work with the iPhone, but in my book that's just like drilling out the square hole to fit the round peg.

So, I thought of a way around this, which is a dirty, nasty and XXX rated. :-) 

You can RDP from the iPhone to your PC if you are on the same LAN. Then, via that RDP session, you can then use your PC's Cisco VPN client to connect to the required remote network and then RDP to the remote server from your PC instead. Whhheeewww....

If you want to connect to your PC from outside your home network then you can setup your Windows XP box to accept incoming PPTP VPN connections (which the iPhone seems to connect to quite happily) and configure your router to forward the connection through.

It's not pretty, and probably slow, but theoretically it should work...

Parliament Hotel - Better than expensing a second home?

With all the fuss going on at the moment over minister's expense claims in the UK, I thought that a much better solution. I think that the state should buy a hotel in Westminster and ministers would stay there whilst conducting their parliamentary business in London.

The underlying problem here is that the vast majority of MPs represent constituencies that are geographically distant from London, and as a result that are required to spend a great deal of time in London to conduct the day-to-day business of being an MP.

The second home allows minister the flexibility of somewhere to stay, rather than paying for a hotel, whilst in London. However, this system has been systematically abused.

If the state was to buy a hotel, many of the basic expenses that are currently individually claimed for by MPs for their second homes (heating, electricity, telephone, internet, cleaning) would all be provided by Parliament hotel on a fixed basis that the tax payer pays for, but with the knowledge that these expenses are fixed. Gone are the expenses for a new boiler, or £600 hanging baskets.

It would basically be a big halls of residence, and for other civil servants, such as the police, ambulance and fire fighters of London, this is a quite common scenario.

What do you think? Good idea or stupid idea?