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The LangaList

24-Apr-99

A Free Email Newsletter from Fred Langa About BrowserTune,
HotSpots, Columns, Tips & Tricks, and Other Activities

In This Issue:
Virus Alert!
Your Browser Can't Count!
Dear Bill Gates...
More On "Continuous Operation" Bug
Three More Y2K Bugs
...and an ActiveX Bug...
...and a HTML Parsing Bug
Why Search Engines Stink
Why A "Windows Guy" Is Buying A Mac
Just for Grins
More!

Warning! CIH ("Chernobyl") Virus Set To Strike Monday

April 26 is the thirteenth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster; it's also one of the trigger dates for the CIH virus. Other strains of the same virus activate on June 26th, and some trigger on the 26th of every month.

This virus infects 32-bit Windows 95/98/NT executables and attempts to modify or corrupt your Flash BIOS. If it succeeds in trashing your BIOS, your PC won't boot at all.

It sounds scary--- and is potentially so--- but every major anti-virus maker knows all about this virus and offers nearly total protection against it. I've always recommended that everyone get and use a good anti-virus application. But I also strongly recommend you don't freak out about this or other viruses:

I know some people who have anti-virus apps and add-ons running all the time. But I find the resource drain is too great; and having all kinds of system-monitoring apps running in the background also can introduce instabilities into your system. I just don't think it's worth it.

While I don't obsess about viruses, I am careful with downloads and have the Windows Task Scheduler set to do a quick scan with a stand-alone anti-virus app every day at about 6AM, while I'm pounding away on a treadmill in the next room. By running the AV app when I'm not using the system, I can keep my system clean but with absolutely no resource drain during the day.

It works for me!

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Your Browser Can't Count!

Most software can auto-correct the rounding errors caused by the way computers do math. For example, even the cheapest calculator can correctly tell you that:

14.28 x 9 = 128.52

Most math-enabled computer software likewise can correct rounding errors and give you reliable results.

But surprisingly, even though browsers can perform client-side JavaScript math (and may even be required to do so in intranet business and online shopping applications), most browsers are pretty bad at it. For example, many browser JavaScript implementations calculate the above not as 128.52 but rather as 128.51999999999998.

That might seem like a small thing until you start thinking about browser-based stock transactions, banking, taxes, inventory and ordering....

If a JavaScript programmer correctly anticipates these kinds of errors, they can be corrected with additional JavaScript code. Still, you may find it a little unsettling that your expensive computer hardware and software relies on a programmer's alertness and extra code to correct the kinds of rounding errors a $5 throwaway calculator can handle on its own!

If you'd like to see how your browser handles rounding errors, type this in the address bar:

javascript:alert(14.28 * 9)

and see if you get 128.52. (When you type in the above, note the colon between the "javascript" and the "alert.")

As you might expect, BrowserTune2000 will automatically check for rounding errors for you. To see a preliminary version of the "math error test page," click over to http://www.browsertune.com/bt2kdemo/matherror.htm .

Dear Bill:

There's a new area on the Microsoft corporate site, and it's perhaps best-described in Microsoft's own words:

"Ever want to tell us what you really think about our products but didn't know how? Now is your chance to let Bill Gates know what you would like to see in the next version of Windows. He would like to know what your long-term business needs are from the Windows desktop beyond Windows 2000 Professional. In other words, what are your most important requirements from the Windows client operating system for business use? If you've had a chance to look at Windows 2000 Professional, what do you think is missing? What features would you like to see in future versions of Windows (beyond Windows 2000 Professional) for business use?"

While the current discussion is about Windows 2000---the OS formerly known as NT5---the site's design makes it clear that eventually all MS products will take their turn in the spotlight of public criticism.

Given the current level anti-Microsoft sentiment, opening a site like this is a somewhat risky thing. To try to prevent blatant flame-wars and nonconstructive vituperation, Microsoft also has listed what they call "rules of engagement" you must agree to before posting. The rules aren't terribly restrictive, but I have to believe that many would-be posters---and perhaps people with the strongest, most legitimate gripes about Microsoft---might suspect that Big Brother is afoot, and decline to participate.

In this week's InformationWeek Online column, I'll give you more information on the Microsoft site--- but I'll also offer an alternative: The threaded chat area associated with that column. Long-time readers know that almost anything goes there. There's no editing, blocking, censorship, or arbitrary restrictions in your posts, and as you may have seen in recent weeks, civil discourse on all side of any issue is not merely allowed but encouraged.

 So, with no "Big Brother" looking over your shoulder, what's your take on NT5/Win2K? Given its delay, I'm slowly coming to think that Microsoft might best use Win2K as a way to break with the past and ditch almost all the legacy stuff that still gets dragged---like a software ball and chain---through each new release of Windows. Microsoft would use the new releases in the Win9x line to continue to provide legacy support, and let NT become what it was originally designed to be: a clean start, supporting the newest and best technologies, without the baggage of the past. Stripping away the legacy leftovers will result in a far leaner, more stable and supportable Windows, and at a stroke eliminate many of the compromises that limit NT today. Alas, this probably won't happen, and I'll bet it'll be 2005 or later before we finally see the last of the really-old legacy issues die away.

 What's your take? Join in the free, uncensored, and wide-open discussion starting Wednesday 28-Apr-99 at http://www.informationweek.com/langaletter ! 

Continuous Operation Bug Fix

Many readers were interested in the "Continuous Operation Bug" I mentioned in the last newsletter. This is a weird one in which a Windows 9x computer will hang after precisely 49.7 days of continuous operation. The culprit is a  timing algorithm in the Vtdapi.vxd file.

You can read more about the bug at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q216/6/41.asp .

And you can solve the problem by grabbing the most recent version of the Vtdapi.vxd file from http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com .

Here are Microsoft's instructions for installing the fix:

1. On the Product Updates page, select the check box next to Windows Continuous-Operation Fix.

2. Click Download.

3. Follow the instructions on your screen.

4. Windows Update downloads and installs the Windows Continuous-Operation Fix.

5. Restart the computer so that the changes will take effect.

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Three More Y2K Holes

Three more "minor" Y2K bugs came to light last week; Microsoft says it'll have patches ready soon.

I'll let you know as soon as the patches are ready, but I'm mentioning it now just in case---like me--- you thought you were done with your Y2K fixes.

The major desktop bugs are well known and squashed, but alas, there no doubt are more minor ones that still will need to be fixed, and we'll all probably have to stay on our toes and keep scanning Y2K news items from now until next year.

By the way, if you haven't yet started your Y2K testing, the pages at http://content.techweb.com/winmag//library/1999/0101/fea0061.htm contain what I believe is the most complete collection of  fast, free and easy ways to check and correct Y2K problems on your PC. Check it out!

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... and an ActiveX Bug...

Last week, Microsoft said it had "released a patch that eliminates a vulnerability in an ActiveX control that is distributed in Internet Explorer 5 and downloadable for Internet Explorer 4.0. The vulnerability could allow a malicious web site operator to read information that a user had loaded into the control, and it also could allow files with known names to be copied from the user's local hard drive."

This bug could affect you if you run

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 on Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0.
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 on Windows 95, Windows 98 and the x86 version of Windows NT 4.0; if you've downloaded the DHMTL add-on from the Microsoft site.

Grab the patch from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/security/dhtml_edit.asp or visit http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q226/3/26.asp for more information.

... and An HTML Parsing Bug

Microsoft also just released a patch for three security holes involving MSHTML.DLL, the parsing engine for HTML in Internet Explorer.

One problem is an issue involving the processing of the "IMG SRC" on web pages; it turns out that the tag can be used to point to any type of file--- not just images!

Another issue is a newly-identified type of the "cross-frame security" vulnerability that Microsoft already patched once before.

We've also seen the third glitch before; it's a new version of the "untrusted scripted paste" except that this one affects only IE5.

If you want more info, see http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q226/3/26.asp . But the simplest thing is just to grab the improved copy of MSHTML.DLL from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/security/mshtml.asp .

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Why Search Engines Stink

Imagine you could visit one web page every second, 24 hours a day, every day without any stops, breaks, or slowdowns. Guess how long it would take to traverse the entire World Wide Web as it exists today?

About 11 years, assuming the often-quoted figure of 350 million web pages is true. (I suspect it's actually a low estimate, and the real number of pages is much higher.) Of course, at the end of that journey, the web would be an entirely different thing, and many or most of the pages you visited early on would be gone, and those that still remained would have changed. You'd never finish your journey.

That, in a nutshell, is one of the reasons why search engines stink. There is no way any search engine's "spiders" or 'bots can visit more than just a fraction of web sites, and at that, the visits will be infrequent and sporadic. Even all the search engines combined, with all the varying technologies involved, can do little but scratch the figurative surface of the web.

To maximize the number of sites they can visit, most of the larger engines use various tricks to try to minimize the amount of time they have to spend analyzing and indexing any one site. For example, search engines such as HotBot, AltaVista, Lycos, NorthernLight, etc., produce an index of text on the web pages they examine. Typically, the engine reads at least the first few hundred words on a web page, including the page title, the "Alt Text" coded into web-page photos, and any keywords or descriptions the page author has built into the page structure.

This type of search engine usually does no content analysis per se, but will use simple word placement and frequency counts to determine how a page is ranked compared to other pages containing the same or similar words. For example, when someone searches on the word "Pentium," a page with "Pentium" in its title will appear higher in their search results than will a site that doesn't mention "Pentium" in the title. Likewise, a page with 20 mentions of "Pentium" in the body text will rank higher than a page with one instance of the word.

Searches based on this technology tend to be fast; you'll typically get search results in seconds (faster than other kinds of engines). But these searches also end to be too broad. Unless you're very, very careful in how you construct your query, you're likely to be overwhelmed in a deluge of "hits" on your search.

There are other kinds of engines and other kinds of searches. In fact, I wrote a feature for the July 1998 issue of WinMag (see http://content.techweb.com/winmag//library/1998/0701/fea0077.htm ) that lists the strengths and weaknesses of each type, and offers many tips and tricks for getting the most from today's best search engines.

But even if you use all the major search engines with great finesse and precision, you're still likely to end up with a vast quantity of low-quality information: more haystack than needles.

 In this week's WINDOWS Magazine discussion area, I'll tell you about a new R&D effort from IBM that's trying to develop new algorithms and systems to rank documents (such as web pages) by their "degree of authority." The early demos look very promising (I'll tell you the details in the online column) and could result in extremely accurate searches that deliver exactly the information you really want.

But it'll be some time before this technology is fully developed, deployed and commercialized: For now, we're more or less stuck with the old standbys.

So let's pool our knowledge today: What are your favorite search engines, and why? Do you find any give you consistently better results than others? Do some seem more current and up-to-date than others, or have you found engines that produce "hit lists" consisting mostly of dead and outdated pages? What tricks or techniques do you use to keep from drowning in data when you do a search? Join in!

I'll have more detail, more info, and what's sure to be a lively discussion starting midday (UT-4) on Monday Apr 26 1999 at http://content.techweb.com/winmag/ . Join In!

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Why A "Windows Guy" Is Buying A Mac

I'm happy to announce that, starting this week, I'll have a monthly column on BYTE's pages. I worked at BYTE magazine for about six years during the mid- and late 1980's, ending up as Editor In Chief there for four great years. It was an awesome experience.

BYTE has always been platform-neutral, and that was one if its greatest strengths. The editorial offices were filled with hardware systems of every cut and measure: Macs, Amigas, UNIX boxes and PC clones of every flavor and variety; you name it, BYTE had it. Collectively, they ran just about every desktop operating system there was. And some of it went beyond the desktop: A bevy of minicomputers hummed in a server closet, hosting the BTYE BBS, for example.

BYTE regularly featured the best and brightest of the computing world in its pages--- people working on every significant hardware and software platform, as well as those busy developing what would be the next significant hardware and software platforms.

It was a multiplatform magazine for a multiplatform world.

But three major events changed the computing climate: In this week's column, I'll give you my take on what those events were; why companies like Apple foundered during the last decade, and why companies like Microsoft succeeded.

I'll also tell you why I think that---if they can get their acts together and overcome some very deep-seated problems---companies like Apple and products like Linux and FreeBSD just may make it a multiplatform world again. That's why this "Windows guy" actually is shopping for a Mac. (Well, OK, there's a little more to the story; the details are in the full column!)

Windows sure isn't going away (and that's a good thing), but choice and competition are returning to the computer industry (and that's an even better thing). The next few years should be fascinating as new and worthy OS competitors jockey for mind- and marketshare. We'll all face a complexity of choices that simply didn't exist in the Windows monoculture, but with more competition, they should be better choices.

It's becoming a multiplatform world again. And that's why I'm glad to be back with BYTE.

Please come check out my inaugural BYTE column starting midday Monday 26-Apr-99 at http://www.byte.com/ and then join in the threaded discussion: Do you think Microsoft's dominance will ever fade, and if so, when? Or will Microsoft remain the 800 pound gorilla for the foreseeable future? Will there finally real competition again? How do you think the OS market share pie will be split in 2 or 5 years? What will it take for businesses to embrace non-Microsoft OSes in truly significant numbers? Join in!

Just For Grins: Computer Gender

Reader George S Harrison sent in a longer version of this, which I've edited down a bit:

See you next issue!

Best,

Fred

( fred@langa.com )

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