Delhi’s deputy mayor SS Bajwa died yesterday as a result of “serious head injuries” after falling from his first-floor terrace while attempting to fight off a pack of wild monkeys, the BBC reports.

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An adopted feline at the 3rd floor dementia unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center is not the most friendly of kitties. In fact, Oscar is the furry equivalent of the grim-reaper. Making the rounds like a normal physician he singles out near death patients, plopping his fuzzy rump beside them.

Oscar is better at predicting death than the people who work there, said Dr. Joan Teno of Brown University, who treats patients at the nursing home and is an expert on care for the terminally ill

She was convinced of Oscar’s talent when he made his 13th correct call. While observing one patient, Teno said she noticed the woman wasn’t eating, was breathing with difficulty and that her legs had a bluish tinge, signs that often mean death is near.

Oscar wouldn’t stay inside the room though, so Teno thought his streak was broken. Instead, it turned out the doctor’s prediction was roughly 10 hours too early. Sure enough, during the patient’s final two hours, nurses told Teno that Oscar joined the woman at her bedside.

No one is certain as to how Oscar does it, but the families of the deceased are grateful for their last opportunity to say goodbye.

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Now, before I continue on, remember the big stink made over Windows Activation, the licensing changes to Vista, and how Windows Genuine Advantage cut down on piracy? It seems I did a rather large paying consumer no-no by downloading and installing a driver update from Windows Update. Upon my reboot from above, Vista re-detected both my harddrives and forced a second restart. To my amazement, after login I saw the pretty gold key icon down in my taskbar. Yes, Vista had become deactivated and proclaimed it necessary to reactivate within 3 days. You see, my hardware hash magically changed and triggered all the bells and whistles in the Redmond palace.

Online reactivation fails of course, as my key is already in use. By me! The nerve! Your only recourse is to phone the automated help desk, key in a 54 character code into the phone, to which the automated response tells you the code is not valid and you must speak with a human. After explaining the situation to said human and correctly navigating the 20 questions on piracy, you finally obtain the golden reactivation string! The process from start to finish took roughly 45 minutes.

You weren’t busy were you?

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By now, most of heard about 7-Eleven’s “Simpsons Movie” Promotion where a handful of 7-Eleven’s across North America are transformed into a fictional Kwik-E-Mart store. As luck would have it, one of the locations is quite close to me, here in Vancouver.

1198 Landsdowne St. Coquitlam, British Columbia V3E 1J7

Sadly, no Duff Beer in Canada – no liquour/beer is sold at 7-Eleven.

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• Launched a new blog site; bonus points if you know what I’m talking about
• Built a Windows Media Center PC from spare parts
• Ubuntu back on the laptop (with complete AIGLX wizardry); removing my Mactel installation – never could get the wireless card working, call me spoiled.
• Moved my websites/email from my Linux server, to Windows (please don’t throw stones), only to move to a shared hosting plan with HostMonster due to Internet stability issues
• Hacked the nag screen from a Yahoo Widget

I’ll probably have a write up or two on a few of these items in the next week or so; time and effort willing.

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That being said, network neutrality in the context of the internet is about transport providers not creating barriers for content providers regardless of whom those content providers are. It has nothing to do with what a transport provider charges its end-user (please note that content providers are paying their own transport providers already and as a rule of thumb they are not customers of the ISP that you get your dsl/cable/dial-in connection from.

Consequently, local loop competition has everything to do with network neutrality, because if we had real competition for every house’s internet, then no one would have the ability to make ridiculous business decisions like a tiered internet or whatever they’re trying to market this week because they would have no customers. If people had real options for getting internet, this wouldn’t even be talked about because people would just switch to a service that didn’t degrade their favorite content in favor of some proprietary junk. Capitalism at its finest, really.

The issue at hand is that transport services should by definition content neutral. This is better for them and for the customer because it makes content purely a responsibility of the content provider, or in other words, doing away with network neutrality results in transport providers becoming – albeit partially – responsible for the content they carry. I leave it to your imagination what the result of that will be.

For as far as the ISP argument goes – yes, Google is making money thanks to your users, but realize you wouldn’t have paying users without such content services, in other words, you are being paid for it already by your own customers which you would not have without said content providers.

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90 minutes wasn’t nearly long enough; they picked a few things and demoed them, so I really don’t have a great feel on Vista from this session. They talked about the aero interface, demoing the graphical touches (realtime screenshots for alt+tab, rollidex-like screenshots for WinKey+Tab). It looks nice, nothing special – and I’m generally an eye-candy guy. (No mention of the Vista desktop widget side-bar thingie, though it was running on their systems the whole time)

Search has been heavily reworked. Every modern OS now has the file system indexed and allows you to retrieve search results quickly. I’ve never really used the search tool previously, so it was hard for me to be excited. All I could think about was the overhead of indexing your system in the background. Search results could be saved, creating “virtual search folders” with the results, that when accessed, would update the results to reflect what was currently on the system. The example was creating a search folder with all of Dave’s marketing documents. It’s pretty clear to me that Vista is trying to get away from working within the file system, making it more abstract – documents don’t have to be organized in a nice file structure for them to be accessible and useful.

IE7 was a large focus of the Vista demo, almost exclusively focusing on the security that’s been added. IE7 runs in what they call “protected mode” which isolates the browser from the system (separate memory, separate file system). It’s basically a backtrack on their idea of integrating the browser so tightly to the OS from previous versions. Now its a marketing feature! Still, it’s a great thing. I’d like to see if IE7 for XP has this ability…

Anti-phishing feature uses an algorithm to determine whether a site is suspicious or not (little details, but some of the things it looks for is IP with SSL instead of a hostname + a login box). The phishing-sites database is updated continuously, from Microsoft. Users may also submit sites that will be evaluated manually, by Microsoft, for inclusion into the database.

RSS (real simple syndication) is now included with IE7 (also integrates into Outlook 2007); a me-too feature and not overly exciting.

Vista security. User Access Control (UAC) is the biggie. Microsoft is making the push to move everyone away from running Windows with admin privileges. (I have to note that they were running all the demo’s as admins). Briefly, any admin-type function dims the screen and prompts you for the proper credentials. Interestingly, even when running as Admin, you are notified and prompted before doing the actions. The difference, you don’t have to provide the password. There isn’t much to say here, quite similar to sudo in Unix. Should have done this years ago …

Ships with anti-spyware (Windows Defender) but not anti-virus (16 Billion/yr industry, scared of lawyers). No demo for Defender but its based on the Microsoft Anti-Spyware that they bought and rebranded, only its been rebranded again to Defender. Firewall has been retooled, supposedly making it possible to have layers of security across your network (integrated ipsec with the firewall). No demo, but basically we define a group of machines with certain access rights to each other; defining smaller trusted-groups across the network. Firewall is bi-directional, but allows all outbound by default. Can be managed by group policy; in fact, it was made a point that “everything” is controllable by group policy, easily.

Parental Controls (yes it will even be called this in the corporate world). This is pretty neat, especially in the home where I have a ton of kludge to handle some of these issues for my kids. Basically, it’s a one-stop shop for controlling access to the system. When can the system be used, what programs can run and when, what types of games can be played, which websites are allowed (looks like it has some attempt at content filtering too), etc. Also, nice activity reports (how many emails were sent on X day, top 10 websites visited today, etc). Event Viewer got a nice new coat of paint. Some highlights, ability to forward events to a central location, react on certain events (send email, restart service, etc). This fits into the rework of Task Scheduler, which can now react to many different types of events/actions. Lastly, a few quick bullet points:

• all system dll’s are signed and verified on every access, vista will not load them if the signature is invalid
• full volume encryption (BitKeeper), requires motherboard with TPM1.2 (most machines in the last few years) for authentication. Can also use USB dongle + pins. The disk is decrypted on boot, and then completely transparent to user throughout the use of the system. Solves the lost/stolen laptop problem.
• built in file system SHRINK! It was the only thing all day that got a round of applause.

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When you open Microsoft Word, you will see the brand new Ribbon. Before you get too scared, simply take a second to actually look at the options. Even the most hardcore user shouldn’t take but a few seconds to get comfortable with the new results oriented menu system. I decided to write this review in Word 2007 so I could become more comfortable with it. It didn’t take me very long to get used to the new interface, and it also didn’t take long for me to fall in love with it.

When it comes to the basics, even with the massive user interface change, Word 2007 is still just a program where you type things. All of your basic functions are right there in front of you, and it shouldn’t take any time at all for someone to sit down and type out a letter, or some other type of document.

• The Home ribbon menu gives you most of the functionality of the Standard toolbar in previous versions of word. It also brings in many of the key tools of the Formatting toolbar as well.
• There is a new default font for Word 2007. Called Calibri, it is a sans serif font and is also set to be included in Vista. In my opinion, almost anything would have been better then Times New Roman. Although I do like Calibri, there are some kerning issues that I have noticed.
• The Insert Ribbon menu does a great job of replacing the Insert menu from Word 2003. The combination of the easy to read Ribbon and the live preview means I can see how big of a table I can insert before knocking off text or what exactly my footer will look like. I think that Insert really shows why we needed this new menu system. Now there is just one logical place to look when you want to insert objects into a document.
• The References ribbon menu should be welcomed by anyone who has ever had to do citations in a paper. Word’s citation system has been great for many years, but this just makes it that much easier to use. If I actually cared enough to cite my sources, I would surely put this to use! APA, Chicago and other formats that I haven’t even heard of are available.
• The Mailings ribbon menu will save me many hours of headaches. In previous versions of Word, the Letters and Mailings wizard was buried under the Tools menu for some reason. Now mail merge is right there, front and center, as it should be. This is one of the most powerful features of Word, and as much as it is used, it is under used. Not only are the tools front and center, they are easier to use.
• The Review ribbon menu brings everything together that you need to review your document. Again, this is another great example of why The Ribbon is so wonderful. Not only do you find your comments and tracking tools here, but Spelling, Grammar, Research, and Thesaurus are all together here. The comment system has been beefed up a bit, as has the changes tracker. If you have ever had to work with someone else on a single document, you will find these tools to be a life saver. However, like many aspects of Word, if you don’t care about them, they are out of your way.
• Although most of the view settings can be controlled by the view section in the Status Bar, the View ribbon menu lets you add things like Rulers and Gridlines. New features such as viewing multiple documents side by side (and synchronous scrolling) help greatly in viewing Word documents.
• The Add-Ins menu helps collect all those different Add-Ins that would tend to clutter up previous versions of Word. It is a simple catch all but it also helps keep Word looking much cleaner.

Outside of those default options, I think there are a few things worth mentioning.

• Word 2007 supports a new document format, with the extension of .docx. This new format uses XML as well as Zip compression. I renamed this review to a .zip file and opened it up in winrar. Different parts of the document, such as styles and settings are saved as different .xml documents. The document itself is saved as Document.xml. All of the formatting is handled via special .xml codes, but the text itself can be read in a normal text editor. I don’t follow XML standards as much as I would like to, but looking through the files leads me to believe that this format should be fairly open and easy to work with. The old fashioned .doc formats are available for saving for cross compatibility. There have been rumors that there will be a download from Microsoft to allow Word 2003 to open .docx documents or some kind of converter will exist.
• Word 2007 also supports saving to .PDF and XPS (XML Paper Specification). So, sharing Word documents just got a lot easier.
• When you highlight text in Word, a handy little toolbar fades in near your highlighted text (and fades out as you mouse away). This box allows you to quickly change the font, highlight the text, indent, turn it into a bulleted list, and more. I found it not to be the most responsive tool, but I like it all the same.
• The new Tables tools are just great. Not only is it easy to insert a table, but changing the format on the fly is great. Word contains many templates for many different objects, tables included. Adding nice looking tables to your document will now only take a few seconds.
• The pictures tools are also much improved. I found that working with Pictures in Word is now easier then it has ever been. There are also some fancy image templates that I am sure will become over used very quickly.
• Changing Font options has never been easier. I absolutely hated trying to do things like Strikeout in previous versions of Word. I can now get to these features a lot easier then I could before.
• There is a new feature called “Smart Art.” Think of what you can do graphically with text lists in HTML with CSS. This is the exact same idea. You can type a bulleted list and turn it into some of this Smart Art very quickly and easily. Then changing the actual of the style through the Ribbon is just as easy. I included a few examples below.
• In the Insert menu are two new features called Text Box and Quick Parts. Although Text Boxes have been around for awhile, these new features allow you to quickly insert objects into documents that are used over and over again. For example, if your company has you writing letters that always contain the same disclaimer at the end of the letter, these features are for you. A few quick clicks and your text is in the document for you. Creating and adding these building blocks is very easy.

All in all, this is a great upgrade. I don’t care what version of Word you have, this is worth the update. From Word 97 to 2003 (especially between 2000, 2002 and 2003), not a whole lot changed. Certainly there were certain pinpoint features that certain people in certain areas cared about. In Word 2007, things are clean and simple, but still very robust. The bottom line is that if you use Word more than once a month, Word 2007 is for you.

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Gone are the days of File, Edit and View. Welcome to the world of result oriented menus. The idea behind The Ribbon is to unhide all of the commands and get them out and in front of you. Screen shots don’t really do The Ribbon justice. It is surprisingly clean and compact and stays out of your way. If you really want, you can double click on the top of The Ribbon and collapse it away until you need to use it. However, according to the Office User Interface Blog, you actually gain space!

One of the best parts of The Ribbon is its contextual nature. Above you can see the default options. When you click on an object, such as a picture or a table, you are given one or more options. These options are highlighted then go away when you aren’t working with that specific object anymore.

The Ribbon also gives you live previews of almost all formatting changes by simply hovering your mouse over the option. For example, when you highlight some text and look through the different styles, as you mouse over the styles, the text changes. If you don’t choose any style, everything stays the same. This feature alone should be worth its weight in gold.

Some people have worried that this is another step away from getting rid of keyboard shortcuts. Well, that is just silly. On most of the improved tool tips, the keyboard shortcut is listed. On top of that, they have made it very easy to use the ribbon with your keyboard. By pressing ALT, different menu options are given little labeled boxes. Press the key that matches the label and it is as If you clicked on it. Quite frankly, Word has never been easier to use without a mouse.

Another great feature is the new Quick Access Toolbar. Next to the Office icon in the upper left hand corner are commands that you use the most. In my screenshots you will see Save, Undo, Redo and Print. Any command can be put into the Quick Access Toolbar by simply right clicking on the command and choosing “Add to Quick
Access Toolbar.”

Speaking of that Office icon, known as the Office Menu, is where you go to get everything you need to work with your document. This is where you go to save, print, etc. Another thing you may have missed is the bottom bar. In the bottom right hand corner, you have all the tools for changing how your window looks. In the bottom left hand corner, you have the status bar (that can be customized by right clicking on it).

The true disappointment with The Ribbon is that it is only in a few applications. Outlook doesn’t use The Ribbon (until you compose an e-mail). OneNote and Visio are also Ribbon-less. I don’t mind change when change is good. This Ribbon is very good, and very well thought out. So, it is a shame that its use was limited!

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It’s clear that Microsoft is attempting to instill safe practices to it’s userbase; you should not run Windows under the Administrator account. Fabulous idea, no one can argue that. However its current implementation is just a nightmare to work with and those of us that are already the “family tech guy” are in for a real treat in a year as Vista becomes more prevelant. The user/permission paradigm is just not a part of the average Windows user’s technology-trained mind. That’s probably the first hurdle in the security marathon. Secondly, many many applications in their current iterations fail miserably under UAP. One of Windows strengths is in its ability to run software from 10 years back – this just isn’t going to fly any longer.

I still have what may be misguided faith that Microsoft will polish this up, because, whether we all want to admit it, this is desperately needed.

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