Bet you never knew ...

Did you know you can enter URL's directly in the common dialog boxes in Windows?

When you open a file with any application that supports the standard "Common Dialog" interface in Windows (the one that shows your files in a miniaturized explorer-like view), you can copy and paste a URL. Want to try it? Right click on the pretty background picture of this blog, copy its location, and open it as a file using Microsoft Paint.

Go ahead, give it a try!

If you're as amazed as I was when I first tried it (completely by accident, mind you), just keep in mind that you're not actually opening the file directly from its location. What's happening is, the integrated Internet Explorer component of Windows is fetching the file for you, and storing it in a temporary location. When it finishes downloading, it then passes that temporary file to the program requesting you to choose the file. So if you modify it, of course you'll need to save it where you can find it. But - still - that's less work that you have to do!

An update has been released for this blog. Please click here to view it.

OMG! Yes, I got around to an update.

Today's topic? Mandatory software updates!

Nothing grates my nerves more than mandatory or automatic software updates. They consume system as well as network resources, and often for no other reason than a programmer forgot a line of code in some silly place.

Some software is better by actually "notifying" you of updates instead of nagging you or just outright performing the update, but it's really not a whole lot better in the long and short of things, it's still annoying as hell and I want to update on MY terms and MY schedule.

One big concern many of these software developers seem not to care for is the fact that many people, even today, are still on metered connections. Consuming network resources, no matter the cause, is a big deal. And they do so without asking you if it's okay to do so, first. And even if they do, if you say no, they'll nag you endlessly about it.

Okay, okay, yes, there are viable reasons to update software. Security is a big concern - I get that. I don't like some script kiddie on the other side of the world using my computer to hack into or shut down the FBI. Not cool, yo? Last thing I need is the super police busting down my door because I forgot to update Windows.

But on the other side of that, updates often introduce new vulnerabilities, themselves, and sometimes the trade-off is not much of a trade-off. That, added to the cost of system and network resources, makes automatic updates a pretty poor case, at best. That, and I come from an age when software updates came in floppy disk form, and were something you were actually excited about, rather than nagged about.

You know what would be neatest? When I stop using my computer, I have the option to update all my software at once, go to sleep and forget about it - it does all the restarting it needs to automatically - even better would be is if it starts up the programs I was using before it did that. It updates on my terms, my schedule, and caters to my own needs, and not to the needs of some software developer who forgot that my own time and resources can so often be constrained.

QUICK! Someone tell Microsoft! Before Desktops are gone completely in Windows 9!

A new blog - And Yahoo! Mail

I guess if you've ever watched TV in the 90's you probably heard about Sienfeld - the TV show about nothing. And that's what it is. Except it's a TV show about 4 friends who are constantly doing fun shenanigans and having a wonderful time together, but ultimately it's about nothing, right? :) God, that was a fun TV show. They really should make more like that. I don't watch TV hardly at all anymore, but if it were a show like Sienfeld I might watch it again.

So, this is going to be a brand new blog that I am writing mostly as a creative output to various rantings and ravings that I have, occasional tech tips, and ... well, I don't know, other things I feel like blogging about. I probably won't put much of my personal life in here except for things that I think relate to other people - who knows, I guess.

I may post here often, I may post here rarely. I know I want to try and keep it straight and relevant. So, enjoy.

Today's topic? Yahoo Mail.

Yeah, one time, I used that. I actually loved it. It was a fun service, and I could get a lot done and I was very productive with it. It was so great that I actually subscribed to Yahoo! Mail Plus. But, today, it's nothing like it once was. It started out as an email service I used specifically as part of a volunteer customer service organization for a game that I really loved, but with how much I loved it and its features in general it grew way past that, and it has become the email service that I have used for pretty much all aspects of my life - both online and off.

About a year ago I ended my subscription with Yahoo! mail. A lack of money was the main motivation but they were also undergoing massive changes to their infrastructure which really put me off. For several years by that time they were purporting a new AJAX webmail client that was really neat but unusable for me because it demanded a lot of system resources. (I use old computers - don't ask)

But that was not the worst of the matter. In the intervening year (up until now) I have started seeing many reasons to dislike Yahoo mail, and after the way the company handles their affairs, both internally and with their customers and prospective bug hunters (HELLO, SECURITY, riiiight?), I've finally decided that it's time to call it quits.

What it comes down to is this - the first and foremost is that they tried to force a change on me that I did not like. I do not want to use their AJAX client - it's slow and resource consuming. Luckily, I had an option to keep using the old web mail interface, but it was completely changed and foreign to me and nothing like what the old one was. And worst of all - it's highly unstable. I get very frequent temporary errors, especially when using the search functions. It may have something to do with how old my account is.

And if that's not bad enough ... *cue dun dun DUNNNN...* then there's the aspect of security. You know how old Yahoo!'s bug bounty reward campaign is? Not even a year old. The entire Yahoo! infrastructure has more holes in it than an average politician's credibility, and I think it took some professional security researchers not more than an hour to discover a password-stealing cross-site vulnerability. This, after being plagued with repeated reports of people finding and exploiting these bugs. You want to know why that concerns me? Yes, I am a victim of some of those vulnerabilities. My email account has been used to send out malicious emails - not because of my password, not because I was phished or scammed, but because someone was able to steal my session id through a fake site. To think that so many banking and other high-security institutions rely on email as a means to verify a person's identity is shocking, especially with a service as insecure as this.

Then it comes to how they treat their employees. They used to treat them really well. I am not an employee of Yahoo so this should not concern me, right? Wrong. How a company treats their employees directly relates to how they will treat their customers, and even more so influences how those same employees will also treat their customers. I won't get into too many details but some of the benefits they used to have, have been taken away, with the CEO of course keeping her own pie while everyone else under her suffered.

And last but not least? It's next to impossible, if not fully impossible, to get in touch with the company. I've tried submitting tickets about some of my issues with Yahoo before. The only way to get help is to post about it on their Answers website. I don't even know if that site is frequented by Yahoo representatives or not, but it's a whole can of worms and, if it's improperly moderated (I don't know if it is or not), it's open to trolling and other childish behavior that is common on the internet.

So all in all? I think I'll start using GMail, thank you very much.