Somebody I work with recently tried to buy a camera from an internet retailer called “WaWaDigital.” He was telling me about the low price they had it listed for, when the guy called him to confirm the order. At this point, I recognized what was going on. For some reason, there is an entire cottage industry (in the little cottage called Brooklyn, New York) that sells the camera for below cost, but cancels the order on you unless you buy hundreds of dollars of over-priced accessories.

One very significant problem in computer security is the “Dancing Pigs” syndrome [1][2]: If J. Random Websurfer clicks on a button that promises dancing pigs on his computer monitor, and instead gets a hortatory message describing the potential dangers of the applet — he’s going to choose dancing pigs over computer security any day. If the computer prompts him with a warning screen like: “The applet DANCING PIGS could contain malicious code that might do permanent damage to your computer, steal your life’s savings, and impair your ability to have children,” he’ll click OK without even reading it.

A fellow Microsoftie, “Jim of Seattle,” has been contributing pieces to songfight.org since 2003. His most recent piece, “Welcome to ______,” adds another landslide win to his list. (That’s 6 dashes, if you care.) He takes the simple Windows XP startup theme, and then builds a nice classical melody around it. Check it out – it’s truly cool. He battles a powerful demon in this song – that being the strongly charged musical idiom.

This is a “life hack” I’ve been meaning to share since I designed my very first GeoCities homepage, and I figure that now’s a good time to get off of my laurels and do it. That is, memory and memorization techniques that I’ve found helpful through time. Not that I’ve invented them, but that I use them. [ Apple, Pencil, Fox, Anvil ] - a list - One difficult recall task we are often faced with is memorizing a list of things.

As Adam points out in his most recent entry, our last release changed the default execution policy to a mode called “Restricted.” The first time you run a script in the new shell, you’ll see the following error message: The file C:\my_script.msh cannot be loaded. The execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Please see “get-help about_signing” for more details. This is probably not the mode you want to stay with, as it doesn’t run those awesome scripts you write.

Many thanks to Cyrus for pointing this out. Videos from the PDC are now available for streaming via http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/. The site is running rather slowly right now (it’s not being Slashdotted, that’s for sure,) so bring a bag of patience with you. I, of course, recommend you start with Jeffrey and Jim’s Monad presentation (during which I was Proctoring at the hands-on-labs.) As Jeffrey quotes, “This is not your Dad’s filesystem”.

I’m sure you’ve noticed by now. One of the things you end up doing a lot in shells and scripting languages is parsing text. We’ve done it many times in articles on this blog. We’ve seen it in many articles on other blogs. We’ve all sat in quiet reverence of the wondrous power that is Regular Expressions. And you want to be part of the Regex Illuminati. Eric has just started a series of exercises on Learning Regular Expresions.

Since the first Channel 9 interviews were so popular, Jeffrey recently gave another interview on Channel 9. With the intentions of talking about the PDC and the CLR, he ended up talking about nearly everything :) Check it out! http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=127819

Last time, we wrote code to refresh our description data while we navigate the file system. We hadn’t yet integrated it to our directory listings, so let’s do that now. Step 3: Customize the format.mshxml for directory listings Our final step is to customize the formatting information that Monad uses to output a directory listing. This is a fairly small change that mimics the way we output the “LastWriteTime” column.

Last time, we wrote code to parse DESCRIPT.ION files – and entertained the whole family while we were at it. This was a manual step, though, so we need to figure out how to make it happen as we use the shell. Step 2: Automatically refresh the hashtable In order for this feature to be of any use, we need to ensure that the descriptions hashtable is updated before the directory output hits the screen.