Scrappleface is a website that has satire stories that reflect the real world. How do these worms get started in the first place? Sadly, this satire is probably more true than it realizes.

The Register has an update on the future of Microsoft's Outlook Express. Last week it was reported that Microsoft was not going to update it. There's been an update to this worth reading..

Stardock's Chief Technologist has taken a close look at Microsoft's early concept for their secure PC initiative (NGSCB for Next Generation Secure Computing Base). You can read the full article here.

Currently, third parties can extend Windows by having their program create a hook into the OS.  Hooks come in many forms (system hooks, shell hooks, keyboard/mouse hooks, etc.).  What they do is allow developers to intercept an OS call and divert it somewhere else temporarily and then return. Basically, they are created for the case when the developer needs to add a feature to the base OS.

For instance, want to add a new button to the title bar? You add a system hook for that.  You want your mouse to pulse when a mouse goes over a link (like the Logitech mice do), add a hook. Most of Object Desktop exists thanks to the power of system hooks. They allow developers to seamlessly extend Windows in innovative ways.

Unfortunately, they can be used to create trojans and viruses. And to that end, Microsoft's proposed solution seems to imply that secure apps won't allow any sort of hooking at all. This would not be just a disaster for ISVs but for users as well and ultimately Microsoft.  The "innovations" that ultimately make it into Windows wouldn't exist without hooks.  Instant Messaging? Would never have happened without a hook to be able to sell if a user is using the keyboard and mouse (to determine if they are "away" or not). Would Windows XP have a skinnable UI without hooking? Nope. In fact, the XP theme system uses hooks. And of course, would there have been an XP theme system in the first place without WindowBlinds in the first place that showed how it could be done?  Basically, any serious OS related innovation created by a third party relies on hooking the OS.

A system that does not allow for legitimate software developers to extend the operating system would essentially lock down the OS to being able to do only the things Microsoft thinks of. This would certainly make Linux advocates happy since corporations and individuals that want to do things with the OS that Microsoft hasn't thought of would be forced to that OS.

What is really needed is moderation. The worm viruses we are running into right now aren't due to hooks, they're due to things like scripting being allowed from Outlook Express (that program Microsoft recently announced wouldn't be updated further). Or people clicking on attachments. Or network security holes. 

Any serious solution to the security issues of Windows requires taking a careful look at what is causing these problems. If I were Microsoft, I would start looking at the network security issues (such as programs having pretty free reign over the network resources). I suspect if you polled IT managers, they are more concerned with programs that send out data over the net without the user's knowledge than the theoretical concern that someone might use system hooks to plant a virus on the system.

System hooks need to be recognized as being a crucial feature of the OS. I would go as far as to say they are a basic feature of any modern operating system. The ability for applications to cleanly extend the feature set of an OS drive innovation in future versions of Windows and keep closed source operating systems like Windows competitive with open source based OSes like Linux. They are not anywhere near the security threat represented by worms and network viruses.

My wife and I saw "Finding Nemo". Early on, the mother fish dies. This isn't a spoiler as the more we thought about it, the more we realize that mothers are pretty disposable in Disney films.

Let's take a look:

Move	Fate of Mother
Finding Nemo	Mother dies in movie
Aladdin	Aladdin's mother dead at start. Then again, so is Aladdin's girlfriend's mother. Both fathers are alive.
Bambi	Mother killed late in the movie.
Snow White	Mother dead (wicked step mother)
Cinderella	Wicked step mother strikes again (father also dead but died after mother)
Lion King	Mother not dead but an amazingly minor character
Little Mermaid	Mother not present, unmentioned
Lilo & Stitch	Mother dead (so is father)
Pinochio	Literally no mother, only the father.
Hunchback	Mother killed early on

Clearly, the life expectancy of a mother in a Disney film is not good.

ObjectDock 0.99 will be released imminently. Amongst its new features will be full support for docklets (dock items that can display things like the time, weather, and other information).

Stardock has released the full Docklet SDK on how to create ObjectDock docklets. The SDK includes full documentation, source code for several example docklets, and more.

I must admit that it's pretty cool seeing the Galactic Civilizations community coming into its own.  Besides there being various "empires" of users now with their own websites to discuss strategies and exploring the GalCiv universe, there's now a regular comic strip for it.

Ah the Drengin and Torians.

You can visit MetaJinx, the home page for all the various strips and other goodies.

The Canon Elura is quite fantastic so far but I've only had it a few days.  It is tiny. Really tiny. The screenshot doesn't do it justice. It's not much bigger than my Little Elph camera that Canon makes (sheesh, you'd think I worked for Canon, I guess they're just on the ball). What I don't like about it is that it is a bit too complex. It's a little awkward to control since it's so small.  My biggest gripe with it is that it is not easy to record video to the computer.

I was naively expecting that it would include a Firewire cable (it has a port) that I could just hook up to my computer and immediately create a .MPG file or something of my film to archive. As you can already probably tell, I'm a total newbie when it comes to video editing. But I can tell you this, it's a mess. A gazillion little codecs with no in your face standard.  As a casual user, I want to be able to hook a cable to my computer, choose my resolution and have it save as some friendly standard modern video format. .AVI just seems so primitive today. What's the deal with MPEG?

What bummed me out was that I could not save my video at a higher resolution than 320x240. I only was able to do that because I happen to have a WinTV USB that I could hook up the S-video to (that I got from my aborted Snapstream experiment). 320x240 wasn't what I had in mind. I want whatever the maximum I can do.

I went to a useful site called http://www.vcdhelp.com/ that made me realize that the whole video on the computer thing is still in its primal stages. It'll be years before someone like my wife is going to mess with this. It's still far more convenient to just save it to a VCR. And that's a real shame because I would much rather have this stuff on the computer. 

Got a lot of gadgets still to write up about. As fast as I type, it's not nearly fast enough to get everything that's in my head onto paper.

I've got a neat headphone MP3 player to review, some noise canceling headphones to review, software goodies, and a few other things. Will get to them as soon as I can.

It's going to be close but if all goes well WinCustomize may break the 1.5 million unique visitor mark for the first time ever (31 days in August helps too).

We're at 1.1 million and it's only the 21st. That's about new 52,000 unique visitors daily so with 9 full days left, if we keep it up we'll break that record.

Ever since college, I've had a long term goal of becoming a fiction author.  The problem is that while I can crank out words fast, their quality is oh so poor. I'm just not cut out for serious writing.  I can be mildly amusing in a pinch but drama, eck.

During my senior year of college, I actually started on the first part of the "back story" of the main set of stories I've had in my head.  My wonderful aunt agreed to edit them. And so I handed in the first few chapters and any illusions I may have had as to the quality of my writing were shattered by my aunt's gentle explanation that my writing needed work. Having looked at what I wrote since, she was way too kind.

The game we made, Galactic Civilizations, takes place in this universe. But only in the most superficial way. I hope in a sequel to be able to do more. Depends on a lot of factors though such as will some future publisher try to own the rights to any characters and such created.

I did put some of the back story in the history of Galactic Civilizations article. But it just scratches the surface.

I have two other story concepts in my tiny brain bouncing around. In brief here they are:

The Alternative Timeline

Main character and partner in the 23rd century must follow an unknown number of terrorists back in time starting in the year 1775 in North America to fix (as much as possible) the damage they did.  The characters go back fully armed with whatever they can carry but have no way to return. However, there are some perks: 1) They age only very slowly (like half a year per decade) and 2) As time passes, they gain in super natural powers due to the nature of the time field (Which is what was the incentive for the terrorists to go back in the first place). Super natural powers being mainly increased strength, increasing levels of invulnerability, very fast reflexes, etc. 

So the series follows the main character and partner through their adventures but deal a lot with trying to go into depth on what life was like during the various periods.  For instance, a modern American would not do well in 1775.  Underwear? Forget it.  You're going to be wearing wool, if you're lucky and it's not going to be soft. The food would make us sick due to microscopic organisms, and we would be physically uncomfortable most of the time.  How long can you go without a shower before you are breaking out in a rash? Could you go 3 months? And so on. 

The stories are an almost guided tour of what different eras in history were like to live in. I got the idea after reading a non-fiction account of what life in 10th century England was actually like. I'd be dead in a week.

He who would inherit the earth

In this story, we're in the late 21st century.  Earth has discovered that it's not alone. It was attacked by an alien force. The only reason humans weren't wiped out was because they had underestimated the pace of human technology. Basically, World War II saved the human race due to the massive technological leaps that were made during it and shortly after (atomic power and weapons, computers, the internet, rockets, space travel, etc.).  But from a captured alien office we learn that they will be back. But because of the distance between Earth and the invading alien world, it will take 100 years for the next force to get here.

The leaders of Earth recognize there's no way to fight off a huge invasion force. A small force nearly took out all of Earth's military forces combined. The next time there will be no stopping them.  Unless... The humans figure out that while they aren't currently smart enough to solve the problem, they resort to genetic engineering to bring into the world humans are who much much smarter, stronger, faster, etc. to try to solve the problem.  Each country is left to its own ideas on what they should do.  Some countries make incredibly intelligent humans (IQs that are off the charts).  Some focus on making humans who are much stronger, tougher, and can be cloned enmass to act as foot soldiers.  The story really revolves around what the North Americans do for it has long term consequences.  The NAs genetically engineered humans aren't as intelligent as some country's are.  Nor are they as strong as the other alliance of country's group.  But they are smarter and stronger than most humans but more importantly, they are still human. That is, they can still reproduce with normal humans whereas the other genetically engineered humans can only reproduce with others of their own species.

The story revolves around a main character starting in childhood. Their goal is to come up with some way to defeat the aliens when they arrive.  But at the same time, the government, which is portrayed as being pretty competent, is also thinking of the aftermath. The Americans take the optimistic view that mankind will win out and the real concern is what will happen after the aliens are defeated. Are we creating a race of beings who will turn on them? Whereas the other projects believe that the aliens are the immediate concern and if we survive we can deal with comes after that later.

A lot of the story focuses on the different cultural differences between the North Americans, Europeans, and Asians.  North Americans, in the story, tend to be far more optimistic, perhaps a bit naive. They've never seen true devastation or suffering like the Europeans or Asians.  The Europeans tend to be a bit impatient with the American "It can't possibly happen to us" attitude.

But what makes things really interesting is seeing how the super kids in America get along with other kids. They're like nerds but with almost super human athletic abilities.

But the aliens do indeed come and one wonders what the super humans have come up with and who will ultimately inherit the Earth. The aliens, humans, or metahumans.