Short cuts

Paul Stephens takes a sideways look at the world of IT.

Published: 01/09/2008 | Last Revision: 01/09/2008

Upstaged (again!)

Following Bill Gates’ annoyingly funny ‘leaving video’ (Short Cuts Feb 2008), we regret to announce that we’ve been upstaged again by Americans doing it better than we can. This time the ‘it’ is lampooning lovable Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, and the medium they’ve used is Jon’s own favourite, the blog.

‘The Secret Diary of Jonathan Schwartz’ (tagline, “Dude, I was the first CEO to even have a blog”) is, we think, not genuine (the URL http://fakeschwartz.blogspot.com rather gives it away). It’s oddly convincing though, down to its Ponytail of the Month feature, even if the language is a bit earthier than that of the real Schwartzy, in public at least. It also features an appearance by our other favourite CEO, Steve Ballmer, who turns up “in his Humvee alone, unarmed, and in dull blue shirt” to sample Jon’s legendary razor clams before collapsing as a result of a seafood allergy after asking if Schwartzy will sell him the Solaris kernel to replace Vista’s (hang on – is this bit real or are we still talking about the fake blog? - Ed). If Fake Schwartz is a bit tame for your tastes, try Fake Steve Ballmer at http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com, which might not be. As well as the unbridled thoughts of Chief Executive Steve, it’s a good source of YouTube videos and examples of the PhotoShoppers art, like this one of Steve welcoming the Dalai Lama to Redmond (allegedly).

An Olympian effort

Our favourite bandwagon-jumping press release this summer was headlined “China takes silver medal for hosting malware in the run up to the Olympics; US takes Gold”, and relayed the quite interesting but totally non Olympics-related news that the USA is the world’s top source of Web-based malware with a whopping 42 per cent, China second on a mere 12 per cent and Germany (really?) third on 6 per cent, with Team GB languishing in fourth on 5 per cent and Russia a poor fifth with a measly 4 per cent.

Californian security vendor ScanSafe did at least make a sporting attempt at an Olympian angle: “Coincidentally this mirrors the real medals table, with the US finishing top at the last three Olympics” they reported, diplomatically omitting to mention that the same could be said of carbon emissions. They also warned of “potentially an increase in the compromise of legitimate Web sites that feature Olympics-related content”, which we translated as “hackers target popular sites” (those malware guys aren’t stupid). ScanSafe’s top tip for safe Olympics surfing was, perhaps unsurprisingly, to sanitize your searches by visiting its free online malware scanner at www.scandoo.com. Surfers actually visiting Beijing were, of course, automatically protected from dangerous Web sites by the Chinese authorities, although they may not have been the same sites.

PHP Class of the Month

After last issue’s excursion into esoteric programming languages (Befunge-93), we return to the mainstream of magnificence that is the PHP Class Library with ‘Anagrams’ by Zandro of Italy. An Innovation Award Nominee, this generates anagrams from given words, allowing the results to be filtered by rules. Anticipating a flood of thought-provoking recombinations such as ‘NET Framework – Fake Rent Worm’, ‘Ruby On Rails – Library On Us’ and ‘Steve Ballmer - Mall Beer Vest’, we couldn’t wait to get it running. In practice, there are limitations. Foremost in our download was the fact that it didn’t work, due to a typo in the source. Fixing that revealed other sub-optimal characteristics, principally that it just generates letter permutations irrespective of whether they’re actually words or not, so spewing out large amounts of nonsense. It can also hit your processor and bandwidth hard if you give it a long string to work on. Other than that it’s great, although the documentation is limited (i.e. there isn’t any). You can see it in all its glory at www.paulspages.co.uk/hardcopy.

Microsoft misleads users shock

Microsoft’s been taking flak again, this time for the Mojave Experiment which sounds like something involving a geodesic dome and recycled bodily fluids but was actually a blind-tasting marketing exercise of the kind normally associated with margarine and soap powder. The company found some consumers with negative perceptions of Windows Vista (perish the thought) and showed them videos of ‘Windows Mojave’, Vista’s top-secret successor. The punters loved it, but were then told that they’d been looking at Vista all along. Red faces for the Vista-sceptics and triumph for the Softies, who’d proved that all you need to love Vista is an open mind (although in some cases your old applications’ source code and a driver SDK might also come in handy). Unfortunately media reaction hasn’t been entirely positive, with some commentators seeing Mojave as an admission that Vista’s reputation has hit rock-bottom, and less moderate ones running “Desperate Microsoft lies to get people liking Vista” headlines. One blog even likened the project to the infamous Milgram experiments, in which subjects were fooled into thinking that they were giving 450-volt shocks to helpless victims – a trifle unfair, although if they showed Steve Ballmer’s ‘Dance Monkeyboy’ video by mistake then there may well have been some confusion. We think soap-and-marge style marketing is a good idea for Microsoft, although it would need localising for the UK, perhaps with Shane Richie running up peoples’ garden paths to offer them a Desktop Challenge (“I wouldn’t swap my current user interface for this one, Shane”; “We’ll see, luv – just give it a try.”). Or they could go the whole hog and rebrand Vista as, “I can’t believe it’s not OS X”, which should have it flying out of the chilled cabinet. Until then, check out the Mojave tapes at www.mojaveexperiment.com.