Great post on Facebook Cookies

User had a problem today with FB 'forgetting' her machine when she logged in each day. Needless to say this same issue also affected her Citrix environment for hosted applications (something work related:-).

A random search turned up this:

http://nikcub.appspot.com/posts/facebook-fixes-logout-issue-explains-cookies

And she got a helpful pop up from FB itself "seeing this message often?"
In IE, "delete browsing history on exit" was checked. It is not clear to me that
that means cookies (darned confusing MS nomenclature again...) But sure enough
uncheck it and the cookies persist.

And away we go, into the sunset!

Windows 8 first impressions

We downloaded Windows 8 and loaded it up in a Virtualbox (generates a HAL error in VMWare). Good impressions from VirtualBox - first time I've used it...

As to Windows 8 - it seems pretty polished for a developer pre-release.

The main things for a traditional environment considering future use:

• Yes the keyboard and mouse work. But the start menu does not have a programs list.


• Yes there is still a desktop, but you have to go looking for it.


• The Vista era control panel stuff is still there. 8 seems much like Win 7, except program launching seems to be handled from the Metro interface (but perhaps only for Metro aware programs). The Metro side says 'Start'. So perhaps the tiles are like program icons in the (old) Start Menu? The Start menu is accessed by going down into the left bottom corner, like in a 1 pixel by 1 pixel area. There are no program groups under the Start menu, at least on the demo. There were none after installing a Win32 application, either.


• Win32 (x86) apps still run - good for compatibility perhaps bad for security (perhaps larger attack surface)


• This means that launching legacy programs will take you to shortcuts on the desktop - unless things change. That's a little confusing. It's kind of like saying "hey, I hear you don't use Widgets? Well guess what, now they're right in front on you ALL THE TIME! You'll use them now!"


• We were able to put the machine up on the domain. Yay. Better for testing apps!
  

Start Menu

Cemetery software never dies...

Strange effect, log out with a Silverlight video running. Can't log back in, the keyboard seems to be remapped. ("b" = "Enter") Onscreen keyboard acts the same...
Not sure how to duplicate that one!

User Profiles and Virtualism

We are in deep annoyance with Roaming Profiles. So we looked for alternatives and came up with RES Workspace Composer. A very capable product, with a nice user interface. But it requires a server backend, and here the complexity was simply too much for our small environment. Sigh.

Along the way I have stumbled into AppSense which looks good but also requires a server backend, and LiquidWare's profile unity - apparently some polish on an OpenSource tool called ScriptStart Community. These tools store the profile information in the file system.
The older tool is not upwards compatible beyond W2K3 and XP. I found out about it from a blog entry on using Roaming Profiles with a Samba server: Windows User Profiles with a Samba Server

Another odd issue is how profiles tend to grow in size. Helge at Sepago has written some very helpful articles on this, liked here: User Profile Design

Interesting stuff!

IE 9 First Impressions

IE 9 First Impressions:

Much cleaner than IE 8 (the ask me a million times browser)
No more 'accelerators' (you want to do WHAT?)
No more '20 questions'

However, it gives a Javascript VOID when pressing a simple submit button in blogger.

It's a lot better, but that means now I HAVE to load Chrome and IE9 to get through
life. Feh. Well, it was a nice try.

Tivo Disk and Tableau Imager

Drop Box

As part of this week's SANS 408 course, I have been looking for a hard drive to grab an image from. The several drives I brought to the class were clean.

Looking for an old hard drive to try mounting on my Write Blocker to grab an image...
Let's try the old Tivo! Cool, it mounts, but of course windows does recognize its Linux goodnesss...
But, even so FTK Imager can grab an image from the disk.

That's an improvement over the others so far. So an exercise for exploration, really.

My old Seagate (486 era) drive causes an error in FTK imager (byte offset).
The Tivo is unrecognized.

Perhaps the higher end commercial tools recognize these different types of drive formats?
But if not there is quite an opportunity to make software that can handle all these weird old formats.
(Non-IDE drives, what do you do with those?)

What about archival applications?