Press "Enter" to skip to content

Tag: microsoft

Fun: Microsoft Users Need Your Help

November 12, 2003
Leave a Comment

Whilst checking that my entry about chmod was published correctly, I noticed the following Google Adword/Adsense being displayed on the page (it’s a “PSA”/Public Service Announcement one, which basically means I won’t get paid for any click thrus 🙁 ):

MSAA needs your support
to help people with
MS lead a better
life. Help us today!
msaa.com

Are MS (Microsoft) products really that bad that people with Microsoft need assistance this much?

(yeah, yeah, I know, it’s really for the Multiple Sclerosis Association of America, but still 😉 And they’ve got a buggy website, Internet Explorer [yes, I know it’s an MS product itself, but I’m still at work] reports a number of “problems with layers”: an error I hadn’t seen before)

Snippet: Microsoft Frontpage 2003

October 26, 2003
2 Comments

As much as my hatred of Microsoft Frontpage is known, I must admit I’m seriously thinking about MS Frontpage 2003 [Order from Amazon.co.uk] amazoncom:B0000AZJV8 . Why? Well until now the “horrible code” it produced and the very templated look of the sites (I can usually tell within seconds if it’s a Frontpage site) has put me off even considering maybe getting a copy – but an advertisement over at Slashdot which pointed me towards this Flash Demo of FP2003 is seriously making me reconsidering. Clean code, “code snippets” (something that my “editor of preference” – EditPlus doesn’t yet offer), regular expression search and replace, “split screen editing mode”, Accessibility checking, and XML data connectivity…. *drool*.

Only two things are putting me off at the moment: The £153.49 price tag (how much!?!?) and the fact it’s a Microsoft product. Oh well, I’ll just have to do without for now.

Snippet: Microsoft Word Maximum File Size

September 6, 2003
5 Comments

*snippet* I’ve just tried loading a 2Gb file into Microsoft Office 2000 Word (thinking that as Word supports “Virtual Memory” at al, it’ll be able to cope with the fact I’ve only got half a gig of RAM). It chugs along for a number of minutes loading the file and then pops up:

Word cannot open this file because it is larger than 32 Megabytes in size.

I never even knew Word had a maximum file size!. But what really peeved me was the fact the Microsoft programmers didn’t implement a very small routine to check the file size before even attempting to open a file – it’s not like it’s a difficult thing to do…

Search: New Microsoft Search

April 20, 2003
Leave a Comment

Microsoft SearchAt the start of April, a Reuters news article came out which quoted Bob Visse, director of Marketing for MSN:

We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience.

Sounds ominous doesn’t it? Many people expected Microsoft to therefore create their own search engine (instead of just using Looksmart, Inktomi and Direct Hit), but it seems things have happened a bit quicker than expected!

Yep, a few people have noticed a new robot or crawler indexing the internet and all signs point back to Microsoft at the moment.

Whilst it hasn’t yet hit my blog, I have been hit by it on one of my other sites with the following details:

131.107.163.49 – – [20/Apr/2003:12:54:56 +0100] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1” 200 763 “-” “MicrosoftPrototypeCrawler (please report obnoxious behaviour to newbiecrawler@hotmail.com)”

The IP address 131.107.163.49 falls within the 131.107.0.0-131.107.255.255 (in otherwords a 131.107.0.0/16) netblock which is allocated to a certain Microsoft Corp of One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052, USA.

Using that information, I was then able to look at the logs again and saw quite a few page requests (I stopped counting after the 200th request made in the first 9 hours of today) from the IP address 131.107.65.225 (also owned by Microsoft) with the “Browser User-Agent” of “Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.2;+.NET+CLR+1.1.4322)”.

So, it would appear Microsoft has launched a new spider/robot out on the Internet and its name is MicrosoftPrototypeCrawler, but Microsoft want to keep it slightly quiet for now by mostly hiding the user-agent string (which states what sort of computer and web browser you are using) as being Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 on Windows NT 5.2 (Windows XP claims to be Windows NT 5.1, so I would guess the new crawler is pretending to be on Windows .NET or 2003).

If the results from the crawler will be made public or not (or if they are just for internal Microsoft development for some reason), or what affect it’ll have on the Internet and the way people search – especially considering that according to Alexa Research, MSN.com is the 2nd most popular site world wide (Google is only 5th). But I’m wondering why MSN/Microsoft is so concerned about trying to semi-hide the crawler for now and why they are using a @hotmail.com address instead of a @microsoft.com one (the former doesn’t really give a lot of “respect” on the internet due to the fact anybody can get them for free).