Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The Second Browser War

With Mozilla's Firefox going strong, currently with roughly a 15% market share vs. Internet Explorer's 78% (source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0), the Second Browser War has begun. For those of you who don't recall the first browser war, or who haven't been reading many articles on the recent browser war, here's a short recap for you:


The first browser war started in the mid 1990s, where Netscape Navigator was the dominant browser of choice. Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer, and thanks to its distribution with new PCs, it eventually became the dominant browser of choice. Netscape Navigator (later Netscape Communicator) was eventually defeated, largely due to issues with distribution and the fee structure (while Internet Explorer was essentially 'free', one had to pay for Netscape's browser up to a certain point). (For more, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars).


Mozilla's Firefox, however, has a few advantageous over Netscape Navigator. Firstly, today, most people have high-speed Internet access, allowing them to easily download a new browser if they choose. Second, Firefox is completely free (and open source), eliminating two of Netscape Navigators problems. However, there's still the giant elephant in the room, and that's the fact that nearly all PCs made today ship with Internet Explorer installed, while very few are shipped with Firefox installed.


Numerous security threats, and in many cases, better performance is still not enough for people to switch browsers. What is needed to force users over to Firefox would be some feature that users had to have. But, whatever feature is added, you can be sure that Microsoft will add the same feature to Internet Explorer in its next release. We've seen this before with tabbed browsing. IE7 introduced tabbed browsing, but it has been in existence in some form in Firefox for quite some time.


Judging from the low ratio of Firefox to Internet Explorer users (1 to 5), things aren't progressing quickly for Firefox. But, consider what internal web applications you use at your place of employment. Are you able to use Firefox, or are you forced to use Internet Explorer? If you work on web applications, do you focus your attention on Internet Explorer, or on Firefox? If you work at a place like I work, Firefox is a word not muttered, nor does one care about it. Where I work, all of our internal apps run on Internet Explorer, and unless something changes, we never will. I'm sure the same applies to internal applications at many companies.


What does this all mean? Well, most people use Internet Explorer at work. And because of this, they're probably not interested in learning to use a second browser for home. In my opinion, until Firefox breaks through into the corporate world, it will not be able to gain a much larger market share. And until that happens, we will have a Cold Browser War, instead of a full blown browser war, like the one that we witnessed at the dawn of the internet age.

SQL Server 2005 Management Studio File Locations

Why is it that each new program that comes along must have a different location to save its files? What's worse is when a new version of a program requires a different location. The first that comes to mind is Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005. Each create a new folder in the users 'My Documents' directory. I recently had to install SQL Server 2005 Management Studio, which, by default, wants to save scripts to “My Documents\SQL Server Management Studio\Projects”

Now, I'm not a Database Engineer, but I have accumulated two dozen SQL scripts for various database tasks and already have a location where I've saved these scripts. There's two options, move the files to the new location (My Documents\SQL Server Management Studio\Projects), or modify the the settings to change where the files are saved.


I recommend the first option, because after considerable effort, I was not able to find all the settings to change where the files are saved.


The SQL Server Management Studio file locations can be customized through the registry. By navigating to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Shell” in the registry, there are several keys which point to the folder “My Documents\SQL Server Management Studio\Projects”. The main key to change would be “DefaultFileOpenLocation”. Unfortunately, this only controls the directory that the program looks at when clicking 'Open File'. After over an hour of research, I wasn't able to find a setting to change which would force the application to change where it saves SQL files. So, while a user can control where to open files by default, the user cannot control where those files are saved by default.


I think the most frustrating thing about this, is how close I got to getting the application into doing what I want. To have that taken away from me because the program is designed to use settings defined in the registry AND hard coded into the system. BUT, the settings sprawl does not end there, in the “My Documents\SQL Server Management Studio\” you'll notice a folder labeled “Settings” which contains even more settings, this time in a .config file. This file also defines file locations, as well as several other application settings.


I initially intended this to be a how-to on how to configure SQL Server Management Studio to point to the location of YOUR choosing. Unfortunately, the application had other plans and this has turned into another example of a program implemented poorly.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Windows Media Player 11 Rating System

I ran across an interesting item the other day in Windows Media Player 11.

Let me explain a little. There are 5 stars between the length of the song and the artist. These songs have an Auto Rating, which is demonstrated by the darker stars vs. the outlined stars. But, half the songs have an auto rating 4, while the others have an auto rating of 3. The strangest thing is that once I play the song, the auto rating changes from a three to a four, even when unconnected from the Internet.


(Song 15, once played, has the Auto rating changed to 4 stars.)


How does Windows Media Player do this? I've seen this happen for dozens of songs. I'm not completely certain, but it appears to rate the songs in the same fashion. A post on an MSDN forum (http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=36220) offers two possiblities, how many times you listen to a song, or how many times you listen to a song completely. However, neither of these can be the case from my experience. Or, are these ratings from a third party source mentioned in this help article (here).


I recently ripped all of my CDs. I've been listening to some of these songs, all which I've never listened to before. If the auto rating was based off how many times I'd listened to the song, then wouldn't all of the songs I listen to once have the same rating? However, all of the songs had different ratings.


I see two possibilities. The first option is that when the CD data is optained, the ratings are saved, but not displayed until after the song has been played once. Though, I'm not certain why the designers whould chose to display these ratings in this fashion. The other possibility is that there is some sort of AI built into Windows Media Player. I'm not certain what the parameters may be that this function uses to determine what the Auto rating may be, but I know one thing, if it does use AI to determine the Auto rating system, the AI seems to really enjoy Nirvana's Nevermind, giving songs on that CD 4.5 stars.


Saturday, October 13, 2007

About me and this Blog

About Me:

I'm a Midwesterner through and through. I graduated from a Big Ten university a few years ago with a Computer Science degree. I got my first job at a software company in the Midwest. However, I got a job in the QA department instead of the development department. After a year and a half, I transferred to the development department. I've been there ever since.


This Blog:

This blog is largely about computers and computer programming. I've only been a professional software developer for a short time, but you could say I've been preparing for years, since I started programming on an Atari 1040 ST when I was 10. I've been exposed to computers for most of my life, and have worked with computers in many different facets. I hope to share a few insights on programming, software development, the software industry, and on computers in general.


Just some random text to test blog design template. This is a paragraph within a blockquote to fully test the blog design template.