Cryptography and security experts bruce Schneier dug up this little gem:

Photographer Matt Brandon was posting a worried blog entry about the future outlook of transporting valuable goods in airplanes. Think expensive photo equipment or laptops. Being forced to put these items into checked baggage usually equates with certain theft or damage.

Readers of Matt's blog quickly pointed out there are goods treated with care in todays's air travel: firearms. For domestic US flights, TSA regulations mandate these to be packed into a locked container.

So here's the punchline: Otherwise harmless "starter pistols" (those little guns that fire blanks at track and swim meets) do not require registration in the US, but are treated as "weapons" for airline purposes. One reader claims he is checking in his photo equipment along with such a starter pistol sind 2001 in one hard case - with excellent result. He claims it's very unlikely airlines can afford to "loose" guns. Too bad this won't work outside domestic US.

So, when are we going to see valuable/fragile checked goods as a standard airline service?

Heard this a lot recently - in the meantime, ease the pain with Kevin's Bag-O-Tricks aka Kevin Moore's collection of WPF controls and samples.

Kevin has updated his sample collection so it compiles and runs nicely under .NET Framework 3.0 RC1 (both on Windows Vista RC1 and Windows XP). You find a number of cool new controls like the animated graph control(above)...

...as well as the demo audiences favorites (the animated Kevin button) and...

...reworked classics like the tile panel, featuring smooth animated transitions. Check this out if you need really good examples on how to write your own WPF controls.

I've seen flexible rubber USB keyboards before, but this is a true novelty:

Based on a British technology called ElekTex fabric, finally we have the rollable keyboard, made of electroconductive cloth. It's wireless, it has drivers for Windows Mobile 2003 and Windows Mobile 5 (PocketPC and Smartphone), and at just £68.95 it seems reasonable priced for a bluetooth gadget.

The catch? You can pre-order it, but it will not ship for at least another 4 weeks.

In case you have not seen Jensen Harris' announcement, you will be able to download Microsoft Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh (B2TR) by the end of this day.

Office B2TR is a huge improvement in terms speed and memory consumption. In fact, running on Windows Vista RC1 the combination of Office B2TR and Vista RC1 performs as well as XP on my 1GB RAM Toshiba Tecra M4 laptop. E.g., just running Outlook, task manager reports a total of 470-500MB of memory in use, even with Aero Glass enabled. The memory penalty when enabling Glass is totally gone in RC1.

Office presents a cleaned up Ribbon and a zillion little fixes and improvements over Beta 2. XPS and PDF export, however, is gone from the base package, you have to install the plugins already available for XPS export and PDF export.

This is really the first combination of Office and Vista Beta that beats running XP. Users of those 100+ Million Windows Vista PCs to be shipped in 2007 (according to IDC's crystal ball) will like it.

Windows Vista RC1 comes with inbox support for those neat new graphics cards, but if you care for the very latest drivers or exended control panels, both big vendors have released new drivers:

ATI: Catalyst Beta Driver for Windows Vista RC1

NVidia: ForceWare Release 95 Version: 96.33

Note: Both links point to drivers for Windows Vista RC1 (Build 5600) and above.

Michael Swanson posted the contest today:

If you create and submit a file converter to XAML, you can win one of three Dell XPS M1710 laptops.

Here's the catch: It must be one of the following file formats, and you must submit your entry by October 29th.

Valid 2D input formats are: Adobe® Flash® (.SWF), Adobe Photoshop® (.PSD), or Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG).

Valid 3D input formats are: Autodesk® 3ds Max® (.3DS, .MAX), Autodesk AutoCAD® (.DXF), Microsoft DirectX® (.X), Autodesk/Alias® Wavefront® (.OBJ).

Your converter has to support at least one of the above file formats, chosen by the WPF developer community as the most popular input formats.

The file converter can be a standalone app or a plug-in, GUI or command line, and it must be freely available (source code is NOT required).

For more details, go to the Contest page on netfx3.com

Depending on who talk to, people will tell you how happy/unhappy they are with current Windows Vista performance. Like most of my colleagues, I have installed the July 2006 CTP (Build 5472, available from the MSDN subscriber download).

On the machines I am using, performance (compared to XP on the same PC) varies wildly. My private desktop machine, a Dell 8300 Desktop with 2GB RAM, purchased in 2003, really shines. (Subjective) performance is noticeable better than XP.

I'm using two laptops, an Acer Ferrari (2GB RAM, X700 Video card) and a Toshiba M4 (1GB RAM, GeForce Go 6200). The Acer machines performs about as good on Vista as on XP, while the M4 was running noticeable slower compared to XP.

Important disclaimer: all performance statements reflect purely my personal observations. Keep also in mind that improvements in future Vista builds, drivers and or course firmware may totally change the situation before Windows Vista ships.

Obvious Choices

So, how to speed up the Thoshiba laptop? The obvious first choice would be to add memory, the second choice would be to change the hard drive. Quite a lot of colleagues swapped the low-RPM drives in their laptops (even in brand new ones) against 7200RPM drives with 8 or 16MB cache and reported huge performance improvements.

On small PCs, less is more

Since I did not want to modify the (company owned) laptop hardware, what are other tweaking options? Looking at resource usage (ResourceMonitor is a vast improvement over TaskManager) it is easy to spot features too resource- hungry for the Tecra M4 laptop.

Disabling Transparency in Aero Glass provides a huge relief in terms of memory and CPU. However, giving up Glass altogether and switching from "Windows Vista Aero" to "Windows Vista Basic" made the real difference. Even when running Office 2007 Beta and Visual Studio 2005 at the same time, the machine now performs at least as fast as on XP.

One more option I am using is ReadyBoost, improving performance by adding a USB Stick:

ReadyBoost

ReadyBoost is a simple way to speed up an existing PC by adding a USB Stick (or, in some machines, adding a SD Memory card). What ReadyBoost does, is caching portions of the pagefile on a USB Stick. (With flash prices going down, 2GB USB sticks are around for 40€ apiece, so this might be a great excuse to buy one)

People have argues that Disk transfer rates exceed Flash Memory transfer rates - which is true. However, random reads from Flash can be as much as 10x faster than random reads from your disk.

Still, you Flash memory/USB stick, USB controller etc. must provide a reasonable transfer rate for random reads. The only real way to find out, is benchmark random reads, and this is what Windows Vista does automatically.

Selecting a USB stick, and doing a right click/properties, you can select ReadyBoost and enable/disable it. Windows Vista will create a ReadyBoost cache file. This file will be used for small, random reads to the pagefile. A recommendation for the ReadyBoost cache is 1:1 (ReadyBoost:System Memory) for smaller machines, going up to 2.5:1 for bigger machines. There can be only one ReadyBoost file on a machine, and the ReadyBoost file can never be larger than 4GB.

ReadyBoost will improve things when the machine comes under memory pressure and heavy disk activity, in this case the PC will be noticeable more responsive. Even more details on ReadyBoost can be found in Tom Archer's Weblog.

The new Excel File Formats. Like all "new" file formats coming along with Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, these file formats are really ZIP containers. Excel however, offers a choice of XML-based or binary files inside such a container.

The XML based formats can be identified by breaking up the extension as follows:

Office 2007 will use the XML based format, Office Open XML as default. However, there is a second new Zip-Container based format: XLSB contains binary .BIN files instead of XML files.

So, why yet another new format? Both XML and binary formats will support all features of Excel 2007 without exception. However, if you create insane large sheets, loading (and parsing) XML will take some time you can avoid by using XLSB.

So, what is "insane large"? Office 2007 increases the sheet size limits in dramatic ways:

Instead of 256 columns, you can now have 16384.
Instead of 64k rows, you can now have 1 Million rows in a sheet. These files may grow real large, and XLSB will load them faster than XLSX. (Once loaded, there will be no difference)

More Excel file format insides and new increased limits can be found on the Excel team blog.

I hope to see many of you at Tech·Ed: Developers Europe Nov 7-10 in Barcelona, Spain. I am one of the people responsible for the content there, taking care of "Windows Desktop and Mobile Development" sessions to be more exact. We'll cover an exciting mix of WPF(formerly Avalon), WinForms, Mobility features (such as tablet, ink and WPF), Windows Mobile and more!

The good News: Mr. .NET Rocks Carl Franklin will be there talking about RSS and also covering how to write efficient, multithreaded WinForms applications, utilizing all those multi-core CPU goodness. .NET Rocks will also do a Live show with a prominent guest (stay tuned for more) Don't miss it!

Oh yes, the Ticket: .NET Rocks will give away one complete Tech·Ed: Developers package (flight, hotel, Tech·Ed tickets). Look here for the contest, it can't miss it.

According to a famous "New Yorker" cartoon by Peter Steiner, "On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog".

That's no longer true. In fact, today we can tell you're a scotch terrier, live north of London, enjoy chewing up your owner's shoes (including brand preference), crave for that special dog food, and have that odd obsession for Perdita from 101 Dalmatians.

Not convinced? These days the AOL search/privacy breach is a top news story.

Earlier this month, AOL posted "anonymized" data containing 20 Million search requests by some 250000+ individual users, collected of 3 months in 2006. While this may have been done with good intentions (to foster search engine research), the result is disastrous.

The data contains a numeric ID for individual users, the original search query string, the result clicked/followed (including ranking) and a timestamp. Most users do not disable/clear cookies for search engines, so you get a pretty interesting profile of their interests.

Worse, people tend to look up their names, related names, search for self-related data and web sites. Data mining these results will not only show trends, but may also expose private details. The original data set, roughly 0.4GB of compressed data is available from an endless list of mirrors by now and will never ever go away. Worse, the data can be queried online on a number of sites.

Software companies such a Microsoft have implemented privacy policies and have privacy statements by now. In fact, these will continue to evolve over the years to come, and be a crucial factor for consumer trust. User feedback is helping to shape software design, the privacy dialog in Windows Media player is a prime example.

Not so obvious: your hardware needs a defined level of privacy as well.

Examples: My laser printer includes near-invisible forensic watermarks (including serial number) on every page printed. Unless disabled, it transmits toner usage data to the manufacturer. Another one: My networked media center extender for audio playback queries the manufacturer home page at every startup (using it's serial number).

Most of these activities are harmless by itself, but combined they provide an increasingly complete picture.

Not convinced? Ever shopped books online? I do. Look what you can do to mine Amazon Wish lists (they are public by default).

The challenge: make it obvious what information is collected, how it could be used, and present users an easy way to opt in or out. Personalization is a great feature as long as you are in control. 

Occasionally people are questioning those fancy 3D Vista examples, or anything beyond today's 2D graphical interfaces will easy man-machine interaction. And, to be honest, it is not always - or even close to impossible - to predict how most people will interact with their PCs a decade from now.

Microsoft Research Projects recently presented at the Siggraph conference offer a peek into such a future, where augmented reality and ubiquitous computing may change how we think about PCs and computers.

Navigate the webs pictures in 3D

Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth is a collaboration between the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. Photosynth analyzes large numbers of photos and arranges them into a 3D context. Photos of objects, or places. So, for example a collection of photos of Rome is automatically analyzed and and arranged - similar to "stitching" software, but this time in 3D space.

Not too far in the future, Photosynth could crawl the entire web, try to find similarities in pictures, and arrange those pictures into a 3D navigatable structure. A web based prototype of such a 3D picture browser is planned for later this year. Watch the videos what Photosynth does today. 

Play Anywhere

Augmented reality will also conquer your desktop. So, better clean up that clobbered desktop space now.  Andy Wilson of Microsoft Research has built a prototype of a desktop projector/camera system that lets you interact with your PC by placing objects on your (real world) desktop, or simply by hand gestures. No gloves, mice, pens or other pointing devices are necessary.

 Place a smartphone on the desktop, it will be recognized, pictures extracted (Bluetooth) and you can instantly manipulate them with your bare hands.

Scroll and zoom the globe (an application using the programmability features of local.live.com).

This is how the device looks today. A video showing this awesome technology has been published on 10.

10 years ago, JavaWorld was wondering if JavaScript has a future. Today, JavaScript has emerged as the most widely deployed form of a "runtime" available. Nevertheless, most of the of the criticism raised a decade ago still applies. Despite the ECMAScript standard (a common, portable subset of JavaScript implementations) existing implementations and side-effects are tied to Browsers.

Developing and debugging JavaScript is still a nightmare. For that reason, most Web 2.0/AJAX style environments offer ways to hide JavaScript, or at least reduce it to tested, portable library modules. But even if you choose a friendly environment like the ASP.NET based ATLAS, there may be situations forcing you to hand-craft JavaScript.

Nikil Kothari is working on yet another approach to tame the beast: Script#.

Script# is a C# to JavaScript compiler. It takes (valid) C# source code as input, and produces JavaScript output. The output is either "plain", "compact" (for deployment) or instrumented for easy debugging. The idea is to use the power of a high-level language, and tools for refactoring etc., while deploying to - whatever is available.

Will JavaScript survive another decade? Or will a portable CLR and WPF/e replace it altogether?

Tim O’Reilly recently published a truly insightful analysis of the computer book market. Looking at the second quarter 06 computer books market provides clues what is hot.

Obviously the real-world distribution of computer languages cannot be determined from book sales, on the other hand this is a true indicator what is coming up. Looking at the computer language distribution (treemap): The big winners this time are C#, .NET Languages, JavaScript and Ruby. NET  plus C# combined has also overtaken Java. On the web side of things, Web 2.0 and AJAX-related technologies are the hot thing.  Looking at the database section (treemap), SQL Server is going strong with doubled book sales thanks to SQL Server 2005.

Viewing web technologies only (treemap), ASP(.NET) and AJAX are huge (note: AJAX is marked as 0% growth because the category did not exist a year ago)

Amusing: Readers of O’Reilly’s blog comment on his own influence on the next “big thing” on the computer book sector.

I've always had this uneasy feeling about WEP secured wireless networks, so when I moved to my current apartment a year ago I purchased WPA enabled devices. Unfortunately this means I cannot use and will not buy a number of nice devices (such as digital cameras with WLAN) secured only by WEP. A lot of equipment still does not do WPA, or perfoms sluggish when using WPA. All those devices should no longer be used. Changing my home network to WPA was sort of painful, but it paid off. 

Because it finally happened: WEP is dead. A paper recently published by Andreas Bittau, Mark Henley (both researching at the University College of London) and Joshua Lackey (Microsoft) describes a new, devastating attack. (Download their research paper here: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/M.Handley/papers/fragmentation.pdf ) The new attack relies on packet fragmentation and use of the known 8-byte LLC/SNAP headers to speed up decryption.

Basically it is so efficient it renders WEP useless. Totally useless.

The method described in the paper breaks WEP in seconds. That said, mechanisms like EAP, changing WEP keys every few minutes, are useless as well. To proof their point, the paper refers to a tool called "wesside". The paper claims it can break many WEP networks in seconds. (For the curious: The tool is written for FreeBSD, and relies on low level functions of the Atheros WLAN card. Source is provided here: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/a.bittau/frag-0.1.tgz). Rest assured that someone has ported this to other platforms and alternate hardware by now.

To illustrate the gravity of the situation: according to the paper, typically around 76% of WLANs in the London Area are secured by WEP, in the Seattle Area an estimated number of 85% is given. Only 20% (London)/14%(Seattle) of WLANs use WPA, practically no one uses 802.11i

The consequence: Switch from WEP to WPA or 802.11i. Retire all your WEP-only equipment today. Methods relying on frequent change of WEP keys will no longer save you.

If you have seen a recent presentation on Windows Vista, you may have noted that fully using new hardware is a recurring theme. So is the use of flash memory. The presenter might have also mentioned “hybrid hard disks with flash memory”.

So how can a hybrid flash/hard drive help speed up Windows Vista? The basic idea is to speed up the boot process as well as improving your notebook battery life. So how is this implemented?

Actually, the hard drive is doing the hard work in hardware, carrying out orders by Windows Vista. The flash memory on the disk can be used as a read- and write- cache. When used as a write cache, the drive can buffer large amounts of data. The flash memory cache is non-volatile, so there is no danger of losing data when power is lost.

This can also be utilized to defer writing for a long time. Power save may have powered down the drive, and as long as there is room in cache and no need to spin up the drive this is a great way to save power.
Read caching is assisted by the operating system. Using new ATA8 NV commands, Windows Vista instructs the drive to “pin” sectors into cache. The OS can also pin writes to cache (think: hibernation file). The OS also queries cache hits and misses for further optimization.

The recently published hardware recommendations for Windows Vista already mention such devices. The need to have embedded flash memory of reasonable size (256 – 512MB) and have to meet certain performance requirements (e.g. read/write random 4K blocks with at least 4MB/s). Looking at the rapidly falling prices for say, 1GB flash drives, I can imagine drives with multiple GBs of flash embedded for the near future.

Hardware is already on its way: Seagate has already announced a series of 2.5” Notebook drives called Momentus 5400 PSD with a capacity range up 160GB. Samsung also announced a range of hybrid drives to ship by January 2007 (according to Tom’s hardware guide)

If you are curious about all specs, have a look at the T13 Committees web site. The T13 Committee is responsible for driving ATA storage commands. Search for “Non-Volatile Cache Command” and you will see the details.