The most bizarre installation I have ever experienced

I have been using and beta testing Visual Studio since it was 1.x and with the release of VS2008 VSTS Beta 2 some months ago, I am obviously eager to try to install it on my machines.

I must say, this has to be one of the hardest and toughest VS beta installation that I have dealt with so far. As you will see that I have to engage one of the weirdest and most bizarre techniques to finally crack the installation.

I must admit I had lots of very alpha .Net framework 3 stuff installed on my previous machine. Hence, I would expect the VS2008 Beta 2 to fail to install. Even after I'd cleaned up all those crumbs, it still failed. But I was shocked when this happened to me on a new machine with only released version of .Net Framework on it.

Anyway, when I performed the normal VS2008 Beta 2 set up on a machine with VS2003 and VS2005 VSTS, the process proceeded normally but hung up on the installation of .Net Framework 3.5. The presence of those released products should not matter.

After several attempts and probing the process, I decided to try to install just the .Net Framework 3.5 alone. This installation proceeded to about 80% and then hung.

Searching the net looking for similar symptom, I came across this one that described installation problem behind an authenticated proxy, a situation similar to mine. Armed with information from Aaron's blog, I ventured into the installation log to try to discover what's happening.

The installation appeared to be hung on trying to access a web site as reported in the last 3 lines of the file dd_dotnetfx35Install.txt and they are reproduced here:

[10/15/07,16:41:18] Setup.exe: GetGlobalCustomProperty - Property:   {8297A38B-6431-4F1D-9F6E-C3D371CEA383} - PropertyName: WebSetup - Value: 1
[10/15/07,16:41:18] VS Scenario: Checking if new setup is available. Url=
[10/15/07,16:41:19] VS Scenario: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91778&clcid=0x409

Armed with the weird suggestion of unplugging the Ethernet cable from the wall, cleaning up all the crumbs (those folders in C:\ with a GUID as a name) and rebooting the machine to ensure no likely installation was still running, I decided to give this a try.

First I tried the .Net Framework 3.5 installation and this flied past the furthest part I had ventured. So my confidence was boosted.

Then I decided to cancel that installation to proceed with the real VS2008 Beta 2 set up. That also went flawlessly to a no-error completion!!

What a bizarre experience. Don't know why an installation program wanted to access a site. Furthermore, I could access that site from IE and that caused me to initially doubt that could be the reason why the installation was hung. But that seemed to be the stumbling block.

Unusual and Bizarre.

Don't dispair if your e-mail does not bring about the desirable result

Recently an article from NYTimes caught my attention reporting that e-mail is often being mis-read by the recipient. This helps me to understand some of the issues I have with e-mail, particularly non-social ones.

The author discovers recent research points out the reason why e-mail is often mis-read is:

e-mail can be emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone.
[...]
Still, if we rely solely on e-mail at work, the absence of a channel for the brain’s emotional circuitry carries risks. In an article to be published next year in the Academy of Management Review, Kristin Byron, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management, finds that e-mail generally increases the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication.

One reason for this is that we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the sender intended. Even jokes are rated as less funny by recipients than by senders.
[...]
On the upside, the familiarity that develops between sender and receiver can help to reduce these problems, according to findings by Joseph Walther, a professor of communication and telecommunication at Michigan State University. People who know each other well, it turns out, are less likely to have these misunderstandings online.

One way to overcome this as proposed by Professor Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s interactive telecommunications program is:

a “banyan model,” after the Asian tree that puts down roots from its branches.

In this approach, he said, “you put down little roots of face-to-face contact everywhere, to strategically augment electronic communications.”

A final note from Professor Shirky:

“social software” like e-mail “is not better than face-to-face contact; it’s only better than nothing.”

So pick up the phone or walk around the cubicle.

IE7 Vs Firefox European survey

Two recent reports released by Web Browser survey company report some very encouraging signs that Firefox has actually pulled ahead of IE7 in Europe.

In this report, they have identified the adoption of IE7 amongst the IE users is only 33.9% versus 83.2% of FF2 in the group of Firefox users. This is interesting showing a lack of endorsement of IE7, which was touted as more secure relative to the vulnerable IE6, in IE users group .

Furthermore, it is interesting to find in significant number of European countries, more people are actually using FF2 than IE7.

The other report shows a relentless increase of FF2 market share touching a shade below 28% across Europe. It also reported that Slovenia and Finland has passed 45% mark.

Good show. Slowly chipping away the dominance of IE.

DRM - never works and a DRM-Free world is being herald in.

DRM is one of those misguided attempts to prevent piracy, developed based on mythical and unsound assumptions, and ending up hurting the consumers. This article refuted many myths propagated by these Music Industries and DRM vendors.

In the article, according to EFF's

In fact, argues Schultz, DRM drives some would-be paying customers to the music black market, because, to date, it's the only place where you can obtain music downloads that you can use without constraints.

A myth that is often used to justify the use of DRM is that the artists being ripped off by these file-sharers. According to this article:

Recording artists won't necessarily suffer in a no-DRM world. These are the struggling musicians who supposedly would be playing their guitars for tips in the subway, in the doomsday scenario, if music were distributed DRM-free. For them, however, the move to a DRM-free world is either good news or irrelevant. It may mean fewer sales for the top moneymakers, but the majority of recordings—85 percent according to the RIAA—don't generate enough revenue to cover their costs.

According to Todd Rundgren, a recording artist

is that artists don't see money from their recordings; we capitalize on music we have recorded by going out and performing live. It is actually more worthwhile to give your music away—and make it up in terms of ticket sales.

[...]

If it takes me a year to sell a million records and I made $1 million in royalties from that, I'd make that much in a week or so if I toured

The recent appearance of sites like http://www.gbox.com selling DRM-free music is a welcoming sign.

Evidence piracy helps record companies

The release of the e-mail from MediaDefenders to the Internet - it must be the sweetest revenge for file sharers - reveals evidence that piracy is actually helping record company.

Piracy is not all one way - it also benefits consumers

I have been tracking this argument that piracy is bad and hurting companies for quite some time. Evidence is now available showing that some form of piracy, others calling this in a less offensive term, Fair Use, is actually good for the companies. This is not surprising at all.

I do not have solid evidence but from experience, the loss of revenue attributed to piracy is probably money well spent than big budget advertising campaigns and trade shows. What benefit could one derive from a week's trade show? Giving someone a few copies of software is probably money well spent in spreading the words of it.

Piracy also has demonstrable benefit to consumers. The latest one is forcing Microsoft to cut the price of their Office suite for students and according to Microsoft

"It is also part of our drive to address piracy issues," Microsoft Australia education marketing manager Donna Magauran said.

Piracy acts like a ceiling setting a upper limit which a company can charge and that it could be tolerated by the community. Without the hackers, will Microsoft cut the price of Vista to 1/3 of the original price in China?

Lately, DRM is on the way out because it is offensive to customers and giving them a bad taste.

Portable devices preinstalled with Malware from manufacturers

Today, I was shown two portable devices - one was a Toshiba 4G memory drive and the other one was a portable ruggerdized hard drive made by I-O Data. On the surface, none of them is found offensive until you insert them into your machine. I was asked to get rid of the programs spawned by these device upon insertion.

This request was a warning to me of potential attack using autorun and so I examined it using my machine that has autorun permanently disabled for security reason, particular since Sony used this technique to infect user's machine before the user had any chance to decline installation of any software.

After inserting the Toshiba into my machine, it took up 2 drives letters. I was asked to eliminate the annoying programs that started automatically when they are inserted.

This is a good reason why you should disabled autorun permanently on all drives because none of these annoying malware runs up on my machine.

The Disk Manager gave this away. One drive letter was consumed by CDFS and the materials on this drive gave this away as being from U3.

The second partition was just an ordinary FAT partition. It is not U3 that I have found offensive.

The second device was a Japanese made 12G rugged portable hard drive. Once again it behaved like that of the Toshiba, except that it did not have English instructions with this devices. They are all in Japanese. Once again one partition containing their software was packaged in a CDFS.

What I have found offensive with this kind of device is their manufacturers' arrogance and dictatorial attitude in not asking their user if they want to configure the devices in that manner.

Their behavior is identical to that used by Sony Rootkit attack in not seeking user' consent in loading up all these software, no matter how useful the manufacturers believe in. Thankfully the U3 had provided a program to eliminate the u3 partition on the device and I quickly used it to get rid of that rubbish. But it did not come with that CDFS partition. I had to download from their site. The I-O Data was less friendly.

The only way to treat that kind of device is to send it back to the manufacturer for a refund. Don't touch it and consider them as being malware infected.

Anyone considering buying any portable device should examine the product description to determine if they are infected with this kind of anti-customer malware. If I buy a drive, a hard drive or memory drive, I want to format and partition it in any manner I want. Not forced upon by the manufacturer.

Sony is another company caught recently with this kind of stupid acts with their Microvault.

Because I turned off the Autorun, I minimized the attack to only losing a drive letter to that partition that was loaded as a CDFS. None of the Malware was started.

For those that has the default settings on allowing Autorun, the U3 will be automatically loaded on the Toshiba device because the CDFS has the autrun.inf.

On the I-O Data Portable device, it can be more damaging had I allowed it run the Autorun.inf. It would have loaded 3 programs: AutoCRD.exe, and two others as well as some DLL. All without seeking users consent.

Since these companies are so rude to their customers, people should avoid buying this kind of rubbish until they treat their users with respect. In the mean time turn off Autorun permanently.

If anyone knows of any general software to delete CDFS on portable devices, please let me know.