I was trying out hte Office 2010 beta today and decided to share the new office experience with a few pictures.

You can download the beta edition by visiting this website, then pressing “Get it Now” on the top right. Follow the steps and the ‘Download Now’ buttons, and you are on your way.

Apart from some ribbon GUI revamping, the only things that really stood out were the flashy new startup logo, and a new File/Print/Info menus that work a lot better when compared to previous versions of Office. The ribbon is a welcome change to all products across the Microsoft Office suite, including Publisher and Outlook.

Below are some screenshots of the new GUI across various applications of the suite. My theme is set to ‘Black’ (setting carried over from Office 2007), however you can find a blue and silver version of Powerpoint in the relevant section. Click the thumbnails to make them bigger.

Word

Powerpoint

Publisher

Outlook

“Send a Smile or a Frown”

Like something about Office 2010? or dislike something? You can easily give the Office Team feedback by clicking the smiley or frowning icon in the system tray while running Office.

“Send a Smile also automatically collections the file location of all processes running on your computer. File locations may include user names and other personal information.” — Well they do need that information to make the products better I guess… It’s all feedback to improve the process…

Recently one of my computer began to act strange, visiting HTTPS sites would always result in a notification of ‘certificate revocation’, basically that the HTTPS SSL certificate is no longer ‘valid’ or cannot be checked if it has been invalidated. It started to affect multiple things on my computer, particular Live Mesh, Google Chrome updating and general HTTPS browsing (such as Google email login) — and finding a solution wasn’t easy…

And so, that is why I am posting what I have found so far; in-case someone else has this issue as well… All the troubleshooting steps are assuming an install of Internet Explorer 8 with Windows 7.

Summary

SSL Certificates arn’t able to be checked for revocation on Windows 7 Professional 32-bit and 64-bit RTM.

The problem appears to affect multiple applications, all of which rely on SSL.

• Live Mesh
• Google Chrome updates (Error 7)
• General HTTP Browsing

Solution

This error occurred again once when having installed the proxy application, WideCap.

The solution that fixes the issue is simple; in an elevated command prompt ‘netsh winsock reset‘.

Troubleshooting

These are the following steps I took in order to try and resolve the problem.

Preliminary steps I took to verify basic SSL settings are correct:

1. Check the date and time to ensure it is correct
2. Clear the SSL State Cache
   Go into Internet Explorer > Internet Options. Change to the Content tab. Press ‘Clear SSL State‘
   
3. Delete all temporary files in Internet Explorer
   Go into Internet Explorer > Internet Options. On the General tab, under Browsing History, press ‘Delete…‘ then, selecting all options followed again by Delete.
   
4. Running a virus scan to ensure nothing malicious was causing the issue.
5. Checking that the BITS service was not disabled
6. Running sfc /scannow to verify Windows files were in-tact

Unfortunately, those steps did not resolve the issue. These following, more drastic steps seemed to resolve the issue. I cannot attribute a fix to a specific step they were all performed together.

1. Resetting Internet Explorer settings
   Go into Internet Explorer > Internet Options. Change to the Advanced tab. Press ‘Reset…‘. Then ‘Reset’.
   
2. Resetting the Windows Firewall settings to default
   In an elevated command prompt, type netsh advfirewall reset, then press Enter.
   
3. Resetting the WinHTTP and WinSOCKS configuration
   In an elevated command prompt, type netsh winhttp reset proxy, then press Enter.
   Then, type netsh winsock reset, then press Enter.
   

Preliminary Workaround

The issue affected various applications as noted in the summary. This is the following steps I took to resolve some of the applications and their errors.

• Disabling revocation check in Internet Explorer options.Go into Internet Explorer then Internet Options, changed to the Advanced tab. Scroll down to the Security section. Uncheck ‘Check for server certificate recovation’ and ‘Check for publisher’s certification revocation’. Note: This reduces web browsing security substantially on the system and therefore finding a solution was a priority.

Cause

So what caused the issue to occur?

• Used a proxy tunnelling application, WideCap
  This program tunnels programs that don’t support proxy protocols through just that, a proxy. This program may have somehow affected the WinHTTP or WinSOCK areas of the operating system. I will continue to use this application to see if the problem regresses.

This issue occurred once again and could be attributed to the WideCap installation noted above.

I hope this helps someone who has a similar problem, as unfortunately I couldn’t find the issue reported anywhere else on the internet.

While Google Picasa Web Albums has had facial recognition in-built for a while now, I knew it wouldn’t be too much longer before the Picasa desktop software was also updated with that feature.

Google finally released the long awaited, facial recognition update for Picasa (Google’s version of photo editing software), to version 3.5.

Along with this update comes the aforementioned facial recognition capabilities; the ability to have faces automatically recognized and identified in the photos you take. This lets you sort photos by who is in them as opposed to tags or file names. Don’t be alarmed; the results arn’t sent to some central facial recognition database! It’s kept purely on your computer for your benefit of photo classification.

Now to how TF2 comes into the picture (pun intended ). So, being an avid gamer, and having an online Game Photo Album, I tend to take a lot of in-game screenshots, which I organize through Picasa. So, Picasa begins scanning for ‘faces’ … and low and behold, the characters in the games are being identified! I found this quite amusing

And so, while the scanning is only at 10%, I have played Medic class at least 46 times… The engineer with the two different poses (on the right) wasn’t picked up as the engineer; but I soon added both the photos under his name.

Interestingly, the 46 Medic photos were all of the same face pose. This was because they were from all the final scoreboard screenshots; an option in TF2 to always take a screenshot of the final match scores.

And the time it has taken me so far to write this post has allowed Picasa to reach 16% of the way through scanning my photo collection. The engineer category now provides substantially more entertaining results

You can download Picasa 3.5 here.

My laptop (as most do these days), has a webcam integrated into the screen… On installation of the webcam’s drivers, prompted me with the following message:

Bewildered by this message (which wouldn’t go away until it was ‘unplugged’), prompted me to disable the device in Device Manager… that seemed to fix it…

With the release of Windows 7 Beta January 09 and the RC release in May, many hardware developers have actively been developing Windows 7 compatible drivers for their products.

The changes between Windows Vista drivers and Windows 7 drivers are not as involved as the changes between XP and Vista. This means that most hardware drivers written for Windows Vista, most likely work with Windows 7 without any hitches. However sometimes driver installations for Vista can not install correctly. Most ‘driver install problems’ on Windows 7 using drivers ‘made for Vista’, are merely a result of the company blocking installation if the OS is not equal to ‘6.0′ or Vista in other words.

Intel Turbo Memory was affected by this. Intel provided Turbo Memory drivers which were downloadable for Windows Vista however compatible Windows 7 drivers were not to be found until the 17th of August 2009. Visiting the Intel download page for Turbo Memory now reveals a ‘Windows 7′ option in the operating system selection. I have installed these drivers and they appear to work without any hitches, and without any ‘computability’ issues.

The drivers can be found specifically on Intel’s website here.

Most operating systems, namely Windows and OS X, have a well known set of alert, error and message sounds that have become synonymous with the product…. especially the Windows XP Start-up sound on computers with their volume up to loud >_<

Some users take the time to remix these sounds. As the sounds in the mixes are heard from computers on a daily basis, the song has an odd sense of familiarity, while maintaining quite a unique and catchy tune. Below is a compilation of some good remixes people have posted on YouTube.

At a conference mid-march, Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) re-fueled a PC vs. Mac debate by commenting,

“Now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction [against Apple] … the economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment — same piece of hardware — paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that’s a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be.”

And of course, he is absolutely right. Although I would have priced it at about $700 (USD), $1000 (AUD). This comment cleverly preceded a new addition to the Microsoft campaign. Dubbed “Laptop Hunters” (which suggests more of these ads are to come), Microsoft asks an individual to find a laptop for under $1000, and if they find it, they can keep it.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/watchtheads/video/behindthescenes/

Recently when I was investigating Business Systems, it was proclaimed that Apple utilises ‘Differentiation’ as a tactic to set their brand apart- but when you look at the bigger picture, at what price? A highly inflated one. Especially in the current economic situation, people will factor this price tag (with an excessive Apple Tax) into consideration and turn away from Apple and instead towards PC.

Overall, this new ad campaign milestone from Microsoft really intertwines well with improving the image of the PC. With Ballmer and this new ad jeering at Apple, I can almost feel an impending “I’m cool enough to be a Mac person” campaign rebuttal…

Late last year Microsoft started their ‘I’m a PC’ campaign to try and alter the stereotype given to PC users partially by Apple from their ‘Mac vs. PC’ ads.

Microsoft initially produced a website to allow the billion PC users that were dubbed and categorized by a certain pc advertisement, to speak out and show their real faces. http://imapc.lifewithoutwalls.com lets you browse the ‘Real PCs’ of the world, their stories, and ultimately why they don’t fit the ‘PC stereotype’. This project rapidly grew and prompted Microsoft to produce various compilations of these real PCs into TV ads and videos.

Microsoft continued their campaign by then showing the world how easy using a PC can be. Several TV ads represnt kids as young as 4 and 1/2 managing their photos using Windows Live Gallery and using simple functions such as and emailing photos, and stitching together panoramic photos.

Overall, these ads, which can be viewed here, provide a great backing for Microsoft’s campaign to prove that PC users can’t and won’t be stereotyped.

I received an email alerting me to the release of a ‘Critical’ patch to address a vulnerability in all currently supported versions of Windows. This includes Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Server 2003 and 2008. The update patch, due to it critical nature for 2000, XP and 2003, has been released outside the usual monthly cycle to patch the issues ASAP.

Click the image below to view the bulletin table included in the notification email sent to subscribed TechNet users.

To view the full security bulletin visit the following website: 
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms08-oct.mspx

A blog entry was also released earlier to the notification to provide advance notification for the patch release. You can view it using the following link:
http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2008/10/22/advance-notification-for-out-of-band-release.aspx

SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 has progressed from the Beta workbench. It is now publicly available for download from Microsoft.

Download Visual Studio 2008 SP1

If you have installed the Service Pack beta you will need to install the following Service Pack Preparation tool before installing SP1. Note: With the preparation tool you may be required to insert your original Visual Studio 2008 installation disk.

The only issue I had was while performing the preparation tool where an MSI file ‘rdbg_std.msi’ was ‘missing’. I found out that it was ‘Remote Debugger’ related, then looked for the relevant file on the Visual Studio installation disk. It was under <cd>\Remote Debugger\x86 (or x64)\rdbgsetup.exe. I had WinRAR installed so I right clicked, and extracted the file which resulted in the creation of a ‘rdbg_std.msi’. I pointed the installation to that file and all was good.

Should you have any other issues installing the Service Pack, take a look at the read me. It contains some troubleshooting material and installation details.