CQuirke's Vista Curve

Sorry folks: From now on, no more comments will be allowed on this blog, as Live Spaces fails to screen out even the most obvious link spam, and I can't find any finer-grained solution to this problem.

In contrast, there are other blog hosts offer the ability to hold all comments for moderation, or do so selectively for comments that contain links while allowing link-less comments to go into immediate effect.

So if you want to start a dialogue, you can do so by commenting at my other blogs.

My first reaction to this issue was to import this blog's content into my WordPress blog and shut this one down, but WordPress doesn't import from Live Spaces.  In any case, it's less extreme to leave the blog up with comments disabled, and just use it less in future.

If you value comments as an interactive mechanism, this issue is a bit of a "stealth showstopper", becoming apparent only after you've started your blog.  Hence my down-rating of Live Spaces from "probably would recommend" to "definitely would not recommend".

Wow, I came so close to abandoning this blog, as another example of territory lost to malware!

Unlike my other blogs, for some reason my Live Spaces blog gets a fair bit of comment link spam, i.e. comments that have no relevance to what they comment on, are not interesting in their own right, and are full of links that I wouldn't touch with a robot-controlled Geiger counter.

It's bad enough that this rather technically-crude spam makes it through as comments, but worse, I couldn't find how to delete unwanted comments.  I don't delete comments for any reason other than spam, and a function to hold for moderation any comment with links in it, is enough to kill the problem so far, on my other blogs.

As it happens, Live Spaces has a very elegant UI to delete comments.  So what went wrong?

Discoverability

You have to be in a particular UI mode to see the UI to delete comments.  Specifically, and I paste...

1. Make sure that you've signed in (To sign in with your Windows Live ID, click Sign in in the upper-right corner.) to Windows Live Spaces.
2. In the Blog module, click Summary.
3. Click the entry that contains the unwanted comment.
4. Next to the comment that you want to delete, click the Delete button [graphic 'X'].
5. Click Delete.
6. Click Publish entry

That UI is the only one that shows a deletion X next to comments, and it seems as if a step not listed in this help is to [X] check each of the comments to be deleted.  In fact, the UI differs from these instructions; there's no red X deletion graphic on each comment, instead you select (by clicking the checkbox) what you want to operate on, and then click the single red X graphic at the top of the page (scroll back up).

Er... and then, nothing happens.  Steps 3-6 do not seem to follow steps 1-2... the drugs aren't working, after all  :-(

Timeout blues

Many actions done through a web browser - with text content editing being the most notorious - can fail due to time-out issues.  Take too long in a different tab, or typing in an IE edit field that doesn't "touch" the web server while you type, and the web server may think you're inactive, and auto-log you out. 

Even if that's fixed and you're still logged in, you may still find your changes don't "stick", or your typed content is lost, and worse; "back navigation" doesn't get it back.

Broken navigation

It's tempting to use kewl Web 2.0 or scripted logic to navigate, instead of boring old HTML links.  Sometimes you have to, when traversing scripted forms, edges between secure and non-secure pages, or whatever.  But unless you have to, please don't - it breaks a lot of browser functionality, such as "open in a new tab", and the ability to paste in a link to an item.

That's why I had to paste the instructions to delete comments; I'd rather have pasted a link, but testing the link in the address bar above the relevant page shows it navigates to an earlier starting point.  I see that as a serious and exploitable issue, in that it silently spoofs the link, i.e. unless you test the link, you're not aware that you won't get what you'd thought you'd get.

Help vs. actual behaviour

This is a generic database sort of problem, of keeping things that have to be separate, as consistent as if they were atomic.  It leads to the familiar system builder's proverb to "believe the paint", when the manual is at variance with what is printed on the circuit board!

In this case, it seems as if the UI to kill comments was revised since the Help was written, and the Help didn't get updated to keep up.

Broken Help search

If I'm logged in to my Live Spaces blog, and I navigate to the Help Central via the link at the bottom of the page (scroll down, it's not "sticky" like a Status Bar), I get Help, as I expected.  I enter "delete comment" in the Search box.  I don't get anything useful back - there are a 11 items, but they don't relate to what I looked for.

If instead, I click on Safety, next to Help Central, and do the same search, I get what I want; it's the top entry in a list of 8.  So why does "the same" search work in one Help search box, but not in the other?  It feels a bit like the old "right search, wrong .HLP file opened at the time" problem, from the days when WinHlp32.exe strode the globe.

Some roads lead to Rome

This is a good label for the above and the first points in this blog.  When success depends on a particular UI picked from various parallel UI that look as if they should be equally effective, this problem arises.  On the other side of the fence, it's like the database problem of many-to-many relationships that led to the "relational database" concept of storing everything once, thus with perfect consistency, then referring to it from everywhere else.

This isn't easy stuff, like avoiding dumb design decisions like "let's run hidden macros in data files - I foresee no problems whatsoever", so the Live team have my sympathy (and that's why I'm writing this in such detail as an attempt to help the Help)

System particulars

Lastly, the specifics of my end of these transactions.  I'm using last night's download of IE8 beta 1 on XP SP2, installing this over IE7 RTM.  I tend to right-click, Open In New Tab rather than click directly into things.  I have settings that pop up alerts on active content, and in the case of this session, I affirm permission each time.  I had Windows Live Writer build 12.0.1370.325 (oh please, make text in "About" boxes respond to select, right-click, Copy) open at the time, and delays in interacting with the logged-in Live Spaces site were spent there, writing this post.

This was a very near miss.  I'll reluctantly swallow banner ads and a bad privacy rating (Spyware Blaster immunization dislikes 2o7, for example, and Blogspot trips the same wires; WordPress is OK) but I will not contribute to a blog that waves malware links at my visitors.  I was very nearly outta here, for good.

Do you see "The directory name is invalid" when running installers, such as Setup.exe, in Windows Vista?

If so, a generic cause may be the absence of the %WinDir%\Temp folder, typically C:\Windows\Temp.  Whereas earlier versions of Windows will automatically re-spawn such folders as required, Vista fails to do so, and then mis-reports the path to the executable as invalid, whereas it is really the system Temp path that is invalid.

Example: MS Office 2007

In my case, this cropped up when installing the Student and Teacher edition of Microsoft Office 2007 from the CD-ROM included in the package.  On this PC, Vista is installed in C:\Windows and the optical drive letter is G:, so the report I got was to the effect that "G:\ is not a valid directory".

I tried copying the CD's contents to hard drive volume F:, i.e. F:\Storage\MSO2007 and then running the Setup.exe from there.  Result; "F:\Storage\MSO2007 is not a valid directory".

Cause: Missing Windows Temp

As part of an early malware management session from Bart CDR boot, the C:\Windows\Temp subtree was moved from C: to F:\Storage\2007DEC\Moved; that is why it was no longer present during attempts to install MS Office 2007.  Because the move was done from outside Windows, the location references were not updated in the registry.  This effect was intentional, as the purpose of the move was to break any possible references to missed malware that may reside there.

What is different in Vista, is that the location is not re-spawned as required, and causes attempts to install software to fail with misleading error messages.

Great news, now visibly out of NDA...

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070929/vista-sp1-recovery-disc/

http://tailrank.com/2990170/Vista-SP1-Create-a-recovery-disc

http://www.boxxet.com/Windows_Vista/How_To_Guide_Create_a_Windows_Vista_Recovery_Disk.17frfy.d

http://adacosta.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E8E5CC039D51E3DB!16492.entry

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/09/30/windows-vista-sp1-lets-you-create-a-recovery-disc/

...Vista SP1 will contain a facility to build a bootable mOS disk.  From the above links, it looks like the WinRE functionality from the Vista DVD.  I'm looking forward to checking it out!

I've started a third blog here, mainly because I liked the look of the hosting service:

• No "bad cookie" alerts, unlike here and there
• Richer feature set
• Better suited to "normal" web site structure

Normally, each blog has a "theme"; this one is about Vista, and the new one might be about Linux if I get traction with that.

This blog was supposed to track my growth with Vista's WinPE 2.0 and WAIK as maintenance OS, but it's a long haul; I haven't got beyond the crude ability to image a reference build and apply that image to build new and SID-independent PCs.  To attain the same functionality as I enjoy in Bart would take a lot of work, and may take longer than the remaining life of the platform, should vendor politics make Vista as unacceptable to sell as OEM MS Office 2007 has already become.

On the other hand, Ubuntu 7.xx claims safe write support for NTFS, which could position Linux as a maintenance OS for Vista.  Unlike Windows XP and Vista, there's no artificial separation of installed OS vs. maintenance OS booted independently of the hard drive, so what I learn about Linux will be directly applicable to both "rescue" CDR use and installation as a productivity OS.  The learning curve may be harder than WinPE 2.0, but what I learn may continue to be useful for longer.