It’s innovative because we say it is. Honest.

1998, Digital Networks North America releases the Rio, a portable MP3 player that can compete with products like the Sony Walkman. 2001, Apple Computer releases the iPod, a revolutionary personal electronics gizmo that lets you listen to your music library on the go. In 2006, Microsoft releases the Zune and is labeled a copycat.

November, 2003: Palm introduces a phone / music player / internet gadget Treo. January, 2007: Apple unveils the revolutionary phone / music player / internet gadget iPhone. Looks like the Apple learning curve has grown from 3 years to 4.

I’m reasonably sure that it’ll be user-friendly and the touch-screen interface has some gee-whiz factor to it, but for a similar price (about $600), I could get a blu-ray high-def DVD player that runs cutting-edge videogames and has a variety of other techie uses (they call it a PS3). Color me unimpressed. Also, I wonder if the new iPhone’s face plate scratches as easily as the free iPod I got a year ago?

Microsoft hired IDC to produce some forecasts (PDF) regarding the economic impact that Windows Vista is going to have on the US economy (other studies have been done for other areas, such as the EU, but I’m in California, so I’ll stick with a more local scope). One impressive-sounding datapoint: for every dollar of revenue spent on Microsoft Vista, eighteen dollars will be spent elsewhere in the “Microsoft ecosystem,” creating a great benefit to the economy.

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Sometimes I really wonder how it is that Apple hasn’t kicked Microsoft‘s butt up and down the marketplace by now. Witness these ever-so-useful logos intended to help hardware shoppers make the right decisions. Together they’re a coup of non-helpful graphic design cloaked in uninformative marketing noise.
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For the past few years, I’ve been using Firefox. I ran it when it was Firebird. I ran it
when it was Phoenix. I ran it with a silly little extension that randomized its name to the amusement of many. The thrill, sadly, is gone.

When the Mozilla Project released a browser-only version of their client (which was basically just Netscape with a little more nerd-appeal), there were some pretty high hopes. It was highly-extensible, it was a tiny little file you could download quickly over a dialup connection, and was generally an excellent alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer, which many web nerds had grown fiercely dissatisfied. Now it’s time to look at Firefox without that new-browser smell and hopeful aspirations of beta and first-version software.

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The MTU is a disruptor of sync and swallower of souls, leaving a path of devastation in its nefarious wake. Look well upon these images, that you may know your enemy, for the MTU is no man’s friend:

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If you’re loading Microsoft Internet Explorer today and find that it mysteriously crashes out on you, try uninstalling the Yahoo! Toolbar.

• Open your Start Menu
• Open the Control Panel
• Double-click the “Add or Remove Programs” icon
• Locate the Yahoo! Toolbar in the list of available programs and click on it
• Click on the “remove” button
• Click any “ok” buttons you are subsequently exposed to
• Rejoice and resume your regular web-surfing activities

No, I don’t know what happened to Yahoo! Toolbar today, but there has been a rash of these problems cropping up suddenly.

*Edit: Every case amongst dozens tonight has involved an installation of McAfee or Norton Antivirus; it looks like Yahoo! Toolbar be getting terminated by those apps. Let’s hear it for rogue virus definitions!

The Efficient Networks Speedstream 5681 is a modem/router combo from the folks at Siemens. There are a fair number of tricks that can be done with one, and there are several interesting firmware revisions in circulation.
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The 2wire Home Portal 1000 HW and 2wire Home Portal 1000 SW are ADSL modems with integrated NAT routing and WiFi, and perform as a PPPoE client for their local area networks. For connections that do not use the PPPoE protocol, some configuration is required.
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Today saw the end of Windows 98, Window 98SE, and Windows ME support from Microsoft (link). There will be no more security updates for these products, and paid support will no longer be available for them. I personally have fond memories of Windows 98 and 98SE, as these were the last times that a major Microsoft OS revision has left the majority of network-related user interactions alone. From the perspective of an ISP technical support worker, the transitions from Windows 95 to 98 to 98SE were nearly pain-free, requiring very little retraining; if you could walk somebody through their dial-up connectoid in one, you could handle any of the others with minimal variation. A little part of me will miss these old warships.

As for the Millenium Edition? Well, the less said, the better.

Similar to the “netsh int ip reset all” command, the incantation “netsh winsock reset catalog” can work wonders for mysterious networking issues on Windows XP systems. Winsock, as we know, is short for “Windows Sockets” and describes how a Windows system should access network services. For most people, this means the port-based sockets of TCP/IP that make the Internet work for 98.42% of computer users these days (or whatever their ridiculously-large market share is). I personally first saw the term used in the 3rd-party software title “Trumpet Winsock,” which was used by many early-adopters of the Internet to hook their Windows 3.1 systems up before Windows 95 bundled winsock with the operating system.

Enough history, here’s what the command is doing:

• netsh: this is a Windows utility that allows one to display or change network settings locally or remotely. The first part of this command simply tells Windows which utility you wish to use; the rest of the command consists of arguments to this utility.
• winsock: this argument to the “netsh” utility specifies the context for the command. We want to affect the winsock implementation of the Windows system we’re running the command on, as we suspect that something spooky has been corrupted there. Another context that could have been specified here instead would be “ip.”
• reset: this argument is an instruction within the previously-specifies context and subcontext means what it says, to reset to default. An example of another instruction that could have been specified here would be “show.”
• catalog: this is an argument to the “reset” instruction telling the netsh utility what we would like to reset, specifically the winsock catalog. The winsock catalog can be thought of as a list of software that has been inserted into your TCP/IP. By resetting this listing, you are reasserting which background widgets should be handling your networking tasks.

An example winsock catalog entry would look something like the following:

Winsock Catalog Provider Entry
------------------------------------------------------
Entry Type:                         Base Service Provider
Description:                        MSAFD Tcpip [TCP/IP]
Provider ID:                        {E70F1AA0-AB8B-11CF-8CA3-00805F48A192}
Provider Path:                      %SystemRoot%system32mswsock.dll
Catalog Entry ID:                   1001
Version:                            2
Address Family:                     2
Max Address Length:                 16
Min Address Length:                 16
Socket Type:                        1
Protocol:                           6
Protocol Chain Length:              1

Any additional information regarding when resetting the IP interface is preferrable to resetting the winsock catalog would be appreciated. I tend to just have folks do both.

*Anecdotal evidence recommends a reboot after running this, though none should be strictly necessary.