Seattle Code Camp 2017

If all went as expected, my fourth visit to Seattle Code Camp is currently in progress and my second talk is winding down just about now. If you decided to see me talk among more than 70 talks in 11 parallel tracks - thank you!

If not, here is what you missed:

My first talk was about my experience with Microsoft’s project Centennial, a way to Windows Store for classic desktop applications. It was based on my experience with getting Bimil to Windows Store.

Second talk is a bit of copout as it is rerun of my talk from last year. And no, it is not completely the same. I added a bit more ranting. :)

Slides are available for download but they won’t be substitute for attending conference.

Easier Certificate Access in Chrome

One of the rare reasons I have for occasionally using Internet Explorer is actually to view HTTPS certificate. In Internet Explorer accessing certificate is as easy as clicking on the lock icon. It used to be like that in Chrome too. And then some smartass decided to move setting in Developer Tools behind zillion mouse clicks.

However, since Chrome 60, Google has silently returned option to view certificate under its lock icon. To enable it, one has to navigate to chrome://flags/#show-cert-link and enable Show certificate link option. Quick restart later and option to view certificate is present at its natural place once again.

Why the heck is this not default, I have no idea.

ReFS No Longer in Windows 10 Pro

I love copy-on-write file systems and ZFS always loved me back. With ReFS story was a bit more tangled as something always stood between us. Be it requirement for registry hacks, be it idiotic decision that integrity streams are not supported for virtual disks, be it lack of boot support (even when using it only for data), or be it just general slowness and opaqueness of its development. Despite all those issues, I have used it for all data on my Windows computers since 2015.

Well, I guess that is history now. With the advent of Windows Pro for Workstations, ReFS is gone from all lower editions - including Windows 10 Pro.

I’ll shed a tear while formatting my disk to NTFS; and dream of ZFS…

PS: No, even more than 5 years of its creation, ReFS is still not bootable. PPS: Yes, I am aware that read/write will still be supported even in Windows 10 Home. Not good enough for me.

Bimil 2.10

For this version the main focus was on improving auto-type - both interface and discoverability. Hopefully, this will get more people to use and abuse this feature for login automation.

One surely controversial change is that entries are now editable by default. The most common complaint by new users was about the extra step needed to actually change anything. For those who prefer it that way (e.g. me), option to have entries in read-only mode until Edit button is pressed is still there in Options dialog.

Additionally, some minor bug fixes and interface adjustments were made but nothing to write home about. :)

You can download the new version either from application itself, from web page, or, for the first time ever, from Windows Store.

PS: Windows Store version doesn’t allow for credit-card information storage due to Microsoft’s policies.

Amazon's Meow

One day I was going over HTML elements on Amazon’s page and noticed one interesting comment. It was ASCII picture of a duck saying MEOW. Putting aside whether duck has capacity to produce that sound, I got curious why is that there? Is there a reason?

A bit of googling found me that MEOW is nothing new - it has been in code for at least 7 years now. However, duck seems to be appearing only since 2016. Despite all my searching I couldn’t really find what MEOW refers too nor why is duck now saying it.

My personal guess is that somebody was troubleshooting page loading and placed MEOW so it could automate it using grep command. Whether that troubleshooting happened in production (remember that Amazon wasn’t huge in 2007) or somebody accidentally pushed it live, we ended with the same result. I could bet Amazon developers noticed extra code quite quickly but nobody had heart to remove it. It was simply too funny. It became internal joke, an Easter egg.

Years later somebody working on that code portion saw it and though an update was in order. And how else would engineer express his love for fun other than in ASCII drawing?

PS: And it isn’t the first Easter egg coming from Amazon - who could forget “Thank You, David Risher” pun from 2007.