Internet Explorer 8 InPrivate

One of the more interesting features of Internet Explorer 8 is InPrivate browsing.

While in IE you can open a new InPrivate session from the menu from Safety / InPrivate Browsing, or with a keyboard shortcut of CTRL-SHIFT-P.

When you open it this way, Internet Explorer will aways open a new window (as it runs in a separate process, similar to how an SSL page will always go to a new process).

To launch into InPrivate directly, either create a shortcut with the command line below, or run directly:

"%ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -private

Internet Explorer 8 compatibility

Now that Internet Explorer 8 has been released in March, I've been going through my sites testing compatibility. So far I haven't had any rendering issues, I guess it's helped developing for Firefox first to ensure W3C standards, then regression testing for IE7.

TechNet had a great article highlighting What's New In Internet Explorer 8. I learned a few compatibility tweaks to force the Compatibility Mode. Most importantly, the order of what applies as you can set it in many places. This order is sequential, the last applied wins.

• User button in browser
• Group Policy
• Server
  
• Site
  
• Page

Both site and page are handled with a meta tag in the page headers, if it's ever needed:

meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7"

SQL Security For Dummies

Having gone through a couple of SQL setup audits with Microsoft, it became apparent that a lot of the security issues for SQL, no matter if SQL 2000, 2005, or 2008, are common sense if you have a good reference.

TechNet had an article about Common SQL Server Security Issues and Solutions. After reading through it, I found that almost every single item is easy to implement for anyone (DBA or not) using SQL. Most importantly, every single item is part of the audit when you pay for having Microsoft come on site to evaluate your SQL setup. So far I've also found that all of the items if missed are easy to remediate.

Did You Know?

A little perspective on technology.



Did it make you think?

Mars Rover

I saw this site from NASA to have your name included on the next Mars Rover - if you can't go to space, may as well have your name go to space!

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname

Cameron's name is already included with a certificate to prove it.

Happy birthday Dad, you're going to Mars too!

Robot Halo Chicken

This is actually funny, a combination of Halo 3 and Robot Chicken... Robot Halo Chicken.


Episode 4 (above) is one Cameron will like - it combines the game Portal in a few spots.

Check out the other episodes:
Robot Halo Chicken 5
Robot Halo Chicken 3
Robot Halo Chicken 2
Robot Halo Chicken 1

LHC

Taking off the computer geek hat and putting on the physics geek hat, here's a video to explain the Large Hadron Collider.



Good luck CERN!

Conference Call Lesson

It's not exactly a lesson per se on how to handle a conference call, but what you can relate to is what makes it funny.

International Conference Calls

Somehow I've seen all of this.