Too many Firefoxes

Many of us remember the famous Windows XP Service Pack 2, which really marked when Microsoft started to get serious about their client systems’ security. Prior to that there was little to guide the end user that I remember. XPSP2 brought the first version of the Security Center, which made it easy to set up the Windows Firewall and actually told them they they needed an antivirus to be safe. This was still prior to Microsoft’s providing one.

Anyway, Windows Firewall is still around and rarely seen after maybe the first week of an installation of Windows, since it is on by default and by then, all the other programs will have been installed and configured to go through the firewall.

Sometimes, however, things glitch:

Three entries for Firefox in Windows Firewall.

I have no idea what the cause of this is. Is it a problem?

Hypermarking by a Microsoft coder

I’ve noticed something about industrial/intellectual property marking: the bigger or more established the company or undertaking, the more understated the marking. For example, Mozilla Firefox’s about box (The traditional place for dropping IP notices) just has a small type note that “Firefox and the Firefox logos are trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation”.

In contrast, small time operators usually go overboard with the ©®™ stuff. I have decided to call this “hypermarking”. The thought of the thesis above came from my observing an example of it in, of all places, Microsoft Windows.

Not clear icon overlay in EU4

Continuing from my previous post about EU4, I found another interface oddity.

Some context: In EU there are “provinces”, which are similar to cities in the Civilization games. Some of these have fortifications that require you to siege them. To do this, you need to have a certain number of troops in the province. If you do not, you can’t besiege the place.

The icon for this situation is shown in the image below (the little red thing):

Too few troops to siege this province.

Most of the iconography in this image is apparent to the player, though possibly highly confusing to a newbie. The red icon though I cannot tell the meaning of. It just looks like a squiggle with an exclamation point after it.

You can rename your provinces in EU4

I had posted a week or so ago about a “grand strategy” game I play. It is called Europa Universalis 4, or “EU4” for short. Essentially you pick a country (doesn’t have to be in Europe) and try and either conquer the world, conquer parts of the world, get achievements, or just survive from 1444 to 1821.

The game is notoriously moddable, but one thing I noticed that I had overlooked for ages because it is so well hidden, is that you can rename provinces you own without having to change text files.

To do this:

1. Click the province to open it.
2. Click the name of the province (in the upper left)
3. Type in what you want.

The change is immediately visible on the map and also in all dialogs. You can change the provincial capital as well.

For some reason, the fact that it is editable is nowhere indicated in the UI, which is strange to me.

Missing cancel option

In Windows 10, there is an option (well hidden) to require people to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete before they sign in to Windows. The technical reasons WikipediA explains here why this is a thing.

Anyway, in all previous versions of Windows, after giving it the three-fingered salute you could cancel out by clicking a back button, a cancel button, or hitting the Esc key.

Windows 10 for some reason eliminated these, so you can’t jump back to the lock screen, but have to either sign back in, or wait 120 seconds for the system to kick you back to the lock screen.

Does anyone know why this was done? Is there some security or usability benefit to this new behavior?

Office integration in File History

At the risk of posting so many Microsoft Windows-related posts that I’m accused of being a fanboy, I will share this discovery I made today.

In Windows 10, Office 2013 integrates into File History (the sometimes confused default backup tool in Windows 8 and Windows 10) so you can view your backed up files without having to restore them.

An entertaining use of the Weather Service

For those of you in the United States, or who have any interest in it, I found out that the NWS has done one better than the USPS when it comes to ZIP codes (alias postal codes).

1. Go to the NWS website: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/
2. Find the box ‘Local forecast by “City, St” or ZIP code’
3. Type in the first four digits of a ZIP code.
4. NWS automatically lists the 10 places with the ZIP codes xxxx0 to xxxx9, as shown below for xxxx = 5454.

Off the top of my head I don’t know how this would be useful, but it is interesting. The Post Office’s website doesn’t do this that I am aware of, but I can’t be sure because it isn’t working right now.