by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/08/19 03:31 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/08/19/4457165.aspx
I found an old friend the other day. Not in person or anything, I found her updated blog.
You see she use to be at http://www.laurahcomputing.com/ with a feed at http://www.laurahcomputing.com/atom.xml and then she moved to http://www.shutuplaura.com/ ages ago.
No worries, I found it just by looking at the old site since it redirected. But the old RSS link redirects to http://www.shutuplaura.com/atom.xml rather than the right link at http://www.shutuplaura.com/journal/atom.xml (I just mistakenly assumed she stopped blogging!).
I meant to look into it, but truly I've been busy. Sorry Laura!
Of course she hasn't written anything in a while so this might be an old blog, too....
Anyway, I was catching up on posts and then I saw her most recent post from February of this year entitled Drowning in DST, which talked about the note in KB 930879 that said:
"Note Do not confuse the Outlook tool installer package that is named TZMove.exe with the actual Outlook tool executable file that is also named TZMove.exe."
After seeing her rant on the topic, I almost felt bad that the install package for Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator is entitled MSKLC.EXE, as is the main executable....
Luckily in my case, it is not a tool you would ever move around in ways that you might be likely to confuse the two. We have never had to put together a KB article on the topic, despite all those downloads. :-)
On a separate note and by the way, if you are reading this post from any of the unauthorized mirrors like Noticias externas (http://geeks.ms/blogs/) or .NET Blogs (http://vsqa.net/blogs/bloggerads) or MSDN Blog Postings (http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com) then be aware that these sites SUCK. They all strip out the identity of the authors of the actual blog postings (replacing it with the name of the communal feed) and just leave a link to the original post that does not describe the source and sends a ping/trackback notification for it, something the communal feed for the server at http://blogs.msdn.com/ does not.
A trackback to them serves no useful purpose other thsn to artifucially drive traffic from the original site. I do not begrudge them the "stolen" content (this is the Internet, after all), but they should TURN OFF THE FREAKING TRACKBACKS! The fact that they publish them is just lame.
The other sites that annoy me are the ones that track mentions of random words like L A O S or T I M O R - L E S T E (obfuscated to avoid being pointed to again) and add my post to their feed, sending repeat trackback spam for every new post they find until mine scrolls.
I find all of this to be really annoying and I have to apologize to the people I link to who may end up with link spam if their filters do not know to remove this sludge from the trackbacks. As this site does sometimes.
(I am trying to get them to consider blocking them always and maybe do more than that but I won't hold my breath on that)
I was considering whether it makes sense to add a small warning akin to this one to every post I do until/unless they cut this crap out. But I doubt people read them anyway, and they probably aren't listening, so the warning wiuld just clutter my posts and even this rant is most likely just a waste of time (after reading Scott Hanselman's post I'm convinced it may well be a complete waste of time. Maybe I have to just turn off trackbacks (which solves the problem for me, but not the people I link to). Sigh....).
All of these pure republisher sites with trackbacks turned on suck, completely and utterly. If they make money off of ads too, then they both suck and are evil, as well.
This post brought to you by a (U+0061, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER A)
referenced by
2007/11/12 Count of pieces of spam to SIAO in 24 hours