I’m not alone in my frustration with Windows Vista (or Windows XP) and the inconsistency in font usage. Fonts are definitely in your face and consistent font usage helps the user distinguish between a UI element and content. David Vronay, Research Manager for Windows User Experience Compliance, has posted a response to a thread that I started on font inconsistency at shell: revealed. Here’s what he had to say on the topic:

I’m sure the use of adding .ICA files to web servers to launch published applications from Presentation Server doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but it’s still useful for adding a link to an application on an intranet site. After adding a .ICA file to IIS6, however, users may receive a file not found error:

Having issues getting Word 2007 to register your blog provider? You may receive the following error message when attempting to add a blog account to Word:

I’ve put together a diagram detailing the flow of IP traffic between the different components of an Access Gateway with Advanced Access Control implementation. This is designed to give everyone involved in implementation of the Access Gateway an understanding of each component and the communication required between each host. This diagram details these components:

This one is in reply to Long’s post, but to be fair I know he’s all for UAC. Windows Vista finally introduces some real security improvements to the Windows operating system that have been long overdue. The product is still in beta, however people are already up in arms about how ‘intrusive’ UAC is. Why is it that Linux and MacOS users understand why it’s not a good idea to run with administrative privileges and Windows users don’t? *

Microsoft and Cisco announced some time ago that they were working on NAP and NAC interoperability. They’ve demonstrated this recently at the Security Standard conference in Boston (all the cool stuff seems to happen in Boston). You can view the Microsoft PressPass update here and the Cisco press release here (they’re the same thing, no need to read both). Cisco and Microsoft have cross-licensed their protocols to make this interoperability work. You can view a white-paper on this architecture here:

I went looking for this last week and just couldn’t find it. Well Sam Johnston has let us know how it’s done. If you want to stop the browser from offering to save your username and password when logging into the Access Gateway, follow these steps on your Advanced Access Control servers:

Check out the battery life on my IBM ThinkPad T41p. There’s way too much FUD out there about Windows Vista shortening battery life, this is almost two working weeks from a single charge..

I promise this won’t become yet another blog just reposting links to other sites (more original posts to come), but here a link to a new document on the Microsoft Download site that’s worth mentioning. This document goes into the various methods that can be used to protect your network from unmanaged clients. This includes:

Ah, the things you find when you’re looking for something else. I was extracting some icons from Window Vista with the excellent Axialis IconWorkshop and stumbled across MSSVP.DLL in the SYSTEM32 folder. It looks to be a part of Windows Search. Well, this file has a number of Outlook icons in it and I don’t even have Office 2007 installed on that particular installation of Vista. What a strange behemoth Microsoft is. Here’s a look at the file properties and icons contained within: