Now that Mark Zuckerberg has seen the evil of Facebook's ways, you can now opt-out of Beacon's spying (as far as we know.)  The process is simple, despite it not being so obvious. 

1. Log in to Facebook.com
2. Click on "privacy" in the top right
   
3. You will now be on your "Privacy Overview" page.  Click on "External Websites" or the "Edit Settings" link to its right
   
4. Check the checkbox and hit "Save"
    

You know you're relatively* free from auto-Beaconing when the image next to Edit Settings changes from this

to this

Finally, it's a good idea to log out of Facebook when you're done with it.  That's a good rule for any site that you don't want prying eyes on.

* Note that on the External Websites profile page, Facebook warns you that,

Please note that these settings only affect notifications on Facebook. You will still be notified on affiliate websites when they send stories to Facebook. You will be able to decline individual stories at that time.

FYI, Beacon still creeps me out.

You read it right.  Get a free, legit copy of Visual Studio 2008 Pro just by visiting your local Microsoft office and attend an installfest.  You better act quick, however, as spots are filling up quickly.  Tim Heuer has a list of dates with links to the western region Microsoft offices' installfest events.

I attended the Vista installfest and it was very much worth the time and effort.  As the tech decider in my company, it helped me understand the paths I'd need to take to get Vista working in my environment.  Oh yeah, and I got a free copy of Windows Vista Ultimate for my time.

The ASP.NET 2.0 CSS Friendly Control Adapters 1.0 are fantastic tools.  Really amazing; you simply drop in 30 pre-built files into your application and your TreeView, Menu, GridView and various login controls stop spitting out table-based layouts and start generating CSS-compliant code.  Oh yeah, it's fantastic.

So here I am, happily pounding out CSS formatting, dropping my login controls building, and merrily moving along my way when I dropped in the TreeView control, went to view the new page and WHAMMY!

The Controls collection cannot be modified because the control contains code blocks (i.e. <% ... %>).

Love affair over. 

Far too many hours later I was able to determine that a very small piece of code on my master page was the root of the TreeView's problems.  I had a footer that was simply writing some standard copy along the lines of, "this site ©2007 My Company" and was dynamically generating the 2007 with the following code:

<%= DateTime.Now.Year.ToString() %>

Removing that code resulted in a running page.  Although removing this code and replacing it with a Label object would be a solution, I have a bad feeling this bug would come back to haunt me some time in the future.

Luckily, I found a solution buried in the forums at ASP.NET, specifically this one from Dmitry Karpenkov dated 4/4/2007.  Add a private string, a method for it, and change the SaveAdapterViewState() method for the TreeView and you're back to work.  I do need to really inspect the fix to find out if there are any negative results, but for now, I'm moving on.

Extra tip: Microsoft's Excel does a great job of finely formatting data that comes out of SQL's Query Analyzer a.k.a. Server Management Studio .  E.g. if you need to send a client or a partner some results from SQL, but don't want to spend the time un/re-formatting the results into nice columns, just copy & paste the results into an Excel worksheet.  Then, copy & past the Excel columns into your destination (Outlook email or Word doc, etc).  You'll magically end up with a nicely formatted document.

Specific to this post, I recently performed this 2 step dance. On closing Excel, I got the "Do you want to save this document" dialog, then the following dialog box:

which says (from snapshot above),

There is a large amount of information on the Clipboard.  Do you want to be able to paste this information into another program later?

• To save it on the Clipboard so that you can paste it later, click Yes.
• To delete it from the Clipboard and free memory, click No.

Followed by the options, Yes, No and Cancel.

Being a lazy developer/user, my eyes scanned right to the yes/no/cancel buttons, and I just froze there, thinking, "Wait, what is this asking?"  Then I re-read the information, then thought hard about my intentions, then cried a little.

Developers: please do your user a little favor by just cutting to the chase on the buttons themselves.  I.e. You could keep the dialog text, but just have two buttons (why, really, have a Cancel option here?) that are:

• Release Clipboard information
• Keep Clipboard information

If you really want to have a "Cancel" option, explain what's going to happen after you push it.  Quick quiz: can you tell from the options above what's going to happen?  Here's a clue: if you're going to follow the above examples, it would read:

• Go back to the document

In my opinion, if you need three sentences to explain a simple dialog on closing a document, something has gone very wrong.  To the developer behind this dialog box: you have failed the Mother-in-law Test**.

** With the best regards to Tim, Mother-in-law Test has a less insidious acronym than Mother-in-law Factor, no thanks to pop culture.

About 2 weeks ago, I was asked to answer a survey about a recent shopping trip I made to the Apple store.  Given that part of my company does this kind of work, I'm willing to participate in these surveys, provided they're not too long and that the survey I'm answering doesn't become invalid by my association with a survey company.

It was a relatively innocuous survey, asking me how the staff treated me, what would get me to shop at Apple more regularly, and if I had any suggestions.  This was all fairly common for a post-shopping survey.  As usual, the end of the survey asked if I could be contacted by Apple for further information.  Not expecting to hear anything further, I said yes and provided my cell number.

On Sunday afternoon, my cell rang and it was the store manager from the store I shop at.  There are two remarkable items to note about this call.  The first is that the manager didn't call me for more detail per se, but just to thank me for the information, as "Apple is very interested in making their stores a better place to shop, and are taking these surveys very seriously."  The other interesting bit was that we spoke for the better part of 20 minutes about my experience and the answers I provided. 

Now, this is a store manager who surely is dealing with all sorts of consumer related issues on a busy shopping day (in the last year, I've never been to this store on the weekend without it teeming with potential and actual buyers).  That he called me was a small miracle, but that he actually talked to me was a little more than that.

We talked about my particular issues with the store (not using stantions at the checkout queue, and none closer to my house/work) and my experiences in the store.  I noted that on one trip, my wife and I specifically visited the store to inspect iLife '08 to help us understand if we need to upgrade.  The sales reps were particularly useless.  Sure, iLife had just been introduced the day before, but I expected to be able to roll in to the Apple store and have all of my questions answered by anyone dressed in black.

What the manager said at this point was particularly interesting.  He claimed that because Apple keeps so much information about new products secret, people walking in to the stores often have more information about the product than the store employees do.  He particularly pointed out this being a problem with the release of the iPhone and iLife, in that Apple did not provide any advance training for their sales staff.

His candor shocked me, but not as much as the obvious issue with being overly secretive.  Joe Consumer really needs help from the technically advanced sales staff at these kinds of stores, or else he's going to - at best - be confused about the product, and - at worst - have a bad experience with a product and never purchase it.  Case in point: my wife and I did not upgrade to iLife '08 as the sales staff was unable to provide us with a convincing argument for the cost.

Bravo to Apple for taking the time to understand their customers a little better.  Boos to Apple for being insanely secretive with their products.  In my opinion, Walt Mossberg shouldn't have more information about or experience with a product than the staff in charge with selling it.