Alternative headlines

The headline for Yahoo's latest news reads "Yahoo rejects Microsoft, report says it may buy AOL" but I'm amazed no one is saying "Yahoo looks gift horse in mouth, shoots self in foot".

Seriously, could there be a dumber move? Has AOL done anyone any good in years - indeed during this century? Have they got money to burn buried in the Yahoo basement? Don't have enough of their own employees to fire so go buy someone elses and fire them as well? Or is Yahoo just doing a bit of dirty work for Microsoft for them before the acquisition really happens? Come to think of it why not scoop up Ask while you're at it? Or does someone at Yahoo have friends in AOL they want to make rich first?

Any way you look at it, every day of delay is another day of dimminshing advertising earnings for Yahoo that has little else to count on to justify their value. Hence they should have countered and wrapped it all up in double-quick time.

I'm kind of sad about all this because Yahoo was the first search site I ever used, when it was still just a directory, and the first online email account I ever had - hence I have a five letter @Yahoo.com email with no digits even if I haven't used it in years because of all the spam. I would have hoped Yang and Filo would have been smarter. It is never too late for them to pack it in and move on to something new.

IE7 installer woes cured

I had previously been unable to install the IE 7.0 beta on my laptop due to an unexplained error. When the final version came out I held off trying to install it on my laptop, but none of the other computers I tried had any problems at all. So tonight I thought I'd bravely try once more and of course it still failed.

After many more Googling attempts I finally found someone who had experienced similar problems and found it was a registry permissions problem. Several other pages had said the same but usually pointed the finger at anti-virus software - I'd already uninstalled mine (Grisoft AVG) to no avail. Fortunately this site directed me to look in the updspapi.log file (which lives in your Windows directory) for a more detailed error. Examining mine revealed the error message:

Setting registry value HKU\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0\1806

So I pulled up regedit and tried to modify the value for that entry and it worked. Bummer!

So I thought about it some more and decided maybe it wasn't actually the current user but one of the other users that IE was messing with. So I looked at HKEY_USERS and tried that entry for each. After several goes I discovered that I couldn't modify either the DEFAULT user or the one called S-1-5-18 which is the local system account. So I went in an clicked at the top of the registry hierarchy for each of those users, pulled up the permissions and added full permissions for system and administrators (I actually made them inherit those permissions which achieved the same effect). Then I verifeid that I was able to change the 1806 entry in the IE zones, rebooted and tried the install again (for about the tenth time now).

Fortunately this time it worked and my Internet Explorer is now just a wee bit more secure and a wee bit less sucky than it was before.

The only question that remains in my mind is how on earth did my registry permissions get screwed up like that in the first place? This is the very first time I've ever modified a registry permission so I can only assume at some stage I installed something that did, and after uninstalling it the permissions never got reset. A lot of posts mention ZoneAlarm as a culprit for causing IE7 installation failures - maybe it was that since I did have it installed at one point but well over a year ago and I vaguely recall some kind of uninstallation problems.