Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is expected to show off new technology on Wednesday that is designed for the board room and is a spin-off of Microsoft's Surface computer.

TouchWall, a prototype device developed by Microsoft Research and Office Labs, is a vertical representation of Surface, the multitouch tabletop computer from Microsoft. TouchWall could be used by business people to give presentations. They can touch the panel that would hang on the wall to drag, scroll and enlarge documents, photos or videos on the screen.

TouchWall comprises integrated hardware that includes laser and infrared lights that recognize the touch of fingertips on the screen. It is run by software, called Plex, that lets users manipulate the content.

Gates will show off the prototype to around 115 CEOs who will gather on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash., on Wednesday as part of the 12th annual CEO Summit there. It is an invitation-only event and, as in the past, only a few attendees have agreed to share their identities. This year, former General Electric chairman and CEO Jack Welch, billionaire philanthropist and investor Warren Buffet, and author Thomas Friedman plan to attend. Tom Brokaw, Charlie Rose, and Michael Kinsley are lined up to moderate some of the scheduled sessions.

In his keynote speech, Gates is also expected to talk about his ideas for the future of user interface technology, a common theme for him. At a recent speech addressing students at the University of Washington, Gates said that the keyboard and mouse have a certain utility and efficiency that will probably always be justified. But recently new devices like the Nintendo Wii, the iPhone, and Microsoft's Surface show that new ways of user interaction can work well.

"We think it's time to amend our slogan of a computer on every desk, because with this we want a computer in every desk," he said at the university, referring to the Surface computer.

Recently, AT&T became one of the first users of Surface, installing the computers in stores where customers can set phones on the screens, which recognize the devices and display information about them. Customers can touch screens to select boxes that detail information about pricing plans and capabilities of the phones.

During his speech at the university, Gates hinted at the TouchWall when he referred to a whiteboard that might be like Surface. He also described a mirror that might reflect what you look like and then show what you might look like if you had on different clothes.

Gates, who is just a couple months shy of the date when he'll start spending less time at Microsoft and more at his charity foundation, came up with the idea for the CEO Summit as a way to bring together business leaders to discuss new technologies that might impact the future of their businesses, said a spokeswoman with Microsoft's public relations firm.

In an announcement overshadowed by Hewlett-Packard's $13.9 billion bid for services provider EDS, Oracle on Tuesday announced it plans to buy AdminServer, a Pennsylvania company that makes policy administration software for the insurance industry, for an undisclosed sum.

The deal, set to close in the first half of the year, may be small compared to megabuys like Oracle's $8.5 billion purchase of BEA, but it represents a significant business opportunity and could even kick off a consolidation spree in the insurance software space, according to analysts.

"This acquisition is likely to shake up the status quo in the sleepy insurance software segment, and could possibly spark a fresh wave of mergers and acquisitions as Oracle's rivals take stock of the new technology dynamics in the sector," said Madan Sheina, an analyst with Ovum Group, in a research note.

Insurance software companies have been bought and sold before, but usually the deals were initiated by investment firms such as Bain Capital, Sheina wrote: "This is the first time that a leading enterprise software maker has bought a specialist insurance software firm in order to strengthen its position. In doing so, Oracle now becomes a direct competitor to traditional vertical insurance solutions providers that might have been partners last week."

AdminServer's employees will become part of a new global business unit at Oracle, led by the company's CEO, Rick Connors, according to a statement. The division will "focus on providing critical operational applications to the insurance industry."

The company's technology will work alongside Oracle's existing insurance-related products, such as Siebel Claims, as well as its business intelligence (BI) and E-Business Suite, according to a data sheet on Oracle's Web site.

The insurance software market is estimated to be worth between $2 billion and $4 billion, according to Matthew Josefowicz, director of the insurance practice at the research firm Novarica.

But the market has by no means topped out, Josefowicz said. "There's a major drive for legacy [system] replacement right now. There's just a high level of activity. There's definitely opportunity for Oracle to rack up significant share."

For example, there could be a "tremendous" opportunity in going after SMBs, according to Josefowicz.

"It depends how you define the [insurance] carrier market," he said. While there are 200 to 300 larger companies, there are also "1,000 others who are chugging away, but they're not Fortune 1000."

Insurance companies are known to develop software in-house, rather than buying it from a third party, but "in the U.S. market, the trend is overwhelmingly toward buy," he said.

Oracle will be competing with companies ranging from specialists like SunGard, to its rival in the business applications and middleware arena, SAP. The latter company has a more established presence in the European insurance market, and has chosen to build capabilities from its platform rather than buy companies, Josefowicz said. He also expects major vendors such as IBM and Microsoft will be "re-evaluating their own strategies."

The insurance software game has its challenges, according to Josefowicz. "The sales cycle are very long, the market is very fragmented."

"But it's a rich market," he added.

When Apple shipped Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" in October, Macintosh users were divided about some of the interface changes Apple had made from prior Mac OS X releases. Chief among these love 'em or hate 'em, changes were the newly translucent menu bar and the 3-D, shelf-like Dock, as well as the new Stacks feature, which, when you mouse over a folder in the Dock, displays the folder's contents as a column of icons or a rectangular grid.

[ See related InfoWorld review,  A developer's-eye view of Leopard. ]

It didn't take long for power users and shareware developers to find ways to tweak the new user interface. At first, modifying Leopard required a level of comfort and experience using the Mac OS X command line and/or modifying system files. Over the past six months, however, the options for tweaking Leopard have become more sophisticated and easier to manage.

Today, most changes can be done easily by any Mac user without trepidation. Here, we'll highlight ways to make Leopard more Tiger-like, customize its look and feel to reflect your personality, and show you how to improve certain Leopard features.

Get back the look of TigerApple's response to complaints about the translucent menu bar came with February's 10.5.2 update, which allows you to turn off the translucent look. If you preferred the look of the menu bar in Tiger, just uncheck the Translucent Menu Bar option in the Desktop & Screensaver preference pane.

You can go even further with a free tool from MD Softworks called LeoColorBar, which performs a handful of tweaking functions, including restoring the familiar rounded edges to the menu bar -- another subtle change in Leopard. It also lets you choose a color besides Apple's familiar brushed-metal gray for the menu bar, a nifty tweak in its own right.

The Leopard 10.5.2 update did not address complaints about the 3-D look of the Dock when it is positioned at the bottom of the screen. (When placed on the right or left of the screen, Leopard's Dock reverts to a 2-D style.)

LeoColorBar comes in handy here as well -- it can restore a 2-D look to the 3-D Dock. For those who like the Tiger look, this tool is a must.

Replace the glowing Dock indicatorsWhile LeoColorBar can give you a 2-D Dock, it doesn't change the indicators for running applications. In Leopard, these indicators were changed from simple black triangles to glowing dots.

If you want to get the triangles back, a free tool called Dock Delight allows you to do so with just a couple of clicks. Again, it's a great tool for anyone who preferred the pre-Leopard Dock.

If you don't want the glowing dots but weren't crazy about the triangles either, you can customize your Dock with an indicator icon of your choice by replacing the default images the Leopard uses to create the indicators. Though not difficult to accomplish, this does require some minor changes to the Leopard system files, as detailed at the Silver Mac blog. You can even download a handful of free prepackaged alternate indicators to use.

Really trick out your DockSo far, I've talked a lot about customizing the Dock to make it look and act more as it did in earlier Mac OS X versions. But that isn't your only option. If you like the idea of a 3-D Dock but not the glass-shelf look, check out the options at LeopardDocks.com and Dockulicious. Both of these sites maintain dozens (if not hundreds) of alternate Docks that you can download and easily install with tools available from either site.

Instead of the glass shelf, you can have an iPhone-inspired Dock, a Dock that looks like a patch of lawn, one that looks like the icons are sitting atop a wood-paneled coffee table or even a Dock that looks like a tattered old pirate map. There are endless options ranging from stylish to whimsical to downright weird.

If you're not into themed Docks, you can also use DockColor to simply change the color of the standard 3-D Dock.

Make Stacks look and act consistentlyIn the Leopard 10.5.2 update, Apple responded to criticism about Stacks by making the feature optional. Users can now choose to display a folder placed in the Dock as a hierarchical pop-up menu of the folder's contents (as previous Mac OS X versions had done) rather than as a stack.

While this choice is an improvement, the update didn't address the major problem with Stacks: the changeability of their icons in the Dock. By default, the icon displayed in the Dock for a Stack shows tiny icons for the first few items (documents, image files, applications, folders, and so on) contained within the folder, stacked three-dimensionally, one in front of the other. The icons included in a Stack's representation in the Dock are arranged in alphabetical order of the items inside the folder.

Apple's intention here seems to be that a Stack icon will always reflect the contents of the folder that it represents. Unfortunately, this means that every time you add a new item to a folder represented by a Stack, the Stack's icon in the Dock may change. As a result, there is no real consistency for folders whose contents change often.

Even when folders don't have constantly changing contents, it can be difficult to tell which Stack is which without mousing over them to see their names highlighted. For example, two of the Stacks in the screenshot above look identical simply because they both contain folders and Word documents, and both happen to have folders within them whose filenames are alphabetically listed before any other items.

Although it doesn't change the overall behavior of Stacks, Stacks in Da Place is a great donationware tool for solving the problem of making each Stack look consistent regardless of its contents. It lets you select a single icon that will be perpetually displayed as the front icon in a Stack so you'll always know which Stack is which.

A great companion to Stacks in Da Place is one of several series of drawer-style icons for Stacks by Yasushi Chida (note that the majority of text on this site is in Japanese) that make your Stacks look like filing cabinet drawers or bins containing the icons of the items in the folder being displayed.

Extend Quick Look for folders and archivesWithout any tweaking, Leopard's Quick Look feature shows you a full-size preview of almost any file without opening an application: As you're browsing through files in the Finder, simply tap the space bar. But there are two free plug-ins available for Quick Look that extend its functionality and usefulness.

The first is for folders. By default, when you look at a folder with Quick Look, you see some general information about the folder and its icon.

But with the Folder Quick Look plug-in, you can also see a list of the folder's contents (optionally including all hidden files) as well as information about each item such as file size, creation and modification dates, and file type.

Similarly, Zip Quick Look Plugin allows you to peer into .zip archives. This makes it easy to see what files are contained in an archive from the Finder or within an attachment in Mail. Being able to get a view of the contents of an archive before expanding it makes it easier to work with compressed files, but it also adds a certain level of security (particularly when used in Mail) because you can ensure that the contents are something that you actually want to expand and/or open.

Add canned searches to the Finder sidebarThe Search For section in the Finder's sidebar in Leopard gives you convenient access to any number of Spotlight searches. Apple packages a handful of these into the sidebar by default, including searches for all files modified on today's date or within the past week.

As helpful as these searches may be, adding custom searches to the sidebar can make this feature even better. Any Spotlight search can be saved to the Finder's sidebar.

To create a detailed Spotlight search, use the Find command from the Finder's File menu (or the Command-F keyboard shortcut). You can designate specific locations to search and whether to search the contents of files or just their file names.

You can also string searches together from a variety of file metadata -- information that is appended to files by applications, the file system and Spotlight itself.

The most common options to search for, beyond a simple string of text contained in file names or contents, include the type of file and the date a file was created or last modified.

Select "Other" in the search criteria pop-up menu to choose from a treasure trove of additional possibilities, including:

The file label assigned to items in the FinderThe album or artist information assigned in iTunesSupport for specific foreign languages in itemsThe number of pages in a documentAll manner of information included by digital cameras, such as camera model or whether a flash was used

To build a search that relies on multiple criteria (all image files that were created in the last month, for example), hold down the Option key as you're making your selections.

To save a search for later use, click the Save button in the upper-left of the search window and in the Save dialog, choose to add it to the sidebar.

If you want access to more searches in the sidebar, but don't want to expend the time and effort to create them yourself, you're in luck. Apple ships a number of prepackaged Spotlight searches with Leopard that don't appear in the sidebar by default; these can be added to the sidebar in a few easy steps.

Change the log-in windowLeopard's starscape backdrop for the log-in window is pretty spectacular, but how about using a picture of the family dog or a favorite vacation memory? Visage ($9.95 from Sanity Software) makes it easy to change not just the background behind the log-in window, but also to customize the window itself.

For example, you can insert a customized message for you or your family -- or in a business or education environment, an acceptable-use policy or new user instructions. Another option: Replace the Apple and Mac OS X icons with pictures of your own.

Visage, which you can try for free for seven days, has some other cool features. You can set a screensaver as a "desktop effect" that displays continually in the background while you're working, instead of a static desktop picture (really great with some of Leopard's new screensaver options).

Visage also lets you customize the text of a number of system alerts. You can add your name or favorite phrase, which is a lot of fun if combined with Leopard's text-to-speech function: Have your Mac read alerts to you when they're displayed.

Add more effects to iChat and PhotoBoothLeopard introduced the ability to show special effects and custom backgrounds in an iChat video chat, with the same effects available in Photo Booth. Both applications make use of Mac OS X's Quartz imaging layer and a series of Quartz compositions to apply the effects to input from a Mac's iSight camera.

More iChat Effects is a package of four-dozen additional Quartz compositions designed for iChat (though they also work well with Photo Booth), all of which make chatting and picture-taking fun and crazy. Ever wonder what you'd look like in a funhouse mirror, with a neon outline or dripping fire? Try it, and you'll know.

Also check out the QuartzFX.com site for more cool Quartz compositions -- or try your hand at building some of your own with Apple's Quartz Composer.

Create a Recent Apps StackOur final Leopard tweak brings us back to customizing the Dock (and requires limited use of the command line).

This easy trick places any recently launched applications -- the same ones listed in the Recent Items option from the Apple menu -- conveniently in the Dock, making a great launcher tool for apps you use frequently.

To add this Stack, launch the Terminal (located in the Applications/Utilities) and copy and paste (or type) the following, then hit the Return key:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'

Then restart the Dock process by typing the following and hitting Return:

killall Dock

You can remove the Stack by dragging it out of the Dock as you would any other Dock item.

Want more?

Can't get enough Leopard tweaks? If you're comfortable using the command line, there are a number of additional subtle changes you can make to the Dock, Finder, and other Leopard components. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of the UsingMac.com series on command-line tweaks for Leopard.

Ryan Faas is a frequent Computerworld contributor specializing in Mac and multiplatform network issues. You can find more information about him at RyanFaas.com. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

For many of us, our first painful introduction to old-school Linux installs came from installing early versions of Red Hat. Like most early Linux installs, it was a highly technical, highly finicky process that was best left to the experts.

Well, times have changed. Today, many Linux users are getting blase about the ease with which we can install Linux. We've been spoiled by distributions such as Ubuntu, which is actually easier to install than Windows. Unfortunately, Fedora 9, the community edition of Red Hat, was a bit too much of a blast from the past for me.

This new release keeps Fedora in step with the rest of the popular distributions, updating Gnome and KDE to recent releases, improving the network management capability, freshening the kernel and adding a USB booting capability.

However, when comparing Linux distributions today, the differentiating factors are fairly limited -- a 2.6.x kernel is a 2.6.x kernel, Gnome is Gnome, KDE is KDE and so on. So you have to look at a few specific factors. How easy is the install? How well does it recognize and accommodate different operating systems that share the disk? What's the package manager like? Does the distribution offer you the chance to use proprietary drivers for your hardware? How well does it work with Wi-Fi?

Install troubles

Unfortunately, it was with that first question -- the install -- that I almost hit a wall with Fedora. All installation experiences are by their nature anecdotal. Everyone has different hardware and makes different decisions during an installation. What is a nightmare for one person may be a walk through the park for another with a different system. Still, when you install a different version of Linux practically every week as I do, you get a good feel for the relative stability (or, in this case, the instability) of the install process.

What follows is a brief diary of my attempts to install the preview release of Fedora 9 on my HP Pavilion laptop as a multiboot operating system alongside Ubuntu.

Try 1: Downloaded and burned Fedora to a DVD. Booted off the DVD. Chose a graphical (rather than text-based) install. Requested to reuse a partition that had formerly held a SUSE install as my root partition. Chose my software packages, username, networking and so on. Got an error from the Python installer and couldn't proceed. Fedora's installation process. Click to view larger image

Try 2: Booted off the DVD. Chose a text install. Decided to make sure the DVD was good. Ran the verification check to ensure the DVD wasn't corrupted. At the end, the DVD popped out, and I was informed it had successfully verified. Put the DVD back in and found myself in an error loop when I kept getting the same error window when I tried to proceed.

Try 3: Booted off the DVD. Chose the text install. Managed to make it all the way through the installation process and rebooted. Seemed to be booting, then left me with an honest-to-goodness Blue Screen of Linux Death (in this case, a solid blue screen with my mouse tracking). Finally hit ctrl-alt-return to restart the window manager and found it had hung trying to mountswap off the fstab . For some reason, the installer didn't like trying to reuse the swap partition left over from the previous install, and it made something go pear-shaped during the initial boot.

Try 4: Reported installer bug to Red Hat. Tried again, telling Fedora to use the entire disk, instead of just the existing partition I was trying to reuse. This time it installed and booted correctly.

Apart from the problems mentioned above, Fedora's install also failed to identify the version of Ubuntu that was installed on an alternate partition and placed it in the GRUB boot menu (GRand Unified Bootloader, or GRUB, is a tool that lets you select between various operating systems in a dual/multiboot environment.) Other distributions seem to have no problem finding and add existing Linux and Windows installations to the boot menu.

The install process also fails the Newbie Test badly. There's no way I'd expect a nontechnical person to be able to reasonably answer a few of the questions asked during the install. For example, asking if IPv6 support should be enabled for a network card and if the host name should be set via DHCP is going to be a bit intimidating for nongeeks.

Fine performance

The good news is that once I finally got Fedora installed, it performed admirably in the "stuff just worked out of the box" department. My sound, Wi-Fi and Intel video driver all showed up for duty when the install was complete. The webcam didn't work, but I haven't found a Linux distribution yet that can cope with the perversity of the Ricoh webcam in the Pavilion notebook. At the end of the day, I was left with a GNOME-based desktop pretty much like any other GNOME desktop.

Fedora, like Red Hat, is an RPM-based system. RPM is perhaps the most widely supported open-source package management system (illustrated by the ease with which I installed Skype, even though the Skype site claimed it only worked with Fedora 7).

It also uses the Yum software package manager, which makes installing from the command line a breeze. I just had to type in "yum install audacity" and I was the proud user of Audacity, the outstanding audio editor for Linux.

One caveat: I'm not a big fan of the "Add/Remove Programs" GUI tool that Fedora comes with, which acts as a front end to Yum. It takes forever to do a search for anything or update a display when you click on a new category; I'd recommend sticking with the command line interface.

Incidentally, it's a good idea to start with Fedora if you're part of a business that may want to transition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL) sometime in the future. Since work done on Fedora flows into Red Hat, this allows for a fairly simple transition from Fedora to RHEL.

However, if you're an individual user who just wants to purchase technical support for Fedora, this does present a bit of a quandary, because you can't purchase Fedora support from Red Hat. For that, you'll need to install RHEL. This is in contrast to Ubuntu, for example, where the same distribution comes with supported and unsupported versions.

Of course, open-source operating systems can enjoy quick fixes to problems, and it's possible that some of these problems may be corrected soon (or may already be corrected when you read this). However, until they are, they represent areas of serious concern, at least to this author.

Conclusions

On the whole, Fedora is a solid Linux distribution that will probably serve you well for desktop usage. Red Hat can rightly claim extensive experience as a commercial Linux vendor; it practically invented the market. Installing Fedora is a good way to ensure an extensive repository of prebuilt software. The hardware support is right up there with any other user-friendly distribution.

But my experiences with trying a multiboot install make me leery of recommending it to anyone who wants to use it in a dual-boot environment. The distribution may be robust, but the installer needs to learn to play better with others. It's also a little too intimidating for nongeek users, so if you're going to get any less-experienced friends on Fedora, you might want to schedule an afternoon to help them out.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Microsoft on Tuesday announced it would restore support for VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) to Microsoft Office for Mac, a direct result of complaints from users about the removal of the suite's cross-platform automation functionality.

Microsoft will return VBA to the next full upgrade to the Mac version of Office, the company said. While Office 2008, which was sharply criticized for omitting VBA, will receive bug-fix updates (such as Service Pack 1, also announced Tuesday ), it will not be updated to add VBA support.

"We know [VBA] is important to a section of our user base who needs cross platform compatibility," said Kurt Schmucker, Mac Business Unit group product manager and lead evangelist. "And we're bringing that back."

VBA is a programming language used with Microsoft Office applications, making it relatively easy to add automation (macros) and customization (menus, dialogs, and so on) to Office documents.

VBA was part of Office 2004, but Microsoft announced in August 2006 that Office 2008 would not have VBA support. Schmucker explained that VBA on the Mac was "uniquely designed for PPC architecture" and thus difficult to carry over to the Intel-native Office 2008. Diverting resources to do so, he said, would have required delaying Office's 2008 release even longer , or significantly cutting back on the product's features. Microsoft has since added resources to work on getting VBA support ready for the next major version of Office for Mac.

Schmucker said that VBA support will have at least the same functionality of Office 2004, and probably some additional features from the Windows version of Office.

Although Microsoft offered no specific date when users could expect the next version of Office for Mac, the company said the product is typically revised every two to three years. Office 2008 was released on January 15, 2008, a little more than three-and-a-half years after the May 2004 release of Office 2004.