Well it seems like Microsoft kicked the last few Windows 2000 home users in the teeth by releasing an update this week that stopped users of Zone Alarm from getting onto the Internet. Symptoms are that nothing can connect to the internet.
Whilst you really should not still be using Windows 2000, if you are. Uninstall Zone Alarm and visit the site below:
All my wife really wanted for her birthday was an new mobile. Specifically it had to be the iphone. When apple announced the launch of the iphone 3G on July 11th, I knew there would be trouble. You see my wife’s birthday is the 17th July. I knew I had to get on the list early. So I registered interest with O2 and Car Phone Warehouse. Needless to say, the online store sold out before I even got a click in. I was going to have to queue.
Brentwood, where we live, is fairly small and has a tiny o2 store. I managed to arrive around 07:30 to get position 20 in the queue. The rumour started at 08:00 that they had only 14 iphones. Bugger.
To cut a long story short, several people lost heart and left the queue. There where 16 phones and I managed to get up to position 15. She is happy. So by default, so am I.
It is typical that as soon as I finish a nice ride and draw it up in Mapmyride.com, I find that my Nokia N95 could have mapped it all for me automatically using the natty new Nokia service. Poo.
I will play with it for a while and on my next ride use it to capture the route. Might be hand as well for plotting the routes of some of the charity rides this year. As my bike computer keeps resetting itself – I think it is because it rattles too much, I need another tool for plotting my distance. My odometer, clock and speedo still work but the distances, averages and maximums keep restarting. Oh well, maybe I’ll just load a new battery and see what happens.
Being odd, I run my own mail server. This is a legacy of me having poor service from online mail providers, being a bit paranoid and wanting to reuse old hardware. I run the excellent Mecury mail server and use Vista’s Windows Mail client to read using PoP3.
All this talk about clouds however has got me thinking. I really should consider beefing up the server and switching to IMAP4. That way I can read my mail anywhere, on any device with a suitable client. Ideally, to even the experience out, I need a webmail client to wrap around IMAP4 and make it truly universal.
After not much poking around, I’ve come across RoundCube. It is a simple, elegant but more than adequate mail client and only took about an hour to get working. As I run Apache, MySQL and PHP already it was a breeze. Mercury is very standards-compliant so it never grumbles when other software talks to it properly.
For anyone wanting to do a similar thing, I recommend getting XAMPP and following the simple steps here on getting it working. If there is enough (any) interest, I may put a page together showing how easy it all is.
According to Activision, Lego Indiana Jones won’t work on my TV as it isn’t a proper monitor. All the other Lego games and every other application works. But not this one.
The cause is simply that this new game will not run at 25Hz-50Hz.
I either make the boys play the game in the Study or I buy a new T.V.
Bugger
I like the Lego Star Wars games. My boys love them too. Lego Indiana Jones ? Fantastic. Oh hang on.
I should point out that rather than having an Xbox or Wii, we have a PC in the living room (in a media-centre box) connected to the TV as a games console, DVD player etc.
Lego Star Wars I & II play brilliantly on the TV using this computer but Indiana Jones just keeps giving me “Failed to create d3d device” and error code 0x8876086c.
Lucasarts pointed me at Activision and currently the nice chap on their support site is throwing suggestions at me. Being the stubborn sort that I am I also tried troubleshooting myself using different video cards, updating drivers, using msconfig to disable services and startup programs. But nothing worked.
I then wondered what was letting Lego Star Wars II work and when Indy just didn’t want to show. The only noticeable thing is that the nuconfig.txt file that LSW2 uses states a screen refresh of 60Hz. My nVidia control panel seems to think it is running the TV at 25Hz. Indy’s PCCOnfig.txt tries for 70Hz. Changing the entry in file doesn’t help.
So, I thought “What if I used a monitor?”. Guess what. It worked. Unplug the s-video cable, reboot with a monitor attached at it all works. Not really an option for me here though unless I go buy a new TV with a PC connector – makes LEgo Indiana Jones an expensive game for me.
Well, hopefully that was useful for somebody else in the same boat. I’ll post here if I get a solution via the TV.
Our Sky+ box has gone “stuck in standby” which means it has a red light on the front and it won’t go green.
You can usually do a software reset by powering it down and then backup whilst holding the “Backup” button in on the unit. But it didn’t help this time and an engineer is on his way later this week.
So no T.V. in the living room. There is a solution though.
Martin’s slingbox is still connected to the Sky box upstairs. It is connected to a Netgear wireless game adapter (basically a one port wired-to-wireless bridge). With Slingplayer running on the living room PC and the settings tuned to LAN speeds, we get very watchable TV and can change channel remotely.
The living room PC is built for low noise so it is difficult to hear it until it has been on for a couple of hours or you’ve been running DirectX games on it. For watching TV it is almost silent.
But I can confirm that TV over slingplayer over wireless over game adapter over composite video over slingbox does actually work very very well.
It also shows just how much resiliency I have accidentally built into my home media setup. I am far too geeky sometimes.
I work in Pre-Sales for the European arm of a major Australian Telecoms company. What that means is that I spend my time explaining to potential customers why what the salesman is trying to sell them will solve their problems. On occasion I also have to explain to the salesman what to sell to the potential customer too. It is a bit like a technical translator.
I also draw fluffy clouds.
First rule of technical pre-sales: learn to draw fluffy clouds. If you want to talk about any complex system, it is important to abstract it in such a way that can be easily understood by non-technical people. You can always thin the smog a bit later but when you want to solve a problem, knowing exactly what size spanner the engineer will use is not always relevant on the first day. (Unless of course the meeting is about spanner sizes in which case it would be churlish to not mention them).
But Microsoft like Google before it has decided that we should all know about clouds. We should save our documents, email, photos, videos and anything else digital “in the Cloud”. Our devices be they computers, mobile phones, consoles or whatever will talk to “the Cloud” and share all this data. We can even share some of it with other people.
Of course Google and Microsoft both want us to use the Internet as the Cloud but more importantly they want us to use their own little bit of it. Google will be the bastion of the open-source, free Internet brigade whilst Microsoft will be the comfortable/safe choice for everyone else. (Please don’t write in with why one is better than the other – we just don’t know enough about them both yet).
For a journalist’s view on the Microsoft announcement, click here or here and start wondering about how much of a cloud you already have at home, on your laptop and in your mobile and how you would want it all to just work. You may soon get your wish…
My father had some trouble with his PC recently and try as I might, I could not talk him through getting Logmein working so that I could get on and diagnose the problem. The key symptoms were lots of pop-ups demanding money for visiting porn sites that were never visited and an immense slow-down.
O.K. well that’s odd as Norton Internet security is running, up-to date and should have blocked any nasties.
But it didn’t.
One screwdriver-themed visit from my very charitable brother-in-law, Ian and a load of bubble-wrap later and the hard disk has arrived in the post for a bit of surgery by yours truly. I plug it into a machine that is patched-up, secure and if push-comes-to-shove sacrificable to see what the problem is.
Lo and behold, a nasty “generic” trojan sits smugly in c:\windows. AVG Free spotted it straight away and killed the blighter off. Hang on. AVG FREE as in the not-paid-for anti-virus solution you can just download and use managed to find a virus that Norton couldn’t deal with? Didn’t Dad have to pay for Norton?
Norton is a great security software house and I’ve used their products for years but now I am truly swayed away from pay-for Norton AV towards the free AVG solution.
If you haven’t tried it yet, try this link and get your hands on the newly released AVG Free version 8. Worth noting that with this release, they have killed-off Anti-spyware as a separate tool. The Anti-Virus product does some work with odd cookies and registry entries but you should keep Windows Defender turned-on to be safe.
So it seems you can’t just sever a load of important international sub-sea cables and just sail away like nothing happened. Good job.