Poirates Ahoy!

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AV Performance put to the test

AV-Comparatives.org have been busy testing the performance hit your system takes by running a resident AV.
Some people will use this report as an excuse not to run a real-time scanner, and just get by with one full scan a week, but these people are stupid. Stupid I tell you!

One interesting thing is Symantec's position in this test. If these results are to be believed, then not only is it catching almost all threats, but it is also extremely light on resources too, even on higher security settings.

Meanwhile, in other news, the number of empty brown envelopes found out the back of the AV-Comparatives office went up by 2342% last month.


Read the last few reports on av-comparatives.org

Read the full performance report

A BSOD with a difference :)

If your PC dies with a BSOD specifying the error:

*** Hardware Malfunction
Call your hardware vendor for support
*** The system has halted ***

NMI: Channel Check / IOCHK

Visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315223 and download Windows Memory Diagnostic tool from here:
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

When I got this error the first time, I simply restarted  the PC and it was fine for a week. This morning it came back with a vengeance - rebooting wasn't an option as I was getting a string of BIOS beeps (indicating a memory problem).
I had to reseat each and every memory module, one-by-one until the BIOS beeps stopped and the PC could be started. Next step will be to burn this memory diagnostic tool onto a disk and do a check. Another day's work :)

Cringeley's "Triumph of the Nerds" Part 3 of 3

Note: This is part 3 of 3

Part 1 of 3
Part 2 of 3

Cringeley's "Triumph of the Nerds" Part 2 of 3

Note: This is part 2 of 3

Part 1 of 3
Part 3 of 3

Cringeley's "Triumph of the Nerds"

12 years is a loooong time in the world of computing, but this is still one of the finest programmes on computing ever to grace the television screen:



Note: This is part 1 of 3

Part 2 of 3
Part 3 of 3

Plastic Logic answer the call

Finally, an A4-sized, flexible eReader that doesn't look like a big lump of nasty plastic, despite what the company who makes it calls itself.
Perhaps this could provide a convenient alternative to carrying around a load of paper. I'll only know when I get one in my own hands and try it out - but it looks promising.

Smart broadband... first day verdict

My brand new Thompson Speedtouch 585 v7 ADSL2+ Wireless router arrived yesterday - had it hooked up and set up on the UTV Clicksilver connection in about a minute... maybe two.
That sounds like an exaggeration, but it's actually pre-configured for Irish ADSL networks (preset to PPPoE, VPI.VCI 8.35), so it's really just a case of putting in your broadband account username and password and you're ready to go. The basic menus are there, but for advanced stuff you have to use the Command Line Interface, which is just Thompson's way of protecting overconfident fools from themselves (while annoying the rest of us ;-). There's very little missing, although I much prefer the comprehensive feature set and take-no-prisoners interface of my BT Voyager 2110 - if only I could get into the web interface after that bad flash...
That said, the Thompson is solid, very pretty to look at and pretty stable. I got faster speeds out of it on my UTV connection than I could from the BT (by 5-10%). I clocked a DL speed of 4521kbps yesterday (407kbps UL) on the local Westnet server.

When I got home this evening I realised (after a period of wondering what the feck was wrong with my connection) that I'd been "seamlessly" been switched over to Smart.
After entering my Smart username and password where the old UTV one had been in the router's Internet services menu I did a quick speed test (Westnet server):
DL: 5871kbps
UL:403kbps
A few more tests seem to clock me around the 6Mbps mark - which, based on the line attenuation is probably as good as I can expect, given how far I am from the exchange...
One of the things that has really improved is the ping - from ~150ms to ~100ms. I'll take that as a consolation, even though I seem to have lower upload speeds :(

Time will tell if this is as solid a service as UTV gave me over the last two and a half years (it was terrible for about a two week period over the last 6 months, before that it was perfect). I'll let you know if the speeds vary a lot.

In the meantime, have a look in the advanced menus of your router for the line attenuation (on download) and check it out using kitz's speed calc. This will give you an idea of what service you should go for - 3, 4, 6, 8, 10 or whatever. You'll get an estimate of how far you are from your local exchange, but remember that Smart's servers might well be elsewhere, so they might not prove to be a great option. Wiser people than me have tried the basic 4Mbps service first and then upgraded once they saw how they were going. If I'd done this I'd probably be choosing a 6Mbps connection now, saving myself €5 per month.

Ah well... sod it - I've got it now. I'm hoping I won't be regretting it.

World Clock

Microsoft Surface - has touchscreen technology finally grown wings?

Microsoft Surface Demo @ CES 2008



I'd love to know what the unit cost is of these things. Are they punitively expensive? Could MS turn a profit on them?

Tried Google Chrome yet?

Google has revolutionized search, and made the email client seem rather unwieldy and unnecessary, but there they have been wide of the mark on a few things.

Google Desktop wasn't very good in the early days. It started out seeming a bit slow and a bit intrusive, both in terms of system resource usage and privacy.

However, I downloaded the latest enterprise version at my workplace, with a private encrypted index and support for Lotus Notes search and I was very impressed. Admittedly, the index got corrupted once and had to be rebuilt, but it has made things easy to find. This is very important when you have one hand on the phone and only one on the keyboard ;-)



So, I approached Google Chrome with some interest. I say some, because I'm not really in the market for a new browser. I love both Firefox and Opera and I can't see how much improvement can be made in this area. However, Google claimed that their browser would have a small memory footprint and wouldn't leak memory either. This sounded tempting because Firefox 3 has only improved on Firefox's tendency to hemorrhage tens of megabytes of lovely memory by a small amount. Opera leaks too, but less so. In addition to this, Google claimed that their new browser was going to be optimized for web applications, especially for gmail. This sounded good, so I decided to give it a whirl.

I was whelmed.

It's not all that special from what I've seen so far. It doesn't suck, but it doesn't blow me away, either. I've used gmail in it - it's OK I suppose, but it hardly seems all that "optimized". What's the difference between it's layout in web application mode than just hitting F11 in FF, Opera or IE? It loads quickly, sure, but then so does FF3 with no plugins. So does IE7 for that matter, but that's a steaming puddle of horse pish. The history search is nice, as you'd expect from Google, but searching your bookmarks and history in FF works well enough for me.

Remember Seamonkey? I still use it quite a bit, mainly because it reminds me of classic Mozilla - my second browser love, after Netscape. Flock has a Photobucket edition, but that's no big deal. Most people have never used Flock or Seamonkey, and never will. Chrome will have to really stand out to have any chance of making a dent in the established browser user base* - the trouble is, I'm still just not sure what makes Chrome so special.

Does anyone else have any ideas?

Read this superb review at InfoQ

* I saw a BBC News report this week that stated that IE still holds 80% of the browser market

Looking for iTunes alternatives

Found one alternative - aTunes - available for Linux and Windows, but would like to know about more:
http://www.linuxalt.com/linux-software/aTunes.html

The main requirement would be full podcast support, and should be opensource (free for corporate use, at least).
Why not use iTunes? Well, I just don't like it. There's Quicktime Alternative - that solves one problem.
As far as I could find tell, the podcast plugin for Winamp doesn't work.

If you know of any other alternatives, please comment.

Forgot what a valuable resource this site is

Just had cause to visit:
http://dougknox.com/

For those who haven't been here yet, it's a collection of VB Script files that will perform tweaks for Windows systems. Just have a look through the left hand menu and try something out. Back up first, etc.

Just goes to show how many problems boil down to the PSU

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://discussions.hardwarecentral.com/showthread.php?t=180313

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CMS News

http://cmsreport.com/taxonomy/term/381

http://cmsreport.com/node/1717

http://cmsreport.com/node/1665

http://cmsreport.com/node/1554

http://cmsreport.com/node/1089

http://cmsreport.com/node/731

Coding Resources

http://www.investintech.com/articles/coderesources/

Is Autocheck.exe playing up on your PC?

Problem: Spybot-SD Resident scanner pop-up requires confirmation every time Windows starts. Clicking "Remember this decision" won't help...

The pop-up is to alert you that the Session manager registry key in the CurrentControlSet is being changed.

Cause: Autocheck.exe is corrupt.

Solution: Run checkdisk on the next boot by clicking Start > run and typing chkdsk /r. You'll see a message saying the volume is currently in use and would you like checkdisk to run on the next reboot - type Y. Reboot at your leisure and make yourself a cup of tea, because this is going to take a while.

It should fix the problem, however, so that's alright then.

pchelptech

Could this spell the end of the sticky post?

That is, if Knol - Google's latest offering to the world of web authoring - has anything to do with it.

Make long links short with shortlinks.js

I got sick of looking at links I posted with long URLs that spilled off the page, making things look untidy.
After looking around for a way to neatly wrap links without breaking them, I found this.

Now I can post links as long as I like, and this little piece of JavaScript will truncate the link text and preserve the URL. All you need is a little script in the head of your page:

<head>

<script type="text/javascript" src="shortlinks.js"> </script>

</head>

Onload, the script will execute and rewrite the link as specified in shortlink.js:

// the maximum length of the links<br /> var mustlength=30;
... rewriting the link using the following function:
var newt=t.substr(0,mustlength/2)
+connector+
t.substr(t.length-mustlength/2-connector.length,t.length);

There are a load of other useful tools on both onlinetools.org and the author's site.

QA Testers needed, job satisfaction guaranteed

http://dilbert.com/fast/1996-07-01/