Brooker enters the forum of Mac OSX vs. Windows Vista...

... With hilarious results:

Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible.

LOL

I don't like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers.

Amen

Read the full article by Charlie Brooker

Boot up faster

If like me, you are still using Windows on your primary PC or Notebook, and - heaven forbid - are still using XP, and you're not a fan of re-formatting and reloading the OS every time things get bit infected, or slow and heavy... Pause for breath... You're probably either just not interested, or , quite the opposite, you're fond of poking around the registry, tweaking and optimizing.

When I get a virus, trojan or other nasty, I like to remove it, clean up all traces of it, and kill off the previous System Restore point(s). I have Nod32, Xoftspy, Malwarebytes, Spybot S&D, Spysweeper and other tools to help me out in this regard. I don't do "re-format and rebuild" - not ever. You learn nothing, and you lose too much. It takes time to lovingly customise your user experience. Reloading XP might be quick, but all the little flourishes you add over months, even years, is definitely not.

The downside of all this, is that eventually, things start to slow down over time. It gets tougher and tougher to clean up the remnants of this and that. One by one, the applications, files, pictures, movies and mp3s accumulate until you're short of resources; CPU, memory and disk space.

So, you do your best spring clean and you look at what you can optimise.

This is a minefield... Many so called optimisations can do more harm than good, so it's best to stick to the few that are known to work well. Keep it safe, at least at the start.

Boot up - we all want that to be quick.
System readiness from logon - that's really important.
Application loading times - Firefox, anyone?

I'm not going to go through all the things you can do to improve performance, because this article makes a pretty good fist of that, but the most important thing to me to start with is boot time.

BootVis can really help here. There's a really good article on it from OReilly, but the best resource is straight from the horses mouth, and was written recently. The document, imaginatively called "Windows Platform Design Notes - Fast System Startup for PCs Running Windows XP" really explains the ins and outs of BootVis, if you really want to know. Otherwise, the OReilly guide is more than good enough.

If you don't feel like using a tool like BootVis, you can always turn on boot logging and read through the boot traces. You'll be digging around for ages, but you'll learn a lot this way (I picked up a thing or two, anyway). You can really see where the bottlenecks are occurring, and can address them one by one. You can read all about this painstaking approach and try it out if you want. Another alternative is tracelog.exe, part of the Win XP SP2 Toolkit, which is described in detail in an article on citrix.com.

One way to get a startup trace whenever you want, is to add the /BOOTLOG and /SOS boot switches to a new OS entry in your boot.ini. This is pretty organic. Just don't mess it up - I promise you'll regret it if you do ;-)

Happy boot optimising.

Further Reading

• The Mystery of the Horrible Boot Speed (anomalousanomaly.com)

Help beat keyloggers on public computers

This is a very good tool to use to avoid your passwords being intercepted by keyloggers.
Read this:
http://windowssecrets.com/2009/09/24/01-More-tricks-to-evade-keyloggers-on-public-PCs

Related reading

• Strong Passwords Not as Good as You Think (it.slashdot.org)
• Webroot unveils new consumer security suite (ubergizmo.com)
• Password and Phishing Protection (chris.pirillo.com)
• Email Passwords Easy Prey For Hackers (huffingtonpost.com)

Microsoft's new tablet notebook offering looks like it could be useful

It's called Courier and it's beautiful

Some people are complaining because it's hinged. So it has a hinge? So what!?
Journals, diaries and binders have "hinges" - nobody moans about that.

Seriously - if Microsuck can deliver on this, I might just stop calling them Microsuck. This could single-handedly make up for Win ME, Vista and even Visio.

Read more

Thinkpad owners with poor wireless connectivity read on...

Most of the time I don't face issues with dropped connections, but recently I found myself in a situation where the signal was not so strong (no repeaters were located any where near me, and the access point didn't have a 5dB+ aerial). As a result, connections were dropping so often, that I was nearly driven mad.

Every other wireless device was fine, dropping either occasionally, or not at all, but my Lenovo Thinkpad T61 was, or rather the drivers for the Intel WifiLink 4965AG card were, quite frankly, performing pretty poorly.

In deperation, I visited the Lenovo site to see if there was any upgrade available. There was:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-70504.html

However, I realised from reading that page, that it wasn't going to be all that simple. The webpage lists a daunting number of prerequisites and caveats relating to model number, card version, current installed program versions and so on. So many, in fact, that I was beginning to get turned off.

Eventually, for me at least, it boiled down to this:

Note: The part numbers are listed so that you can find each component driver easily.

Intel Wireless LAN (11abgn, abg, bg) driver: 6hwc05ww.exe
ThinkVantage Access Connections for Windows XP - Notebooks : 6hcx41ww.exe
ThinkPad Power Management driver for Windows - ThinkPad : 6hku06ww.exe
Hotkey driver for Windows Vista, XP, 2000 - Notebooks : 6jvu32ww.exe

From the readme notes for Intel Wireless LAN (11abgn, abg, bg) - 6hwc05ww.exe:

Make sure that the following driver prerequisite were installed on your system
  before installing this driver:
  - MSXML6.0 Parser or higher
  - Windows Installer 3.14 or higher
      (Download installer from http://www.microsoft.com)

- If you use ThinkVantage Access Connections, the following software must be
  installed.
  - ThinkVantage Access Connections for Windows XP/2000
      version 5.1 or higher
  - ThinkPad Power Management Driver for Windows 98 SE/Me/2000/XP/Vista
      version 1.51 or higher
    or
    ThinkPad Power Management Driver for SL Series
      version 1.44 or higher
  - ThinkPad Hotkey Features for Windows 98/98 SE/Me/NT 4.0/2000/XP
      version 1.24.0603 or higher
    or
    Hotkey Features for Windows Vista/XP/2000
      version 2.09.0002 or higher
    (Note: Refer to each Hotkey package for which version to use.)

- If you currently use IEEE 802.1x authentication on Windows XP Service Pack 1
  and do not use WPA encryption, Lenovo recommends you to uninstall Q826942 (WPA
  Supplicant update rollup package in Windows XP) and Q815485 (WPA Wireless
  Security Update in Windows XP).
  This does not apply if you are running Windows XP Service Pack 2.

  To check if Q826942 or Q815485 is installed and to uninstall it:
  1. Start Windows XP and logon with administrative privileges.
  2. Click Start and then click Control Panel.
  3. Click Add or Remove Programs.
  4. Click Windows XP Hotfix (SP2) Q826942 or Windows XP Hotfix (SP2) Q815485
     if it is listed under Currently installed programs.
  5. Click Remove and follow the instructions on the screen.

  Note:
  The above action will remove all the fixes within the update rollup package,
  Q826942. You may need to re-install the other specific hotfixes you expect for
  this rollup package.

- You may need to re-enter security information after updating the Wireless LAN
  driver.

- If you use Single Sign-On with the following authentications, ThinkVantage
  Access Connections version 4.22 or higher is needed.
  - LEAP on Windows XP

- [Specification changes] 2200BG/2915ABG Network Connection will report lower
  signal strength than with previous driver versions. Because the 2200BG/2915ABG
  methodology was changed to be more accurate and responsive, similar to the
  3945BG/3945ABG. However, wireless network performance and functions are not
  affected at all by this change.

 I don't know about you, but I find even the readme a little bit discouraging.
So from the notes, check you have the right MSXML parser 6.0 +, and the latest Windows Installer, and from there:

Switch off wireless radio (use the hard switch to be sure it's not going to come back on)

For the T61 with the 4965AG WiFi card:
Install the following parts in this order:

1. Hotkey driver for Windows Vista, XP, 2000 - Notebooks : 6jvu32ww.exe
2. ThinkPad Power Management driver for Windows - ThinkPad : 6hku06ww.exe
3. ThinkVantage Access Connections for Windows XP - Notebooks : 6hcx41ww.exe 
4. Intel Wireless LAN (11abgn, abg, bg) driver: 6hwc05ww.exe

You will have to restart after each install. Make sure you do this. Messing this up is not an option!!!

Note: you may find that you are already at some of the minimum driver / program levels, but still look for the latest for your platform. For the Vista versions of the drivers above (points 3. and 4.) visit those pages and you'll find the link to the page for the Vista drivers / programs.

So, after doing all this, how was the performance of the new wireless adapter driver?
In short, pretty much perfect. Not one droped connection, and even a 40% signal could be used to get acceptable transfer speeds (18-24Mbps out of a possible 54).

What was an added bonus wass that the new Access Connections program is pretty cool and flashy. It's still the same underneath, but there are some extra features. I won't spoil the surprise for you in this post. Maybe later.

If you are suffering at work or at home from all-to-often dropped connections (and I know many of you are), you could do a lot worse than upgrade. Your sanity will thank you for it.

Ever wonder how you spend all that time on the PC?

Well, no need to guess. ManicTime is a handy little freeware utility that allows you to track your time spent on your computer, by program, and your idle time too.

All this information is stored in a local database, isn't transmitted anywhere (for those with security concerns, rest assured), and can be displayed in all manner of views, graphs and charts. It's not a mindreader, so you might have to tag your time, but that's pretty easy.

It might not be something you'll use often, but it's interesting to give it a try at work, you might be surprised just how much you spend time switching applications when you see the results, not to mention the surprising amount of downtime. An eight to ten hour day doesn't amount to as much real work as you might think, especially when you take away the time lost to meetings, lunch, coffee breaks and other meanderings.

Network Security for work and play - time to upgrade to NMap 5.0

If you haven't used NMap before, here's what it does in a nutshell:

NMap is short for "Network Mapper", and it is used to determine what hosts (computers and other network-enabled devices) are on the network, what services they offer (apps), firewall and AV or filtering they have installed, plus OS type and version.

It's obvious to see the benefit if you're a network administrator. Just start it sniffing on the company network and it will report back all this information, allowing you to do inventory, security compliance audits and vulnerability testing.

Of course, the more subversive of you out there will probably think other uses. Whether your hat is white or black, you can have a lot of fun with this. Sniffing for hosts to attack, or just to play about with is easy and rewarding. However, I wouldn't run it on a tightly-controlled, corporate network unless you're really tired of your job ;-)

The latest version is NMap 5.0. It came out in July, and unfortunately no-one told me until now :(

I upgraded my not-so-old 4.75 version on my Win XP machine, but I haven't done the same for my Ubuntu box. Zenmap, the front-end, looks slightly tweaked, and overall (I might be imagining things, it's not as if I benchmarked it) it seems to run faster.

If you haven't tried it, maybe now is a better time than ever. Considering what it does, and how powerful it is, it really isn't much of a hassle to install and configure. It has a really great tutorial, and the NMap site it a treasure trove of tools, tutorials and ideas. It's well laid out too.

Further reading

• IPwatchD an IP conflict detection tool for Linux (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)
• GitHub, Firewalls, and Freedom (autonomo.us)
• Top-Rated Firewall Back by Request (chris.pirillo.com)
• Protect Yourself With A Bank Firewall [Fraud] (consumerist.com)
• Introducing The Virtual Machine Trojan (elasticvapor.com)
• How to set Windows as Default OS in Grub (techie-buzz.com)
• Why Is Linux Notebook Battery Life Still Poor? (hardware.slashdot.org)
• Migrating to Linux, Part 2: Avoiding Separation Anxiety (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)

Tech support cheatsheet

Your most invaluable guide to tech support, courtesy of xkcd.com

It was 40 years ago today

OK, it was 40 years ago a few days back...
But it's still hard to believe that Unix is really that old.
I still don't know as much about it as I'd like.

Further reading

• 40 years of Unix (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)
• Do one thing, and do it well: 40 years of UNIX (crunchgear.com)
• Unix at 40 (news.bbc.co.uk)

Firefox 3.5 really is faster and better

Image via CrunchBase

I know, this isn't exactly news, but if you haven't upgraded to Firefox 3.5 by now, you probably should - and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

All the good things that made the majority of users choose Firefox (other than those who just blindly accepted IE because they had no idea how to do otherwise) are still there. But there are a few new features. Some are new (native JSON support, web worker threads), and some are just new to Firefox (private browsing). Other features were available in add-ons, such as Tab Mix Plus and Session Manager (closed tabs, closed windows, tab tearing).

These new or borrowed features are important factors that will contribute to Firefox staying ahead of the competition, but I think I'm not the only one who was starting to get tired of every bell and whistle slowing the browser down. Safari wasn't going to tempt me away, but Chrome - while it didn't impress at first - started to really grow on me. Thanks to Chrome View, I could set certain sites to load up in Chrome instead. I'd noticed that Firefox 3.0.x, while it felt like an improvement at first, seemed to have terrible trouble with sites with deeply nested links. It simply took a ridiculously long time to load such sites, making the browsing experience pretty unbearable in the process.

So, the main area for improvement for Mozilla to look at, for me, was speed. Chrome and Safari had it. Chrome had some neat features too (even if Safari had nothing), but it had no add-ons (and probably never will). Once I heard that Firefox 3.5.x was much faster than Firefox 3.0.x I was very nearly sold. It was just a matter of time before all my favourite add-ons were confirmed compatible with 3.5 and then I'd be on my way.

My favourite add-ons (all FF 3.5 ready :)
- Ad Block Plus (essential)
- Greasemonkey (essential)
- Personas
- Tab Mix Plus (quite redundant now though)
- Selenium IDE (essential)
- Flashgot
- Firebug (essential)
- Speed Dial (essential)
- Stumbleupon
- Forecastfox
- Zemanta

Now that I have upgraded, since all the add-ons listed above are supported, I can vouch for greatly improved performance. The claims from Mozilla were that FF 3.5 is over 2x faster than FF 3.0, while benchmark tests on many sites claim it's up to 2.5x faster. All I can say so far is that I can feel a huge improvement. Most of the frustration has been removed, and I don't think I'll be reaching for Chrome quite so often from now on.

Performance index comparative (OS: Win Vista) from lfie.net

Futher reading

• Tab Mix Plus Beta For Firefox 3.5 (techie-buzz.com)
• New hint of gallery for Chrome themes emerges (thaibrother.com)
• Firefox 3.7a1pre Portable lets you try before you install (downloadsquad.com)
• Google building 3D hardware boost into Chrome (thaibrother.com)
• Firefox 3.5 performance 250% (lfie.net)
• Top 5 Killer Features in Firefox 3.5 (mashable.com)
  

Cowon S9 - looking good

Cowon's new flagship offering looks fantastic, but then again, most of their products do.

It features a 3.3" screen and it looks like it will be extremely high def, with perfect colour.
That seems to be the main improvement (maybe the UI and controls were made more intuitive), because the sound quality is exactly the same as the models that have been available for the last few years:
20Hz - 20kHz freq. range and ~30mW per channel max output @ 16 Ohms
I suppose it doesn't need to be any better than that for consumer use - but they could easily take on the pro market if they wanted to.

It has a lot of nice additional features: flash playback, wireless, bluetooth, AV output in PAL/NTSC - I wouldn't mind some of that.
Pity they never did anything about the recording facility. This seems to be the only thing missing - a really good stereo condenser mic instead of a pinhole, and a good sampling bitrate (say 160kbps - 320kbps mp3, instead of 96kbps WMA).
With that, musicians (and bootleggers ;-) wouldn't need the Zoom H-2

Google opt-out

Tired of Google dominance? Walk away with Google (tm) opt-out

Pro-Georgian blogger is targeted

Cyxymu, a Georgian who has blogged extensively on the Russo-Georgia conflict and the land grab of South Ossetia was apparently targeted in a DoS attack lasting around two hours yesterday.

His Live Journal blog (which I won't link to), Facebook page and Twitter profile were hit hard, probably by a botnet set up to silence him.

The side effect of the DoS attack was that Live Journal, Facebook and Twitter were heavily affected, with Live Journal an Twitter being brought down, unable to handle the millions of requests, while Facebook performance was greatly reduced. Google and YouTube were also targeted, but their architecture greatly limits the effects of such DoS attacks, so they were able to absorb most of the impact and no end users were impacted.

It is not yet known who was responsible, although there was the suggestion (from Cyxymu himself) that the Russian authorities were involved. There is more evidence that an individual or a small group was responsible, leveraging the power of hacked PCs (known as zombies) around the world to stage what is quite a traditional type of denial of service attack - flooding target pages with a very high and volume of requests, sustained for long enough to bring down the site or service serving the page.

Cyxymu's Live Journal blog is still offline - presumably as a precautionary measure from Microsoft, to spare other users from further outages. Understandable, if a bit cowardly.

Whether the KGB was behind this, as some suspect, or if it was a disgruntled diametrically opposed (in the political sense) hacker or group of hackers remains to be seen. It is unlikely that this is the last we will hear of it.

Further reading

• Bits: Attack on Twitter Came in Two Waves (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Web attack blogger blames Russia (bbc.co.uk)
  
• The Most Hated Man Online? (mt-soft.com.ar)
• Russian hackers launched Twitter attack 'to silence Georgian blogger' (telegraph.co.uk)
• Twitter attack aimed at political blogger (cbc.ca)
• Twitter and Facebook DDoS Attacks Targeted One Man (mashable.com)
• Twitter still struggling to recover from DOS attack (macworld.com)

Technical Support should never be necessary

Ah end-users. The only thing really wrong with the world of software support. PEBCAKs, the lot of them.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Support-Should-Never-Be-Necessary.aspx

I've received quite a few mails nearly as bad as these, but I'm sure it would breach the patient / madhouse software doctor confidentiality rule.

pchelptech
"There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works"

Estimation

See more strips like this at: xkcd

MS .NET 3.5 users: beware fix pack 1

I don't use the .NET 3.5 framework myself, I'd rather stick pins in my eyes, but for those who do: watch out for fix pack 1 - it'll open up a security hole. The vigilant will probably notice that you have a new add-on in Firefox that can't be uninstalled without some registry diddling. I'm sure it'll be patched some time, perhaps next month.

Of course, if you're one to install the .NET framework in the first place, you're probably not the type to check these things.

Here's a particularly inflammatory post about it.

Related articles

• Microsoft .NET Framework: Making Firefox Just as Vulnerable as IE (blippitt.com)
• Do You Trust Microsoft? (q-ontech.blogspot.com)
• Microsoft cannot be trusted! (dvorak.org)
• MS Issued a Fix For Its Unwanted FireFox Extension (yro.slashdot.org)
• Did Microsoft Install A Firefox Extension On Your System? (lockergnome.com)
• Think Firefox is Safer than IE? Microsoft Doesn't Want It That Way (lockergnome.com)

Bitnami in the Clouds

A couple of months back, I posted this about Bitnami. They provide applications such as Drupal, Wordpress or phpBB to be installed natively on a PC, Mac or Solaris box with no existing web application infrastructure stack in place - all in one convenient installation file, providing the complete package: a full-stack infrastructure with the application of choice as the cherry on top.

This makes the whole process of getting a blog, CMS, bulletin board or portal set up as easy as possible. All you need is a modest box to serve it to the company, or to the world at large.

Of course, if you don't have a modest box (a server, in other words), you're stuck. Hosting a public application can be a headache, and there's a cost involved, which can grow as your application scales.

Why not take one of these Bitnami stacks and put it in the cloud? There are lots of cloud providers out there, that will provide you with a scalable site with an application, configure it, manage it, load-balance it and monitor it for you.


Enter Bitnami and RightScale, linked with Amazon's cloud offering. RightScale will give you 10 hours free cloud computing with Amazon EC2, after which further costs are linked to your EC2 account.

I'm not the biggest fan of cloud computing, yet, but if you have a business that needs a public facing site, and you want to put the responsibility of running it firmly in the hands of people that know what they're doing, then I can see how this could be a great solution.

Can anyone stop Oracle?

A few weeks back, when IBM turned down Sun's offer to acquire them, I thought they were crazy. You would think they would at least try to block their main competitor, right? Wrong. Oracle have been busy doing some buying of their own of the last few years, gradually building up momentum, looking for a big name acquisition.

Image via CrunchBase

Then, they got one.

Weeks have passed, and it's still hard to say what the future will hold for Sun, and for Oracle. While in the past they have been pretty much steamrollering the smaller companies they've got their hands on, a company of the stature of Sun - who gave us Java and Solaris - requires different treatment. This should be an alliance, a meeting of minds.

However, what makes this approach even more interesting, is that Sun only recently acquired Oracle's greatest open source competitor, MySQL.

Image via CrunchBase

Now it's personal. Reading around on TheRegister and Slashdot, amongst other places, I'm getting a bit worried. I actually care about MySQL. I've been using it since I started to work with databases and especially since I started to develop web applications. It's default beep, sounding every time I type something stupid into it's command line, is music to my ears.

Where will things go from here? Who'll be next?

Bitnami Newsletter, May 2009

Sony post massive €1.4bn loss

For those who have been waiting for Sony's strategy of flogging over-hyped, overpriced products for years to catch up with them, this is very, very good news. For the 16,000 unfortunates who will be losing their jobs over the next year, this won't be such a welcome development.
Samsung make better TVs, Apple make better personal music players, Nokia make better phones, Nintendo make better games... Shall I go on? Sony nowadays are the definitive jack-of-all-trades, master of absolutely nothing. Good to see them pay the high price their foolish customers usually do :P