For techie tips and tricks, tools and sites of (dis)interest

Never run out of disk space again

| Tuesday, March 02, 2010
There, that got your attention ;)

Sometimes I think I have enough storage. Then I wake up and realise I was just dreaming. So if you've got designs on serious disk space, you might be interested to know how to get Petabytes of storage.

How long will it be before the average personal computer's storage is measured in petabytes? 2, 3 or 5 years? Or will there be no breakthrough to miniaturise enough in that time? Will it simply be a question of affordability, or will it be a combination of these two factors as it is now? Who knows the answers to all these questions? Who cares?
Not me. I can't even be bothered to knock together a proper post.

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Whelmed by the iPad, bored by Apple

| Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Apple excels at taking existing concepts – computers, MP3 players, conceit – and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration. It took the laptop and the coffee table book and created the MacBook. Now it's taken the MacBook and the iPhone and distilled them into a single device that answers a rhetorical question you weren't really asking.

Read the full article

iPad - iNotImpressed

| Saturday, January 30, 2010
After hearing loads of reports coming back about the iPad being a big disappointment, I thought I'd better catch up and see what it's all about. So I watched this:



And after watching it, I was like, meh...

Steve Ballmer, on the other hand, was like:



OK, that was from about 3 years ago, but it's still great.

Here's the product I'm really waiting for:



Ballmer will be sooo pissed.

Free copy of "HPC for Dummies"

| Wednesday, January 27, 2010
AMD Opteron Six Cores dieImage via Wikipedia
Want to learn more about HPC? For a gentle introduction, get your free copy of
"High Performance Computing for Dummies" (Sun and AMD special edition).
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Send Your Details to Support

|
The clever guys and girls over at Imulus have put together a handy page at http://supportdetails.com/
which displays the visitor's environment details right there on the page, such as:
  • Operating System
  • Screen Resolution
  • Web Browser
  • Browser Size
  • IP Address
  • Color Depth
  • Javascript (enabled/disabled)
  • Flash Version
  • Cookies (enabled/disabled)
You can copy individual details, export them as .csv or .pdf, or even mail them to a support tech or engineer for review.

One neat feature you can try is to build a url to send to users to click on when they want to request support:

http://supportdetails.com/?sender_name=Jessica&sender=email@sender.com&recipient=email@recipient.com

The details aren't really the point - it's more about the interface and the way the information is presented. It's not hard to see this being applied to present much more detailed and useful system information.
Having worked with automated data collecting tools before, I have to say that this kind of interface would be a quantum leap over what I've seen being used in the support divisions in many of the largest IT companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun, and I for one would welcome the chance to use it. Imulus would, however, almost certainly have to stray from their world of ASP.NET to provide such tools.



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Google Chrome on the march - overtakes Safari

| Monday, January 04, 2010
Google Chrome IconImage via Wikipedia
It's official - Chrome is now #3 in the browser charts by number of users, nudging its way past Safari, Apple's browser offering.

In a little over a year Google Chrome has risen to 4.63% market share and has overtaken Safari, at 4.46%. One possible factor in the swing of about 1% that took place in December 2009 is that Google released Chrome for OS X giving Mac users another, possibly better, lightweight and fast browser to choose from. However, since the total market share of OS X really isn't that high, it was more likely the result of steady growth in Chrome uptake, while Safari stood still.
Mashable covered this in an article yesterday, and the graph they provided shows clearly how Chrome has been steadily growing in popularity. After all, Chrome is technically faster than Safari, and was since the early days, as this chart shows, so it was only a matter of time before it overtook it in terms of its user base.


Of course, Internet Explorer is still king. Then again, my recent acquisition of a new laptop running Windows 7 came with IE8 pre-installed, just as it would have done in Windows 3.x, 95, 98, NT, ME, 2000, XP, 2003 or Vista. The anti-trust, anti-anti-competition brigade didn't manage to change anything in that respect. Until they do, it's not a level playing field, and IE will continue to dominate. Firefox weighs in with 24.61% of the popular vote, and this is what Google are really chasing, so much so, that I think they're starting to really worry Mozilla's CEO John Lilly, and the gloves are coming off - in a way that can only hurt the interests of both companies.




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Merry Christmas!

| Thursday, December 24, 2009

metaplace - Now That Didn't Last Long

| Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Well, anyone who signed up for metaplace and wondered what exactly it had to offer anyone that made it worth the effort will not be surprised to hear that:


Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

metaplace.com is closing on january 1, 2010


Today we have unfortunate news to share with the Metaplace community.  We will be closing down our service on January 1, 2010 at 11:59pm Pacific.  The official announcement is here and copied below, and you can read a FAQ guide here.  We will be having a goodbye celebration party on January 1st at 12:00noon Pacific Time.


Over the last several years, we here at Metaplace Inc. have been working very hard to create an open platform allowing anyone to come to a website and create a virtual world of their own.

Unfortunately, over the last few months it has become apparent that Metaplace as a consumer UGC service is not gaining enough traction to be a viable product, requiring a strategic shift for our company.

We’re sorry to announce today that Metaplace.com will be closing to the public at 11:59pm on January 1st, 2010.

This is a bittersweet moment for us. Metaplace Inc the company will be continuing on – in fact, we have big plans – but what you the users have known as Metaplace will be going away. We are also losing some friends and colleagues here as part of this strategic shift.

We’d rather dwell on the good than the sad. You, the users, have done amazing work here, and we want to celebrate it. We may not have managed to reach our goals with Metaplace.com and Metaplace Central, but we still had a lot of fun, watched creativity flower, visited amazing places, and made a lot of friends. We’ve had amazing guest speakers, more parties than we can count, live concerts, movie premieres and art shows; we’ve seen you make adventures and schools and churches and games and countless other sorts of worlds that would otherwise never have been created.

In that spirit, we want to treat these next two weeks more as a celebration of the good times. We invite you all to come back to see all of the amazing worlds that you have made. Registration will remain open, so you can show off to your friends. Remote embeds will remain active until the last day as well.

We’ll be turning off billing immediately, and refunding everyone for all purchases in the month of December as well as subscription payments that apply to December and future months. This month is on us. We are suspending regular customer service, but the support site will remain open for now in case there are any critical billing issues.

We know many of you have done work here that you would like to preserve. Please do use this time to capture screenshots, data, scripts, movies, and assets. We have a FAQ that explains how to retrieve assets from the service.

When other worlds have reached a sunset point, people have lost touch with each other. We’ve made a lot of friends here and we’re sure that you have too, so we don’t want that to happen. We have created a forum site athttp://www.metaplaceveterans.com that will be operational soon, so that you can all keep in touch with one another.

Finally: we want to treat the 1st of January as a celebration, rather than a sad moment. Please join us on that day for a party, starting at noon Pacific time. If Metaplace.com has to go, we want to go out with style, with joy, and with the same sense of fun that we have always had. Let’s celebrate the journey, not the ending. There will be meeps – count on it.

We’re sure you have many questions about all of this – and there’s a detailed FAQ that we hope answers them. Click here to read it.

In the meantime, we want to thank you all for your support, your effort, your creativity, and your loyalty. We know that many of you will be disappointed by this outcome. We are too. We are embarking on a new and exciting direction, and it feels strange not to have you all along for the ride.

It has been a privilege to have had you here with us on this great adventure, and we hope that this community – this wonderful, engaged, passionate, friendly community – lives on and on.

We’ll miss you -- and we hope to see you again.

Metaplace Team



Proof that virtual worlds, just like the real one, will, sooner or later, come to an end. It's just that in the case of Metaplace it was very much sooner.


For the few that did think it was a good idea, commiserations. With Forterra on its way out too, you'll just have to move back to that other complete waste of time, Second LIfe. Which assumes you had a life of your own in the first place ;)


 
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Message to UPC: You Suck!

| Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Never in the whole of human history has a cable television / phone / broadband provider sucked quite as much as UPC do at the moment.

I would have thought they'd have been content with getting our bills wrong, cutting us off by mistake, disrupting our service, fobbing off and downright ignoring our legitimate complaints, boring the crap out of us while rolling out a firmware upgrade, providing us with less than 10% of advertised broadband speeds during peak periods and even leaving us without the broadband we paid for for up to three days at a time.

Obviously, I was wrong.

Not remotely interested in providing a better quality service, and this counts for both technical and customer service, UPC has instead spent all their money on protecting their "service" by switching to Nagra 3 encryption.


So now anyone with an box of dreams, or viewer of stars, or whatever, can no longer even watch the channels they've rightly paid for on anything except that god-awful excuse for a box by Pace. The interface. The size. The responsiveness. The remote (see right) It all sucks.


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Assisted Brainstorming

| Monday, December 14, 2009
ASSIST Machine Sketch Interpretation - It's not new (dates back to 2001), though I wonder when we'll have these kinds of tools firmly in our everyday grasp.
It's certainly impressive, but the more I look at this presentation, the more I think I've seen it somewhere before...



Hmm... Did I see it here perhaps?

Is Oracle's Acquisition of Sun a Formality?

|
Oracle DatabaseImage via Wikipedia
Not if the European Commision, the EU's competition authority (who Microsoft know only too well) have anything to do with it. At least, according to newsfactor.

When I first heard about Oracle's move on Sun and, therefore Sun's own fairly recent acquisition, MySQL, I thought it would all be a done deal by the end of the summer. Little did I know it would still be dragging on now.
That's not to say I'm not glad someone is stepping in and contesting the deal on anti-competitive grounds.

As I've mentioned once or twice in the past, I love MySQL and would hate to see it suppressed or, even worse, blown out of the market completely. I agree with Oracle's claim that they are not in competition with MySQL because they are aimed at completely different market sectors, but I still don't believe Oracle have the intention to allow MySQL to develop any further.

Hopefully, if there is any justice, the EU Commission will find some way to protect MySQL without denying Sun the investment they undoubtedly need. Every day lost in this challenge costs Sun a whopping $3.4M.

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Lotus Notes is 20!

| Monday, December 07, 2009
IBM Lotus Notes 7 customized Welcome PageIt was 20 years ago today -Image via Wikipedia
Ed Brill reminded me today that Lotus Notes just turned 20. Didn't it grow up fast? I first started using is back in 1996, but since 1999 I can say I've used it every single working day, so I've known it for half its life. How nice.

In that time, I've sent mails, used application databases on it, chatted in it, replicated mailfiles and other DBs on it, collaborated through it, designed applications and LotusScript doodahs for it, installed it, upgraded it, customized it, loved it, hated it, swore I'd never work with it again, and then did the very next day.

No matter how much I've criticised Notes (and found myself nodding along with this guy), I probably wouldn't use Outlook over it. Obviously, there's integration to consider in some cases, and if you're in a Microsoft shop with Office, Sharepoint and the rest, you might have other needs, but in a mixed shop, or an IBM one, it's probably the best choice. The majority of Fortune 500 companies seem to think so.

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Computer Forensics

| Sunday, November 22, 2009
Wietse Venema, creator of the Postfix mail system.Image via Wikipedia
If you're a Unix administrator who has no choice other than to be interested in security, or you're just an enthusiast who likes to poke around deep in the file system searching for the fingerprints of malware, Dan Farmer of Elemental and Wietse Venema of IBM (picured right) have the book for you.

It may be getting a bit long in the tooth now, published over four years ago, and things in the security world move pretty fast, so you might be wondering why you would buy such an old book. The thing is - the world of Unix security doesn't really move all that fast. Just have a read through this online version of the book, and you'll see that pretty much all of it is still just as relevant today. They discuss SATAN, which is 14 years old and counting from the date this post was published, but when you take a look at what it did, you can see that this would still be useful today. The file system basics they cover in good detail will probably always be relevant - this hasn't changed much since the dawn of Unix. Even the principles of malware analysis will stay relevant, although you will need to keep adding to your knowledge of them. After all, we've seen new viruses and trojans emerge that fool the latest scanners by employing by now age-old techniques that had been forgotten about.

This is a solid book, and a solid online resource. As the authors request - if you are thinking of printing the book out from their website, maybe you should just buy the book instead. At $32/£24, it won't break the bank, and these guys deserve your cash. It's well worth it, as it's about as condensed as such a book can be, and provides a perfect introduction to security for students - I'm astonished it wasn't on our security course reading list, so I'll certainly be recommending it to my former lecturers.

There are a few other resources listed on their site, such as the TCT, the leading toolkit for forensics analysis on *nix systems - even available as a Gentoo package, which is where I first ran into it, adding it to my short-lived Gentoo installation.

I hope you'll find this useful, interesting or both. The return on the investment of time (and possibly money) for the chapter on file system basics alone makes the effort worthwhile.

 Resources:

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It's not just me - Firefox doesn't like Windows Presentation Foundation either

| Sunday, October 18, 2009

You may have seen this "Add-ons may be causing problems" window recently.

It seems that there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Microsoft's .NET Framework Assistant and WPF add-ons cause serious instability and can leave your computer vulnerable to remote code execution.

If I'd installed these add-ons, I'd say fair enough - uninstall them for now, wait until MS patch them, and install the patched versions.

I suppose I happened to visit a site with some (or lots) of Silverlight content. I was told that I needed these add-ons to allow the content to be displayed properly. I allowed them, restarted and the content was loaded. Presumably. To be honest, I don't even really remember doing it. Perhaps I didn't.

It seems that these pesky parasites latched on to my lovely browser when I installed .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. They are slipped in the back door, without so much as a by your leave. For most of us that have these add-ons, they were installed around February this year. That's eight months of risk.

So, there they were, and they were leaving our browsers vulnerable to crashes, and worse.
They're disabled now, and I'll be uninstalling them shortly. I'm not impressed that the warning came from Mozilla and not from Microsoft. I imagine that Mozilla noticed them in user-submitted crash reports and opened a ticket with Microsoft's security team to say that their .NET / WPF add-on / plugin was causing crashes. MS probably said it was a browser issue, for Mozilla to sort out, and so on...

You might like to take a look at Mozilla's list of dodgy add-ons - you'll also see the Apple QuickTime Plugin, v7.1.*, which also can allow remote code to be executed on your machine. I have version 7.6, so I guess that's safe, for now.

You can also view the details on these add-ons, and the .NET / WPF add-on thread on Bugzilla is especially illuminating. It pretty much says that Microsoft advised Mozilla to just go ahead and block the plug-in, probably because they missed it in the Patch Tuesday roll-up, and the next one is still some way away.

  says:
It does show up in
http://people.mozilla.org/~dbaron/crash-stats/20090929-interesting-addons ,
although the correlations that show up aren't necessarily signs of causation. 
However, that shows that it's quite common in the wild: it's installed for the
users submitting 48% of our Windows crash reports on Firefox 3.5.3.
If Microsoft is recommending disabling it (all versions, or just some?) because
of security vulnerabilities, then I'd strongly support adding it to the
blocklist.

I'm was not too impressed that MS didn't quickly release a patch themselves - but reading further down in that thread, you can see that there is some doubt creeping in - perhaps they did?

George Robert said:
Is there a particular reason why these are being blocked two days after
Microsoft released a fix for this issue?

MS09-054 was released on 10/14/2009, which the linked technet article in
comment #23 very clearly states resolves this issue for both IE and Firefox
Yay! So I'm safe and I can enable it again? Well, no:


It seems that the reason they had to put a blanket ban on all versions of the WPF plugin, is because:
a) There is presently no way for Firefox to hook into the OS list of installed MS patches
b) MS don't bother putting version numbers on their WPF libraries - they are just called NPWPF.dll
c) MS didn't put a new version # on the WPF plugin or .NET add-on to indicate that it was downloaded / installed after the patch was applied

Ultimately, this decision to add them to the blocklist was arrived at by mutual consent, which is clearly stated by Mozilla's Mike Shaver. This is the final word on the matter, and I'm satisfied that Mozilla did the best they could in the situation, even if some administrators in the field who got Firefox approved as the browser of choice in their company, and use some of the affected technologies will be very put out.

So, tough luck for MS.  Now most Firefox users will have a slightly lower opinion of them than they did before and this is another setback for WPF, its advocates and users.

Oh, and while all you Firefox on Linux users are welcome to have a little chuckle about it, you'd better check if you have Moonlight 2.0 (BETA) installed first.

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Windows Presentation Foundation has some serious issues

| Wednesday, October 14, 2009
All is not well in Microsoft's attempt to improve the Windows user experience for Vista, Windows 7 and subsequent releases.
I still don't have Silverlight installed on my home PC (No! It can't be so!) - I need to use it for collaborative work with Microsoft on my computers at the office, but I can't say it enriches my experience as a user.

If I was a .NET developer, dependent on MS for new SDKs and APIs, I'm not sure I'd be too happy to read this, but InfoQ are going around and saying it has some serious problems, the biggest hitter probably being the fact that it memory leaks like a big bucket full of memory with a massive hole in the bottom.

Other members of the blog-o-sphere spotted this issue before, so I'm not sure why it took so long for the InfoQ guys to sniff it out. The point is that they eventually did, and they even identified some major areas where it was leaking.

Read more about the basics of WPF, Microsoft's own WPF library, a site for its fanboys, and the Windows Presentation Foundation SDK.
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Slow Firefox Startup

| Saturday, October 10, 2009
Mozilla FirefoxImage via Wikipedia
It doesn't seem to matter what version of Firefox you're likely to still have, they are all slow to start up.
In this old post, I gushed about the greatly improved performance with Firefox 3.5, which I stand by.
However, the startup is really poor. Once it gets going, it's great, but there's very little noticeable improvement in startup times for FF 3.5 over FF 3 once you have a load of add-ons installed.
You can tweak as per this old post all you want, but the /Prefetch:n switch doesn't really do it.

As much as I hate preloaders, in the end, I had to capitulate.
The FirefoxPreloader, hosted on Sourceforge, really works and has cut down start times from 30 seconds to about 3 seconds. It loads during startup, and by the time your PC is up and running and you click on old Foxy, you'll be on your home page in no time.
I think this is well worth it if you browse for much more than 50% of your total time at the PC.

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Search for Software Vulnerabilities

| Saturday, October 03, 2009
While stumbling around the internets I came across this darkReading article titled:
"FBI: Your Social Networking 'Friend' Really Isn't In Trouble Overseas"

It was worth reading, but not really anything we didn't all know already. However, the links to the right of the article in the "BUGS Enterprise Vulnerabilities" section were very interesting, not least because most of the ones showing at the time happened to be WebSphere Application Server 6.1 related, which I work with day-to-day.

Clicking from there to the originating website brought me to this excellent resource, which until today, I didn't even know existed.
The vulnerability search is the main draw, as far as I can see, and I was able to find innumerous hits (well, not strictly true, since it says exactly how many hits you got from a query) for several applications I use, or hate.

This is no reflection on Apple, but I did a little search on "Apple Safari", and got 192 hits. That's not bad, and there were only 18 vulnerabilities in Safari listed here for the last 3 months.
What puts this into context is that a search on Apache Tomcat got just 63 hits (all time), with the last on listed on June 16th this year (so none in the last 3 months), while a search on "Windows_Vista" (you need to use _ to do a phrase search, not quotes as with most searches - or you can use the advanced search instead) produces 209 hits. This is lower than I expected, but when I checked a few I could see that some of them were compound threats, with links leading to KB articles and rollups.

If you have any software you'd like to check for holes, this is a good place to look. The vendor might be brilliant at keeping you informed and warned (like Drupal, for example, who send me vulnerability warnings by mail regularly), but they might also not be very forthcoming like, I don't know, Symantec for example.

Don't wait for the vendor to tell you about it, I guess that's what I'm trying to say.

Since it doesn't look like the National Vulnerability Database lists everything, I'd appreciate any links to other sites that provide a similar search facility (and don't say google.com either!).
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Brooker enters the forum of Mac OSX vs. Windows Vista...

| Tuesday, September 29, 2009
... 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

| Saturday, September 26, 2009
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.





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Help beat keyloggers on public computers

| Thursday, September 24, 2009
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