CompuDave

Suriously

2012-03-06T10:31:00.001-08:00

A solution in need of a problem...

Leap Day - What Leap Day?

2012-03-02T09:23:00.002-08:00

Just in case you were thinking of going to 'Cloud Computing'

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2156502/microsoft-blames-azure-cloud-computing-outage-leap

That could be the most rank amateur programming error...

Good News For HP

2012-02-16T09:31:00.000-08:00

I've long been a fan of HP (and hated some of their products and policies as well) but I'm gratified to hear Ms Whitman is able to see where they need to go. Hopefully this will undo the mess that started way back with Princess Carly.

HP CHIEF Meg Whitman has revealed her intentions to establish WebOS as a credible competitor to Apple's IOS and Google's Android, and reassert the firm as an innovator through doubling its R&D spend.

At HP's Global Partner Conference in Las Vegas today, Meg Whitman gave a rallying cry to her staff, customers and partners, setting out clear and decisive plans for every aspect of the company.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
A major part of the strategy is to refocus the firm on invention and innovation. Whitman said that HP Labs had been underutilised over the past few years, and needs to become more focused on business and sales.

"I want to get them from incredible idea to commercialisation faster," she said. "We're doubling down on our R&D spend in every division in this company."

Whitman dropped several less than subtle hints about her thoughts on previous management at the firm.

"We have to do a better job of organic innovation," she said. "That's the way we should be able to invest, and that's how we will."

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2152853/hp-plans-fight-apple-android-webos

(and she would have been a better governor then the one we have now)

Over A Year!

2012-02-14T10:59:00.000-08:00

Wow. What was I thinking. Time to get back in the saddle. I think if I commit myself to once a week I can post something meaningful.

Right now includes setting up a large MySQL database. Using HeidiSQL.

http://www.heidisql.com/

Table defines are super easy. Data imports from CSV files are good with the exception that if it chokes on a bad data field the whole process stops. If you're loading 40k records that can be a pain to go back and fix the bad data to get a successful load. I need to find the work around.

The Culprit Is...

2011-01-25T07:28:00.000-08:00

I've had some serious slowdowns occurring on my computer and had one hell of a time trying to figure it out. I would bring up the task manager (ctl/alt/del) and sort the processes by CPU time with highest on top (click the cpu column heading twice). It became obvious the FireFox was really eating up 100% of the cycles.

From blogspot

Here you can see what happened as soon as I closed FireFox. Some web searching provided nothing useful except to show several people have had this problem. I disabled some of my addons I really didn't need. Each time I started FF the problem came back. I tried starting FF in safe mode but it still happened.

Now I was allowing all my tabs to be restored each time. I had roughly twenty open. I left task manager up and started closing tabs slowly, watching the CPU usage. Turns out it was one site, SFGate. I had left a story open I was interested in. Doesn't matter what I do, anytime I have a SFGate page open it happens. Now I have some ad blockers and no script installed but it seems that might not be it. After all it still happens when I tried safe mode which disables all blockers.

I also tried Chrome, IE8 and Opera with the SFGate home page. Each showed an initial sharp spike in task manager but then settled down. Opera showed a somewhat higher usage with up and down spiking at around 20-25%.

Interesting and I'll still keep using FF as my default browser since I like it and am used to it. It should be interesting if I find any other pages with this happening. The underlying cause remains a mystery.

Fighting the TDL3 Hijack

2010-12-28T20:29:00.000-08:00

TDL3 rootkit. A very hard one to identify. I've had two different computers at completely different locations experience this. The big clue is redirection of search results. Even Google on FireFox. You get the results but if you try to link it redirects.

I have no clue as to the vector. AVG, Hijack This, Housecall and Malwarebytes all failed to find it. Combofix could see it but failed to fix it. Kasperskey has a specific cleanup tool that did the job.

Football, Guns, Beer & Rednecks

2009-12-11T08:13:00.000-08:00

Even for me this is a little too stupid. A $3600 TV.

CrossLoop Badge

2009-03-18T14:57:00.001-07:00

You Agree To...

2009-03-16T18:58:00.001-07:00

Microsoft Retail Stores

2009-02-13T13:29:00.000-08:00

Microsoft to open retail stores.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/982/
1050982/microsoft-plans-retail-adventure

Stupid Flanders.

Preinstalled Software

2008-08-29T11:14:00.001-07:00

Consumer grade computer often come so loaded with unneeded and use trial software it has developed it's own moniker - crapware. One of the reasons I steer people towards business class machine is they have far less preinstalls; with the exception of trial versions of MS office. But why would you buy that when you can get Open Office for free?

All aside this article explains that some manufacturers are rethinking the whole concept. They should.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/
news/2008/08/28/pc-makers-rethink-preloaded

PC BOX BUILDERS are thinking of getting rid of the tradition of stuffing your new PC or laptop with trial software that you don’t really want anyway.

The reason is that some retailers, such as Best Buy, are making a small fortune removing the software and charging punters for the privilege.

According to the New York Times software companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars to PC makers like Hewlett-Packard to install their photo tools, financial programs, virus killers and other products, usually with some tie-in to a paid service or upgrade.

PC makers have come to lean on this cash as profit margins become thinner than a French catwalk model who has skipped eating for a month, fainted and fallen under a steam roller.

Circuit City and other US chains also report that users are miffed at the amount digital infomercials which are being packed onto the PC.

Always the end user advocate, my advice still stands. Look for business models to buy. You'll probably have to go on-line to do so.

Ink & Toner Ripoff

2008-08-22T14:21:00.000-07:00

Well really, does this come as a surprise?

http://www.slate.com/id/2198316/

I bought a cheap laser printer a couple years ago, and for a while, it worked perfectly. The printer, a Brother HL-2040, was fast, quiet, and produced sheet after sheet of top-quality prints—until one day last year, when it suddenly stopped working. I consulted the user manual and discovered that the printer thought its toner cartridge was empty. It refused to print a thing until I replaced the cartridge. But I'm a toner miser: For as long as I've been using laser printers, it's been my policy to switch to a new cartridge at the last possible moment, when my printouts get as faint as archival copies of the Declaration of Independence. But my printer's pages hadn't been fading at all. Did it really need new toner—or was my printer lying to me?
.....
OppressedPrinterUser found that covering the sensor with a small piece of dark electrical tape tricked the printer into thinking he'd installed a new cartridge. I followed his instructions, and my printer began to work. At least eight months have passed. I've printed hundreds of pages since, and the text still hasn't begun to fade. On FixYourOwnPrinter.com, many Brother owners have written in to thank OppressedPrinterUser for his hack. One guy says that after covering the sensor, he printed 1,800 more pages before his toner finally ran out.

Surprise!

Eye Candy

2008-07-30T11:10:00.000-07:00

So what's wrong with eye-candy?. In my last post I mentioned that Vista was offering mostly eye-candy as opposed to real features. Don't get me wrong, I like cool looking applications just as much as anyone else. But do you need Vista for that? You could of course get a Mac, they're all about eye-candy anyway. Not just their software but their general styling as well, but you do pay for it.

What about dressing up XP, that is easy enough to do also. Two things I use and really like. First an old one, the Google Desktop. Want all those gizmos on your screen along with that slick glassy look and a great search, then this does just that. Works great on my wide screen laptop because frankly I don't care for most applications to run that wide. Ever tried following small print all the way across a 17" wide screen? I just keep my application in a more normal aspect and let GD fill the right 2" of my screen. Well I'm a sucker for a lot of Google ware as it is. Gmail, Google Docs, Blogger and Picasa - both the program and the on-line photo sharing.

That brings me to my latest little piece of eye-candy. Pic Lens as a FireFox addon.
Those iphone commercials where they glide through pictures. Go there and check it out.
http://www.piclens.com/

Such a cool interface for Picasa on-line.

I said two items but I offer one honorable mention. Opera. The latest version sports a new look if nothing else. And it just works. Excellent browser that still has a really nice feature of fit-to-width view. The look is by default a very pleasing and glassy modern black and dark red that I truly like.
opera.com

Opera and FireFox are both skinable and there are quite a few offerings, or do your own is always an option (yeah in my free time).

What's Wrong With Vista

2008-07-24T15:52:00.000-07:00

Microsoft is trying hard to polish up Vista's image.

Spurred by an e-mail from someone deep in the marketing ranks, Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista.

"Oh wow," said one user, eliciting exactly the exclamation that Microsoft had hoped to garner when it first released the operating system more than 18 months ago. Instead, the operating system got mixed reviews and criticisms for its lack of compatibility and other headaches.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-9998336-56.html?tag=nl.e703

At this point many of the annoying bugs that first appeared in Vista are gone. This still misses the point. What's wrong with Vista is what isn't wrong with XP. XP works pretty well. Vista offers mostly eye-candy and slower operation due to that. From a business user and sys admin's viewpoint there is no there there. Top that with the need for an outlay of money and a learning curve for the way some old features now have new names and locations and try to figure out the motivation.

I can't.

Working Without a Script

2008-05-08T15:05:00.000-07:00

Because of the SQL attack occurring on webpages I decided to retry using Firefox with the NoScript addon installed.

Now I really don't feel too vulnerable to begin with. I use Firefox almost exclusively and I have Zone Alarm Antivirus running as well. I do a lot of surfing and I never get hit, but I don't click on unknowns either. I had used the NoScript addon before but had stopped. I decided a revisit was in order.

First and foremost you will find it annoying at best. Things like youtube videos won't even show the preview shot. Blogger won't work right with it but you can set temporary or even permanent permissions. After a while you will have given NoScript permanent permission for many of the sites you visit regularly and it won't seem so bad.

On the plus side it also stops a lot of advertisements and much to my joy those damn moving ones that way too many of my favorite reads have started using. The LA Times crossword get permission of course.

Now most users won't be able tolerate it. BUT IT IS SAFER! If you've been infected with a virus or adware trojan you might well be aware of how difficult it can be to clean up. I know I do plenty of disinfections for others (thank you). I suggest you might just want to try NoScipt and see for yourself.

Gmail & Imap

2008-04-29T13:23:00.000-07:00

What do you use when accessing email from multiple computers? For most people that's not really a problem nor has it ever been for myself. I have several email addresses and three different computers I use regularly to read it. Most of my email addresses are set to forward into my long standing earthlink account. From there I pickup up my mail using Thunderbird on one of two desktops or my laptop. The two desktops are set to read the mail but leave the messages on the server and the laptop removes the messages when it reads them. All computers check for mail every ten minutes and the desktops automatically download the messages. The laptop only notifies me of mail and I have to click get mail to force the download and removal from earthlink servers. It actually works pretty darn well and I rarely have to bother with any kind of synchronizing. Every great once in awhile I download something to the laptop before it gets picked up by the desktops but I know to watch for that.

Now I know some people think their world revolves around email. Pretty foolish really. If you know something is important best to get on the phone and have a little back and forth and know things are being taken care of. But what really are the choices if you need multiple access?

Most isps provide only POP mail servers and webmail. POP works fine most of the time but not for multiple access if you need to stay synced. Webmail isn't bad but once again there is really no way to sync up things like mail you send from the web interface (well you can cc to yourself but then your sent is really now a copy in your inbox).

So what are the choices? You can get synchronizing software. You could set up your own mail servers (come on, are you really big enough to justify that?). You might have an isp that provides imap instead of pop mail servers(rare). You might use gmail that is free and provides imap service. Now without going into details on the works of an imap mail server and client lets just make the point that it is a service designed for multiple access. Google makes it trivially easy to set a gmail account to imap and it's trivially easy to setup in a client like Thunderbird. As I explained above I not sure I have a need for it, so just for fun and experience I've changed my gmail to imap and will be playing with it. So far looks good.

MS OOXML

2008-04-22T15:58:00.000-07:00

Foisted on their on petard.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/22/
office_2007_oxml_fails_test/

Microsoft's Office 2007 Word documents do not conform to the newly-approved Open XML (OXML) international standard.

Alex Brown, who heads up the group responsible for maintaining the OXML standard at the International Standardisation Organisation (ISO), revealed the less-than-pretty findings in a blog post late last week.
.....
Microsoft had tried to fast-track OOXML via Ecma International, the group which originally rubber-stamped the format. However, a vote of the draft failed to gain sufficient approval last September.

The Ecma-approved version of OOXML conformed to Office 2007 documents, but, following the changes made at the BRM, the wheels appear to have fallen off.

Oh yeah.

Email 101

2008-03-14T08:59:00.000-07:00

Had one of those fun little problems yesterday. User said that someone was sending emails to them but they were not receiving them. Question one - are they getting bounce backs? No. Are they sending them to the right address? Yes. What about the catchall account? What is that?

Okay there are two ways to set up email domains to take care of misaddressed email. Bounce back or catchall. In both cases we're assuming the domain is right just not the actual recipient. In bounce back the sender will get a return. In catchall the domain administrator designates an account to be the catchall and all mail that can't be identified to an individual gets sent there. Turns out the person with the catchall account wasn't there that day and no one had checked that email yet because "They were busy".

I was on site and looked and there they were in the catchall. This person (the receiver) has one of those name with ei in it that people confuse a lot. Swears they told the sender the right spelling more than once. You know a good way to resolve issues like this is for the recipient to send an email to the sender to get the correct address in their hands. The sender then needs to update their address book from that email. Just looking can be hard on easily misspelled names.

I was on the phone with the sender and trying to be helpful and pointed out the spelling mistake. Maybe they felt a little embarrassed over such a simple solution. Look we all make simple mistakes, myself included. I never try to make people feel foolish in spite the temptations at times but now they started making this worse. This company has two domain names, one they use for the public and one they use for emails and private web services. There was a good reason this happened but thats not the point. This person somehow had come across both, probably from reading the email header somewhere. They asked me which one they should send to (same user name, different domain). I told them they should use the main domain name but it didn't really matter as the one forwarded to the other. They ask again. Hmmmmmm....... this is a client of the company don't offend them. I simply say, "Use the main domain name". They insist on sending a test to each domain name and have a reply sent back. Let them have their way and hopefully they are happy.

Of course I hope you get the real point of the story. The easiest solution is usually to try to send mail back to the sender. In this case the sender kept using the address in their contacts and not seeing the misspelling. Updating from a received email would have been a better choice.

Home Theater

2008-01-29T15:50:00.001-08:00

A little different from my usual subjects but just in case a 50 inch TV and surround sound isn't enough....

http://theater.stevejenkins.com/gallery/complete/

be sure to check out the whole building phase.

Nine Years Ago - The Great Bakersfield Snow

2008-01-24T18:57:00.000-08:00

Jan 25,1999

Here's the link
http://compudave.com/snow/sfindex.htm

Fun

2008-01-16T10:31:00.000-08:00

Dominos With 1500 Hard Drives - Watch more free videos

And all I did with mine is erase them and send them off to recycling.

The Fat Lady Sings

2007-12-20T08:53:00.000-08:00

Most of what I do involves small businesses, but I sometimes do work for individuals so the other day when a retired fellow I'd helped before called I went over to his house. He has an older Dell computer which he had some sort of trouble with. He had taken it to CompUSA and after a month they managed to wipe out his installation of XP Home and reinstall Win 98 SP2. He was unable to find the product code for his win XP update even though he had the cd. He was forced to go back to the Win 98 that came with the computer.

They told him they had been bought out and their regular techs had left. He wasn't aware CompUSA was going out of business.
(They are, they were sold out to a liquidation firm, not to some one who is going to run it. In a way I will miss them as they were often a ready source for hardware but on the other hand their help was lousy, and their techs usually incompetent.)

Back to the story. His machine had a usb keyboard and mouse. Win 98 will usually not recognize those until you install drivers but try to install drivers without a keyboard and mouse. A quick hookup of some usb to standard adapters (which I carry in my laptop case), got us started, drivers installed and Bob's your uncle.

Now go to windows update and run the critical updates. So far so good. Now he uses Hotmail for his email and accesses through the IE browser. We head over there and signin but when we get to the inbox it renders completely out of wack and is unreadable. Seeeeesh! what now?

We just want to get this done and let him read his emails before he heads out for the holidays. First I think Firefox but since Hotmail is an MS site I think again and decide on Opera.

Quick download and install. Signin to Hoptmail and we're off. Damn I'm good some days.
If you've never tried Opera let me tell you ist pretty nice. Fast, has tabbed browsing and my favorite that even Firefox doesn't have, fit to screen. Ever have a page that wanders way off to the right and you have to keep scrolling side to side? When I hit those I just fire up Opera and away I go.

Opera web browser. Recommended.
http://www.opera.com/

Automatic Updates & IE7

2007-11-30T09:45:00.000-08:00

Well it appears Microsoft automatic updates is again pushing IE7 on to some systems. I Usually set updates to download but ask before installing. Now IE7 is an improvement over previous versions but here is the ironic part. It won't run many web applications written with Microsoft active x and .net. Yes, I've seen it more than once. The user then needs to roll back to IE 6.

First go to the control panel and use ad/remove programs. Remove IE7. Second if you have automatic updates on you may see the yellow shield in your system tray. Click it and bring up the dialog and then choose custom install. When that opens showing the IE 7 update uncheck the box then proceed. You should get a message that the update was not installed and in that window there is a box to check which says never prompt me for this again. Check that and close. Hopefully this will stop any attempts by Windows update to reinstall IE7.

Better choices, use Firefox whenever possible. For developers quit using Microsoft tools that lock your users to IE. The problem is obvious when their own updates cause your application to fail and this has been going on for almost two years. Java is a far better developer choice.

The $200 PC

2007-11-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

It starts today. I would never recommend for businesses but for a second home unit - why not?

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/
news/2007/11/01/via-powered-199-pc-tips-wal

WAL-MART has begun offering a $199 Linux PC powered by VIA's C7-D Processor.

The Everex TC2502 Green gPC comes with 512MB of DDR2 system memory and a 80GB hard disk.

It runs gOS operating system, which is based on Ubuntu 7.10, and, apparently, sports a friendly green front end.

Now I'm no fan of shopping at Wally World but I'll do it on a rare occasion. Now I have lots of old PC's to play with and have put Linux OS on more than one. Ubuntu is a good choice for most user.

What's Going on Behind Your Back

2007-09-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

Well I've been bad. No post long time.

When does off not mean off? Well if you own an iPhone.
(This article fails to point out the phones were turned off and never used but they still do email downloads.)
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/
4800-ATT-Wireless-Bill-87411?nocomment=1

Back in July, a man was shocked to see that he'd received a $3,000 iPhone bill after heading overseas and getting nailed by the AT&T Wireless "pay-per-byte" data plan. He managed to get a full refund from AT&T after complaining via the blog Boing Boing. The user brought attention to the fact that AT&T Blackberry users are able to sign up for a $70 unlimited international plan, but iPhone users are not.

Apparently, he wasn't the only one not paying attention to the billing plan he signed on for. Another family is complaining they were billed $4,800 by AT&T after taking their three iPhones on an international cruise.
"Levy and his daughter each have three e-mail accounts on their iPhones, and they were each billed more than $1,900. His wife's phone had one e-mail account, and her bill hit $890. One connection alone ran $223. Levy said he has complained all the way to office of AT&T's president."
AT&T iPhone users users who travel Outside the U.S. pay $24.99 for 20 megabytes. In some countries, users can pay between $5 to $20 per megabyte for data.

And now Microsoft does updates even when your settings say not to.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=774

Microsoft Corp. has started updating files on computers running Windows XP and Vista, even when users have explicitly disabled the operating systems’ automatic update feature, researchers said today.

Scott Dunn, an editor at the “Windows Secrets” newsletter, said that nine files in XP and Vista — but not the same files in each operating system — have been changed by Windows Update, the Microsoft update mechanism, without displaying the usual notification or permission dialog box. The files, said Dunn, are related to the XP and Vista versions of Windows Update (WU) itself.