I spotted the first sign of trouble when I checked the Sciencetext stats this morning and noticed that aside from the homepage they had flatlined. A quick click on the current story spewed up a generic 404 error page, not even my custom 404 page. Something was amiss.

I have installed a couple of new Wordpress plugins this week and disabled some others, so I reverted those, but the 404 was still showing. Something else.

Next step, check the permalinks setting in Wordpress settings? Nope, that’s fine too. The Wordpress cache was empty, which only confirmed the stats, no one had visited any posts or pages overnight.

Last place to look, first place I should’ve checked – the site’s .htaccess file. This Apache configuration file controls how your site’s server responds to visitors. Somehow, and it wasn’t me, ‘onest, guv, the Wordpress specific chunk of code had gone AWOL. This is what you should have in the .htaccess in your Wordpress folder:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

It’s back in now, and all is well again. Phew.

Finally, I checked the Google cache and Google Webmaster Tools, nothing awry there, the search engine hadn’t spidered the site overnight, so won’t even be aware that anything untoward had happened.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

Normal Service Resumed

You attempt to open the PDF from an email in Thunderbird and Adobe Acrobat Reader (or Foxit, or whatever) tells you that the file is corrupt. However, you can open it perfectly well via the web interface for GMail. Somehow the IMAP synchronization process is causing the problem.

Well, after a little searching for GMail IMAP PDF problem, I found a comment on a post on a blog that provided the answer.

According to Luca the workaround involves opening Options in Thunderbird, going to the Advanced tab and then opening the program’s config editor.

Next step is to search for two variables on after the other:

mail.imap.fetch_by_chunks
mail.server.default.fetch_by_chunks

Double click each in turn and it will set them to false. This solution means that the attachments won’t be downloaded to Thunderbird in chunks and so will avoid the corruption that seems to occur when these settings are true.

GMail has great spam filtering, so it’s a wise choice to which to port your email from different accounts. With IMAP synchronization you have the tools available via your conventional email client when working from your main machine but don’t lose any emails when you need to check mail on the web when working away from your office for instance. Any messages you send, mail you receive, files you delete, whatever, will be synchronized next time you run your email client and with this tweak your attachments will be pure and true too.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

GMail, IMAP, and PDF Problem

Here’s the simplest way to get your old PC back to an as-good-as-new state (assuming hardware is okay) and that you have your operating system disk:

• Backup externally your data files (photos, images,documents, music, video files)
• Fully reformat the hard drive
• Reinstall the operating system
• Reinstall only essential programs
• Restore your data files
• Optionally make an external image of your freshened up hard drive

Your mileage may vary, I’ve always found it to stick a rocket up even the slowest seeming PC. One additional tip, rather than installing the likes of Thunderbird and Microsoft Office, Photoshop etc, consider using cloud applications such as Google suite (for docs and email).

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

Computer Speed Tip

At around the same time, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) named its “dirty dozen” spams and scams:

• Business Opportunities – Pyramid, Multi-Level Marketing (MLM), or identity theft scams
• Bulk E-mail – Offers to sell and resell lists of e-mail accounts
• Chain Letters – Requests to send $1 to the five names on the list or else!
• Work-at-Home Schemes – Envelope stuffing, pen assembly, jewellery construction
• Health and Diet Scams – Pills, herbals, pharmacy and other drug misrepresentations
• Effortless Income – Get-rich-quick schemes
• Free Goods and Services – Just another MLM or Ponzi scheme
• Investment Opportunities – Crazy rates of return, offshore accounts, precious metals, penny stocks
• Cable/Satellite Descramblers – The kits generally don’t work, and use of them is illegal
• Guaranteed Loans – Generally unhelpful lists of uninterested lenders
• Credit Repair – Erases or cleans your credit usually in conjunction with a loan
• Vacation Promotions – ‘You Won’ a free vacation in Hawaii, with only a small
  fee to claim your prize.

Today my spam box is stuffed almost full thanks to a few days out at the World Conference of Science Journalists in London, but a quick scan of the contents reveals at least a score of examples of each of the dirty dozen and a few more, while the comment spam filtered out by Akismet here on Sciencetext hoards just as many similarly ludicrous and pointless entries.

You might have the impression that it’s sexual spam that would head the dirty dozen in terms of actual spam email numbers. But, the tens of billions of spams sent every day break down approximately as follows:

• Health 54.4%
• Finance 24.6%
• Pornography 5.4%
• Direct products 4.6%
• Gambling 0.4%
• Scams 0.2%
• Other 10.4%

So, approximately three quarters of spam is for health and financial products. Superficially, one might imagine that companies selling such products would be the most unscrupulous and you’d be right given the figures. The pornographers and gamblers account for very few of all those billions of spam messages, and the scammers even fewer.

Adnan Omar of Southern University at New Orleans, Khurrum Bhutta of Ohio University, and Gwénola Lepeu of Nicholls State University, Louisiana, have reviewed the state of play regarding spam. They suggest that despite the best efforts of legislators and email providers, spam “is a significant and growing problem for all web [sic] users”. It slows internet traffic and is costly and time-consuming to deal with.

I must confess that these days I am not particularly troubled by spam. I get a lot. However, Google Mail’s filtering seems to send it to the spam folder with little trouble. I only occasionally scan a couple of pages on a random basis to check for false positives (genuine messages mislabeled as spam) as they are now very rare.

I figure that if a correspondent receives no response to an important email, they will either call me or send a chaser email that would more likely not be trapped. If the email is not important, then I don’t need to see it in the first place, surely?

Bhutta and colleagues suggest that tighter legislation, an electronic postal fees for bulk mailing, and various other measures will ultimately stop spam. Well, legislation so far has had almost no impact. Electronic postal fees will be untenable and will fail miserably in the context of countries that do not participate and in the context of zombie bot-nets composed of compromised computers. While spammers, like their cousins the malware writers, will always jump one step ahead of technological solutions. Indeed, despite the take down of one of the biggest spam relays by the FTC, there are already signs of major recovery in spam rates according to Google and Security Fix reports.

Instead of trying to deal with spam using draconian measures that will only stifle the creativity of legitimate users, we simply have to learn to live with spam, like we have learned to live with household dust. Install filters, by all means, but buy a new broom too and spring clean your inbox on a regular basis and you will feel cleansed.

Adnan Omar, M. Khurrum S. Bhutta, & Gwénola Lepeu (2009). Managing spam: a global challenge Int. J. Management Practice, 3 (4), 405-416

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

A Fresh Approach to Spam

But, enough from me, watch the video and see Tidy Favorites in action. If you fancy winning a free license for the full version, subscribe to the Sciencetext Tech Talk ezine and drop me a line from the email with which you subscribed and I’ll enter you in the draw to win one of a bunch of free licenses.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

Tidy Favorites

rundll32.exe is an internal program used by Windows to run yet other internal programs known as DLLs (dynamic link libraries) which are needed by the operating system and your programs (Word, Outlook, Internet Explorer, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, or whatever to function). It loads up the DLL into memory and then triggers specific functions from the DLL module.

To see what else is running on your machine and what programs are using them you might like to try Sysinternal’s Process Explorer, which was recently acquired by Micro$oft and is available for free download here.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

What is rundll32.exe

Another cleaning tool I heard about years ago, but had long since forgotten goes by the obvious name of Windows Clean Up! Running this tool not longer after a CCleaner session revealed I had 9005 files of a temporary nature hogging half a gigabyte of disk space.

Needless to say, I feel much better having swept those out. Although with a fairly new 250 gigabyte hard drive in my laptop, that half a gig is just a fraction of the available space, but clearing out unwanted files means you can run a more efficient machine as there are less fragments for other spring-cleaning tools such as defraggler to struggle with.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

Spring Clean Your PC

But, today, is one of those days, so instead of an essay here’s a list of the top ten summer successes as measured by visitors reaching the site from Sciencetext short URLs, which are used on social media sites, such as Twitter:

1. Riding the Google Wave
2. Shorten Your URLs
3. Publish Your Blog on Kindle
4. China Blocks Twitter
5. Geek Chart
6. Google Wave Singularity University
7. Metallica, Napster, and Marx
8. Bing Is Not Google
9. Who Owns Your Avatar?
10. 10 Security Problems and 10 Security Solutions

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

Summer Successes

Firefox 3.5 does seem to perform better than previous versions and didn’t take long to start up from a cold start. When I saved the draft of this page it seemed to refresh within a split second, whereas on 3.1, I’d normally wait several seconds before I could carry on writing or editing in Wordpress. That’s a much appreciated boost for me.

Mozilla says improvements are partly due to its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. They are also due to improvements in the Gecko layout engine, which include speculative parsing for faster content rendering. Firefox has also improved security and privacy features, including the now obligatory “Private Browsing Mode,” (equivalent to Chrome’s Incognito tab).

“Geo” is the current buzz word of the day and Firefox now has the ability to provide location aware browsing using web standards for geolocation. Additionally, it supports new web technologies such as HTML5 video and audio elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms, for those interested in the technical aspects.

If your web browser is mission critical, don’t download it just yet, this is a beta, well officially it’s a release candidate, which is like the final, final beta. Either way, before you install, make sure you’ve backed up your favorites, bookmarks, settings etc.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

New in Firefox 3.5

Is this yet another attempt by Google to destabilize Microsoft’s so-called “decision engine” Bing and Wolfram Alpha’s information calculator? Bing is fast grabbing market share from the big G. Apparently, a single percent of market share in search is worth a $1 billion, so every % gained by MS is a significant loss to Google. The announcement of Google Wave probably rebutted some of Microsoft’s efforts and even Opera with the recently announced Opera Unite server within a browser system seems part of the move towards an advanced form of the web.

However, don’t go flipping when you discover you cannot login to the Google News Flipper just yet, it’s still under lock and key ad accessible only internally for the privileged few in the Googleplex. Any day now.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tips and Tricks

Google Flipper