Thread 1
Thread 2

After some testing on my own to see what I could do to fix the problem I have come to the conclusion that there is some interference from the bluetooth connection and my Airport connection. After disabling my airport and using the wired connection for hours I have had no problems.

Apple, please get this issue resolved soon. I don’t like being all tangled up in wires.

UPDATE: Just wanted to give everyone an update on how I fixed the issue. I found that I have a new wireless network in my area now, which I believe was set to the same channel as my router. I went into my router settings and changed my wireless channel from 6 to 9 and applied the change. I haven’t had a problem since. Apple suggested that I buy a Airport basestation because it supports more then the 2.4GHz spectrum. This would also fix my problem, but for $200.

General Misconceptions

For use to learn how to spot a liar, we must learn that almost anything you have learned about spotting a liar is… well sorry to say it… but wrong.

1. I was with a group of friends one night showing off the fact that I could spot a liar, and decided to demonstrate. I asked one of my friends to volunteer and had them sit down next to me. I then told the group that I was going to ask her (my volunteer was a female) ten questions, and that she was only allowed to lie on one question of her choosing. I told her that I wanted her to try to not give away on which occasion she had lied. I proceeded to ask her questions about her day, and after all ten questions I asked my group of friends what she had done differently on the time she lied (still not knowing which time she lied). One of my friends suggested that she had not kept eye-contact when she lied. The rest of the group then agreed that this must be true, and could swear that they had seen her looking at me on every question except for one. I then explained to my friends that they were wrong. The reality was that she looked at me when she lied. The rest of the time she was looking around gathering her thoughts on how to ask the question. Yet, all my friends remembered the exact opposite, all because of their expectation.
2. The next misconception is ludicrously to simplistic. The claim that when someone looks up and to the right, and instead of the left when the person inventing a mental image rather then genuinely recalling one, is one of the most absurd things I have ever heard. There is no evidence behind this claim, likewise there is no way to properly test this theory either.

The Ways of Spotting Lies

There are only three ways to spot deceit: by looking at non-verbal language, verbal language, and by measuring small physiological responses such as increases in blood-pressure, heart-rate and sweating of the palms. This third option is left to the polygraph, which is often mistakenly called a lie detector. It isn’t: it merely measures these small changes, which could of course be produced by a nervous or frustrated suspect for any number of perfectly innocent reasons. The polygraph reading must therefore be combined with skills of the examiner in handling the interviewee and interpreting the reading before any conclusion can be reached as to whether the subject is lying. However, this necessarily subjective interpretation, and other procedural criticisms which are often aired, make the accuracy of a polygraph test a matter of great debate. Researchers have tested to see whether the polygraph is as effective as its defenders claim. In one undercover test, they had four polygraphers on four different days each test four employees of a company to see which of them had stolen a valuable camera. However, each polygrapher was told prior to the test that one employee was under particular suspicion (a different employee was used every time). The idea was to see whether or not this piece of information would sway the results of the polygraph test. In fact, no camera had been stolen and all the examined subjects were telling the truth in denying the theft. Yet each time, the polygrapher in question confidently identified the ‘suspected’ employee as the guilty party.

Now that I have gotten my raft out about the accuracy of the polygrapher, the techniques left for the rest of us to identify lies correspond to the first two methods: non-verbal and verbal language. In other words, our body language and the way we speak. We will have a look at both here. Within these two areas, it is worth being in mind that there are three processes which a person might experience when lying. Knowing these processes will help you look for signs of one or more of them leaking out into the person’s words or behavior. The three processes to bear in mind are as follows:

1. Emotional Processes.
2. Content Complexity Processes.
3. Controlling Processes.

Emotional Processes refers to the emotions which can leak out during deception. The most common emotions experienced by a liar are guilt, fear and excitement. I may feel guilty about lying; I might fear the consequences of my lie if, for example, the stakes are high; I might be excited about lying, especially if there are other people around who know the truth and might be amused by my bold lie. This last emotion is referred to as ‘duping delight’.

Content Complexity Processes com from the fact that lying can be cognitively quite an involved task: for example, it will often become more difficult to maintain a convincing lie if you are questioned more and more on the subject in question. Equally if we are taken by surprise, it is often quite difficult to lie. The result is that you have to think rapidly or just more than normal, and this fact might well leak out in your behavior.

Controlling Processes are those which we carry out to hide the signs which we think might give away our lie. In other words, we try and behave normally, and this will usually involve unnatural or incongruent behavior which can be spotted.

I feel that the key to reading body language is to understand that you are looking for key changes, not simple, specific ‘tells’ that mean a certain thing. So in order to be able to effectively read a person, or spot a lie, you must first establish what his ‘normal’ behavior is, in order to appreciate any deviance from it.

Rapport is one of the most important features or characteristics of unconscious human interaction. It is commonality of perspective, being in “sync”, being on the same “wavelength” as the person with whom you are talking. -Wikipedia

For those of you who are still lost on the subject of rapport let me have you think back. Has there ever been a time that you have been up late one night talking to a friend, one of you moves from a chair or couch to the floor, and a short while after, the other does the same? We have all experienced (but have never told anyone) of knowing when another person is about to get up and leave, or say… look over at you in from the car next to you. These are some examples of the mind being in a state of unconscious ‘rapport’. You will mirror each other’s body language and so on without realizing it. Rapport by no means only connected to body position, people in a state of rapport will breathe at the same rate, adopt each other’s facial expressions, blink at the same rate, and use the same language.

The question that arises, “Is it really that simple? Simply mirror everything the other person does?” The answer is no, by mirroring exactly what the other person does will more less trigger an alarm for the other person, and have the opposite effect of rapport.

The Benefits

Now, for those of you out there thinking, “Well… gee… I could use this to pick up women!” Well…. yes… but no. Knowing how to create a state of rapport will help you to connect with an individual, but not necessarily have them fall for you. The benefits of rapport is exactly what you have already experienced in your times of rapport. The sense of connecting with an individual, and creating that feeling of connection. If you’re clever enough to find the balance that is needed you will find this very helpful tool for you.

Creating Rapport

Let’s imagine you are sat at a table and wish to have someone near you, or at an adjoining table, take an interest in you. The game is to mirror the person subtly, constantly and peripherally, so that she (we’ll use the feminine pronoun, but it need not be part of a seduction) finds herself feeling a connection with you and not knowing why. You are not talking to her or even looking at her; you can only watch her out of the corner of your eye. This allows you to be quite bold at times. If at a party, take a sip of your drink every time she drinks from her glass. Mirror her position as much as you can: lean back in your chair when she does, shift when she shifts. Sometimes an exact copy might be too obvious. So if, for example, you see her drumming her fingers, you might swing your hand instead in a natural gesture. Do whatever you can get away with. You might be involved in a conversation with a third party at the same time (this poor person really won’t feel much of a connection with you at all). Just let your body move and react in the same rhythm as her. See it as a dance.

After a while you can begin to test to see if the rapport is working. You take the lead now. So take a drink , and see if she copies you. It’s not magic, and by far not difficult; you are just sending out signals of sameness in a situation where people are grateful for that kind of thing. It can make you oddly attractive, but it is by no means some grotesque ‘instant seduction’ tool.

Summary

If you have preformed fluidly and pitched everything just right, you will find the other person in question comes over to make converstation with you later, and feels you’re ‘their sort of person’. This also teaches you to pay attention to the non-verbal language communication by another person, which is a worthwhile skill if you are then able to react sensitively to it.

Most of the time it can be a nasty little bugger to get removed, and most anti-virus and anti-spyware software doesn’t remove or fix the problem. That is because the bug likes to hide using different techniques.

So today I wanted to share all the types of explorer.exe killers I have found, and how I fix the problem.

Before we begin:

I just want to say before I get started on letting you know how to fix this problem, is the trick to fixing this issue, has more to do with identifying which technique the bug is using, or if it even a bug at all. Explorer.exe can also start to do the same thing if an update didn’t take correctly. So, make sure that it wasn’t an update that killed off Explorer.exe first before assuming it’s a bug. If you think it was an update problem, I suggest reading this article.

The Killer Driver:

The first type of explorer.exe killer I find is simply a bug that installs a startup driver that kills that restarts the explorer.exe process any time it starts up. It is one of the easiest to spot, and is easy to fix. The first process is to find what drivers are being loaded, and which one it is that it is. What I recommend to do is to start up into safe mode (Reboot, hold F8, select Safe Mode). The reason we want to startup into safe mode is safe mode only starts the operating system with the minimum startup items, services, and drivers. So if we indeed do have a startup driver that is causing the issue, we should be able to login into Safe Mode and not have any explorer.exe problems.

First thing is to optimize the machine, so lets have you startup Msconfig. Go to Start > Run > Type in “msconfig” and hit enter.

In the window that appears choose the startup tab, and choose to disable all. Now go over the the “services” tab, and check the box to hide all non-microsoft services. Click “Apply” and hit “Ok”.

What we have done is cleaned out your startup and services, so if by chance the bug is one of those, we have stopped it from starting up, typically it isn’t going to do the trick, but will cover all our bases.

Now lets download a quick tool. Download link. This tool will allow us to see what drivers are currently loaded in Windows.

Reboot your system into Normal mode and run the program. Scroll through the list of drivers that are loaded, and see if you find any with any description or file type that is blank. If a driver has blank information, it may be the file we are looking for. Once you have found one, do a search for it, and delete the .sys file.

The .DLL File:

The majority of the time, this problem comes from a .DLL file. I would say about 90% of the machines I have worked on with this problem comes from a bad .dll file in hidden in the Windows or System32 directory. The technique I use to find the file we want to look for is a simple process as long as you have the right tools. First, we need a tool to help us watch system processes.

Go ahead and download Process Explorer. Process Explorer will allow you to watch system processes, and see what files, directories, etc they are calling for.

Once you have that up and running, make sure that you have the program running when explorer.exe is currently crashing and restarting. What you want to do is watch Process Explorer for the explorer.exe startup, and see if any other processes start up along side of it.

Typically what I see is explorer.exe starts up, then you have x process open up, and explorer.exe quits, and then x process quits. When x process starts up we want to hurry and take a look at what .dll files it is calling for. Once you have that info, go to the location of the file while being booted into a Live CD. and change the x.dll file to x.dll.bak. This way, if by changing the file messes up your system, you can go back and change it back to x.dll.

On the other hand, if it fixes the problem, you can go in and completely remove the file all together.

I know I didn’t get really to technical here and I apologize. If you have any questions or other techniques please leave a comment.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors.

read more | digg story

First, here’s a potentially easier way to share the screens of other Macs on your network. First, realize that the screen sharing feature is just an application. It resides in /System/Library/CoreServices, under the tricky name of Screen Sharing. Find it now, and drag it onto your Dock, or into your sidebar, or your toolbar—whichever you prefer for quick launch access.

Now you can launch Screen Sharing directly from the Finder, without first selecting a machine in the SHARED section of the sidebar. When you do, a dialog box appears onscreen, asking for the remote machine’s address. Great, you’re thinking, now I have to type in a machine’s IP address to connect to it? This is progress? No, not yet it’s not. Quit Screen Sharing if you launched it, switch to Terminal, and copy and paste this line:

defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing ShowBonjourBrowser_Debug 1

Now launch Screen Sharing again, and revel in the new Bonjour Browser window that allows you to pick which machine you’d like to connect to from a list:

You can now pick your machines from a list of all Macs on the network. (And if there are any other Bonjour-compatible operating systems that support VNC (the technology behind screen sharing), I would expect they’d show up here as well, but I can’t test that assumption.) If you click the Add to My Computers box, the machine you connect to will be added to that section of the browser window, making future access a bit easier (think of it as a Favorites section).

Now that connecting is easier, let’s add even more functionality to the program. Again, quit Screen Sharing if it’s running, and then pop back into Terminal. If you’ve presently got a screen sharing session open, close it. Then copy and paste the following lines into Terminal, then press Return:

defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing \
'NSToolbar Configuration ControlToolbar' -dict-add 'TB Item Identifiers' \
'(Scale,Control,Share,Curtain,Capture,FullScreen,GetClipboard,SendClipboard,Quality)'

That’s all one long line, so feel free to copy and paste directly to Termianl. When you launch Screen Sharing again, you’ll see six new buttons on your toolbar. (If you can’t see the toolbar, use View -> Show Toolbar to make it visible.)

So what do these new buttons do? Here’s a quick rundown on each.

Switch between controlling the remote Mac (the default) and simply observing the other machine.

Switch between allowing the remote Mac’s keyboard and mouse to be used (the default) and locking them out.

This button will lock the other Mac’s screen, displaying an all-black background, a huge lock icon, and the text you enter after clicking this button. Note that there’s a minor bug here; you’ll actually see the name of a variable that Apple left in the text field, too—so if you type “Using remotely,” the displayed message will be “Using remotelylockedByString.” This button is off by default, meaning the other Mac’s screen displays what you’re doing.

Click this button to capture the remote Mac’s screen to a local file. You’ll capture the full screen, and the system will ask you to pick a name and save location for the file.

Toggle between windowed (the default) and full screen modes. In full screen mode, the toolbar floats in the top left of the screen. To exit full screen mode, click the “X” button on the toolbar.

Not really a button at all, this is the quality slider. If you’re finding that screen updates are going slowly, for instance, you can reduce the quality—all the way down to a badly dithered black-and-white representation—to speed things up.

You might run into the occasional glitch with some of these features—like the extra text displayed in the lock screen mode—but for the most part, they work quite well. You can customize the toolbar as you would in any app, too. Feel free to use Command-drag to rearrange the icons, for instance. The only thing you can’t do is drag the default set back into the toolbar. If you do that, you’ll lose all your custom buttons. Obviously, that’s also the easiest way to undo this hint; just pick View -> Customize Toolbar, and then drag the default set up onto the toolbar. But after trying screen sharing with these new features, I have no intent to give up the added functionality!

The main thing to me is this new view in iTunes 7 called album view. In which a user can graphically scroll through album art to the chosen album and find your music. It is very sleek and sexy. The problem I encountered was that if you have a soundtrack that has multiple artists songs in the album, you get the same album over and over in they view only because iTunes recognizes that they have different artists. Come on APPLE! It is one album, I’m sorting by albums, SHOW ME THE ONE ALBUM. NOT 11 OF THE SAME STINKING ALBUM!

Now that I got that out of they way, gapless playback. I love this idea for gapless playback, its great to listen to songs with no gap and get the real feel the artist was going for.

I have also noticed, with other users, that when you login or off MSN, or you lose your internet connection, you music playing in the background suddenly stops, and a minute later resumes.

My last nudge with the release is when I play videos. When I play my TV shows (The Office for example) in a small window on my desktop, I lag out. The video is all stuttery and slow and the refresh rates are horrible. When I change over to full screen all is well. This has never happened before, why start now?

UPDATE: After reading some other bloggers post about there experiences (problems) with iTunes 7, I have come to realize that iTunes is using more memmory then it did in version 6. In version six I got about 20,000 K – 40,000 K Memm Usage, and now I get 144,000 K Memm Usage.

Here are some links to other bloggers issues.
-iTunes Memmory Hog
-Huge Problems with iTunes 7
-iTunes 7 Bug Discovery

So first things first, the install. So the install was easy, nice, simple, cleaner then previous versions of Windows where the wizard would nag with all these questions while you were eating your sandwich in the other room, only to find a half an hour later that you install isn’t done because it’s asking you a question. All in all much better then what it has been, but I think they could still improve.

After about an hour long install later (keep in mind I was putting this on a minimum requirement system, to see how well it works) I was in the GUI and feeling refreshed with this new, for Microsoft, eye candy feel. What I mean by that is that I feel the number one change from XP to Vista is the GUI, but all it is coping old Mac style.

Once logged in I saw so new features.

One, the “gadgets” bar. A sidebar that is modeled from Mac’s widgets idea, the only difference is that it is not as good as widgets, and it’s on a sidebar.

Two, menu bar has changed slightly, adding some new features to easily access different functions. I don’t really care to much for this “improvement”. I feel they are just moving things around to make it seem different, when it really isn’t. The address bar on the other hand I really do feel is an improvement. The basically changed it from a simple address location, to a tree. You still can enter addresses in the old way.

Three, the start menu is slightly setup better. I feel that access programs is a lot better now, because instead of hovering over the programs menu and getting a pop out menu, it replaces quick link area with the programs. So, if you’re running XP right now, open up your start menu and you see (depending on how you setup your start menu) 5 quick links of the programs you most use. When you hover over programs in Vista, that list is replaced with the list of programs. A well need improvement. The last thing in the start menu is that they added the search right to the menu, and again they changed searching over to the indexed system (again, building on old Mac technologies).

If you are a parent with children, and want better parental controls, I have to say, Vista does a fantastic job at the parental controls. You can use when users are able to log on to the computer. Meaning, if you don’t want “Timmy” (your twelve year old son) playing video games, or searching the internet at 2:00AM while you’re in bed, just disallow “Timmy” login at 2:00AM, etc. You can also change ratings for games, and disallow games to be played that have no rating. You can make it so “Timmy” can play “T” rated games, and “Sarah” (six years old) “E” rated games.

Overall these are the main features in my opinion that stood out to me. There is so much more, but I really don’t feel like typing about all of it. So let me sum up my feel on Vista.

Overall Vista is better then XP, when it’s finally released. The beta is still screwed up and I would say not to bother with it yet. Vista in my opinion is still XP, just some “new” stuff added on. All Microsoft has done is implemented old Mac technologies. Apple is pushing out everything new and Microsoft copies to the best of its abilities. Mac OS X put out spotlight, the indexed search, Microsoft added indexed search. Mac gave us widgets, Microsoft makes “gadgets”. Mac gave us the eye candy we all know and love, Microsoft tries to give us eye candy. Mac gives us security, Vista doesn’t.

So is Vista a buy or upgrade when it is finally released? Well the thing is that the only “good” version of Vista is to go all the way and get Ultimate, all the other editions are crappy and lacking key features. The key to all of it is purchase price. I simply say that if you have access to a genuine serial number of Vista Ultimate, upgrade, if you don’t, do not waste your money, stay with XP until you upgrade your machine and then get Vista, or at lease until you finally figure out Mac OS X is better.

“…portability engine for Intel-based Macs, offering game developers and publishers the ability to deploy Windows-based games on new Macs quickly and easily, without the need for traditional arduous porting.”

It looks like I was right. Things are starting to slowly merge and close the gap. Don’t get me wrong though, Windows and Mac with never be the same.

So now for another prediction! With all the talk about next week and Apple’s WWDC 2006, I’m going to make my predictions as to what Apple will unleash.

1) Power Mac will be replaced by a new Intel Xeon Processor, and a availble Intel Core Duo processor.

2) Mac OS X 10.5 (of course) but here are the features im guess at will be added.

a) tabbed browsing inside Finder.

b) new iChat features (possible to sync to iPod)

3) New…..er MacBook and MacBook Pro.

I’m betting some updates to some of things they have been having issues with, and maybe a new processor.

4) New iPod!

a) Wifi, Bluetooth capabilities

b) ya, it will be a phone. (thats my guess anyways)

5) New iPod Nano colors. This is probelly my only guess that I don’t really think will happen, but it could.

Anyways, I just had to go and make some predictions because everyone else is. I can’t wait to get this next week over with so I can sell my PC and by my MacBook, that is, if they release a new…er MacBook.

-searchbar

-images (in IE)

-alignment (in IE)

-upload new footer

So its basically done, but I’m going to include somemore features to it as time goes on. Mainly its just stupid IE stuff I have to fix. If you aren’t already, download use a standards compliant browser like FireFox. I love to here your comments on the theme.