Life near the Ochils

Updating to XP SP3

2008-05-06T23:52:00.001Z

Well it finally showed up today in windows update... XP Service Pack 3. So I thought I'd bite the bullet and install it on all the main PCs here which consists of the wife's PC, my laptop and my main machine.

Through various podcasts I have heard a few minor issues with service pack 3 with respect to some driver issues, though these problems seem few and far between I decided that I would take disk images of each PC's system drive before installing.

Two tips: -

1. Set aside some time to install, it takes a long time to install it.

2. If you like windows themes you'll need to go grab an updated uxtheme dll in order to display your lovely appearance changes. You can find this at http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancements/SP3-UxTheme-Patcher.shtml

I'm on Twitter now

2008-05-05T22:51:00.001Z

As is no doubt apparent I have signed up for twitter. I have decided to do this for a couple of reasons: -

I want to send out links to people that follow me that I think are of interest with out having to write any huge essays.
I was fed up hearing about it on podcasts and wanted to see for myself what the fuss was about.

That second reason is a bit of a lame one I grant you, but it did get to the point each we where I was listening to Twit (This week in tech) and over half the shows seemed to twitter related even Dvorak was getting in on it. I'm sure I'm not the only one who laughingly refers to the podcast as "this week in twitter" at the moment.

The main reason is to get links and stuff out to people that like what I like quickly. So if you like the content of this blog, then you'll probably want to follow me on http://twitter.com/sacs

The Back-up fashion

2008-03-24T12:56:00.001Z

It seems to me that in the last 6 to 12 months there has been a real increase in the talk in various podcasts about taking proper back ups. It's not really surprising, just think of how much data we rely upon in our personal lives these days. All those pictures of our kids, our music, financial information and much more.

So I've decided to follow this fashion and I have purchased two 500GB external drives. One for drive images and the other for data.

I think I'll be using syncback for data files and Acronis for drive images since this is able to do incremental imaging the drive images. Though Arconis may be able do the data back up as well I have yet to find out if it has the same advantage of creating data back up profiles. I've decided to avoid symantec's Ghost, as with many symantec products it seems to be getting bloated these days.

Anyway... though I am still trying to decide what software to use and how to schedule it, for now its safe to say I am getting serious about making sure my data is backed up and being a dedicated follower of this fashion.

Archos 605 Wifi

2008-02-14T00:48:00.002Z

I picked up a shiny new Archos 605 Wifi recently and I have been living with it for a while and thought I would post a quick few comments about it (seeing as many of my previous posts have simply been too long).

Good points: -

I can surf the web over a WPA protected wireless connection
It plays Xvid and DivX out of the box
The screen is nice and big and really sharp

Bad points: -

The Opera browser currently supplied in version 1.7.13 of the firmware is slow, annoyingly so.
Google Reader does not work well on it at this time (not sure exactly who is to blame for this)
You have to buy an add the plug-ins on top of what you have already paid for the device which at the time of my purchase was around £50.
Can't charge standing up without a dock (home made or otherwise)

I got the 40GB version which was around the same price as the 30GB. To be honest I would have rather got the 30GB to get the thinner case so it was more pocket friendly.

Lastly, loads of people are trying to download the plug-in activation files from torrent sites. Currently this is a waste of time. These are serial number specific and this is very very fixed to a single device (loads of hardware signing and stuff like that going on under the hood).

Overall, I am happy with it and use it a lot, but I should have got a thinner one and the firmware still needs work in terms of performance in the pdf reader and the browser.

Autopatcher Alternative

2007-11-17T10:53:00.002Z

We all know that guy that seems to do everyone's home based tech support. From close relatives to all the relative's friends, it seems this guy does everyone's PC and never seems to get paid. Though getting paid for fixing this does not really matter as this guy generally enjoys solving the problem and it's not what he does for a living. Well for now, I'm one of these guys and yesterday I was wanting to do the usual security updates to someone's PC as they do not want Microsoft's satanic crippler of PCs (Windows Genuine Advantage) and its not been done since July. So I go to grab the latest copy of Autopatcher but alas Microsoft's legal boys have put the breaks on this by sending them a big old friendly cease and desist putting an end to a great utility.

Autopatcher was a great download. You would download and install this and either create a CD for patching or run the program locally to patch the current PC. You could select what Microsoft (and others) patches, updates and essentials that you wanted to install, hit the button and watch it get on with the job... absolutely great for supporting other people in a quick way.

The good news is that it does not seem like Autopatcher is going away, a new version is currently in early beta that will download all the required files from Microsoft directly. However, since this is still in an early beta (if the content of the forums at the time of writing this is correct) and since I tend to only use software on other peoples machine that is not quite so hot off the press. You never know whether or not there is an issue just waiting to leap out at you so I tend to wait and let others take the fall and therefore I did not want to put such software near another person's PC quite yet. So the search was on for a stop gap alternative.

With a little bit of googling I found this offline update which is not as pleasing on the eye but is a neat little set of scripts that ties in to services that windows update uses to download the latest critical fixes and allows you to create a custom ISO file to burn or mount in order to patch the system of your choice.

The dialog is fairly self explanatory, just select what you want to be able to patch, whether or not you want the service packs included, if you want one big ISO or separate ones for each version of windows or office and then you simply start the scripts running, minimise and forget until in the end you get a dialog stating your ISO(s) are ready.

One advantage this program has over the traditional Autopatcher is that you can update your ISOs as soon as the updates are available via windows update.

One thing that is missing from offline update is the level of information you can get in what is about to install before it does which I imagine would make a big difference to someone wanting to deploy this to a lot of machines. Being able to review these things prior to the installation does mean that any show stopping fixes that you don't want can be removed right off the bat saving you some valuable time.

Personally I'm looking forward to further releases of Autopatcher. It was such a great utility before Microsoft decided to use the heavy mob letters and I'm betting it will be again, but until then this will keep me going nicely.

Edited 14th Jul 08 -- Updated the link to the offline updater

Freeing up time from feeds

2007-07-17T22:35:00.001Z

Many years ago Kev introduced me to the joy of reading blogs, one thing led to another and before you know I was downloading podcasts like "this week in tech" and boagworld and watching online video shows like dltv and more recently crankygeeks. In fact I started to look at enough of these to install various feed readers before ending up with the excellent jet brains omea reader. However recently I have found that I want to reclaim some of the time I have in the evening for doing something more productive so here is some small simple steps I am doing to achieve this: -

1. Weed the rss feeds - Now old feeds that don't update much are not the problem, you really need to get rid of feeds that suck away your time but don't really give you much in return. Ask yourself what you are getting out of it. If you struggle to answer, you need to unsubscribe.

2. Moving from a desktop app reader to an online reader. This means I can keep up with feeds on the many PCs I use and not duplicate any effort or clicks. This also means I can read these at other times than when I am sat at my main PC wanting to do something constructive. E.g. lunch time at work or in the Kitchen at the weekend (I like to sit in the Kitchen with the laptop in the morning before anyone else in the house is up).

Currently I am trying out Google reader... and to be honest I find it just as good as the features I actually used in omea. I especially like when you scroll through a long page of entries it marks them are read one by one without having to click on something or anything like that.

Acer Aspire 5633 Laptop

2007-04-11T20:21:00.002Z

Well the company I work for were daft enough to give me a bonus this year and even better they managed to back themselves in to a silly corner and had to pay out double the amount they wanted to. I'm positive many larger companies base the targets they want for bonuses not to reward the good work as such, but to only cost them so much. They want a carrot to tempt you, not a whole veg garden.

Anyway... back to the laptop, cause they had to give me more than they wanted I decided to buy a laptop so I hunted high and low and finally ended up with an Acer Aspire 5633. Specs as follows: -

Core 2 Duo 1.66GHz
1GB ram
120GB 5400rpm HD
GeForce Go 7300 with 128MB
DVD writer
15.4" screen (1280 x 800)
Integrated 1.3M webcam, wireless, ethernet, modem, bells, whistles and trombones!!

At £565 delivered it the most bang for my buck I could find, even cheaper than a dell.

Have to say... this is a great little bit of kit, just let down by the supplier in one respect and one respect only. Packaging. They took the Acer box and packed it in the solid container know as a plastic bag. The Acer box was not much bigger than a VCR, this should have arrived in another box especially if you are going to let initial citylink deliver it.

The box was damaged and if the strike had been 1 inch to the right, the laptop would surely not work.

I think I may be upgrading the Acer warranty... just in case.

Gmail - no need for invites now

2007-03-26T22:59:00.001Z

This is old news now, but something I wanted to put up here for a while...

There is no need to worry about getting damned invite to Gmail any more. So if you want an email account with really good spam filtering that you can use pop3 with that's free... accept no substitutes.

Building the beast - Part 2

2007-03-11T10:02:00.002Z

So I was going through the joy of building my own PC again, something I promised myself I would not do again although I don't remember why until now...

I check everything is set as it should be and yup its all good... push the big button and nothing :-(

Essentially the system would not post and if your system doesn't post then its usually one of four things. CPU, Graphics Card, PSU or Memory. So Checked the CPU and Gfx card a seated well and removed a stick of Ram and got the system top post. After more testing and even taking the rig up to Kevs house where he generously allowed me to swap stuff around, it seemed that both sticks of ram had given up. So I went through the joys of the RMA process (more on that in a future post).

Once I got the new ram I got the PC up and running and everything installed and it runs sweet as a nut... I even got some help installing XP.

See... even a child can install XP!

This took the best part of 2 weeks to get sorted and THAT is why when I get any more PC's... I'm buying from dell (so I can have different problems).

Building the beast - The Core 2 Duo (Part 1)

2007-03-09T23:04:00.001Z

I recently decided to build a new PC and with some money that I had been saving for a good while I decided to take the plunge and build a new PC. So here's what I got for nine hundred sheets: -

Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz
2GB DDR2 PC6400 Ram
Zalman CNSP9700LED Cooler
GeForce 7900 GS 256MB
250GB Samsung Sata drive
Asus P5B Deluxe Wifi Motherboard
Antec P180 Case
Corsair HX 520W PSU
Pioneer DVR-111DBK DVD writer

Check the size of the heatsink !

On this I'm running XP SP2 and it absolutley flies !!! :-)

Took a while to get it working mind (more on that in another post)

Sky is the limit?

2007-02-27T00:54:00.001Z

Well after many trouble free years with Nildram, my better half finally persuaded me to move ADSL providers to Sky because she can get it for nowt! (i.e. the staff price). Frankly when comparing £26 per month for Nilly and £0 for Sky I could not justify not at least giving it a go.

So how is Sky ADSL? Actually its been pretty decent so far. Download speeds are right up there and the pings in games seem fine so where is the downside? Well, it turns out the downside comes as soon as you want to do stuff like bit torrent or any other popular p2p. At this point it all goes to hell frankly.

The connection we have is "Sky Connect" which basically means ADSL on BT's kit and not Sky's LLU'd stuff (which from what I have read is not a bad thing) and it has a 40GB download limit. What this also means is to reduce costs for Sky and ensures good performance for less bandwidth and there is a of a lot of packet shaping on the various p2p protocols and ports.

So is there a way round? Ohhhh yes I set up utorrent to force encryption and randomise the port (and accept "legacy" connections where required). With this work around in place my download speed jumped from 10kB/s to 300kB/s which was not as good as Nildram, but definitely acceptable.

So, so far this looks like not a bad move, but as with anything we'll see over time. One thing that was interesting... once I told Nildram I was leaving, my connection became the best it had ever been. Full speed with anything all the time like a limit had been removed. Funny how that happened as I left, almost like it was a plan to make their service look great so I'd move right back if I had any problems. Not that I would for one minute suggest this was the case... or maybe I just did.

Quick tip: Email accounts from your ISP

2007-02-25T16:04:00.001Z

Okay, so you've got yourself a lovely connection to the internet. Good for you, welcome etc. etc.

Your new ISP has been a dear and given you email too! You are the lucky one aren't you. Now obviously this email address should be given to all your friends because this email will be with you for all your life and they will always be able to get you on this email address... right?

Well no. This is something someone that I know has just been bitten with (as are many people). You've signed up for lovely-ISP.com and got your lovely-email and given this to your friends, family and anyone else you feel should be able to email you. All is well in lovely-land... and then you decide to move.

Now you are faced with the task of making sure everyone you would wish to have the ability to contact you aware of this change. In my opinion this is worse than a phone number because: -

People tend to pay attention to a phone number change... not an email one.
If anyone has emailed your old address it's not like a phone where they'll know straight away so you'll miss email.
You don't tend to use your phone number for online shopping usernames or contact with companies, that's the job of your email address.

So what should you do? Two options: -

Get a free online account that is not bound in any way to your current ISP. In my personal opinion, Google's Gmail is the only choice for this.
Buy your own domain and get email set up to use this.

I'd say most personal users should go for option 1. Business users should always go for number 2 (and you would not believe the amount that don't).

So what do you use the ISP based account for? Well, I'd use it for emailing folks you dont really care about getting in touch with again becasue you are never going to have the need to.

Now go email and be happy!

Logitech Quick Spy crashing my PC !!

2007-02-25T15:33:00.001Z

Recently I went through the long a painful process of building a new PC (I'll post soon about that, its a long story and deserves consideration first) and once completed and everything was installed I got up this morning and came through to my PC only to find that my PC would reset as soon as I logged in. Not very handy!

I was worried this was a hardware issue as windows was not shutting itself down, it was just a case of "BOOM!" and I was looking at the post screen and I had also had a few issues with the PC build so this was in the back of my mind.

So first off I checked to see I could boot in to safe mode - check !

Then I opened msconfig and unchecked "Load startup items", reboot in to normal mode - PC boots fine

Again with msconfig I enabled startups that I know had been working for a while - PC boots fine

I then continued to work through all the others till I found the offending item "lvcomsx.exe". Essentially this is a part of my webcam's installed bunch of stuff and from a quick google it appears that its main function is to spy on me and report back to logitech (nice).

So after mucking about with various versions (since this worked fine on my last PC) I just disabled this exe from running during start up and all works fine. PC is stable again and the webcam still works in all the apps I need it for. How Handy ;-)

A few posts coming soon

2007-02-25T15:11:00.001Z

Okay, so not much has been happening on this blog for a little while. Well that's about to change. I have a list of things that need blogged (12 strong so far) so expect a little bit more activity in the near future.

The gmail spam filter: - The Results

2006-11-21T15:04:00.001Z

Well the results are in and frankly the news is good. From the short time I have been using Google's gmail to spam filter my regular email I have had no false positives and only 1 out of 200 spam emails getting through. When you are paying nothing that cannot be sniffed at.

So if you can place a redirect on your email and you are getting spam, get yourself a spare gmail account and use it to filter the spam. I have even set up the pop delivery on gmail so the email just arrives in my inbox with no spam. Life on the web is good again :)

Using gmail as a spam filter

2006-11-12T17:30:00.001Z

I dunno how many folks will have the option of doing this so think of it more of a tail of one man's fight against the demonic evils of email of spam rather than a tech tip or anything like that.

It all started when I bought tickets from ticketmaster some months ago. Unknown to me at the time of purchase that ticketmaster were quite happy to sell your details on with no way to opt out of this. So needless to say the address and god knows what else is in the hands of spammers now.

Anyway... getting back to the point. Using gmail as a spam filter. Well this is not rocket science if you have an email account that is getting spammed and you can place a redirect on that account redirect it to a gmail account. The gmail account is free and as far as I can tell their spam filtering seems pretty good.

Now as I said, not all email accounts are capable of redirecting email (not the same as forwarding) but if they are this is a nice free way of adding spam filtering.

Note: - a redirected email will not look like it was sent (in terms of the email addresses shown in the email) by the email account getting spammed. A forwarded email will look like it was sent to the gmail account by your other account.

Testing on other browsers? What other browsers?

2006-10-27T23:11:00.001Z

This is annoying. I was looking for 2 tickets to see Jools Holland in December in Glasgow and found a reputable site to purchase from but when I was going through the search I kept getting a page not found error from a 3rd party site that they obviously used as their ticket agent. So after a few attempts I went to the venues own website and purchased them there. All is good... or so you might think.

We needed tickets for a different night for the Outlaws (my name for the Inlaws) and my wife went to purchase them using the other site and she was finding some great seats and everything was working. So out of interest I try searching again at the same time... page not found!

Page not found !! Wtf? !!

And then it set in... the grey matter kicked in to gear and I realised what was happening. I use Firefox and the wife against all my concerns uses Internet Explorer. So I crack open IE and low an behold 2 great seats for the night I wanted to go. You can imagine at this point I'm feeling about as stable as Charles Manson and generally looking for blood.

Why was this not tested? Had they not heard of FireFox? Surely developers these days are not that lazy? Well, it looks like they are.

In the end I bought a second pair in the good seats and I'll sell on the others at work for cost.

Defragging your drive a bit quicker

2006-10-13T10:12:00.000Z

Did you know that in windows XP you can defrag your hard disk on the command line. This is something I have used for a very long time now and just had the thought that it might be worth passing this on.

Why use the command line defrag over the graphical version? Simple... its faster and that's good enough reason for me.

Just type the following at the command line:-

defrag c:

(or what ever drive you wish)

If you need to stop the defrag operation ctrl-c exits this gracefully (i.e. doing a little tidy up or something in the background, not just exiting the process point blank)

You can get more details on the this command with the usual

defrag /?

I prefer to use

defrag c: -a -v

first just to see the state of the drive and then I run the same command without the -a to do the actual defrag.

Upgraded to blogger beta

2006-10-06T21:53:00.001Z

This is a little apology to anyone who has subscribed to this blog and just got a crap load of old posts downloaded in their favourite blog reader.

The reason for this is have just upgraded my blog to the new blogger beta which makes managing the layout a heck of a lot easier and a few other bells, whistles and trumbones!

I would of upgraded a while ago but I was waiting for a version of Windows Live Writer that supported it to become available.

Programing 101 - Validating input

2006-09-19T20:05:00.000Z

This is something I have been meaning to blog for a while. This is something that I thought everyone did because without doing so all hell would break loose.

Validation people! Validation!

If you are programming any software and you get data from anywhere that could on some level be considered external to your code, you must validate that data before using it. There are a number of reasons you need to do this but the ones I can think of off the top of my head are: -

Security - avoid nasty input by making sure it conforms to what you want. You don't want a web app that takes a text box for granted and then only later to find your app has fallen victim to a SQL Injection attack.
Reduces programming headaches - Once you can be sure of what is coming in to your system then you only have to worry about it in that form. Or to put that another way, once I am 100% sure of what form the data will be in my programs, classes, interfaces, unit tests etc. etc. do not have to. Just think how much duplication of effort is avoided by validating and think how much more robust the final article would be.

I'd love to say where I saw this lack of validation, but I'm afraid I can't for legal reasons. However buy me pint and I'll tell you, that way I can blame the booze ;-)

Windows Live Writer

2006-09-18T12:28:00.000Z

Frankly, if you have a blog you need to get Windows Live Writer.

I use Blogger and this works with it seamlessly and posts and publishes and heck of a lot faster (or at least that's my opinion).

Rant: - Don't grab my focus !

2006-09-18T12:21:00.000Z

Okay, this gets on my nerves. I'm opening some programs and I need to enter some passwords, so I start typing my password into a program and 3.. 2.. 1.. I'm looking at firefox and I am now googling half my password !

Am I the only person that gets pissed off with this random grabbing of focus?

I downloaded TweakUI from the windows xp power toys site which has helped, but it still happens and it still annoys me.

Life, why do you mock me !

Windows Live Messenger and the UPnP madness

2006-09-18T12:13:00.000Z

So as you have no doubt seen MSN messenger has had a bit of an update. Everything is all very nice (once you've turned off what you need to) and the program looks good visually, but there is one thing I hoped and prayed that the folks at Microsoft would learn to live without. The unspeakable evil that is UPnP.

In short, UPnP is a feature in many NAT routers (and no doubt other things) that automatically opens ports required by programs on a PC on the internal side of the router's network ensuring that programs that require any port works seamlessly without issue.

Though UPnP is a great idea in theory it is just scary when it comes to it potential security implications. For instance, lets suppose that program on the PC on the internal side was a nasty bit of spyware, worm or virus, then I think you'll see the potential downside to UPnP.

I did think about forwarding the required ports to make sure MSN messenger works perfectly, but sadly there are so many that messenger can choose from this is neither safe nor is it practical.

So the choice is this... Use UPnP or open the ports for the features you require.

Here is a brief listing of some required ports for live messenger (provided by this guy http://www.jonathankay.com/ on some messenger news group). Note this may not be complete, correct and is provided with no warranties etc. etc.

Basic text messaging/connection to Messenger server: port 1863 or 80 TCP and 443 TCP
File Transfer/Sharing Folders*r: 6720-65535 TCP
Audio*r: 5004-65535 UDP
Video Conference/Webcam*r: 9000-9999 or 80 TCP, 5004-65535 UDP
Remote Assistance*: 3389 TCP
Whiteboard/Application Sharing*: 1503 TCP
Launch Site Games**: 80 TCP

* denotes features which use Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). UPnP file transfer only available in Windows Messenger 5, MSN Messenger 5/6/7, Windows Live Messenger 8

** MSN Messenger 6 or higher feature exclusively r denotes that feature can utilize a relay server not requiring a direct connection to the contact (and therefore incoming ports not necessarily required to be available)

Another Road Rant

2006-08-17T22:34:00.000Z

Okay so I’m driving along the motorway (or freeway for our

friends) and it’s a two lane road which isn’t big, but it’s big enough for the number of cars needing to use it. Anyway I find my self catching the car in front and decide I should overtake.

(All is well so far).

At this point before pulling out I look to see the way is clear, but its not there is a car that I have had my eye on that seems to be going faster than it was before. Why does it seem this way? Are my eyes wrong?.. no. Are my mirrors faulty?... no. Is the car actually going faster?... actually, yes it is.

Fair enough, I don’t want to pull out in to someone’s way when I can wait another 10 seconds for it to pass. So I wait… and I wait… and I wait some more. It should have been past long ago. Where is this car? Alien abduction?.. no. The bloody thing has slowed along side me because its mission is fulfilled, the mission to block me in and keep me out the other lane.

Imagine the indignity of me potentially costing this guy (and it usually is one of us guys) the 10 seconds it might have take to wait for me to pull back in from over taking which incidentally was the same amount of time I was willing to give him.

And people wonder why they find driving so stressful.

So what do I do now? Well, I keep close eye on my mirrors; I’ve always liked to know in my mind where every car is at all times so now if I see these sort of folks in their car accelerate to block me in, I pull out before they get near to doing so (as long as I feel it is safe enough).

The lesson here is don’t try to block me intentionally, I’m watching you and I’ll pull out in front of anyone, Mr Banger or Mr Merc… I don’t really care.

On a side note I have witnessed someone that does this a lot with me as a passenger in their car. It would seem this can be very dangerous, especially when a big 4x4 does not see you being this stupid and then you hide in their blind spot. Needless to say this was a close one that required new pants.

9/11 Loose change

2006-08-17T21:56:00.000Z

Regardless of whether or not you believe this you simply have to watch it. Did the US really bring the twin towers down themselves? You decide.

My opinion? Well I think some of the arguments made in the video are a bit over the top, but there are so many that they do leave a feeling that a good portion of this has to be true.

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-5946593973848835726